Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are often cited as the greatest supergroup in the history of rock music. The label was actually already fitting back in 1968, when, after Crosby left the Byrds, Stills left Buffalo Springfield, and Nash left the Hollies (abandoned precisely to give birth to the superband), the three of them, jamming together in Joni Mitchell's living room, discovered the evocative power of their vocal harmonies, and decided to make music as a trio under the legendary CS&N banner.

After all, at the time he joined the band, shortly after the release of "Crosby, Stills & Nash" (Atlantic, 1969), Neil Young was, paradoxically, the least famous of the four. Sure, he'd served in Stephen Stills's Buffalo Springfield (not for long, but long enough to leave his mark, see "Expecting To Fly", and to spark a creative yet conflict-ridden relationship with Stills), and his rough-edged rides with Crazy Horse ("Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" had come out just a few months earlier) were starting to make a name for him, as was his solo output ("After The Gold Rush" was also fresh off the press), but the legend was anything but underway.

Indeed, when Atlantic's enlightened manager Ahmet Ertegun suggested bringing Young into the lineup as an additional guitarist for the tour supporting "Crosby, Stills & Nash", he thought of him as little more than a hired gun, a suggestion that in fact raised serious doubts in Stills, who during his Buffalo Springfield days had done nothing but clash with Young. Then again, it wasn't easy to convince Neil and his formidable manager Elliot Roberts to accept either. The price reluctantly paid by "Captain Many Hands" Stills was precisely the addition of the famous Y to the band's name.

The difficult but creatively inexhaustible relationship between Stephen Stills and Neil Young would also heavily shape the making of "Déjà Vu" (Atlantic, 1970). A genuine guitarist even before being a sharp lyricist, Young wanted to record every track live in the studio, so the album would radiate the energy of a live performance. The perfectionist Stills had a completely different idea: he wanted an album that sounded flawless, to be recorded in separate parts, so that each musician could give their best on their own sections before everything was assembled with the sterile precision of the mixing desk.

Given these premises, and Young's less-than-easygoing temperament — he'd earned the nickname "The Loner" down to the letter — the recording sessions for "Déjà Vu" were no walk in the park. With the exception of "Helpless", "Almost Cut My Hair" and "Woodstock", which were recorded by the full band together, Young worked on his songs alone in Los Angeles before handing them over to the rest of the group, who had instead set up at Wally Heider's Studio in San Francisco to finish the recordings. Once the recording process was done, Young would take back the tapes to handle the final mix by himself. The reverse process applied to songs by the other writers that featured Young's contribution: he was given the tracks missing his part so he could work on them before passing them back to Stills.

In fact, one could argue that the Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist was never truly a full-fledged member of the band. Even from a distance, his contribution completely transformed the largely acoustic folk-rock of "Crosby, Stills And Nash", charging it with the electricity and rawness that would make it unique, voluptuous and restless.

Perhaps exaggerating a little, Stills has claimed that production of the album took around 800 hours, with songs like the title track finished after roughly a hundred takes, while others, like "Carry On", were written and completed in under eight hours. Myth or not, Stills's estimate captures well the meticulousness and sheer range of the four musicians, who were involved not only in writing and performing the album, but in producing it as well.

The sheer brilliance of "Déjà Vu" goes well beyond what would already be an unbeatable sum of its parts. Having at their disposal the talent of four of the greatest musical minds of an era, capable of moving fluidly from folk and country to psychedelia and blues, all dipped in Nash's distinctly British gift for melody, certainly played its part, but the unrepeatable nature of this masterpiece also lies in the historical and personal circumstances surrounding its creation.

What's more, four frontmen, singers and songwriters could never have pulled off an album like this without the help of some exceptional session players. The remarkable bass and drum contributions come courtesy of Greg Reeves and Dallas Taylor respectively, who indeed appear on the album's cover, while the precious slide guitar work of Jerry Garcia and the harmonica of Joan Sebastian make "Teach Your Children" and the title track even more special. It's also impossible to miss the hand of the project's matron figure, Joni Mitchell, who wrote "Woodstock" for the album.

Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice

(from "Carry On")

During the making of "Déjà Vu" (July 1969 – January 1970), the Sixties were drawing to a close, and with Woodstock — which was in fact the quartet's live baptism — a season of joy and revolution was ending. The fire of the youth uprisings of '68 was far from extinguished, and neither was the war in Vietnam, nor all the social injustices still waiting to be overturned. But the hippie euphoria, that generation's waking dream, was fading, giving way to mounting disillusionment and anger, to a new way of reacting to and channeling rebellion. This is a shift the album captures and dissects with real force.

The personal lives of the four musicians weren't exactly going through a happy patch either. Graham Nash had just broken up with Joni Mitchell, as had Stephen Stills with Judy Collins. David Crosby's partner, Christine Hinton, had recently died in a tragic car accident, and the singer-songwriter was spiraling dangerously into depression and drug use. Heroin and cocaine would become a staple of his diet during the album's recording sessions.

