Sugar Mountain - Neil Young Tribute
- Mar 7
- 2 min read
Sugar Mountain, a Neil Young Tribute band played at Penn's Peak on Friday night with a new leader singer and guitarist, Geoff Doubleday, replacing John Hathaway. This was only Geoff's second performance since joining the band. They were tight, authentic and true to the magic of Neil Young's music.
Geoff is a multi-instrumentalist, singer and song writer from Sparta, New Jersey. He has been playing guitar since he was three years old and professionally since he was thirteen. In addition to Sugar Mountain, Doubleday performs as a solo artist with his band Doubleday as well as with various other artists and groups including:
Patrick Fitzsimmons
Railroad Earth
Bobby Syvarth
Denny Tilton
Jamie Chesson
Cold Hill
John Kimock
Jungle Jazz Initiative
He has shared the stage with the Outlaws, Asleep at the Wheel, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Max Weinberg, Joe Russon, Billy Hector, Eli Young Band, the Marshall Tucker Band among others.
Per their website (https://www.sugarmountaintribute.com), this New Jersey band brings together an ensemble of veteran musicians to reproduce the Neil Young concert experience by covering all the best-known songs, hits and deep cuts for its listeners.
The setlist opened with "When You Dance, I Can Really Love" from their After the Gold Rush album. The rest of the evening spanned decades of Neil Young from his time with Buffalo Springfield, CSN&Y and Crazy Horse. The entire list in order:
When You Dance
The Loner
OHIO
Heart of Gold
Human Highway
Out on the Weekend
Comes a Time
Everyone Knows
Walk On
Long May You Run
Alabama
Southern Man
Cowgirl in the Sand
After a short intermission, the band came back with some more classic songs including some harder rock numbers:
Sugar Mountain
Old Man
Harvest
Winterlong
Don't Cry No Tears
Mr. Soul
Power Rangers
Mansion on the Hill
Down by the River
Hey Hey, My My
Hurricane
Rockin in the Free World
The encore song sealed the evening with a raucous version of Cinnamon Girl.
All told, it was a great mix of softer classics that prompted sing-a-longs to heavy rock versions that got the audience on its feet.
The Sugar Mountain Lineup includes:
Geoff Doubleday - Lead vocals, acoustic & electric guitars, harmonica
Tom Delaney - Acoustic & electric guitars, pedal steel, vocals
Luke Liddy - Keyboards, vocals
Walter Super - Bass guitar, vocals
John Torhan - Drums and percussion
An added bonus to the great music was a rolling collage backdrop of Neil Young photographs from his start as a musician in 1963 over the next 63 years until today at the age of 80. He continues to perform internationally on his 2026 Love Earth Tour.
His discography to date includes 45 studio albums, 22 live albums, 4 soundtracks, 3 compilation albums, a couple of EPs, 116 singles as well as 31 archive releases. This equates to over 500 unique songs spanning six decades. Some of the collage of photos has some early pictures of him with Comrie Smith Music to more recent:
My wife and I witnessed this phenomenal show on Friday night. Super impressed with the new addition. I kept thinking to myself, if Neil himself had experienced this band for himself and would he have been as impressed as we were.