Cinnamon Girl. Neil Young with Crazy Horse. 1969. Reprise.

Exiled from banality, the outsider expatriates to borders within rock and roll desperate to outrun reality’s status quo. Finding there only others of the same ilk, we storm our new topography with an inebriated passion that ultimately reorients our psychological weaknesses towards a new understanding of the realities of vertigo. On Neil Young’s debut record with Crazy Horse, the mythological conceit of the outsider, along with the outsider’s primary theme, absence, haunts its most well known single, Cinnamon Girl. Two versions of that single exist; the version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and the version originally recorded for that record which includes a co-lead vocal sung by the late Danny Whitten, whose vocal track Young had erased for the now familiar FM radio staple. On Cinnamon Girl, absence makes itself known with the phantom non-appearance of the titular girl, whom we experience only as an object of desire, vibrant inside of two individual imaginations, the lyric narrator, who, we’re told, dreams of her, “chasing the moonlight,” and the drummer, who famously waits for her to appear between shows. The obsessive concentration of a typically memorable Young performance distinguishes this account of living with and without a cinnamon girl from the pop commercialism of homogeneity, and those insipid, impersonal valentines that, lacking a genuine personality, fail to take root in the mind. Whitten’s version of Cinnamon Girl is a reminder of Young’s time with Buffalo Springfield, and, touched by harmony, loses the surprise edge of its opening, duo guitar attack. Influenced by Hendrix’ example, Young’s instincts as a solo artist sharpened because of the attention of his core individualism, his imaginative soul of the outsider. Whitten was merely expressing the joy of having found himself at the center of a musical group that, seeking freedom for itself and its audience, frequently, brilliantly, hit its mark; cursed with physical anguish, however, he crossed over into creative compromise while spiraling swiftly into lethal addiction. Listening to Cinnamon Girl now, it’s easy to lose oneself in Young’s master accomplishment, which was to have affixed garage rock aesthetics to a sixties’ communal ethos. Kurt Cobain died trying to revive that ethos within a nineties artistic contingent that claimed to have an understanding respect for the organizational, anarchic principles that we’re told held punk rock together. “He’s a perfect stranger…”Young sang on his debut record. “He’s a feeling arranger and a changer of the way he talks. He’s the unforeseen danger…he died, but it did not show.” The outsider par excellence had only just begun his career.

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