neil young live at the riverboat 1969

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Meaning of Sugar Mountain (Live at The Riverboat 1969) by Neil Young

Sugar Mountain (Live at The Riverboat 1969)

Listen to the full song on Apple Music

"Sugar Mountain (Live at The Riverboat 1969)" by Neil Young is a nostalgic and introspective song that deals with the bittersweet experience of growing up and leaving behind the innocence and joy of childhood. Through the use of vivid imagery and a wistful tone, Young explores the universal struggle of reconciling youth and adulthood.

The song commences with the chorus, immediately setting the scene on Sugar Mountain, a metaphorical place where the barkers and colored balloons symbolize the excitement and wonder of childhood. However, the phrase "you can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain" suggests that this idyllic, carefree state can only be experienced in youth. The repetition of the line "though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon" emphasizes the regret and longing to hold on to the joys of youth, even as one grows older.

In the verses, Young delves into specific moments and memories that contribute to the overall theme of the song. He describes the bustling noise of a fair, creating a vivid backdrop for the nostalgic journey. The mention of "candy floss," a sugary carnival treat, evokes a sensory experience and reinforces the theme of Sugar Mountain as a symbol of innocence and happiness. The presence of the protagonist's parents also implies the comforting and protective nature of childhood.

In the second verse, Young introduces the figure of a girl, possibly a young love interest, who further symbolizes the fleeting experiences of youth. The hidden note referenced in the lyrics represents the sweetness and secrecy of a young romance, revealing the innocence and simplicity of early relationships.

As the song progresses, Young delves deeper into the complexity of growing up. In the third verse, he portrays a sense of rebellion and defiance, as the protagonist finds themselves "underneath the stairs" and giving "back some glares." This imagery suggests a moment of rebellion or frustration, a departure from the carefree atmosphere of Sugar Mountain.

The final verse reveals a crucial turning point in the protagonist's journey. They decide to leave home, seeking independence and solitude, thinking it will bring happiness and fulfillment. However, the irony lies in the realization that the pursuit of freedom and adulthood comes with its own set of challenges and responsibilities. The line "ain't it funny how you feel when you're finding out it's real" captures the mixed emotions and newfound understanding that come with leaving the comforts of childhood behind.

Overall, "Sugar Mountain (Live at The Riverboat 1969)" offers a poignant reflection on the duality of growing up. On one hand, it acknowledges the excitement and allure of the adult world, while on the other, it mourns the loss of youthful innocence and the simple pleasures it brings. Neil Young's introspective lyrics and melancholic melody make this song a timeless anthem for anyone grappling with the passage of time and the struggle to hold onto the magic of youth.

This meaning interpretation was written by AI. Help improve it with your feedback

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Newly-Released Archive Recordings of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, ‘Early Daze’ is a Crucial Document of the Group’s Prime Era

Clocking in at a concise 39 minutes, the 10-track Early Daze is a collection of raw-and-raucous 1969 recordings of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Young’s 47th and most-recent release, it’s an intimate, crucial document of his prime era with his longtime backing band.

While Young has worn many hats since his mid-‘60s Buffalo Springfield days — prolific solo songwriter; grudging member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; country rocker and uncompromising activist, to name a few — it has arguably been with Crazy Horse where he has tapped into his rapturous electric leanings. First appearing on record with Young on 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere , the band formerly known as L.A. group The Rockets helped Young unleash definitive, moody rockers including “Cinnamon Girl,” “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.”

On Early Daze , the full lineup of Crazy Horse (guitarist-vocalist Danny Whitten; keyboardist-producer Jack Nitzsche; bass guitarist Billy Talbot and drummer-vocalist Ralph Molina) meet and exceed Young’s once-estimation that they were “the greatest garage band in the world.” Penned and sung by Whitten, “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” first appeared as “Downtown” on Crazy Horse’s 1971 Young-free eponymous debut and a live version recorded in that same year was included on Young’s 1975 album, Tonight’s the Night . It’s easy to tie off some dark romance to the song, whose lyrics encapsulate the anticipation of Whitten chronicling the agitated joy of going “downtown” to cop heroin, the very drug that helped facilitate his downfall and eventual 1972 death; Tonight’s the Night was essentially a wake memorializing the fatal overdoses of both Whitten and band roadie Bruce Berry.

