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An unofficial news blog for Neil Young fans from Thrasher's Wheat with concert and album updates, reviews, analysis, and other Rock & Roll ramblings. Separating the wheat from the chaff since 1996.
From what we gather, this appears to be a continuation of the Twisted Road/Le Noise tour of 2010. (note that poster above is from 2010. No info on opening act as of yet.)
UPDATE: Since publication of this story, it has come to our attention that this tale -- while highly intriguing and very entertaining -- is somewhat suspect. So, proceed accordingly and -- as always -- please use disCERNment.
Rare Neil Young "Cinnamon Girl" 45 RPM Picture Sleeve
Recorded Live at The Fillmore East, New York City, March 7, 1970
(41 years ago *today*)
"I wanna live with a cinnamon girl
I could be happy the rest of my life
With a cinnamon girl"
So who was Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl"?
And why did he want to live the rest of his life with a "Cinnamon Girl" anyways? (Then again, who wouldn't?)
Who was she? Or did she even really exist?
If we look at the Decade box album, Neil's hand written note about the song "Cinnamon Girl" says:
"Wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me thru Phil Ochs eyes playing finger cymbals.
It was hard to explain to my wife."
The mystery of "Cinnamon Girl" only deepens.
Which city? What's peeling pavement? Who's Phil Ochs? Finger cymbals?
And why was it hard to explain to his wife, Susan?
Well, in that wild, weird and wonderful little Facebook world we recently got a message from someone claiming to be the song's inspirational muse.
The actual "Cinnamon Girl" herself.
So here's "Cinnamon Girl"'s story as relayed to us over a series of posts and messages. We report. You decide.
I met Neil when I was in high school at Kipling Collegiate in Etobicoke Toronto in late spring, early summer of 1968.
The kids from my high school called me the Cinnamon Girl. I was one of the first flower child kids at my high school. I was living way out in Etobicoke with my parents and we weren't allowed to go to places like a coffee house named The Riverboat. It was there in front of The Riverboat that I met Neil one afternoon.
I only met Neil that once.
Funny thing is if Neil had not been carrying his guitar we never would have met. My best friend had just been bragging to me that her and her sister & another friend now had super cute boyfriends who played in a band. She said they were the singer and guitar & bass player that were playing at El Patio in Yorkville.
I felt so left out.
I told my friend I was going to try and find a drummer to be my boyfriend. Truth is my father was super strict and I wasn't allowed to date. To go to Yorkville I always let on I was going to the movies, or babysitting. All hell would have broken loose if he thought I was with the hippies......
I saw his guitar case first and blurted out "I'm interviewing musicians to be my boyfriend.......are you interested?"
Without hesitation Neil came right over and stood beside me. Oh god. I looked up at him and he was the cutest boy I had ever seen.
He said "What's involved?"
I said you get to hang around with me for a couple of hours. I will ask you questions about dating and relationships and see if you pass. There will be kissing involved...are you a good kisser?"
Neil said "I guess so".
He seemed to be a little shy but amused by the situation. He didn't seem to be in any hurry to go anywhere and so the game started.
When we were together that night, I asked Neil to write a happy song about me and he promised he would. My nickname at school was 'The Cinnamon Girl'. I told him to make it sound Canadian (and even sang him the song from the cartoon ' Pow Wow The Indian Boy' so he's know what I meant). Funny, he's the singer but I was the one doing the singing....He had his guitar with him, he opened the case and showed it to me, but didn't play a note.
Everything in the song is something we did or something we talked about. I had never heard of Neil (or any of his bands) before but the time I spent with him still all these years later feels somehow magical. It was as though I could clearly see his future....and it was as though we had known each other for years, laughing our heads off.I guess the best way to describe it was I found him to be intoxicating.
I think 'Cowgirl in the Sand' is also about me. When we first met I was playing a crazy game with him, and he seemed amused by it. We talked about horseback riding, getting a farm one day, and the fact that I wouldn't tell him my age. I turned the conversation to the ages girls could wed in different provinces yet couldn't drink or vote. We spent the night in a park on the edge of a kid's sandbox talking about our lives, our dreams and the urgency for him to get to California.
I don't know if I'm a muse, psychic or an encouraging Cancerian or a combination of all of these because just as we sat there and talked I knew he would be very successful...just knew it. It was never 'if' it was 'when'.
When I left Neil at the Yorkville subway, I had an overpowering sad feeling that something would happen and i would not see him again for a very long time. It was 6:00AM and we had no paper or pen to exchange contact info.
Who knew I would get so sick?
