The song Neil Young said Crazy Horse could never play: “I took that as an omen”
Neil Young’s endlessly multifaceted career has made the songwriter an unshakable fixture of the musical landscape for over half a century, but it has also provided Young with a unique set of dilemmas, too. After all, there’s only so much songwriting genius to go around.
Most musicians, throughout the history of popular music, have resigned themselves to doing one project at a time. While you often get artists taking a leave of absence from their bands to record an – often very lacklustre – solo record, you rarely get artists doing both at once.
Nevertheless, during his peak years, Neil Young was recording as a solo artist in addition to performing with Crazy Horse and recording with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. No rest for the wicked, it would appear.
Inevitably, though, there was often a lot of crossover between those three very disparate projects, much to the chagrin of the various musicians he was performing with. At one point, for instance, the Canadian was recording with Crazy Horse in the mornings, before trotting along to record CSN’s Déjà Vu in the evenings.
“The only thing I really remember about that is that it bothered them that I was doing both things,” he told Guitar World in 2009.
That is not to say, however, that Crosby, Stills, and Nash always bore the brunt of Young’s multitasking. In fact, one such miscommunication within his overfilled schedule ended up providing the folk-rock supergroup with one of their defining tunes. Back in 1969, during the early days of Crazy Horse, the songwriter took ‘Helpless’ into the studio, but the recording didn’t quite go to plan.
In support of the band’s rock and roll ethos, Young and the gang chose to record the track live in the studio, giving it the kind of raw power and spontaneous quality that his work with Crazy Horse would soon become synonymous with. “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 recalled to Uncut back in 2004.
What might have been one of Crazy Horse’s earliest masterpieces was squandered, however, by a recording engineer who forgot to press ‘record’. Thus, this definitive, perfected take of ‘Helpless’ was lost, and Neil Young didn’t fancy doing another take. “The engineer didn’t press the button down,” he remembered. “I took that as an omen. That’s why I did it with CSN.”
Eventually, ‘Helpless’ saw the light of day on Déjà Vu, as one of the ultimate stand-outs on that masterpiece of an album. The group’s folk-rock sound certainly seemed to suit Young’s songwriting on the song, but then again, there is no guarantee that that fateful take with Crazy Horse wasn’t better.
Although the song has appeared on a plethora of Neil Young setlists over the years, both with and without Crazy Horse, it wasn’t until 2024 that the world finally got a glimpse of what that lost recording might have sounded like. On Early Daze, audiences heard, at long last, one Crazy Horse version of ‘Helpless’ and, if that is one that was deemed not good enough for release all those years ago, there is no telling just how magical that lost track from 1969 really was.