It was precisely this grim, tense historical and personal climate that fueled "Déjà Vu", propelling it into a work that pushes American folk-rock to a new level of awareness and to one of its absolute peaks, directly in response to the negativity of the circumstances. It's no accident that the album opens with Stills's "Carry On". A driving acoustic beginning, then a rhythmic surge pushing the harmonious chorus forward, urging us on toward a new day, a new path, toward a necessary and inevitable reaction: "Rejoice rejoice, we have no choice". From beneath the surface, the electric guitars creep in, first slithering, then rippling and overwhelming, building to the song's core, marked by percussion and the inescapable mantra "Carry on love is coming, love is coming to us all". A love that can only arrive in the form of keyboards, sealing a season steeped in Eastern flavors and asceticism, before an ecstatic finale of jagged electric guitar solos set against backdrops painted by the organs.

The following “Teach Your Children”, written and sung by an ethereal Nash, marks a decisive turn toward bucolic country, defined by delicate strumming and soft slide guitar flourishes. Yet melancholy and hope for a better future don't leave the field entirely, to be sparked by the teachings of the fathers so that the children won't have to reckon with their hell: “Teach your children well, Their father's hell did slowly go by, And feed them on your dreams, The one they picks, the one you'll know by”. What with hindsight we might call a pious illusion remains a crystalline postcard, one able to immerse us fully in those years marked by dreams and turmoil.

And isn't “Woodstock” also a postcard more effective than any documentary, as darting electric guitars and lulling keyboards make us relive first the journey to Yasgur's Farm and then the unrepeatable, dreamlike gathering of youth and musicians?

Pain, creeping disillusionment, the urge to give up, and fear set in motion a bleeding blues number titled “Almost Cut My Hair”. Amid the scraping flow of electric guitars, Crosby makes his confession: the other day he'd almost cut his hair, maybe it was because he'd had the flu at Christmas, maybe because he'd seen a police car in his rearview mirror, maybe because he thought he'd be marked as subversive, maybe because he didn't feel up to it. It's a bitter, downcast song, sung with head bowed, until that “almost” — and a line like “But I'm not, I'm not giving in an inch to fear” — turns it into yet another anthem, yet another proud act of defiance.

Young finally makes his entrance on the fourth track, one we needn't hesitate to call a peak of his vast songbook. While the rest of the quartet repeatedly echoes the title over one of their trademark harmonizations, Young, with his unmistakable nasal, plaintive timbre, waxes poetic about a hopeless life in Ontario. A place both geographic and of the soul, sketched out by spare slide guitar touches and a piano that drags itself wearily, drained of strength, across endless frozen expanses. Three and a half minutes in which we can practically smell the boundless spaces that gave birth to the shaggy-haired minstrel, grasping the social troubles of a place one flees only to inevitably miss it. It's Canada, but a Neapolitan might well see himself in it too.

Too late to keep the change, too late to pay,

no time to stay the same, too young to leave”

(from “Country Girl”)

After “Woodstock” closes out side one, it falls to the title track to open side two. Of the three songs recorded by the full lineup, this is by far the one in which the synergistic energy of the live take comes through most forcefully. Crosby's song flows directly out of the guitars tuning up, unfolding like a jam session not just in its instrumental passages but also in the way his bandmates spontaneously join in on vocals. John Sebastian's vibrant harmonica adds yet more soul to the mix.

Next comes the joyful “Our House”, cheerfully underpinned by piano, another display of Nash's knack for conjuring a bright, jovial melody seemingly out of thin air.

Placed right before the glorious final one-two punch, at just over two minutes “4 + 20” is the shortest song on the record. It's a sad elegy of voice and fingerpicked acoustic guitar courtesy of Stills, recounting the end-of-life feelings of an eighty-four-year-old left so alone that he longs for death to come. It's a stark, cramped moment that, positioned right before Young's triumphant three-part epic “Country Girl”, only heightens the hymn-like power and the vast harmonic-melodic scope of what follows.

Already tried out live back in the Buffalo Springfield days, “Country Girl” is a triumph of keyboards, from piano to organ, and harmonies framing the melancholy and indecision typical of youth, seen through the eyes of a young, insecure waitress unsure which path to take. The contrast with the previous track is thus not just musical but also one of opposing perspective, first that of an old man, now that of a young woman — with the passage of time dominating the thematic arc of the album's second side.

It all ends in euphoria and Buffalo Springfield fashion (and in the Stills-Young Band still to come) with the brief “Everybody I Love You”, which closes the record and brings things full circle, returning to the spirited guitars and Summer Of Love ethos that had already permeated opener “Carry On”.

On “Déjà Vu”, rock, country, blues and folk brush against one another, meet, collide, blend and blur together a little, only to return each to their own track. Nothing that hadn't been heard before, just like in a déjà vu, but now bolstered by a new awareness. Much like the personalities of the four frontmen, which remain distinct, with authorship of individual songs strongly marked and easy to spot, yet ready to merge as one in the thrilling electric surges and celestial harmonies. A dream team of pure playmakers, excelling as much in solo runs as in intricate choral weaving.

The democratic live album of the following year, the equally legendary “4 Way Street”, would immortalize on record the miraculous communion of the four in its live incarnation — a feat in some ways even more astonishing than what happens on “Déjà Vu”, which nonetheless managed the miracle of delivering ten anthems in as many songs to that era.

The triumph, as noted, was commercial too. Indeed, even though the four members' solo careers would go on to soar after the album — Young's above all — none of their records would ever match the sales success of “Déjà Vu” (No. 1 in the US, the Netherlands and Australia, and No. 5 in the UK, for a total of roughly nine million copies sold).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

25/10/2020