The Early Daze version of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” kicks off with producer David Briggs (a key alchemical force in capturing the lightning in a bottle that was Neil Young & Crazy Horse) leading the band for “take 14” via studio talkback mic. The band answers the call with a casual swagger and the song’s still-knee-buckling main guitar hook. The Georgia-born Whitten delivers the song with his raspy twang, Young harmonizing high on top, as the rest of Crazy Horse roll it all along with their minimal (and signature) stoned propulsion. More of a noir field report than a moralist warning, the lyrical refrain of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” factors in police busts that threaten the transaction ( “Sure enough / they’ll be selling stuff / when the moon begins to rise / pretty bad when you’re dealing with the man / and the light shines in your eyes, yeah” ) while our hero continues to move from spot to spot: “Walk on, talk on, baby tell no lies / Don’t you be caught with a tear in your eye.”)

In conjunction with Crazy Horse, Whitten always elevated the atmosphere of Young’s halcyon, raw work. And Whitten’s skills as a songwriter were certain: the aforementioned Crazy Horse debut featured a pair of stunners from Whitten: “Look at All the Things” and “I Don’t Want to Talk About It.”

More than 50 years after his death, Whitten remains one of the lesser-known but absolute “what ifs” of ‘60s rockers. And while it’s easy to default to morbid romanticism of Whitten’s tragic death, this unreleased version “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” and the remaining tracks of Early Daze (which includes the original mono mix of “Cinnamon Girl” and an early, unreleased version of Young’s classic, “Helpless”) pop with life force, vitality and gritty joy.

Courtesy of time and retirement, the roster of Crazy Horse has changed over the years, appearing on fifteen studio albums and eight live albums with Young, the original lineup of the band supplied Young with enough confident loyalty and loose, inspired camaraderie that still resonates — loudly — to present day .

Early Daze is available on vinyl here . Stream “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” on your preferred platform and follow Neil Young & Crazy Horse on Instagram.

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Neil Young’s ‘On the Beach’ at 50: His Bummed-Out Masterpiece Reigns Supreme

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Happy 50th anniversary to Neil Young ’s On the Beach , an album that, to put it mildly, is not a very sunny one. Young himself called it one of the most depressing records he’s ever made — and that was after he wrote and recorded the famously funereal Tonight’s the Night . But that album could be joyful at times, like the groovy movie in “Speakin’ Out,” or the fried eggs and country ham in “Albuquerque.” You won’t find any breakfast delights on On the Beach , but you will find three songs with the word “blues” in the title. The good times are coming, but they’re sure coming slow.

Every hardcore Young fan worships On the Beach , and not just because it became a cult rarity within a decade of its release. It stopped being pressed on vinyl in the early Eighties, effectively vanishing from view, and it wasn’t released on CD until 2003. You can hear On the Beach anytime now, as easily as you can hear After the Gold Rush or Zuma , but it’s lost none of its uniquely haunting beauty. There’s simply nothing like it in his catalog. We love On the Beach because it’s the most raw and personal Shakey ever got, the moment he rooted himself in his melancholy, drank up the pain, and used it to push further than he ever had. He was incredibly bummed out — and very, very, very stoned. We wouldn’t have him any other way.

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You can thank the honey slides for that. The infamously potent concoction of fried weed and honey fueled the recording sessions at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, which is probably why the music feels like a frenzied high on the verge of becoming a very bad trip. (Neil told an audience that year that the secret ingredient was “poor-grade marijuana, worse than you get on the street. You take it and you get your old lady, if you got one, to cook it up on the stove.”) The peak of that honey-slide haze comes when he takes on a wild-eyed, Manson-esque persona in “Revolution Blues,” barreling around L.A. on a destructive spree. “Remember your guard dog?/Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone!” he sings, with a menacing grin you can hear through the speakers. He goes full Tex Watson in the final lines: “Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.”

“Heart of Gold Pt. 2,” it’s not. But even in this sweat-soaked nightmare, Young manages to toss in a glimmer of his real-life despair, admitting, “But I’m still not happy/I feel like there’s something wrong.” Looking back, he was absolutely correct about that. His bleak mindset at the time was the result of several factors, mainly his crumbling relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, the woman who had inspired him to write “A Man Needs a Maid” just a couple of years earlier. “Pretty dark, not really that happy,” he said in the definitive 2002 biography Shakey. “I think it was a period of disillusionment about things turning out differently than I had anticipated. I think I was starting to realize what a fucked-up life I had chosen for myself with Carrie.”

His career wasn’t bringing him much joy, either. Refusing to satisfy audiences who wanted another Harvest (“I can’t write the same book every time,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975 ), he made the movie soundtrack Journey Through the Past and the live album Time Fades Away , the latter recorded on his massive, miserable Harvest tour. Neither one came close to matching the gigantic commercial success he’d seen in 1972.