I got dangerously ill after I met Neil. It lasted 2 weeks, first I was delirious with fever & then Bronchitis. So, I was unable to meet him as planned at The Riverboat.....one of the biggest regrets of my life. My friend saw him there waiting ......she estimated he waited for 2 hours and then was gone...I tried in the early years to contact Neil but letters were returned.
I've always had the feeling that that when the time is right, and the stars are aligned we would somehow meet again.
Surprisingly -- or not so much so -- we get all sorts of Neil tales, that -- quite frankly -- we can't make heads or tails of like this one.
But here's the other thing about this story that makes it a little cosmic. As we were doing that Facebook thing with our "Cinnamon Girl", we just so happened to stumble across the 45 single pictured above and noticed the date -- March 7, 1970.
That's tomorrow?!
And as we scanned the Decade box album liner notes, we recall how Neil -- absolutely totally astonishingly -- wrote "Down by the River", "Cinnamon Girl", and "Cowgirl in the Sand" all in a single afternoon -- while sick and delirious with a 103 degree temperature.
Down by the river (boat) he shot his baby (broke up with his young girlfriend) -- a red head (cinnamon girl) -- who was a cowgirl (hippie) in the sand (box at the park).
Both heartbroken and sick at the same time.
sometimes you just never know...
Thanks for sharing the memories cinnamon girl!
~~~~
So what exactly would it be like to live with a cinnamon girl? Well, this is what we think it would be like...
UPDATE:
Since publication of this story, it has come to our attention that this
tale -- while highly intriguing and very entertaining -- is suspect. So, proceed accordingly and -- as always -- please use
disCERNment.
UPDATE 3:And the confirmed identity of "Cinnamon Girl" can be found below in comments. This is why this post will remain here and not be removed given these disclaimers at top and bottom. So chill out MemphisBelle ..peace
Which brings us to a recent interview with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe in The Observer by Sean O'Hagan. Stipe discusses their new album Collapse Into Now and a Neil Young influenced song:
Collapse Into Now, like its predecessor, Accelerate, sounds like a group who have rediscovered their mojo after a run of albums that sounded, well, like a big stadium band on cruise control. There are pop songs, and harder rock songs, and odd little in-between songs that could not have been made by anyone else. As always of late, they walk a tightrope between a signature and a formula. And, as always, it is Stipe's elliptical lyrics that, depending on where you stand, are the most intriguing or the most annoying aspect of the whole.
Even more intriguing is 'Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I', a kind of meta-pop song that references a Neil Young number called 'Pocahontas'.
In that song, Young imagines himself shooting the breeze around a campfire with Pocahontas and Marlon Brando, who, among other things, was a campaigner for Native American rights. I ask Stipe what his Marlon Brando song is about. 'It's about me going to Neil Young for advice,' he replies, as if this was the most natural thing in the world to write a song about. Has he actually done that? 'Oh, no. It's entirely made up, but it's sincere. I hold Neil in high regard, but I have never asked him for advice, though I am sure he would have honoured it if I had.'
For me, the great weapons used against the American people are fear and ignorance. Keeping people either so uneducated or distracted that they are not able to really form a valuable, educated choice is a great weapon. Fear is an even greater one.
For one half of my life we have had administrations in this country that have used both of those to divide and conquer and to establish their particular vested interests in a way that best suited them and the people that they wanted to see profit.
"Over the holidays, our talented pal Christopher Mills, who previously created a short film for our song 'Collect Call,' continued the narrative with his gorgeous video for our cover of Neil Young / Buffalo Springfield's 'Expecting to Fly,'' says frontwoman Emily Haines.
And falling into the category of "we thought we had seen everything until this category", here's The Muppet's covering Buffalo Springfield's "For What's it's Worth".
We've heard a lot of covers of a lot of Neil Young songs over the years, but we're still always amused when something strikes us with a "Hey, now that was different".
So here's a rather remarkable cover of "Cowgirl in the Sand" by Houssaine Kili, a gifted Moroccan musician.
We're not too clear on the world music lineage here, so if you can help out, drop a comment. This seemed to turn up on Facebook | Thrasher's Wheat recently.
American Dream: How could something so good, go bad, so fast?
Say what you will about Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young's 1988 album American Dream, but it did contain some quite lacerating and scathing commentary on the state of the American Dream.
The video is clearly an indictment of the rampant corruption of the U.S. President Ronald Reagan's administration and the Iran-Contra coverup scandal where high ranking government officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which had been specifically prohibited by Congress (The Boland Amendment).
And here we are 23 years later. My how things have changed for that American Dream...
I used to see you on every T.V. Your smiling face looked back at me. I used to see you on every T.V. Your smiling face looked back at me. Then they caught you with the girl next door, People's money piled on the floor, Accusations that you try to deny, Revelations and rumors begin to fly.
