What inspired the Neil Young song 'Helpless'?
By: Will Howard (Far Out Magazine)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
What inspired the Neil Young song 'Helpless'?
A look into Helpless, a song by Neil Young for the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album Deja Vu, which Elvis Costello named as one of his favourite songs.
(Credit: Alamy)
In 1951, a Polio epidemic swept through the Canadian province of Ontario. Over the course of the year there were over 2500 cases, one of those being that of a then five-year-old Neil Young, who contracted the disease in the rural village his family were living at the time.
The report written about his experience suffering from the illness is harrowing, and the experience left him with a limp he still suffers from to this day. 19 years later, Young had become one of the most exciting names in music.
First as a member of Buffalo Springfield, then as a solo artist. His songwriting was as plaintive and as vulnerable as his keening tenor, plumbing his own emotional depths for classic songs. It was only a matter of time that he would look into his experience with polio for songwriting inspiration, but the full context of it was a surprise to say the least.
After his debut solo album stalled with little fanfare, his erstwhile Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills formed a new band with David Crosby and Graham Nash. Creative firebrands that they were, they named the album Crosby, Stills and Nash. Stills reached out to Young to join the band, initially as a guitarist. Young, cantankerous even then, would join only on the condition that he join the band as a full on partner to the other three songwriters, rather than as a sideman.
Creative firebrands that they were, you can probably guess what they changed the name of the band to. The newly re-christened Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were now the most exciting new band in the world and their second effort, 1970's masterpiece Deja Vu, one of that year's most critically acclaimed and successful.
Though Crosby, Stills and Nash probably weren't keen to admit it, Young's presence was arguably the biggest reason for that: his guitar playing lighting up the other members' songs and his own songs being the record's real standouts. 'Country Girl' is a classic, but the real showstopper here is the spellbinding 'Helpless'.
The song is pretty explicitly about that trauma. Putting the unimaginable trauma of catching a life-threatening illness when you're five years old into words. He sings of lying in his childhood bedroom, a place that should be the very definition of safety and comfort, but instead, all he can do is watch "Big birds flying across the sky / Throwing shadows on our eyes / Leave us Helpless, helpless, helpless."
The song became a classic both for the band and for Young himself. It's one of the most compelling scenes of one of the best concert movies ever made, The Last Waltz, where Young plays it accompanied by fellow Canuck legend Joni Mitchell on backing vocals.
The song's legacy doesn't end there, though; no less a legend than Elvis Costello put Deja vu on his list of greatest records of all time and singled out Helpless as the high-water mark of it. Hopefully, all of us can take the trauma lingering from our youths and process it into something as beautiful and lasting as Neil Young did with Helpless.
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IMO the songs written by songwriters are as much "literature" as any novel or poem. The Nobel Committee has that opinion as well, or Bob Dylan would not have received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Helpless, by Neil Young
There is a town in north Ontario
With dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there
Blue, blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now
The chains are locked and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow
Blue, blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Helpless, helpless, helpless
The article does not identify WHAT town in North Ontario that Neil Young is singing about. It is Omemee, Ontario, a small town located between Peterborough and Lindsay in the Kawartha Lakes District of Ontario, an resort area north of Toronto.
Neil Young was born in Toronto, and through the years has lived in many places, but Omemee is where he laid in bed suffering through polio, looking out the window, while "The chains are locked and tied across the door,"
I cannot count the times I have watched the video of Neil singing 'Helpless' with Robbie Robertson and The Band, from The Last Waltz