Young wasted no time clapping back at the critics, kicking off On the Beach with the rollicking “Walk On.” The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the record. “I hear some people been talking me down/Bring up my name, pass it ’round.” The track, recorded with his right-hand man Ben Keith and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, sounds almost dementedly upbeat. The lesson: Do not piss off Neil Young.

But that was just the start of his complaints. Like many people in the summer of 1974, he was feeling burned out by the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Watergate scandal, and other lurid headlines. “I never knew a man who could tell so many lies,” he says of Nixon on “Ambulance Blues.” The disgraced president resigned two weeks later. If the hippie dream had ended with Altamont and the Manson murders in 1969, now it felt like the world was just rubbing everyone’s face in it. Nihilism was the mood of the day, and it struck a chord with Neil.

On the iconic album cover that he designed with Gary Burden, Neil stands on an overcast Santa Monica Beach in a cheap white-and-yellow polyester suit. Tacky floral patio furniture sits in the foreground, next to the taillight of a 1959 Cadillac sunken into the sand. (Another old dream dead and buried.) “SENATOR BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN,” reads the headline of a local paper. But Young isn’t paying attention to any of it. He’s turned away from the camera, hands in his pockets, looking out at the ocean. The sky is about to rain.

“You go down to the beach and watch the same thing, just imagine every wave is a different set of emotions coming in,” he told Melody Maker in 1985. “Just keep coming. As long as you don’t ignore it, it’ll still be there. If you start shutting yourself off and not letting yourself live through the things that are coming through you, I think that’s when people start getting old really fast, that’s when they really age.”

On the Beach has a seriously impressive list of personnel, from the Band’s Levon Helm and Rick Danko to his CSNY bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash. That’s what being Neil Young in the early Seventies got you. But the most notable guest at this doomer shindig might be Cajun slide-guitar ace Rusty Kershaw. Not only did he cook and distribute those honey slides with his wife, Julie, and play some swampy fiddle to boot, he’s also responsible for shaping the sound of On the Beach. Kershaw convinced the band to sit extremely close together in the studio, and made sure they didn’t rehearse prior to recording, creating an intimate, intuitive vibe. With a ginormous beard and overalls, he was a figure known for his joyful debauchery. Young wasn’t in the right headspace to be the life of the party. Kershaw did it for him.

Few records have a more staggering Side Two than On the Beach , an emotional bulldozer of just three songs. “The whole B side of this album, you can just put it on and get lost,” Father John Misty once told us . “You can get stoned and go inside this little universe. And when the song ends, go back to the beginning.” It starts with the title track, a stormy, stunning glimpse into Young’s mind as a celebrity and perpetual outsider. He needs to be surrounded by others, but he can’t bear to socialize with them. He’s thinking he’ll get out of town, get out of town. The hand drums, played here by Keith, make this one spooky dirge.

Young laments and processes his fallout with Snodgress in the devastating “Motion Pictures (For Carrie),” his most vulnerable moment on the record. “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” he promises. The song is so intense and personal that Young has only played it a single time, when he premiered On the Beach material at a surprise show at New York City’s Bottom Line in May 1974. Catching it live is the ultimate holy grail for fans.

The record culminates with “Ambulance Blues,” a nearly nine-minute masterpiece that is widely regarded as one of his very best songs , second only to “Powderfinger.” It starts with a wistful look back at his early career, playing in Toronto coffee houses like the Riverboat and living in an apartment at 88 Isabella Street. He’s so bummed out, he’s even mourning his old apartment building as if it were a tragic heroine: “Oh Isabella, proud Isabella/They tore you down and plowed you under.”

That era was not even a full decade in the past, but Young was painfully nostalgic for it, yearning to go back to a simpler time. His voice sounds deeper, weathered, and a bit distant — which was intentional. “Robert De Niro gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull , Neil did the same thing for his music,” bassist Tim Drummond said. “He was smoking two packs a day to get a late-night, frog-in-his-throat voice.”

Using his aching harmonica and a melody he later admitted he nicked from English folk master Bert Jansch , Young continues to reflect on everything that’s happened since those early days, including the dead-end state of CSN (“you’re all just pissing in the wind”) and the recent deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist  Danny Whitten  and roadie Bruce Berry. “An ambulance can only go so fast,” he says. “It’s easy to get buried in the past/When you try to make a good thing last.” He tells a surreal story about a kidnapping plot and gets some parting shots in at those ungrateful critics and President Tin Soldiers. Then the needle swings back and On the Beach ends. Fifty years later, it’s still echoing in our heads.

