KLEM FM

Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain" always reminded me of Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game."  If you're a fan of both songs, perhaps you've thought the same or maybe you knew it already. Not until tonight did I realize that they are explicitly related. Joni Mitchell explained:

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 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favourite haunt, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get back 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. 'Cause 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. (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 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.' Link

Here's a video version of "Sugar Mountain" that includes some rare before and after banter by Young which usually gets deleted in compilations:

Link in case the video doesn't load