Now you think about reaching out Maybe get some help from above. Now you think about reaching out Maybe get some help from above. Reporters crowd around your house. Going through your garbage like a pack of hounds, Speculating what they may find out, It don't matter now, you're all washed up.
You wake up in the middle of the night. Your sheets are wet and your face is white, You tried to make a good thing last, How could something so good, go bad, so fast?
American dream, American dream American dream, American dream.
Don't know when things went wrong, Might have been when you were young and strong. Don't know when things went wrong, Might have been when you were young and strong. Reporters crowd around your house. Going through your garbage like a pack of hounds, Speculating what they may find out, It don't matter now, you're all washed up.
Don't know when things went wrong, Might have been when you were young and strong. American dream, American dream. Don't know when things went wrong, Might have been when you were young and strong. American dream, American dream.
George Bush's invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of at least 100,000 (and almost certainly more) innocent Iraqis: vastly more than Osama bin Laden could have dreamed of causing. It left millions of people internally and externally displaced for years. It destroyed a nation of 26 million people. It was without question an illegal war of aggression: what the lead prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials called the "the central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together." And that's to say nothing of the worldwide regime of torture, disappearances, and black sites created by the U.S during the Bush years.
Yet the very same country -- and often the very same people -- collectively insisting upon the imperative of punishing civilian deaths (in the bin Laden case) has banded together to shield George Bush from any accountability of any kind. Both political parties -- and the current President -- have invented entirely new Orwellian slogans of pure lawlessness to justify this protection (Look Forward, Not Backward): one that selectively operates to protect only high-level U.S. war criminals but not those who expose their crimes. Worse, many of Bush's most egregious crimes -- including the false pretenses that led to this unfathomably lethal aggressive war and the widespread abuse of prisoners that accompanied it -- were well known to the country when it re-elected him in 2004.
Those who advocated for those massive crimes -- and even those who are directly responsible for them -- continue to enjoy perfectly good standing in mainstream American political circles. The aptly named "Shock and Awe" was designed to terrify an entire civilian population into submission through the use of massive and indiscriminate displays of air bombings. John Podhoretz criticized the brutal assault on Fallujah for failing to exterminate all "Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35." The country's still-most celebrated "foreign affairs expert" at The New York Times justified that attack based on the psycopathic desire to make Iraqis "Suck. On. This."The Washington Posthires overt torture advocates as Op-Ed writers and regularly features Op-Ed contributions from the architects of the Iraq crime, as they did just today (Donald Rumsfeld claiming "vindication"). And, of course, we continue to produce widespread civilian deaths in multiple countries around the world with virtually no domestic objection.
There's no question that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack committed grave crimes and deserved punishment. But the same is true for the perpetrators of other grave crimes that result in massive civilian death, including when those perpetrators are American political officials. As Ferencz put it when describing one of the core lessons of Nuremberg: "every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone." More than anything, that precept -- the universality of these punishments -- was the central lesson of Nuremberg, as Jackson explained in his Opening Statement:
What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. . . . . And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations,including those which sit here now in judgment.
But as Ferencz put it: "Nuremberg? That was then, this is now." Or, to put it another way, Nuremberg is so pre-9/11 (and even before 9/11, we often violated Jackson's insistence that those principles must apply to ourselves as much as they did to Nazi war criminals).
There is, of course, a difference between deliberately targeting civilians and recklessly causing their deaths. But, as American law recognizes in multiple contexts, acts that are undertaken recklessly -- without regard to the harm they cause -- are deemed intentional. And when it comes to an aggressive and illegal war that counts the deaths of extinguished civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands -- such as the destruction of Iraq -- those distinctions fade into insignificance.
The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks deserve to be held accountable for those crimes. But it's been a bit difficult listening to a country that continuously commits its own egregious crimes -- ones that constantly cause civilian deaths -- righteously celebrating the bin Laden killing as though it is applying universal principles of justice grounded in unmitigated contempt for lawless aggression. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what has provoked such rage at bin Laden as a supreme criminal isn't the unlawful killing of civilians, but rather the killing of Americans on U.S. soil. The way we treat our own war criminals and policies of mass civilian death from around the world -- and the way we so brazenly repudiate and even scorn the Nuremberg Principles we said we were establishing for the world -- leave little doubt about that.
