Recently saw a very good documentary on one of my all-time favorite bands, Crosby Stills Nash and Young. (Fifty By Four) I'll skip the long, involved history lesson, as everybody who has bothered to read this far probably already knows it. And if you don't, and are interested, go to Amazon Prime and find the doc. It's very good.
David Crosby is the creative flake of the band. Which never really was a band, just a collective of friends. It actually seemed to be a way for three very good musicians and songwriters to get a gig together, who hadn't had any luck doing so before. They all came from other bands, who either folded, or kicked them out, or they left.
Cros was the one who got kicked out; by the Byrds, as it happened. I heard him explain in an interview once that the story was, he was asked to leave because of creative differences. The real reason, he says, is because he was an asshole. There are reports that this has never changed.
That's one of the things that makes CSN&Y so interesting. Each of these guys has his own role within the collective. Crosby's was to be the nut. Er, sorry, the genius. He had the wildest, most daring ideas. He probably wrote the best, and the worst, songs in their catalog. He also had the nicest voice in the band. Maybe the best, maybe not, but surely the nicest. He was responsible for writing and singing:
Guinnevere
Long Time Coming
Deja Vu
Almost Cut My Hair
The Lee Shore
Triad
Delta
and half of Wooden Ships.
In the 1980's, he went to prison on drug and weapons charges. When he got out, the other three dragged him into the studio. They've always insisted that they did this, not to cash in, but to support their friend. The result was a rather disappointing album called “American Dream.” Oddly enough, the best song on it (imho) was “Compass” by Cros:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB1efHJAhn0
Stephen Stills was the engineer. Not as in, sound engineer in the studio, but builder. He could construct great songs on command, and played every instrument on the first CSN album except the drums. Of the original three, he has been the most prolific and consistent as a solo artist.
Stills came from Buffalo Springfield, a band that everybody name checks but never caught on with the public at large. They were built around the same basic concept as the Byrds; playing folk music with electric guitars and drums. Everybody in the band were excellent musicians, for early 60's rock musicians, but the leadership quickly became the property of Stills and fellow guitarist/singer/songwriter Neil Young. They were great friends who simply didn't get along. Egomaniacs can be like that.
When the band broke up, Young began a solo career and struggled. Stills didn't even get that far. He found himself doing studio work, including one of the landmark albums of the mid-60's, called “Super Session,” with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. He used his contacts to get a little studio time and threw together a demo tape, just himself on an acoustic guitar. This tape was released decades later as “Just Roll Tape,” but at the time, it got him squat.
A chance meeting with Cros and a Brit named Graham Nash came together so well, they became the not-quite-a-band we know and love today. Before going into that, a quick list of some songs that Stephen Stills contributed:
Love The One You're With
Southern Cross
Carry On
As I Come Of Age
Dark Star
Find the Cost of Freedom
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
4 + 20
and half of Wooden Ships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVUwrifwKrI
Graham Nash wrote their biggest hits. His school for this was a reasonably successful British Invasion band called The Hollies, and he wrote most of their hits as well. A great pop song craftsman, and a beautiful high tenor voice.
Lynn and I had the privilege of seeing him live a couple years ago at the Berklee School of Music's main auditorium in Boston. He was doing a tour in which he did his first two solo albums in their entirety (Songs For Beginners and Wild Tales). He and his band were fantastic. After doing both albums, and discussing the songs, he then went into a bunch of his better known works, including many from CSN&Y.
In many ways, he was the glue that kept this bunch of raging egomaniacs together, both musically and socially. His was the high voice that filled out those beautiful harmonies. And, his were the songs that got them on the radio, over and over again. Some of those songs were:
Teach Your Children
Lady of the Islands
Our House
Chicago
Immigration Man
After the Dolphin
Wasted On the Way
Just a Song Before I Go
In many ways, he was seen as the least of the three/four. He was probably the least skilled, overall, as a musician. And yet, his are the songs we remember the best. He was the lightweight, and yet his light songs often made the biggest impact.
Graham was the one that didn't come from the American folk and folk/rock movements. He probably has the most diverse catalog of any. Whether he wrote about romantic love, or his beliefs, you knew he meant it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnYKRacKQc
If that was where it ended, it all would have surely gone differently. Yes, there were conflicts between these three guys, but nowhere near to the extent as when they became a four-piece.
Neil Young had been in Buffalo Springfield with Stills, and the ongoing conflicts between the two were a large part of why that group didn't survive. From there, Young went on to a solo career and, while not a big star, was selling in respectable enough numbers that he was in no serious danger of losing his career. The same could not be said of the others.
CSN was a last-ditch effort for all three. It is very likely that, if their first record had tanked, they would have all had to go get real jobs. Say, didn't you used to be in the Byrds? When it turned out instead to be one of the biggest selling albums not by the Beatles of the entire decade, things changed. And when it got time to go out on the road, clearly, Stephen Stills couldn't bear as much of the load as he had in the studio.
According to that documentary, they approached Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, and one or two others about supplementing the band. There were also a drummer and bass player, but to adequately reproduce the album in a live setting required another guitar player on par with Stills.
I've never been clear on why Young was made an equal member, and not just a side man; whether somebody or everybody in the band offered it to him, or if he made it a condition of his joining. At any rate, CSN became CSN&Y, for good and for ill.
In a way, Young duplicated Cros' role as the class genius. He did not, however, duplicate the role of class clown. Too many times, the problem with geniuses is that they're unreliable. In Crosby's case, it came out as getting too loaded to be functional, and then sliding into too addicted. For Young, this would manifest when he got bored and suddenly left. He also had, and apparently still has, no patience with which to suffer fools. And in the Neil Young universe, anybody could quickly qualify as a fool.
