The Last 20 Seconds of “Cinnamon Girl”

The lore surrounding the song “Cinnamon Girl” by Neil Young and Crazy Horse is extensive. Recorded and released in 1969 on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, it is one of Young’s most beloved songs and an unassailable classic. Stories about the song abound, such as how it was one of three songs written in a day by Young while in the midst of a fever, the one-note guitar solo, and the mystery surrounding the true identity of the song’s titular character. Yet there is one aspect of “Cinnamon Girl” that remains overlooked: the last 20 seconds.

“Cinnamon Girl” is powered by a riff that launched a thousand ships as countless bands and Young himself have adopted the same crunchy, guitar-based template. A heckler once yelled at Young that all of his songs sounded the same and Young famously responded: “It’s all one song.” There’s a strong argument that “Cinnamon Girl” is in fact that one song, serving as an urtext for grunge and indie rock for generations to come.

Young plays the song in a drop-D tuning, meaning that he starts with a guitar’s standard tuning and lowers the low and high E strings to D notes. Young had employed the tuning before on Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul,” but it is in “Cinnamon Girl” that he grasps the true power of this technique, providing Young with a low drone, whether heard or implied, that permeates the song with a deep intensity and weight.

The drone is heard plainly at the 2:37 mark of “Cinnamon Girl” as Young and Crazy Horse finish playing the central riff of the song one last time. Young holds the low D after the other guitar and bass fade out. The last 20 seconds of the recorded time of “Cinnamon Girl” acts as the coda of the song. In music theory, a coda is a concluding statement within a song or larger movement. It’s a wrap-up and usually serves as an addition or extension of the principle motif or arrangement of the piece. In this coda, Young plays a flurry of notes by hammering the strings on the fretboard of the guitar to produce the sound rather than using a pick. Over the course of these 20 seconds, he plays 11 different flurries, each a variation on a theme. It’s not the central riff of “Cinnamon Girl” anymore, but this new theme feels connected and even an enhancement on the song’s main riff. This outbreak of notes played by Young in the coda is tumultuous and frenzied and then suddenly finishes as Young lets the sustained drone of the low D ring out. As the drone continues towards its vanishing point, Young hits natural harmonics on the guitar twice just before the song ends, providing a twisted high complement to the drone. With that, the music fades out, ending the coda and “Cinnamon Girl.”

Without the coda, “Cinnamon Girl” would still be an indomitable classic, yet it enhances the beauty and the power of the song. Going further, the coda has the potential to stand on its own. Just as “Cinnamon Girl” ends, it suggests new possibilities, pointing the way towards undiscovered countries. “Cinnamon Girl” has been covered many times but an artist or band should cover only the last 20 seconds. Or, a sound artist could partner with Young to extract the coda and manipulate it by adding beats to it. Or perhaps one of the flurries of notes could be isolated and repeated, all while augmenting and expanding the drone. It’s easy to imagine this drone-based version of the coda featured in a sound installation piece akin to ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), the long-running performance in a German church of the John Cage composition that is expected to conclude on September 4, 2640. The coda deserves to have the same treatment. It could be played on an extended loop in a Rothko Chapel-type environment, transformed from a 20-second tag into its own world.

Though not a cover, the first part of “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos is centered on a colossal guitar riff that employs the same hammering-on, flurry of notes as the coda of a “Cinnamon Girl.” While it was composed and recorded after Young’s song, Duane Allman, who conceived of the signature riff for “Laya,” apparently drew influence for it from the intro to “As the Years Go Passing By” by bluesman Albert King. There are even hints of the coda in “Cinnamon Girl” by Lana Del Rey; not a cover as the title instead serves as an acknowledgment of Young’s influence on Del Rey’s music. Her “Cinnamon Girl” has its own coda that lasts a minute and a half, featuring a swirling theme that hints at the drone of the last 20 seconds of Young’s song.

Listening to live performances of “Cinnamon Girl” over the years on bootleg recordings and Neil Young Archives, Young has performed the song many times, both with and without Crazy Horse. In the early 1970s, Young mostly stayed away from the coda, but he began to incorporate it into performances, playing variations on the coda’s theme. The version of “Cinnamon Girl” included on 1979’s Live Rust provides a template for how the coda would be performed live. The other members of the Horse accompany Young on the coda, violently playing waves of feedback and sound. They extend and stretch the coda to a breaking point before finishing with a sonic boom instead of fading out as on the studio version. A different version of the coda can be heard on a recording from November 13, 1990 later released on Way Down in the Rust Bucket. Young’s playing on this rendition is less brutal and much more spacey and cosmic. That feeling would change only a few months later as Young and Crazy Horse’s tour coincided with the Operation Desert Storm bombing campaign against Iraq in early 1991. Young commented on how the images of war that he and the band were witnessing on television couldn’t help but inform their own playing night to night. This sensibility was documented on the 1991 live album Weld as Young told Rolling Stone:

“We were there all the way through it, and to me, that’s what Weld is about. It’s very brutal, especially the songs with the big endings. I was trying to create the sound of violence and conflict, heavy machinery, outright destruction…We were watching CNN all the time, watching this shit happen, and then going out to play, singing these songs about conflict. It was a hard thing. And I feel there was nothing else I could do. Whatever could bring people together was more important than me playing a new song. We couldn’t go out there and just be entertainment.”

