It's a mighty tight squeeze

Neil Young - 'Cripple Creek Ferry' (After The Gold Rush - 1970)

Neil Young’s “Cripple Creek Ferry” is a short song to close out his 1970 masterpiece After The Gold Rush. So far, we’ve not had many of these short, farewell and good night final songs from an album; maybe Frank Ocean and Derek and The Dominoes fall into that pot.

After The Gold Rush, the album was inspired by Dean Stockwell-Herb Bermann’s screenplay for a film of the same name that was never made, though, clearly Young had read the script, and along with the title track, this is one of the songs that Young wrote for it.

The album was poorly received at first - now considered a masterpiece, and it is finished by this minor piece that only lasts a little over 90 seconds. Despite this, it packs in some lovely moments; the way Young squeezes the word “squeeze” at the end of the first verse after a pregnant pause - as if it were he, Nils Lofgren and Danny Whitten who were trying to squeeze the hulk of the vessel in somewhere. Given how the album is, in turn, bittersweet and poignant, this is a lighter entry and verges on the precipice of being knocked off, “will this do?” effort. However, it is bittersweet and poignant that it is the last time the three of them combined their vocals on record before Whitten’s death in late 1972.

What is a Cripple Creek Ferry anyway? As many of you will know, gambling isn’t legal in all parts of the US, and one loophole is that it is legal on a boat if it isn’t at the dock. This “ferry” is essentially a floating bridge, a tight squeeze perpendicular to the river’s flow. The captain “hasn’t heard from his deckhands” because there are not any, and he is only a captain in the sense that the “vessel” needs one for some paperwork.

This won’t work now for Joe Rogan related reasons; it might do so in the future.