'Sugar Mountain' release reveals a Neil Young 'before the gold rush'

By Jim Farber
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Tuesday, December 2nd 2008, 4:00 AM


Platt Collection/Getty

Portrait of Canadian rock singer Neil Young in 1969.

Everyone dreams about the days when stars were new. Who doesn’t wish they’d seen the Beatles rip up the Cavern Club, or attended those mythic Scandinavian dates when Led Zeppelin tested things out under the name the New Yardbirds, or lurked in the garage as Nirvana made its first fumbling attempts at what would become grunge?

That’s the kind of fly-on-the-wall excitement that surrounds “Sugar Mountain” — a CD, out today, that captures a Neil Young concert taped before he’d released a single solo song. The singer was hardly unknown at the time. Though not yet 23, he had already spent over two years in the popular Sunset Strip band Buffalo Springfield, a group he’d left just six months earlier.

To test out his solo skills live, Young booked a pair of dates — Nov. 9 and 10, 1968 — at the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, on the campus of the University of Michigan. Two days later, he released his first solo album.

In some ways the newness shows. Young rambles shyly in 10 overlong raps that stretch between the 13 songs. (Luckily, they’re contained in separate tracks, so you can skip them after first-time curiosity flags.) Also, the recording itself could barely be more creaky. An ancient TEAC two-track tape recorder captured it, and it doesn’t seem like much has been done to buff up the sound 40 years on. Young’s voice never sounded more rickety (which is saying something), nor his guitar so splintery.

Luckily, this only adds to the immediacy, and nascent nature, of the whole affair. Maybe because Young built a key part of his subsequent career on demonizing slickness, there’s something right about a recording so raw. Also, the disparity between the amateurism of the technology and the erudition of the material just makes the latter more startling.

Few musicians have written a more sterling melody than the one in “On the Way Home,” a song Young penned for Springfield. He includes other pieces he recorded with that band — “Broken Arrow” and “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” — along with others that turned up on his solo debut, like “The Loner” or “The Last Trip to Tulsa.” Perhaps the most fascinating track is “Birds,” which didn’t appear on an album for another two years (on “After the Gold Rush”). Not only does it match “On the Way Home” for melodic grace, it ranks as perhaps the most generous breakup song ever written from the point of view of the one doing the breaking.

“Sugar Mountain” represents the first pebble of what will be an avalanche of early Young recordings to tumble down in 2009. Next year will see the release of “Neil Young Archives Vol. 1,” a 10-disk Blu-ray and DVD that contains recordings from 1963 through ’72. Judging by this tease, we have a lot to look forward to.

jfarber@nydailynews.com


RECORDINGS : Quick Spins
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Tuesday, December 2, 2008; Page C05

SUGAR MOUNTAIN: LIVE AT CANTERBURY HOUSE 1968

Neil Young

The latest installment in the Neil Young Archives Performance Series, this intimate collection was culled from a pair of live shows recorded 40 years ago at a coffeehouse at the University of Michigan. Young was fresh from the recently imploded Buffalo Springfield, and apparently there was some concern as to whether his more complex, idiosyncratic songs like "Broken Arrow" and "Expecting to Fly" would translate to a stripped-down solo setting. Just the palpable hush captured on the two-track recorder used to document the experience would have been enough to confirm that those apprehensions were unfounded.

The set opens with a gorgeous, jazz-inflected version of "On the Way Home," one of a half-dozen numbers from Young's Springfield days, including achingly beautiful takes of "Out of My Mind" and "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing." A handful of tracks that wound up on his self-titled, 1969 solo debut are here as well. Benefiting most from the unplugged treatment are "The Old Laughing Lady" and "The Last Trip to Tulsa," the former perhaps more ethereal, the latter more starkly surreal, for the spareness of their instrumental accompaniment. Young's wistful performance of the impressionistic title track, a coming-of-age classic written when he was 19, is the recording that subsequently became a staple of FM radio, and deservedly so. His more meandering between-song banter might not be to everyone's liking, but in all fairness to Young, then 22, this set finds him less self-conscious, and abundantly more gifted, than the often-exasperating likes of, say, Ryan Adams or Devendra Banhart will ever be.

-- Bill Friskics-Warren

CD: Neil Young, 'Sugar Mountain'

Joel Selvin
The San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/
Sunday, November 30, 2008

A few days shy of his 23rd birthday and the release of his self-titled debut solo album, Neil Young played two nights solo acoustic at a small Ann Arbor, Mich., nightclub. Fresh from Buffalo Springfield - numbers from that band's songbook litter the set - Young is caught at the dawn of the singer-songwriter era ("I used to be a folksinger," he sings on "The Last Trip to Tulsa"). The seeds of everything he became can be clearly heard in this disarming performance; he's commanding beyond his years. It's a remarkable snapshot of a budding rock great.


ALBUM REVIEW: NEIL YOUNG - SUGAR MOUNTAIN: LIVE AT CANTERBURY HOUSE 1968
Neil Young
(Reprise)
5 stars

By Allan Jones
Uncut Magazine
http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/neil_young/reviews/12548


On May 5, 1968, in Long Beach, California, Neil Young played his final show with Buffalo Springfield, a band he’d already left and re-joined at least twice. “I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next,” he told me in 1989. This seemed unlikely. For someone with only a vague notion of what he was going to do, he moved decisively, quickly hiring Elliot Roberts as his manager. Roberts - on his way to becoming one of the most powerful people in the American music business - had worked briefly with the Springfield earlier in their last disputatious year together, before being sacked by Neil for playing golf when he should have been attending to the group’s multiple whims. Roberts now signed his new client to Reprise, where apart from a short and unhappy liaison with Geffen Records, Young would remain for the rest of his career. That summer, Neil started work on his first solo album.

