The iconic Neil Young song that never got recorded: “I took that as an omen”
Seemingly, nothing is sacred anymore. The album alone is no longer the living proof of an artist’s experience. Instead, it comes with an onslaught of TikToks and maybe a Netflix documentary after fact, sweeping up every bit of content the LP recording may have missed.
Gone are the days of imagining just how magical the missed moments of music were. Maybe it was a guitar solo that Jimmy Page laid down, or a vocal take Marvin Gaye delivered yet chose not to put on the final record, on that basis of artistic direction. These moments are untouched relics in culture that all add to the mythologised beauty of being a fan.
Perhaps one of the finest examples of this is the moment Crosby Stills and Nash met. A moment Graham Nash describes as the time when “the world fucking changed”. It all took place in a Californian neighborhood, where Nash’s girlfriend Joni Mitchell, invited him to have dinner with his future bandmates.
During a typically late 1960s impromptu jam, Nash sung ‘You Don’t Have To Cry’ with Stephen Stills and David Crosby, and together they experienced the shared magic their voices create. While we eventually got a recording of the song, that moment, when it first initially happened, will only be remembered by those three and Mitchell, while we just simply have to imagine. As painful as that may be, there is ultimately a beauty in it.
Those moments didn’t stop for the band either. In fact, they were the happy beneficiaries of the result of such a moment just a couple years after their garden rendezvous. In 1970, Neil Young joined the ranks. Somewhat carefully, the band accepted his admission at the request of Stephen Stills and the now four-piece had to feel each other out once more, to gain a true understanding of how this new dynamic would work.
Relatively swiftly, it became apparent to the band that it would work just fine, with Young not only understanding the instrumental harmony required, but coming armed with a catalogue of brilliant songs. Alongside ‘Ohio’, Young brought them the beautifully crafted ‘Helpless’.
But while ‘Ohio’ may have been designed with the four-piece in mind, ‘Helpless’ was never meant to make it as far as the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young studio.
“We were doing it live, everybody playing and singing at once and we did an eight- or nine-minute version of it with a long instrumental in the middle,” Young explained, of the first recording with The Crazy Horse band. He continued, “And the engineer didn’t press the button down,” he says. “I took that as an omen. That’s why I did it with CSN.”
Happy accidents have clearly made some of the greatest moments in musical history and it’s clear that the modern world of mass content and digitalization is drowning out the possibility of more of these happening in the near future. I’m willing to champion a reversion back to this, even if that means I miss out on more iconic nine-minute instrumentals.
