Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “Helpless”
Year: First performed in 1969; first released in 1970 on the hit album Déjà vu
Artist: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. This LA-based super-group, which periodically performed and recorded as Crosby, Stills & Nash (sans Young) was active from 1968 to the mid-2010s. Stephen Stills and Young were both former members of Buffalo Springfield, and it was Stills who brought Young into Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Neil Young holds the sole writing credit on “Helpless” and has frequently played it throughout his long career, which stretches from the early 1960s to today. Young rose to fame with Buffalo Springfield but, as well as being a member of CSNY, has performed solo or with his backing band, Crazy Horse, throughout the years. He is still writing and performing.
He’s played it at home and to arenas of thousands. He’s played it on a pump organ, on a piano, on a harmonica, on an acoustic guitar. He’s played it in Omemee and at venues around Toronto — Centre Island, Massey Hall, the Air Canada Centre. Neil Young has played “Helpless” live around the globe at least 440 times. It’s his 15th most commonly played song and easily one of the most recognizable — especially for Ontarians, whose province is namechecked in its plaintive opening line. But what, and where, exactly, is “Helpless” about? Depends who you ask.
The inhabitants of Omemee maintain the song is about the Kawartha Lakes town, where Young’s family lived for about four years when he was a child. His father, writer Scott Young, returned there in later years, and his brother, Bob Young, still lives in the area.
Neil Young and then-wife Susan Young at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia in 1970, not long after Young started performing Helpless. (Joel Bernstein/Warner Records)
“‘Helpless’ is closely associated with Omemee,” says Young biographer Sharry Wilson, author of Young Neil: The Sugar Mountain Years. “But Neil has also stated in interviews that the song actually refers to a few places where he lived in Ontario as a child and teenager.”
“It’s not literally a specific town so much as a feeling,” Young told one interviewer in 1995. “Actually, it’s a couple of towns. Omemee, Ontario, is one of them. It’s where I first went to school and spent my ‘formative’ years. Actually I was born in Toronto... ‘I was born in Toronto’... God, that sounds like the first line of a Bruce Springsteen song.”
Candidates include Omemee and at least one other southern Ontario locale, Wilson says, but also likely Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay, which is more plausibly described as “a town in north Ontario.”
In Jonathan Demme’s 2002 documentary “Neil Young: Journeys,” the musician returned to Omemee and talked about his childhood.
Omemee maintains its claim to fame, however. Young has kept up a close relationship with the town; he encouraged biographer Jimmy McDonough to visit because “they remember me like I don’t.” He played a concert there in 2017: “Helpless” came just before “Heart of Gold” on the setlist.
Wilson watched that concert on the screens set up outside Omemee’s Coronation Hall. She first saw him play “Helpless” at Massey Hall in 1971 but believes she must have heard the song before that performance, because it’s included on the hit Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Déjà vu.
“I think it’s just a really vivid evocation and appreciation for small-town life in Ontario,” she says.
In a sense, asking what a song is about is the wrong question. “Most works have some level of unconscious or other meaning about them,” notes British cultural-studies professor George McKay.
Crazy Horse in 2022 (left to right): Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, and Neil Young. (Joey Martinez/Warner Records)
McKay studies music, with a special focus on disability. He got interested in Young while researching Ian Dury, a polio survivor who became one of punk music’s foundational figures. “Somebody said to me, ‘Oh, you’re probably going to write about Neil Young as well, aren’t you?’”
Like 1,700 other Ontarians, Young contracted polio in 1951. He was five years old. Soon after symptoms began, the Youngs left Omemee in the family’s Ford Monarch with Neil lying in the back and the family doctor riding up front with his parents. They had to leave him in the polio ward of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and return to quarantine in their home.
A week later, they were able to bring him home, and his life continued relatively uninterrupted, though it took some time to recover from the illness. The experience left lasting psychic and physical marks. “I really think that was my first big trauma,” Young wrote in his memoir of getting a lumbar puncture at the hospital to definitively diagnose his muscle weakness, back pain, and partial paralysis as polio — standard practice at the time.
Neil Young performed “Helpless” during “The Last Waltz,” the Band’s farewell concert. Joni Mitchell, who also survived a bout with polio in the 1951 Canadian epidemic that left her with lasting symptoms, harmonizes offstage.
“Polio f*cked up my body a little bit,” he told McDonough. “The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right.” His brother Bob, quoted in Young’s memoir, attributes some of Neil’s later health issues to his bout with polio.
As McKay dug into Young, he discovered a fan theory about “Helpless”: that the song deals with Young’s polio experience. “It is about the landscape, but it’s also about childhood memory,” he says. And the memory of polio undoubtedly had a big impact on Young as well as on his family — his father dedicated an entire chapter of his memoir, Neil and Me, to the incident.
The refrain, “Helpless, helpless, helpless,” can easily be read as a reference to a bout with an incurable disease. But there are several other lines — “all my changes were there,” Young sings about his town. And, to McKay, “the chains are locked and tied across the door,” could be about the Young family’s experience of quarantine, when a white sign on their door announced “Poliomyelitis. Infant paralysis.”
“There are several references to everything that’s going on in the song and to this very powerful experience,” McKay says. “That’s my reading of it.”
Wilson doesn’t agree with this interpretation. “I wouldn’t have said polio at all with ‘Helpless,’” she told TVO Today. “It’s just broad strokes, his feelings.”
Highway 7 through Omemee. (P199/Wikimedia)
Lots of other things happened in Omemee and elsewhere in Ontario, Wilson notes: a youthful Young discovered a love of trains and nature, got into chicken farming, and started listening to rock and roll. “There are so many things that came out of his experiences living in Ontario as a child, and it was reflected in songs of his — ‘Helpless’ included.”
The song stands for itself, a recollection of an unrecoverable time when irrevocable changes — whatever they were — happened in smalltown Ontario.
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