Joni Mitchell knows the real reason Neil Young became a folk singer
Sometimes it feels as though certain artists were always destined to work within a particular musical realm, and while some do manage to break out of these restrictive areas and experiment with new sounds, they’re always likely to return to their areas of comfort.
In the mid 1960s, Canada had produced two new acts on the folk circuit who appeared to be the next big prospects in the field, with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young both showing plenty of promise.
Both artists were moving around in the same circles and had become friends through playing shows together in the province of Manitoba, where Mitchell hailed from. From their early days, it seemed as though both shared the same aspirations of being folk artists, performing as soloists, and writing songs in the vein of Bob Dylan, who was not only becoming a cultural icon at the time, but was a major inspiration for both acts.
However, if you were to ask Mitchell about Young’s venture into the scene, she might tell you that it wasn’t as straightforward as it having always been her counterpart’s ambition, and that it was down to some of the rejections that he faced as an artist that encouraged him to move in a different direction. For Mitchell, she was always set on this path of pursuing a career as a soloist in the folk world, but for Young in his early career, he wanted recognition for more than that.
In 1970, when performing at the Royal Albert Hall in London, she introduced her song, ‘The Circle Game’, by recounting a story of Young, and how he was the primary inspiration for writing it. Speaking about their time as young adults together in the Winnipeg era, she noted how it was occasionally tough for Young to get gigs, especially in the circles where he wanted to be seen most.
According to Mitchell, Neil Young had been performing with his previous band, The Squires, for two years, but departed in 1965 when he turned 21, because the club that they used to regularly get gigs in, and that was his favourite hangout spot, didn’t allow patrons over the age of 21. Now that he was excluded from the place where he had formed some of his most valuable friendships and connections, he decided to make a transition to becoming a folk artist, largely due to his infatuation with Dylan.
As she introduced the song, she said of Young: “One of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn’t play in this club anymore, ’cause he was over the hill. Once you’re over 21 you’d had it and everything, you know? There was this strange philosophy going on at that time, so he wrote this song.”
The song in question is ‘Sugar Mountain’, and although Mitchell was wrong in asserting that Young was 21 (he was, in fact, 19 years old when he wrote the song), she was inspired by his lamentation, and decided to pen ‘The Circle Game’ in response.
“I thought,” Mitchell continued, “If we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, it’s a pretty bleak future and so I wrote a song for him and for myself, to just sort of give me some hope.”
