“One of the lamest”: The Neil Young song featuring intentionally terrible lyrics
From pioneering alt-rock to featuring in the greatest supergroup of all time, CSNY, Neil Young has done it all. He’s had a widespread effect on the development of popular music, and unlike many of his peers from the 1960s, his influence and spirit can still be felt across music today, through his most famous acolytes like Radiohead and Oasis, and their own prominent adherents. That’s not bad going.
One aspect that has underpinned the success of the Canadian’s operation is that he has never been beholden to anyone. While he might have tapped into the R&B and folk trends when starting out, he always had a unique approach thanks to his songwriting, vocal delivery and guitar style. These assets set him apart from the mass of contemporaries trying desperately to make it big. He possesses a rare natural flair.
Not only is he prolific and so dynamic that he’s mastered searing guitar lines, textural dissonance, piercing personal poetry and sharp social commentaries – as well as other creative elements – but Young is also characterised by his rather forthcoming and sometimes even self-effacing manner. He might be one of the most influential artists of all time, but he’s only managed to do so by recognising his pitfalls and acting upon them.
That’s why before embarking as a solo artist, he’d already tried his hands at various projects and has continued to expand his scope through using different genres, mediums of release, and by drawing upon the skills of others to help him bring his vision to life. He’s had a definitive arc, and it’s encompassed everything from folk to electronic – most people forget about 1983’s Trans, a heartfelt exploration of new wave and electronic sounds inspired by the cerebral palsy therapy of his son Ben, and a world becoming scarily reliant on electronic technology.
Young’s self-critiques are some of the most brutal out there, and on occasion, he’s slammed songs that rank among his most favoured among fans. One classic track he’s made very clear that he doesn’t care for, despite being a resonant lament written in his late teens about ageing, is ‘Sugar Mountain’. He composed it on his 19th birthday – November 12th, 1964 – at the Victoria Hotel in Thunder Bay, Ontario, during a tour with his early band, The Squires, and it had a handful of releases before finally emerging on an album in the form of the excellent 1977 compilation, Decade.
When performing in February 1971 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Young extensively discussed the lyrics and outlined why he had a problem with them: he intentionally included a terrible verse. He explained that when he first wrote the song, he penned a whopping 126 verses for it, and when figuring out which ones to include in the final version, he chose “the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote.”
He continued: “What I’m trying to say is, by stopping 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, uhh…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.”
Such is the nature of Neil Young. Not only has he made a career out of appealing to people with his sincere moments of emotional expression, but from time to time, he’s used his dedicated audience as guinea pigs to see how far he could push his work and where he could take it and still retain success. After all, he’s released 47 studio albums to date, and the contents are as varied as you’d expect.
