Neil Young: A Rougher Ride

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after it was recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, 'Cinnamon Girl' sounds like it was cut the day before yesterday on a battered eight-track studio in Seattle. With its raw, churning groove, the song's riff is a slacker headbanger's wet dream, one of those hypnotic loops you'd point to as incontrovertible proof of the power of rock and roll. The voices are high and mewlish, the lyric drippily hippy-dippy, but it doesn't matter, because what this is about is electricity, texture and repetition, the whirring and buzzing of distorted guitars. It's about GRUNGE.