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50 Years Later: Themes Of Anger & Alienation Lead Neil Young’s ‘On The Beach’ To Triumphant Acclaim

• By Doug Collette
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With the hindsight of a half-century, Neil Young’s  On The Beach (released 7/19/74) stands on its own terms more forcefully than either of its two companion pieces in ‘The Ditch Trilogy.’ Whereas the live  Time Fades Away  of the year prior was a direct response to audience expectations based on the success of the preceding blockbuster,  Harvest,  and 1975’s  Tonight’s The Night  was an exorcism of demons following the untimely deaths of individuals close to Young, on this second of three decidedly unconventional pieces of work, the iconoclastic Canadian staked out a territory of his own in both creative and personal terms.

Only two cuts of the total eight are accessible to some degree, and they both appear right in sequence at the very outset of the album. Neil rarely, if ever, presented such a clear-cut declaration of intent as “Walk On,” but he balances its equanimity in the face of conflict with the slightly jaunty gait of its performance. Ben Keith on slide guitar and vocal, plus the Crazy Horse rhythm section of bassist Billy Talbot and drummer/vocalist Ralph Molina, further imbues the collective motion with a carefree air that belies the certitude of the author’s position.

Reminiscent of Young’s vintage solo work but without the lone acoustic guitar or grand piano with harmonica, “See the Sky About to Rain” is a much more forlorn piece of work. Still, it’s brightened by the author’s playing on Wurlitzer electric piano as well as the stalwart drumming of the late Levon Helm of The Band (the latter mythic outfit had moved west with the rest late the prior year and its bassist Rick Danko also appears here on “Revolution Blues”). 

The fade-out of the tune leaves the remainder of  On The Beach  in the deeply introspective, solitary atmosphere fittingly encapsulated by the title track. The mix of resignation and acceptance there and on “Motion Pictures” blossoms fully on the nearly nine minutes of the final cut, “Ambulance Blues.” Betraying no little world-weariness he buttresses with a sanguine attitude; Young delivers a seemingly stream-of-consciousness litany of observations on the machinations of the world at large (and its ramifications on him). 

Rusty Kershaw uses his fiddle there to cauterize psychic wounds, both professional and emotional, and, as a result, the number rings as true now as it did five decades ago (and in many more respects than simply its final verse). Still, as estranged from the world at large as Neil sounds there, he retains his self-awareness, stating as he does: ‘…I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow…’ 

In the meantime, the idiosyncratic artist clearly felt compelled to write and record the discordant likes of “Vampire Blues.” Sluggish as it sounds, this performance nonetheless represents the man’s first expression of environmental awareness. The aforementioned “Revolution Blues” is more topical but taken at an edgy pace, as if Young had become more than a little impatient with the privileged (who generally remain nameless but may very well also include himself). 

His electric guitar solos on the latter two cuts are most definitely not the pointed likes of those he played with Buffalo Springfield or the early days of Crazy Horse, much less similar his exchanges with Stephen Stills on stage with their two famous friends. And along those same lines, during the wan reading of an overly-verbose piece called “For The Turnstiles,” a combination of dobro and banjo sets a dolorous mood that mirrors this album’s desolate cover images (outtakes of which are decidedly more lighthearted).

Neil Young knew he had an audience for  On The Beach  and was probably more curious than concerned about the response. And he hardly cared to resolve the apparent contradictions of his position(s) either. On the contrary, he chose to embrace the paradoxes, a significant part of which stance was reuniting with Crosby, Stills, and Nash for the first time in four years to embark on a stadium tour the very same summer this fifth studio album of his was released . 

The small handful of selections from this effort in setlists from those shows (the mammoth jaunt is chronicled on the 2014 live album  CSNY 1974)  was the only live support Neil gave to this work, that is, apart from an impromptu one-off performance at the Bottom Line in New York. Widely circulated in ensuing years, the audience recording of that appearance–its audio restored and remastered– was eventually released in 2022 as  Citizen Kane Jr. Blues 1974 Live at The Bottom Line , part of the  Official Bootleg Series  inaugurated that same year. 

Thankfully, the heightened attention given to this period of Neil Young’s career hasn’t negated its essentially inscrutable tone in the fifty years since it came out. Quite the contrary , in fact, because, like its two counterparts,  On The Beach  presents some (uncomfortably?) candid insights into art, commerce, and the after-effects of celebrity that few of this man’s peers (except perhaps the Who’s Pete Townshend) have ever dared offer.

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