How can a country which has so passively accepted the complete immunity for George Bush, Dick Cheney and others -- and which long tolerated if not actively supported their murderous policies -- convincingly pose as stalwart opponents of lawlessly caused civilian deaths? Does anyone doubt the widespread American fury that would have resulted if Iraqis had come to the U.S. and killed Bush or other U.S. political leaders during that war? Recall the intense condemnation of an Iraqi citizen who did not shoot Bush in the head and dump his corpse into the ocean, but rather simply threw a shoe at him to protest the extraordinary amounts of Iraqi blood he has on his hands. Any efforts to harm an American political leader for the civilian deaths they cause would be decried by American consensus as "Terrorism" or worse (and that would be the case despite the fact that we not only tried to kill Saddam but are now quite clearly attempting to kill Gadaffi). "American exceptionalism" in its most odious expression means that we have the right to do things that nobody else in the world has the right to do, and that, as much as anything, is what is driving the reaction here.
It's always easier -- and more satisfying -- to condemn the crimes of others rather than one's own. There's always a temptation to find excuses, mitigations and even justifications for one's own crimes while insisting that the acts of others -- especially one's enemies -- are expressions of pure evil. But a country that regrets the Iraq War only because it was not prosecuted as competently as it should have been -- and which as elite consensus scorns as radical and irresponsible the notion of accountability for its own war criminals -- is hardly in a position to persuasively posture as righteous avengers of civilian deaths. The claims being made about why the killing of bin Laden is grounded in such noble principles would be much more compelling if those same principles were applied to ourselves as well as our enemies. And the imperative to do so, more than anything, was the prime mandate of Nuremberg.
Here are some pro-shot video highlights from last year's 2010 Bridge School Benefit Concerts. (If you're pressed for time, cue up Part #2 at 4:00. The complete "Bluebird" jam is included. And they do the huddle formation. So cool.)
A somewhat amusing interview with Bob Dylan from Entertainment Tonight on 4-1-86.
The video details are unsourced, however, on March 31, Bob Dylan received the ASCAP Founder's Award at Chasen's Restaurant in Los Angeles, CA. This most likely is the event. (Thanks Scott!)
The next day, appropriately April 1, Dylan contributed a vocal for a rap song recorded by Kurtis Blow in NYC.
Neil Young is more or less just hanging out while Bob handles the interviewer's inane questions. At one point, Bob -- apparently for goofs -- hands off the question to Neil, who naturally gives one of his typically penetratingly insightful comments.
We have stated before and will again that if you're not supportive of these revolutions then you are either one of the elite wealthy 1% or one of the "ordinary people". It's that simple. period.
As Jon Tapli frames the situation: "We are entering a global phase of extreme turbulence in which the bottom-up forces of a networked world battle the top-down hierarchies of centralized power."
The political showdown in Wisconsin is about class warfare.
No one in the traditional media wants to admit it. No one in the traditional media wants to admit that the Republican agenda is about class warfare. Many in the traditional media long ago chose sides, and they don't want anyone to know that the war exists. They only call it class warfare when those who aren't of the plutocratic elite try to stand up for their rights. They only call it class warfare when those who aren't of the plutocratic elite attempt to draw attention to what the plutocratic elite are trying to do.
Wisconsin has become ground zero in the class war.
That's the real story about Wisconsin.
And as for the those hard workin', patch o ground, ordinary people?
As you may recall, poor LincVolt v 1.0 suffered in a devastating fire while parked in Neil Young's warehouse last fall. And -- just as promised -- "Lincvolt rises Phoenix-like from the ashes, she still lives."
The disastrous fire that destroyed LV1 has offered us an unbelievable opportunity to make improvements throughout the car in the LV2 version. These improvements will allow LV2 to boast superior performance and be even cleaner than LV1.
January and February have been busy months for the LincVolt project. We are restoring the body of LincVolt by carefully and selectively replacing damaged body parts in the original car. A 1958 donor car (a gift from my wife) with many identical parts is parked alongside LincVolt.
Under the direction of famed California hot rod builder Roy Brizio (Brizio Street Rods) LincVolt's 1959 body is being painstakingly restored at Camilleri's Auto Works back to its original condition.
In LV2 the dashboard's original Lincoln Continental instrument cluster is being repurposed to monitor the functions of the new 200 KW electric drive and 30 KW Capstone Micro Turbine power generation systems. We found that the original Lincoln instrumentation layout was superior in user friendliness to the one we had installed in LV1. Now we have a chance to improve that.
Read all of the progress details on LV Gazette. (Thanks BNB!)
and a Neil Young influenced song:
, sounds like a group who have rediscovered their mojo after a run of albums that sounded, well, like a big stadium band on cruise control. There are pop songs, and harder rock songs, and odd little in-between songs that could not have been made by anyone else. As always of late, they walk a tightrope between a signature and a formula. And, as always, it is Stipe's elliptical lyrics that, depending on where you stand, are the most intriguing or the most annoying aspect of the whole.
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Human Highway
Concert Review of the Moment
This Land is My Land
FREEDOM In A New Year
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"We're The Ones 
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