I WANNA LIVE
WITH A CINNAMON GIRL
I COULD BE HAPPY
THE REST OF MY LIFE
WITH A CINNAMON GIRL
The shows Neil Young played at the Cellar Door in Washington DC were late in 1970, two months before the Massey Hall gig that has been issued twice in his Archive series. Seven songs appear in both sets; worse, only three of Cellar Door's 13 tracks haven't already been heard in a similar solo recording from the same brief period of Young's career. Add the inexplicable decision to excise from this release most of Young's banter with his audience – the characterful joy of the acoustic archive – and it's hard to see why anyone should buy it. Except this: the stillness and intimacy of each live recording is singularly enthralling. There's a moment in Cinnamon Girl – lithely played on piano – when Young's vocal subsides into a giggle. He's on piano for Expecting to Fly, too, his voice soaring, tremulous, above chords resolute as granite. Closing with Flying on the Ground Is Wrong, he improvises a playful attack on the piano strings that offsets beautifully the tender solicitude of the song. You don't have to be a Young aficionado to appreciate that.
Recorded at
The Cellar Door,
Washington, D.C.
Additionally,
the album features
the only known recording of
Young performing his song
"Cinnamon Girl"
on piano.
As stated by his comment
on the disc
"That's the first time
I've ever performed
that song on piano!"
The album closes with
"Flying on the Ground is Wrong"
in which Young quips:
"I had it put in my contracts
that I would only play on a
nine-foot Steinway
grand piano,
just for a
little eccentricity
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