Helpless—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
#365Songs: July 12
I don’t think I’ve ever recommended CSNY for anything. I am not the president of the fan club. I’m not even a member. I’ve never owned a record, or attended a concert. Not by the band, or anyone in the band. I really haven’t thought much about them at all.
When I have thought about them, I’ve thought that Stephen Stills is an underrated guitarist and an overrated human being. I’ve thought that David Crosby was a spoiled twat. I’ve thought, and still think, that Graham Nash is insufferable.
And then there’s Neil Young.
Neil Young is just one of those polarizing kinds of characters. As the cliche goes, you either love him or hate him.
Given how long he’s been at it, we’ve all probably been on both sides of that line several times.
Neil Young sings like he plays guitar — that is to say, out of tune and out of time. He sings with what might be kindly referred to as a vibrato; a sound he mirrors with his Bigsby tremolo, most famously on Old Black, his beloved Les Paul.
As to his writing, how to describe it? At his best, he has produced lyrics that are impossibly beautiful even as they escape meaning through their ellipticality. His worst songs, conversely, offer dollar-store-bins full of hackneyed phrases, cringe-inducing cliches, and lines and rhymes so pedestrian you can’t quite believe they were allowed to be released.
That they were released to Young’s seemingly indestructible commitment to doing whatever the fuck he pleases, whenever he feels like it.
For us listeners, it means a great deal of work. But as any good dumpster diver knows, you have to crawl through a lot of crap to find the good stuff.
Oh, but what good stuff it is, when you find it. Just a quick walk through the chronology of his studio albums yields a canon that is almost unparalleled in modern song:
The Loner
The Old Laughing Lady
Cinnamon Girl
Down by the River
Cowgirl in the Sand
After the Gold Rush
Southern Man
Out on the Weekend
Heart of Gold
Old Man
The Needle and the Damage Done
For the Turnstiles
Tonight’s the Night
Tired Eyes
Cortez the Killer
Long May You Run
Like a Hurricane
Comes a Time
Lotta Love
My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)
Pocahontas
Powderfinger
I mean, christ, that’s just the first ten years.
Neil Young is, to me, a kind of post-modern folksinger. Which might seem like an oxymoron, but I think it makes sense. His lyrical approach is much closer to Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique than even Dylan at his most surreal, and it bears virtually no resemblance whatsoever either to Woody Guthrie’s plainspoken and Frost-like couplets or the straight-from-the-headlines poetics of Phil Ochs. Young’s ragged and raw approach is virtually the opposite of Paul Simon’s hopelessly over-crafted and desperately self-conscious theatrics, while the depth of emotion he’s able to wring from the towel of his threadbare narratives makes a near mockery of the stylized eccenstricisms of his fellow Canadian, Joni Mitchell.
One of the strangest things about Neil Young is how well he manages to fit into other musical environments, despite his irrepressible and unchanging strangeness. CSNY is perhaps the most profound example of this. The pairing of Young and the CSN lads makes no logical sense whatsoever, and yet, somehow, it works.
It works, of course, because anyone who works with Neil Young seems ultimately to have to give in to his eccentric genius. His songs with CSNY, despite ostensibly being billed as of the ensemble, are, in effect, simply Neil Young performances with a particularly good trio of backup singers.
There aren’t really that many CSNY songs of merit. That said, “Ohio” and “Helpless” are masterpieces, each in their own way. “Ohio” for its uncompromising anger, and “Helpless” for its incomparable beauty.
I’ve chosen “Helpless” because it fits the bill of my theme week: songs about hometowns. Young’s immortal opening lines make clear the rightness of the choice:
There is a town in north Ontario
With dream comfort memory to spare
In my mind, I still need a place to go
All my changes were there
I love the twist here, the idea that our changes happen before we leave the nest, not after. And note that I choose the avian metaphor deliberately:
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
Young’s imagination is somehow simultaneously rife with beatitude and madness — I’ve never heard another poet or songwriter present a vision of bird flight that is both so gorgeous and so disturbing.
Save for, perhaps, Poe.
~
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