Helpless

Young said the town in the song is less a real place than a feeling, built from a couple of towns, one of them Omemee, Ontario, where he spent his early childhood. He first cut it with Crazy Horse at Sunset Sound in 1969, and later said the Horse version stayed unreleased only because the engineer missed the perfect take, an eight or nine minute performance with a long instrumental in the middle. His bandmates then persuaded him the song suited Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young better.

That version was recorded at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco on 7 November 1969, with Stephen Stills on piano and Young singing his lead live, and guitars added afterwards. In his Decade notes Young said it was done at about four in the morning, once everyone was tired enough to play at his speed. He has said Nash's singing on it is beautiful to him. It came out on Déjà Vu in March 1970 and as the B-side of Woodstock. AllMusic's Bill Janovitz called it a stunning nostalgic lament.

Live

Sugar Mountain counts 444 performances, the first at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor on 16 October 1969. At The Last Waltz in 1976 he sang it with The Band while Joni Mitchell sang harmony offstage, and it appears on many of his live albums, from Massey Hall in 1971 to Unplugged in 1993. Buffy Sainte-Marie recorded it in 1971 with Young on guitar, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds covered it for the 1989 tribute The Bridge.

There are two uploads of Helpless in the hypersongs web, and they are different recordings. One is the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young studio version from Déjà Vu. The other is the Crazy Horse studio take from Sunset Sound, 9 October 1969, first released on Early Daze in 2024.