Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Neil Young - Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House 1968

Esce dagli archivi questo bellissimo live con sole chitarra acustica e 
voce.
Per chi ama il primissimo Young si prospetta album imperdibile. 
Atmosfere rarefatte ancor meglio dell'acustico 4 Way Street (vabè, più 
intimo, non c'è il palco del superconcerto, ma lo stage di un luogo 
molto più raccolto).
Voto 7,5
-- 
The greatest luxury in life is time

 Voto 7,5
Uncut:
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.


 Per chi ama il primissimo Young si prospetta album imperdibile.
Non è che si prospetta, lo è proprio.
Purtroppo ormai siamo talmente saturati da vero e proprio
trash cantautorale di serie Z che dischi del genere,
se sentiti, manco possono essere più recepiti.
--
mr

 Voto 7,5
un voto superiore al 7,5 a cosa corrisponderebbe?????
gg
-- 
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 un voto superiore al 7,5 a cosa corrisponderebbe?????
Cioè?
8 ad esempio.


8 ad esempio.
lol
--
"Hey, hai dato degli stronzi ai miei figli del cazzo, 
mi spieghi che cazzo c'entrano adesso i miei figli del cazzo?"

 lol
Rotfl. Immaginavo chiedesse altro.
La risposta poteva allora essere: After the Goldrush.
lol
:-@


La risposta poteva allora essere: After the Goldrush.
Si riferiva al termine "imperdibile", se 7,5 significa imperdibile, i voti
superiori a che aggettivi corrisponderebbero? Mi sembrava questa la
domanda.


 domanda.
Bene: capolavoro, epocale, eccezionale, inarrivabile.
Cmq è un bel disco per tutti. Per chi ha amato e ama la west coast o il 
cantautorato di livello, è ottimo.
np Jimi