The next step was to get Young in front of an audience, to test their reactions. In November, with the release of his debut solo album, Neil Young, now looming, two shows were booked, at Canterbury House, part of the University Of Michigan. The gigs were recorded on two-track tape, and exactly 40 years later finally see the light of the proverbial day as Sugar Mountain.

I think if I’d been there on either night, my first reaction would have been something akin to shock. From what I knew of him at the time, Young was by reputation surly and remote, inclined towards fractious discord. In pictures, he had a tendency to look sullen, a moody loner. What a flattening surprise, then, to hear him here sounding so, well, goofy, I suppose you’d say. Ten of the 23 tracks listed on Sugar Mountain are spoken word introductions, rambling asides, random observations, often hilarious anecdotes delivered in a youthfully high-pitched voice that he at one point makes fun of himself.

This awe-shucks folksiness is thoroughly disarming, as no doubt intended. Down the years, Young’s played this part to serial perfection – the straw-chewing backwoods philosopher, the bucolic savant, plain-speaking, daffy but wise, Jimmy Stewart on his way to Washington as Mr Deeds. “I never plan anything,” he says at one point, sounding baffled by his present circumstance in front all these people, some of them calling out for Buffalo Springfield songs he thought no one had even heard. But how true, you wonder, is this?

Among the Buffalo Springfield songs for which he was perhaps best known were elaborate patchworks like 'Mr Soul', 'Expecting To Fly' and 'Broken Arrow' (all featured here). These were post-Pepper sonic collages, painstakingly assembled during long hours of over-dubbing in the studio, which was also how much of Neil Young had been produced, a process that had left him by his own admission disenchanted. For these Canterbury Hall shows, though, there clearly would be no attempt to replicate the unreleased album’s dense arrangements, orchestral flourishes and gospel backing vocals.

This is just Neil, his voice and guitar and 13 songs, six from his Buffalo Springfield days, four from the forthcoming album, the unrecorded 'Sugar Mountain', an exquisite version of 'Birds', a song that would appear on After The Goldrush, and a brief snippet of 'Winterlude' that barely merits a track listing of its own. In virtually every instance, these solo versions are preferable to the originals, performed with a singular confidence that suggests he may already have realised how dated when it came out aspects of Neil Young would sound, the stereo panning and overlaying of studio effects giving it an ornate fussiness that sat uneasily in the mutating musical climate of the late 60s.

What’s striking here is how cleverly Young by now had grasped the fundamental changes in American music essayed already by Dylan and The Band on John Wesley Harding and Music From Big Pink. The summer of 1968 had seen the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. A season of riot had left cities on fire across the republic and Nixon was in the White House. Dark times were getting darker. It was as if the only legitimate response to more complicated times was a new kind of simplicity. And so the precocious psychedelic technician of those Springfield epics is calculatedly recast as a soulful solo voyager whose songs spoke without undue adornment of shared apprehensions, collective uncertainties.

On songs like 'Sugar Mountain', 'If I Could Have Her Tonight' and 'I've Been Waiting For You', his vulnerability is something tangible and universal. On a quartet of great Springfield songs included here – 'Out Of My Mind', 'Mr Soul', 'Expecting To Fly', 'Broken Arrow' – he expresses among other things an uneasy discomfort with fame and its hollow trappings that places him on the side of the people he’s playing to, an unchallenged alliance.

These songs and similarly intimate others like them were unquestionably personal. Young brilliantly, however, was able to make the ‘you’ of the songs not only the individual they initially were addressed to, but also the people who would shortly be buying his albums in their thousands and then millions. The ‘you’ in this instance being the plurality of his audience, spoken to as if in private conversation, with whom he shared mutual intimacies, feelings about love and loss in which his fans would increasingly hear aspects of themselves and what they were going through.

One of the pivotal songs here, I think, is the surreal 'Last Trip To Tulsa', which as the closing track of Neil Young would be regarded by some as an aberration, too heavily indebted to Dylan, its solo acoustic setting at odds with the rest of the album. Now, of course, its impressionistic narrative – nightmarish, absurd, paranoid, awash with grim portent - can be heard as the precursor to masterpieces to come, like 'Ambulance Blues' or 'Thrasher' and even 'Ordinary People', that similarly took the pulse of the nation and its people.

Sugar Mountain is a fascinating snapshot of Neil Young at a transitory moment in his long career, for which it also provides an indelible template. This is in many ways how he would sound for the next 40 years. At least, that is, when he wasn’t raging noisily with Crazy Horse, taking various detours into unadulterated country, winsome folk, synthesiser-pop, stylised rockabilly, big band R&B, grunge, electronic experimentalism, otherwise undermining convenient expectation or elsewhere meandering down the musical avenues that have at various times left fans baffled and at least one record company exasperated enough to want to sue him for not sounding enough like himself, when in fact for all this time he has sounded like no one at all but himself.