The song Neil Young called an “omen” to join CSN
They say that fate moves you in the right direction. If you hit a run of red lights, the world is saving you from a run-in with an ex. If you miss your train, it’s keeping you from some annoyance, maybe even a crash. You can choose to see all these things as signs and surrender to them – that’s what Neil Young did.
Young isn’t religious in a traditional sense; in fact, he’s openly said that he’s not a fan of organised religion and especially thinks it should be separated from the state. “I think religion and freedom of religion and people’s relationship with God is something that should not be hijacked by any certain political party,” he said to NPR. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a believer.
Instead, Young is more spiritual. He sits somewhere between believing in God and believing in the moon and things like astrology. “Before there was organised religion, there was the moon,” he said once, getting into the more woo-woo stuff.
He added, “The Indians knew about the moon. Pagans followed the moon. I’ve followed it for as long as I can remember, and that’s just my religion.”
So while he’s not a church-on-Sunday type of man, the idea of a higher power does direct his life to some degree, or at least give him pointers on living it, or ways of viewing certain situations.
Those situations include the classics like missed connections and bad luck in traffic. But specifically in his case, they include a situation like trying and trying and trying, but only failing to record a song.
The song in question was ‘Helpless’. Instead, by his childhood experience of contracting polio that impacted the whole left side of his body, it’s a song that finally processes the emotions of that experience, making it an especially important one to him.
However, when he took it to his band, Crazy Horse, things kept getting in the way. As they worked on it at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, they were running through takes when, finally, Young felt like they got it right. He thought surely that take was golden; that was the one. Then he noticed the red recording light, and it was off. The tape machine hadn’t been running.
“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,” he reminisced on what sounded like a glorious moment before the sinking recognition set in; “And the engineer didn’t press the button down.”
Young saw the sign. At this point, he’d joined Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young but only for live shows. The group had yet to release any music together, and as his own band’s attempt at the song felt fated to fail, he thought perhaps the world was speaking. “I took that as an ‘omen’. That’s why I did it with CSN,” he said as he granted the song to the supergroup, and it sat as a golden moment on their first joint record as if it was always meant to be there.
