← Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
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- [00:00]
Janda
97.1Fm the drive presents the behind the Song podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes. Here's your host, Janda It's a song.
- [00:12]
Christian Lane
That doesn't sound like anything else, a droning rocker with lyrics so mystifying they sound like they were written in a fever dream. And that's because they were. Neil Young's classic Cinnamon Girl was written while he was in the grips of a bout with the flu, which explains some of its inscrutable lyrics. But who was it written about? Let's get into it in this episode of behind the Song. And if you like it, don't forget to hit subscribe. Let's put things on a timeline here. Cinnamon Girl is the album opener on Young's second solo release, Everybody Knows this Is Nowhere, released in May of 1969. This was after the breakup of Buffalo Springfield and concurrent with his work with Crosby Stills in Nash. It's his first with Crazy Horse as his backing band. And with Crazy Horse, Young had the opportunity to get away from the overdubbing that he was so dissatisfied with on his self titled solo debut. He'd seen a band called the Rockets play at the Whiskey a Go Go club in West Hollywood and recruited three players. Danny Whitten on second guitar and harmony vocals, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums. And them. Crazy Horse. Making music with this group solved the overdubbing problem because they played together so naturally that the album was recorded mostly live. His musical relationship and friendship with Danny Whitten blossomed in particular. Unfortunately, Whitten developed a heroin addiction to combat rheumatoid arthritis and he became completely ruled by the drug. He was eventually fired from Crazy Horse and then was to tour with Young in 1972, but he was so out of it at rehearsals that Young sent him home. He tragically died that very night after mixing diazepam with alcohol when he was just 29 years old. Young later told his biographer that it took him years to stop blaming himself for Whitten's death, and Whitten was a huge part of how this album and this song sounds. It's his high harmonies that we hear on Cinnamon Girl. Those harmonies juxtapose with the droning grittiness of the song, a sound that was achieved when Neil Young tuned his guitar down to double drop D and this was actually something that he and Stephen Stills had discovered together a few years earlier and Young fully embraced it. For Cinnamon Girl, both the high and the low E strings are tuned down to D and with that he helped revolutionize heavy guitar music decades later in the grunge age when bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden tuned down, earning him the nickname the Godfather of Grunge. Incredibly, three of the songs on Everybody Knows this Is Nowhere were written in a single day while Young was in the throes of the flu. Cinnamon Girl, the River and Cowgirls in the sand were all written while Young had a raging fever at home in Topanga Canyon. Now at the time, he was living there with his wife, Susan Aceveda. The Two married in 1968, but were only together for two years. She filed for divorce in October of 1970, a month after his next album, after the Gold Rush, was released. Because he was constantly touring or in the recording studio, leaving not much time for a home life, he has said that his life was better for knowing her, and he credits her with turning him on to artists like David Bowie Devo early on and turning him onto the concept of art in general. One endearing story goes that she sewed patches on the jeans he's wearing on the back cover of after the Gold Rush, using her hair as a thread. Some fans have speculated that Cinnamon Girl was about Pamela Corson, Jim Morrison's girlfriend and muse, who was on the scene around that time and who famously had cinnamon red hair. But Young himself has debunked that story. So was Cinnamon Girl about Susan, his wife at the time, on Young's 1977 decade compilation. In the liner notes he says, I wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Oaks eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife. I'll come back to that. Let's review the lyrics now, which go like this. I want to live with a cinnamon girl. I could be happy the rest of my life with a cinnamon girl and Verse two A dreamer of pictures I run in the night you see us together chasing the moonlight My Cinnamon girl. Now you could see how if you were married and this song wasn't written about your betrothed, you could get into a little hot water. Verse three gets a little more opaque, which could be explained by the aforementioned fever that Young was battling at the time. 10 silver saxes a bass with a bow the drummer relaxes and waits between shows for his Cinnamon Girl. The second verse repeats and then the song's lyrics end with the bridge PA send me money now I'm gonna make it somehow I need another chance. You see your baby loves to dance. In his biography, Shaky Young is asked who inspired all the dancing women songs that he had written. And Young shed some light on the subject of Cinnamon Girl when he I remember this one girl, Jean Ray, she did a lot of dancing with finger cymbals. Might have been her good chance. I kind of had a crush on her for a while. Gene Ray was a singer in the husband and wife folk duo Jim and Jean. Her husband, Jim Glover, was a college friend of songwriter and protest singer Phil Oakes, a big figure in the same Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City that Bob Dylan sprang. Oakes lived with Jim and Jean for a while, and he wrote the title track for their second album, Changes, on the COVID of which is a photo of Jim and the beautiful Jean. Young and Oakes connected in the early 60s as part of that progressive folk scene, and he's often cited him as a major influence. So there's the Gene Ray connection through Oakes. Incidentally, Jim and Jean put out three albums total and then divorced in 1969. And Brian Ray, Paul McCartney's guitarist and Gene Ray's younger brother, has said that she was the inspiration for the song, as well as Cowgirls in the sand, one of the three songs that Young wrote that feverish day at home in the Canyon. So when Young said that he wrote it for a city girl playing finger cymbals coming at him through Phil Oaks eyes, that's Jean Ray. But when he was asked in his biography to confirm that Cinnamon Girl was indeed about her specifically, he said that only part of the song was about her and that there's images that have to do with Gene and images that have to do with other people. So it's at least partly about Gene Ray and the rest is left to the songwriter. Cinnamon Girl has remained a part of Neil Young's live set for decades, and it's been covered by scores of other artists from the who to Radiohead to Phish and many more. It only made it to number 55 on the billboard chart when it was released, but its influence can't be overstated. There is a peculiar magic in this heavy down tuned song, a daydream set to music by the always enigmatic Neil Young. I'm Janda and this has been behind the song. Special thanks as always to Christian Lane for the music you hear on these podcast episodes. Check us out on TikTok and you can find me on the air weekdays from 9 to 2 Central at 97.1 FM the Drive in Chicago and at wdrb.com on the way. Much more classic rock and roll.