Now greet the arrival of 'Sugar Mountain- Live At Canterbury House 1968,' another singular installment in the continuing Neil Young Archives Performance Series. On this CD+DVD set, recorded in Ann Arbor, MI, November 9-10, just days before the release of Young's self titled solo debut, one of the greatest singer-songwriters in rock history is heard solo and acoustic at the height of one of the must tumultuous and creative periods ever experienced both in music and culture. This set contains a CD featuring 14 tracks, a DVD disc including a high resolution audio mix of the album plus a 5 minute trailer for the archives set.

2009-01-04 -- 4/5:: dissapointed w the DVD
I bought the Caterbury CD/DVD and like others thought the DVD was a video of the cd- like Massey Hall. I even went back to the store and said the dvd was defective but found I was wrong- why does the disc say multiple angle views when all you get is a pick of neil w snow flakes??? I hadn't read any reviews until this morning and discovered what the deal is, although dissapointed that the dvd isn't concert footage the preformance is still magical and worth the $. The packaging should say that the dvd is not a video. Otherwise great gig and love to hear Neil talking to the crowd- similar to Massey very historic!!

2009-01-03 -- 1/5:: WHAT DVD?
The DVD is a farce,unless you like being stared at while fake snowflakes with a background of reel-to-reel tapes turning for an hour. The music is great, but the DVD is nothing more than an still of Mr. Young.

2009-01-02 -- 5/5:: Oh to live on Sugar Mountain With the barkers and the coloured balloons
Sugar Mountain is a recording of a solo concert Neil Young did in 1968, just after leaving Buffalo Springfield and embarking on a solo career--not to mention being the 4th member of Crosby, Stills, & Nash. Between songs Mr. Young rambles, but though you might not want to listen to these interludes every time, they provide insight into the mindset of young Neil Percival Young. They reveal a lot about his approach to songwriting, as when he explains that a song like Mr. Soul just came to him, as if he were a radio antannae. It really has that kind of spontaneous feeling, what with the unusual rhyme pattern and wordplay, yet it just flows out like Neil tapped some kind of artesian well:

I was down on a frown
when the messenger
brought me a letter
I was raised by the praise
of a fan
who said I upset her
Any girl in the world
could have easily
known me better
She said, You're strange,
but don't change,
and I let her.

The title track, Sugar Mountain, is a song that he wrote a long time ago, and hadn't played in about 5 years. Yet, it is a perfect gem of a song, and a perfect take. The track was included on Neil's Decade album set, and he also does a live version released on the Live Rust album. This song is so perfect I had to ask for Sugar Mountain for Christmas. Neil tunes his Martin guitar down a full step to play this, and it uses just a few simple but pretty chords. It is a wistful lament for the lost innocence of childhood, but it evokes that feeling so powerfully that it is awesome and amazing. The chorus just keeps repeating interspersed with simple couplets that advance the narrative, while leaving plenty of room for the imagination to fill in:

It's so noisy at the fair but all your friends are there,
And the candy floss you had, and your mother and your dad.

Oh to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the coloured balloons
You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon
You're leaving there too soon.

Now you're underneath the stairs and you're giving back some glares
To the people you once met and it's your first cigarette.


Sugar Mountain is simple and perfect, a wonderful song that haunts you, and how did he do it? He makes it sound so easy, but did an angel whisper it into his ear?

On the Way Home is a song he did with Buffalo Springfield, but with just Neil's high voice and his guitar, it sounds even better. The opening line to me seems to describe his songwriting process:

When the dream came, I held my breath with my eyes closed
I went insane, like a smoke ring day when the wind blows

There is a lot of great music on this, and a chance to hear a portrait of Young, the artist, as a young man. A lot of the same themes run through his music--maybe it is all just one big song. He uses lots of imagery from Nature with a capital "N." This thread continues in a song called Birds:

When you see me fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go
It's over
It's over

Lucky for us, though the concert at Canterbury House is over, thanks to this audio document we are able to hear it again. There are actually 2 discs, but one is the same concert in Audio DVD format. It is some kind of High Fidelity audio format, but it would not play for me either on a DVD player or on my computer. I thought it would be a film of the concert, but don't think there is a film. They do have film on Live at Massey Hall, another archive release from a few years later, in 1971. That one, I hear, has gaps in the visual record, and to fill them they just run tape of a tape recorder recording. Even if it is the actual tape recorder that recorded the show, who wants to look at that? The Sugar Mountain DVD has just a picture of Neil's face from the CD cover, but there is snow falling over it (I was able to watch the DVD but the sound was very unstable, it wasn't playing properly and started warbling). Anyway, look at it as an extra bonus DVD, but don't be disappointed that it doesn't have any film of the concert. It is just the same concert in a different format. The price is just for the CD, so even if you can't use DVD-A format, it is just icing on the cake, or Sugar on the Mountain, I guess.

Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield Again
Last Time Around
Live at Massey Hall 1971
Decade
Neil Young
After the Gold Rush
4 Way Street
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Rust Never Sleeps - The Concert Film

2008-12-31 -- 4/5:: Complainers read this!!!
Maybe some of you 'so called fans' should go and read some Neil history on wikipedia. NY has, since they came out complained about the sound quality of standard CD's. This is why a chunk of his back catalog spent so much time out of print on CD. The next step in audio is SACD (super audio CD) or DVD-A. Both of these formats support 96khz resolution (twice that of CD) and 5.1 surround sound if you decide to mix it that way. Artists like Pink Floyd have hitched to the SACD format, NY, Rush and others are going with DVD-A. DVD-A means audio only, at 96khz, no pictures. Only live at massey hall has any video on the associated DVD. Previous archive releases have been available as either CD or CD/DVD-A packages with differing prices. This one isn't, but at $14.99 for an archive release you can't really complain, you'ld be paying $20 to a bootlegger and get a substandard release. Please know your facts before commenting!!

2008-12-31 -- 1/5:: We Expect a DVD to Contain Moving Images
I was excited about this release and when I preordered it the description was "Sugar Mountain-Live At Canterbury House 1968 (CD/DVD)". I see that Amazon has since added a "-A" to the DVD part of the description. Based on the fact that other recent Neil Young CDs have contained DVDs with something to watch, I fully expected to see a concert video when I popped the DVD in the player last night. No such luck. There is a still picture of Neil for the concert and a 5 minute advertisement for the upcoming Archives release. What a let down.

I thought the music CD was pretty good and at least all of the between songs chatter is set up as individual tracks so it can be skipped easily. But what I really wanted was to watch this concert. I don't think that was an unreasonable expectation given that the item was sold to me as "Sugar Mountain-Live At Canterbury House 1968 (CD/DVD)".

When selling a DVD that is not a DVD in the sense that most people think of, the fact that there is nothing to watch should be more than clearly stated. Neil loses credibility for deceptive marketing.