Monday, December 18, 2017

Sugar Mountain (1965)



From Joni Mitchell's introduction to her song "The Circle Game" on the album You Can Close Your Eyes 

"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 [20, actually], 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 [19] 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".

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