Neil Young: ~ Cowgirl in the Sand ~ 1976 Budokan Japan: unRELeAsed. ~vIDeo~ Great guitar work

The visuals were saved and uploaded incorrectly on this video before I was hip to how the program I was using worked. But the version of this song is OUTSTANDING IMO. "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969) is Neil Young's second solo album and his first with backing band Crazy Horse. The album was produced by Neil Young and David Briggs and contains three of his most memorable songs: "Cinnamon Girl", "Down by the River", and "Cowgirl in the Sand", the last two of which were written when Young had a 103 °F (39.5 °C) fever. In 2003, the album was ranked number 208 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. After the Buffalo Springfield imploded, Neil Young recorded his first, eponymous solo album, an elaborately overdubbed affair that cast him in the role of brooding singer-songwriter. But soon after that record was released, in January 1969, Young began jamming in Los Angeles with a band called the Rockets, redubbed Crazy Horse, and started a relationship that would change guitar rock forever and form the foundation of his career. If Neil Young had an aura of careful subtlety bordering on tentativeness, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere felt raw, rushed, energized. Indeed, Young dashed off the album's three central songs -- "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand" -- in a single fever-addled afternoon, and Young and the band play with an almost reckless disregard for prettiness, precision, clarity.... On the epics that end each album side, "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand," Young and Whitten circle, prod and light into each other like boxers in a sweaty fifteen-round match, the notes stabbing in and out, answering each other in short staccato bursts while the rhythm section stolidly keeps things from flying apart. The quartet's interplay is at once primitive and abstract, more suggestive of Ornette Coleman's fractured free jazz than the jam-band psychedelia that was the prevailing West Coast fad at the time. Some listeners found it crude, but the gloriously spontaneous sound forged on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere would endure, not only as a blueprint for Young and Crazy Horse (even after Frank "Pancho" Sampedro replaced Whitten, who died of a drug overdose in 1972) but as an influence on countless bands, from Sonic Youth to Son Volt." GREG KOT

Added 21 Sept 2026