The one song Neil Young plays just to make his fans happy: “I owe it to them”
There must be something about the 1960s that produced a range of singer-songwriters unwilling to compromise. The decade produced a gluttony of incredible lyricists and musicians and, those who continue to play for massive audiences today, do so with the unabashed confidence to play exactly what they want and when they want to. While Bob Dylan is perhaps the most famous version of the stubborn singer, refusing to play his hits, other artists, like Neil Young, have also avoided their more populist tunes in favour of deeper cuts.
It makes sense. The 1960s were a decade that encouraged creative freedom and told a whole generation of singers that their words and their performances mattered more than ever before. The spirit of counter-cultural revolution also shone through everything they did, and that must have influenced the singing set to be confident enough in their work to deliver exactly what they wanted to perform and not be indebted to those ticket-buying audience members and their wanton whims.
Bob Dylan has become well known for his unwillingness to play anything one might consider a hit on his seemingly never-ending tour. David Bowie also went through spates of rejecting the mammoth songs that topped the charts and gained him stadium-sized audiences waiting at every city stop. Neil Young has rarely refused the opportunity to be defiant and has often curtailed his setlist in favour of what he would prefer to perform. However, there is one song that he will always include just to see the smiles on his fans’ faces.
‘Sugar Mountain’ is probably a little way down the list of the singer’s most notable tracks. Even when Neil Young was a young man, he was worried about getting old, and he used this track to share his worries. This one is a bittersweet affair which laments the loss of innocence and the fleeting expression of youth. What’s more, Young wrote the song when he was only 19.
It helped to inspire another Canadian by the name of Joni Mitchell who, in turn, wrote ‘The Circle Game’ about her pal Neil Young, making a little bit of fun at the teenager making issues with getting old. Mitchell would become a valued friend for Young and would also be integral in introducing Young to a future bandmate by the name of David Crosby.
While the track might hold some sentimental value, Young admitted that it made his set list for one reason and one reason only: the fans. “I do ‘Sugar Mountain’ really for the people more than I do it for myself. I think I owe it to them, cos it seems to really make them feel happy, so that’s why I do that.”
Young acknowledges that those people who are willing to part with their money: “They pay a lotta money to come and see me, and I lay a lotta things on ’em that they’ve never heard before, and I think I owe it to them to do things they can really identify with. It’s such a friendly song, and the older I get, and the older my audience gets, the more relevant it becomes, especially since they’ve been singing it for 20 years. It really means a lot to them, so I like to give ’em the chance to enjoy that moment.”
Young is certainly an artist who refuses to be categorised or curtailed in any way. However, the singer is clearly happy to give over a little of his creativity to the fans who gave him the stage from which to sing.
