"Sugar Mountain" is a song by Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 folk rock

Folk rock

Folk rock is a musical genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term referred to a genre that arose in the United States and the UK around the mid-1960s...

 singer and composer Neil Young

Neil Young

Neil Percival Young, OC, OM is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation...

. Young composed the song on his 19th birthday in 1964, and its lyrics are reminiscences about his youth in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Meaning of the lyrics

In her album "You Can Close Your Eyes", Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...

, who was already friends with Neil Young by the time he wrote this song, opened her song "Circle Game" with this speech:

Mitchell: "In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock'n'roll band (...) he had just newly turned 19, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 18 you couldn't get in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill. So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth.He wrote it on his 19th birthday (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 19 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called The Circle Game."

Releases

Young first recorded the song on November 10, 1968, as part of a live performance at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...

. This recording was released as the B-side of Young's 1969 single "The Loner" (and again as the B-side of the "Cinnamon Girl

Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young song)

"Cinnamon Girl" is a song by Neil Young. It debuted on the 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which was also Young's first album with backing band Crazy Horse...

" single later that year), but was not collected on an album until the 3-record compilation Decade

Decade (Neil Young album)

Decade is a triple album compilation by Neil Young, released in 1977, now available on two compact discs. It contains 35 of Young's songs recorded between 1966 and 1976, among them five tracks that had been unreleased up to that point...

was released in 1977. A 2-CD release of recordings from the Canterbury House performance, Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House 1968

Sugar Mountain - Live At Canterbury House 1968

Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House 1968 is a live album by Neil Young. On November 8–10, 1968, Young performed three shows at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This album is compiled from the performances on the 9th and 10th....

, was released November 25, 2008 as part of Young's ongoing Archives Performance Series.

A live acoustic rendition is included as the first track of Young's 1979 album Live Rust

Live Rust

Live Rust is a live album by Neil Young & Crazy Horse, recorded during his fall 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour. The show at the Cow Palace, San Francisco was filmed and was the performance used in the concert film, Rust Never Sleeps; however, the album Live Rust was composed of performances...

.

On the bootleg

Bootleg recording

A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance that was not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority. The process of making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging...

 album Live on Sugar Mountain, released just days after the concert at which it was recorded (on February 1, 1971, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is one of the halls in the Los Angeles Music Center . The Music Center's other halls include the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre, and Walt Disney Concert Hall.The Pavilion has 3,197 seats spread over four tiers, with chandeliers, wide curving stairways and rich décor...

 in Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

), Young talks at length about the lyrics. He says that when he first wrote the song, he

"wrote 126 verses to it. Now, you can imagine that I had a lot of trouble figuring out what four verses to use... I was underneath the stairs... Anyway, this verse that I wrote... It was the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote. So, I decided to put it in the song, to just to give everybody a frame of reference as to, you know, what can happen. What I'm trying to say here, 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 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."

Then he sings this verse:

Now you're underneath the stairs

And you're givin' back some glares

To the people who you met

And it's your first cigarette