OK, boys and girls, today is the birthday of Neil Young, 69
today. And Neil’s one of those main dudes. Like, it’s hard to imagine the
history of my listening without his contribution. Young has had his fallow
periods, certainly, but his best stuff hits on different fronts: there’s Neil
the hard-rocking guitarist, usually in collaboration with Crazy Horse, his
garage band of musical mates; there’s Neil the crusader for this or that cause,
steering by his own idiosyncracies—including criticism of both Bushes,
criticisms of the record industry, of mp3s, of gas-guzzling cars (he’s been
working on both a hybrid electric guitar and an alternative format for sharable
music), and his concerts to support the Bridge School; there’s Neil, as I first knew him, as folky-trippy crooner with a
penchant for strung-out states of mind. That Neil is represented by
today’s song, which is the first song of his I ever heard way back in 1970. It graces
Déjà Vu, the album on which he joined
Crosby, Stills & Nash to create one of those albums that seems a landmark
of its time, more than the sum of its parts. And yet “Helpless” is more than
all the rest. The song marked me when I first heard it, all of eleven or so,
and still works its magic on me. And it's also
the song Neil performed at The Band's farewell concert and it appears on
The Last Waltz (1978) with Joni Mitchell on backup vocals.
The strung-out Neil was the basis of so many memorable
Seventies albums from him:
Tonight’s the
Night (1975),
On the Beach
(1974),
After the Gold Rush (1971),
which also had some of the guitar hero Neil on display on, my favorite,
Zuma (1975), which also has quiet tunes and even a CSNY number, and
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969), which also has the droning acoustic downer “It Won’t Be Long,” a song that is sort of
quintessential Neil. But what really is? Neil’s a bit of a chameleon. I’ve
already posted on “Thrasher,” his great narrative of disillusion in the late
Seventies from
Rust Never Sleeps
(1979). And, indeed, I feel like I should go to something later than that, but
I didn’t care much for Neil’s output in the Eighties—not really wanting to
revisit
Trans (1982) or the even more
forgettable late Eighties albums—though he ended the decade strongly with
Freedom (1989). In the Nineties, Neil rode
that renewed purpose into a series of worthwhile discs:
Harvest Moon (1992),
Sleeps
with Angels (1994),
Mirror Ball
(1995),
Broken Arrow (1996). Two of
those are with Crazy Horse, and
Mirror
Ball is with Pearl Jam, while
Harvest
Moon revisits the sound that made him millions on
Harvest (1972), which I guess could be called hip Country.
I’m tempted to take a song from one of those latter LPs if
only to indicate that Neil has done good stuff beyond the Seventies but I haven’t
listened to those albums recently enough to feel drawn to them. And of course
Neil keeps going:
Prairie Wind (2005)
might be said to pick up where
Harvest
Moon left off, and
Greendale
(2003) is an involved dramatic tale that only someone like Neil could pull off.
I haven’t mentioned the many live albums—it’s always interesting when Neil
picks up his electric guitar for an audience—including
Weld (1991) with Sonic Youth and, with Crazy Horse,
Year of the Horse (1997), which was also
a film by Jim Jarmusch, for whom Neil did the guitar soundtrack for
Dead Man (1995), all of which shows that
the Nineties was a decade of revitalized guitar-playing for Neil, and more
power to him.
More recently (the last works I’ve picked up), there was the
entirely solo grunge-guitar classic, Le
Noise (2010), with production effects via Daniel Lanois, and another Crazy
Horse outing, the sprawling Psychedelic
Pill (2012)—on both albums Neil offers some songs in a retrospective mood,
such as the notable tracks “Hitchhiker” on Le
Noise and “Twisted Road” on Pill.
Made interested again by those latter day offerings, I picked up Chrome Dreams II (2007), another
sprawling effort I have to admit I haven’t “fully absorbed” yet, as indeed I haven't any
of Neil’s work since the mid-Nineties. His is a vast body of work, and he
continues to work on his Archives, releasing unreleased performances and
alternate takes and mixes. Certainly it’s about time someone did a full, in-depth
critical study on Young’s career.
So . . . “Helpless.” It's not only the first song of his I loved, it also lets me get CS&N on here as it doesn't look like they'll be showing up otherwise, though I have come to admire
Déjà Vu more like I once did. It's interesting to hear Young working with those other worthies who, to my mind, never got close to doing anything as good again. Not so Neil.
“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.”
There you have
the look backward that shows a rosy past, a past that impoverishes the present,
to some extent. One still needs “a place to go,” in one’s mind, because the
present oppresses, except to the extent that the changes of the past live on. And Neil's vocal is as pure as any he ever did.
I confess I always heard it, sang it as: “dream, comfort,
memory, despair.” For me the parallel was that dreams provide comfort—a possible
future—while memory brings despair, because one has failed to live up to its
promise or because what is recalled is shaming or undermines the present. Which
is why a “place to go” in one’s mind is necessary. But Neil isn’t so glum; he’s
recalling a place—in Canada, where he’s from—that provides comfort to his mind.
There’s not much development in the song, and that may be
what I loved about it. Young and company seem to be stopped in time, hanging in
a stasis as he contemplates those “big birds flying across the sky / Throwing shadows
on our eyes / Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.” An odd word for what the
song conveys, I’d say. Listening to it in my teens/twenties it would be better
to sing “wasted, wasted, wasted”—and I think that’s what the song conveys.
(Probably that word would’ve been censored anyway.) The song, with its
slowed-down strum and that limpid pedal steel, sounds like what being really
stoned feels like, making Neil Young the best conjuror of that state. And the
plea, “sing with me somehow,” makes us all want to chime in with him. We hear
ya, Neil.
And yet, when I first fell in love with the song it was in
those days of “changes” called childhood into teens. It’s bracing to think of
being 11 and recalling “a past” already out of reach—or is it depressing? I
suppose there is some comfort in the look back, but it wouldn’t be going too
far to say that this entire daily project, this series, is an effort to get out
of the past—“the chains are locked and tied across the door” but let’s hope not
forever.
Baby, can you hear me
now?
Happy birthday to Neil, one of the originals.
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