Elvis Costello on the greatest Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song
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 Déjà 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 Déjà 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.
