I first heard Neil Young as the lead guitarist for Buffalo Springfield but I didn’t know it at the time. The next time was on an 8-track tape Neil Young and Crazy Horse where I played Down By the River over and over again. But After the Gold Rush was the album that put me into Neil’s fold. Yeah, Harvest, was fabulous but not as poignant to me as Gold Rush.
Remember reading in my previous blogs on learning songs off the jukebox? Well, Sugar Mountain was one of these. It wasn’t released on an album at the time so I had to pour quarters in the jukebox to get the guitar and lyrics.
Hammer-Ons (Hammers-On?)
The beginning chord of Sugar Mountain is actually a standard C- chord but two frets up in a sort of D-position. This creates a suspended harmony. I use a hammer-on from the open D to F# and then when I step back down to the C position the same hammer-on from the open D resolves to the E.
The intro to Tell Me Why has a bass walk up to the C-chord and the similar hammer-on from C to E for this position as Sugar Mountain. Then Neil plays a B as the C resonates giving a Major 7th resonance and the 6th when he next plays the A. These were the little tricks to harmony that I learned from Neil’s acoustic playing. A hammer-on is also a primary tonal trick in Southern Man and Cowgirl in the Sand too.
Neil did some amazing things, both with acoustic s and electrics. My favorite has always been his pre-Rust Never Sleeps stuff. But my all-time favorite is Long May You Run, written for Neil’s beloved Pontiac hearse, “Mortimer Hearseburg.” Neil drove “Mort” from Toronto to Los Angeles, where he met Stephen Stills and then they formed Buffalo Springfield. Mort broke down in Blind River in June 1965.
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