Wednesday Wadio: Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl

It’s hard to believe this song only reached #55 on Billboard’s 100 when it debuted in 1970. Especially since it was up against such classics as “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family and “Everything is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens. Oh well, we can appreciate it fully in retrospect. My favorite element is the one note guitar solo which you can see in this video at 2:07 and again at 3:00.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBS3B2cZcFM[/youtube]

We wouldn’t see the one-note solo reach such great heights again until Joey Santiago brought it back in the late 80’s – but that was because he didn’t know how to play the guitar. So what exactly was Neil’s excuse? My first guess would be – drugs – but there are many theories as to the inspiration and genesis of the song. Here are a few I gathered together:

• Young has never said who the Cinnamon Girl is. He prefers to leave lyric interpretations to the listener.
• This song got Young in trouble with his wife. He had to explain that the Cinnamon Girl was just a person he came across while touring.
• The liner notes in “Decade” say he wrote this song about a girl he saw walking down the street playing finger cymbals.
• There was a music club in the 60’s called Cinnamon Cinder. It was featured in an Time magazine article about teenage nightclubs in the early 60’s. It has always seemed obvious to me that it was about the girls that would hang out at that club.
• I think that the real “Cinnamon Girl” was a young, attractive Native American, Latina or Pacific Islander woman with dark tan (read: more or less cinnamon-colored) skin and long black hair.
• This song was known to be a song for Pamela Courson… also known as Pam Morrison. I know this because I read it in a book about the Doors.
• Neil was rated as one of the ten best lead guitarists in a recent magazine and it listed this song as THE essential Neil solo. That had to be a joke, because this solo is the same note played over and over.
• Neil Young had a very high fever when he wrote this song and just picked up his guitar and wrote a song. He talks about it on an episode of Conan O’ Brien its not a very big secret.

What? No space aliens were involved? Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Cinnamon Girl, anyone? Didn’t think so. This song rocks, grooves, bashes and batters its way through to the end, and even if you don’t consider yourself a classic rock fan, watching the video is worth it just to see where the Coen Brothers got their inspiration for Anton Chigurh’s haircut.