The version of the coda released on Weld is from February 27, 1991 is truly severe and seemingly conveying the audio version of the tracer fire and missile launches viewed nightly during the Gulf War. In the middle of this mayhem, Young quotes the melody of “Norwegian Wood.” At first, this reference could be considered as a respite during the thunder and lightning or a reminder of gentler times, but then recalling how The Beatles’ song ends with the narrator either imagining or actually setting fire to his departed lover’s apartment, suddenly the allusion is appropriate to the rest of Young and Crazy Horse’s performance.

Concurrently with the release of Weld in 1991, Young also put out Arc, a 35 minute-long compilation of waves of noise and sound ripples produced by Young and Crazy Horse during the tour earlier in the year. The music of the album doesn’t encompass previously written material but assembles together various improvisations by Young and the band. Arc is a collage of the musical flotsam and jetsam found between the proper performances of the songs. From the same 1991 Rolling Stone interview linked above, Young said of Arc:

“That, in some way, is the essence of the music, those things we do at the beginning and the end…As soon as we lose the beat, we break it down and we’re gone. Nothing else matters. There are so many bands out there that are supposed to be rockin’, and they’re really playing to a click track. This is my reaction to all that shit…I really made Arc for people who ride around in the Jeeps with the big speakers.If you pull up beside somebody on the street and you’re playing that, that makes a fucking statement.”

(Quick aside: One of the most hilarious releases of Young’s career is the Arc single, a three minute long snippet from the longer album. Imagine a world in which it hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1991 alongside Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” and “OPP” from Naughty by Nature.)

To find analogies for Arc and the last 20 seconds of “Cinnamon Girl,” it’s best to look to the visual arts. Both Arc and the “Cinnamon Girl” coda act as musical equivalents of the metal sculpture work of the late artist John Chamberlain. In this strand of his work, Chamberlain used found scrap metal, often old automobiles or other industrial materials, and crushed and reshaped these components to create messy, abstract, beautiful objects. There’s a painterly aspect to these Chamberlain sculptures as the viewer can’t help but remember the car or washing machine that the metal was previously used for while, at the same time, recognizing the entirely new object created by Chamberlain.

In this extended quote from a Chamberlain interview with Artforum, he explained his process:

“I remember I lived at Larry Rivers’ house in Southampton and he had a few parts from an old ’29 Ford. I tried to deal with the fenders and it turned out that I was dealing with one fender and then the other fender. It took me a while before I got both fenders together (they went together at a certain point)….What it turned out to be was two fenders that I finally got together. I put rod around it—it was almost like wrapping it up with rod….It was more like whether the pieces fitted. That’s difficult to describe, but you can see it in the sculptures. Go joggle them or something and you’ll find that they fit. It’s like how something will fit in your hand when you pick it up. You can pick it up this way or you can pick it up that way. You have a certain sense of control by the fit…So, you could literally take big pieces of material and throw them at each other and sometimes they would go chink, chink. There’s a wall piece owned by the Guggenheim Museum, Dolores James, that I finished in ’62. I had started it earlier that year and it had been going for a long time. I started it in the country and then I moved to the city and I put it up on a wall. I painted the wall one color and I didn’t like that and I put it on another wall with another color. Nothing worked. The piece was almost done, but I couldn’t figure out what it was that kept it from being complete. One time I came back really drunk and stood about 25 feet away and threw an eight pound sledge at it. It went right into it like a knife—only three inches of the handle stuck out. All the pieces went chink, chink, chink. It did just that. It’s amazing what you do in your own terms, of how you make things work. There’s no formula.”

The coda of “Cinnamon Girl” and the beginning and ending improvisations that make up Arc sound as if Young is creating his own versions of Chamberlain sculptures, only his material is sound. Young deconstructs his music in real time, leaving behind something blasted, twisted, and beautiful. Arc is the fully realized vision of Young’s process as it shows him adjusting, fusing, and melting these musical pieces together in order to find the same fit that Chamberlain describes as the result of his own improvisatory method. It’s easy to imagine Young throwing a knife at Arc in order to make the musical pieces fit together. 

Young’s fascination and obsession with old cars has been well documented over the years, especially in his memoir Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars. Young has the same attraction to metal, chrome, and color as Chamberlain. It’s unclear if Young ever saw a John Chamberlain sculpture and if he would have loved it. Perhaps if he had, it would have been too obvious to what he had been doing his entire life among the fleet of cars in various states of disrepair on his ranch. Or maybe Young would have seen the connection between Chamberlain’s work and what he does onstage with his guitar alongside Crazy Horse.

As an assemblage of spontaneous beginnings and endings, Arc couldn’t have been created without the last 20 seconds of “Cinnamon Girl.” The coda serves as the first time Young captured one of the improvised endings on tape back in 1969. It pointed the way for him and the band to extend songs and reach that point of extreme musical tension. But the coda of “Cinnamon Girl” has the ability to stand on its own; it doesn’t need to be combined with any other material or parts or even the rest of “Cinnamon Girl.” It is its own separate work of art with the potential to stretch and expand endlessly through time. 

Image: Chamberlain, John, Dolores James, Welded and painted steel, 1962, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, © 2023 John Chamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.