Song · Live covers
Cinnamon Girl
Neil Young wrote the riff in a fever, and Radiohead played it four times in 2001.
1969
topanga, with a temperature
Neil Young wrote it at home in Topanga, California, while ill with flu and a high fever, in the same stretch that produced “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand”. It opened Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his first record with Crazy Horse.
It is in double drop D, a tuning he uses on several of his best-known songs, played on the Gibson Les Paul he called Old Black, and Danny Whitten sings the high harmony against Young's low one. NME has filed the riff under proto-grunge, which is one way of saying everybody took something from it.
2001
twice kept off television
Radiohead's first go at it was at a Canal+ taping in Paris on 28 April 2001, as an encore, and it was the one song that night not from Kid A or Amnesiac. Canal+ left it out of the broadcast. Six weeks later, recording Later... with Jools Holland at the BBC in London on 9 June, the band opened with it, but it was not broadcast, so it missed television a second time.
At the Santa Barbara Bowl on 30 June it came in the second encore, and at Yokohama Arena on 4 October it was the third encore and the last thing the band played.
the video
Neil Young cover.· Bas Kollenwatch on youtube →
Live history
| Times played | 4 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Saturday 28 April 2001 · Paris |
| Last played | Thursday 4 October 2001 · Yokohama |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources5
- Nigel Williamson, Journey Through the Past: The Stories Behind the Classic Songs of Neil Young.
- “50 greatest guitar riffs of all time”, NME, 25 October 2012.
- NME, “'Head music”, 29 April 2001, for the Canal+ taping and the broadcast it was cut from.
- NME, “Radiohead go on Later!”, 10 June 2001, from its reporter at the recording, for the recording and what was broadcast from it.
- Performance dates and running orders from this site's own setlist archive and show pages, via setlist.fm.