Sugar Mountain - Neil Young (cover-live by Bill Sharkey)

3 years ago
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Sugar Mountain (Neil Young, 1977). Live performance by Bill Sharkey, Home Studio, Hawaii Kai, HI. 2021-03-14. "Keeping the Oldies Alive"

Although "Sugar Mountain" never made it on any of the Billboard charts, it is one of his fans favorites. The song was released as the "B" side of two singles, "The Loner" (1969) and "Cinnamon Girl" (1970) (Wikipedia, 2021). Neil Young wrote the song after turning 21 and not being able to continue performing at a local under 20 club in Canada (Joni Mitchell, Royal Albert Hall, Oct 29, 1970). In 1971, Neil Young performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles where a fan recorded the concert and released it as a bootleg album, "Live On Sugar Mountain" (allmusic.com, 2021). While playing "Sugar Mountain," Neil stopped in the middle of the song and provided this interesting piece of information about his writing of the song, specifically the 3rd verse. He said "when I wrote this song, I wrote 126 verses to it. Now, you can imagine that I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out which four verses to use. I was I was underneath the stairs at the time . . . Anyway, this verse that I wrote, it was the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote. So, I decided to put it in the song, to just to give everybody a frame of reference as to, you know, what can happen. What I'm trying to say is, by stopping here in the middle of the song, and explaining this to you, is that... I think it's one of the lamest verses I ever wrote. And it takes a lotta nerve for me to get up here and sing it in front of you people. But, if when I'm finished singing, you sing the chorus 'Sugar Mountain' super loud, I'll just forget about it right away, and we can continue" (Neil Young, Live On Sugar Mountain, Feb 1, 1971).

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