It's somewhat strange that they're all so strongly tied together. They didn't need Neil, and he didn't need the others. And you certainly can't say that magic happened every time they collaborated as a quartet. As a group, they did three studio albums, and two of them are pretty disappointing. (American Dream and Looking Forward.)
On the other hand, the first of their combined efforts, Deja Vu, is quite possibly one of the greatest albums in the rock canon. It is certainly one of my favorites. And, in a lot of people's hindsight, it is considered the lesser of the first two. It's not as cohesive, but lightning strikes rarely are. The list of Neil Young's contributions to their legacy is not as long, but it is quite dramatic:
Country Girl
Helpless
Ohio
American Dream
He is, by far, the most successful of the four as a solo artist. Graham Nash's solo albums, on the other hand, probably didn't sell as many copies all together as any one of the group's by itself. Same with Crosby. Stills had a good run in the 1970's, but not much since.
Neil is also, by far, the most frustrating of the four. By the late '80's, he seemed determined to drive away every fan he ever had. After Deja Vu, he had a big hit with After The Goldrush, and a huge one with Harvest, and then . . . who knows?
He would go back and forth between apparently trying to recreate Harvest, with records like Comes A Time; and then go off on some tangent with something that left people scratching their heads. He experimented with country (American Stars and Bars), punk (Rust Never Sleeps), blues (This Note's For You), rockabilly (Everybody's Rockin'), and even techno (Trans).
For me, I largely lost interest in his continued output by the early '90's. Everything he's done in the last 30 years sounds the same, with a few notable exceptions. I liked Freedom, which had “Rockin' In the Free World” and a blistering cover of “On Broadway”. And the song “Let's Roll,” honoring the victims of 9/11, was great. The rest, or at least what I've heard, doesn't do much for me. Including Harvest Moon, which was supposed to be his great return to form.
Besides solo efforts, the four also worked in varying combinations. Crosby/Nash, a revived CSN, and even the Stills/Young band. At one point, there was even a Stills/Nash project in the works, but halfway into it they invited Cros. If a band is like a marriage, this group was more like they were fooling around. Hippies, y'know.
In the end, it was simply too volatile to survive in the long term. For one thing, they were all too prolific to ever be able to fit everything they wrote into one band. They'd have had to release three or four albums a year, and that would have quickly skewed in the direction of Stills and Young.
It's easy to dismiss these guys as musicians. There isn't a virtuoso among them. Nash is a serviceable enough guitarist and pianist, but if your band was holding auditions, he wouldn't make the cut. Unless, of course, you were looking for a songwriter or singer.
Crosby's guitar style is not the usual. He uses a lot of open tunings, which is part of what makes his songwriting so interesting. A big part of what makes him great is the way he voices chords; on guitar, piano, and he's had a lot to do with how the vocal harmonies work. You guitar players out there would be well served to find out what tunings he used for some of his songs.
In a way, writing a song is like owning a dog. A really skillful musician/composer can let the dog roam free. And yet, sometimes, you see that they've set a specific path, even dug a rut, of the favorite places they like to go. The places they've marked, and the food dish, so to speak. Many songwriters develop a template that they wind up using over and over; verse, verse, chorus, bridge; or whatever.
When you write using an open tuning, you're shortening the leash. It becomes a limitation of sorts, because the tuning is friendlier to a smaller group of chordal harmonies than standard tuning. And yet, those limitations also open up options that might not readily be available in standard tuning. In fact, if you use standard tuning chord shapes on a guitar that's tuned to an open chord, it creates some really interesting things.
This is a technique that Cros, and Stills, use quite a bit. The song, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, was written in a tuning of EEEEBE. He is alleged to have used the same tuning for Carry On and 4+20. (It's in the Wikipedia article, so it's gotta be true, right? Right?) So, it would be very difficult to use that tuning all night on every song. And, you can certainly play those three songs in standard tuning. But the tuning helped write the song. You tune your guitar, and start banging away on it, and pretty soon you've got a little pile of music in your lap. Gotta housebreak that dog.
Stills and Young were the band's lead guitarists and, to be honest, on a skill scale of 1 to Eddie Van Halen, neither of them score particularly high. Doesn't matter. Yeah, you Steve Vai/Ritchie Kotzen/Yngwie/Fripp/Guthrie Govan/Al DiMeola fans out there can scoff all you like. If you don't think it's possible to express passion with an acoustic guitar on your knee playing one chord, then you probably haven't read this far anyway.
To me, a great example of this can be found on the all-star Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary tribute album. There's a version on there of My Back Pages, sung by Roger McGuinn. Eric Clapton takes a solo, and it's very nice. Sweet, harmonically interesting, carefully crafted, and very good. Then, Neil Young takes a solo. He proceeds to rip the song's head off and shit down its neck. I suppose you either like that sort of thing, or you don't.
Here's another good example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAkMlzOBFbc
I would also note that the drummer on this is New Hampshire's own Johnny Barbata.
It's very easy to pick out which playing is Stills, and which is Young. They've been in a weird sort of competition since Buffalo Springfield. Stills' playing is much smoother; Young's is rougher, angrier. Stills used to hang out a lot with Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter, and they would jam for hours. Young plays like he found his guitar on the side of the road and has never heard anybody else play, before or since.
Now, there's nothing wrong with skill. Plus, skill and passion are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to have both. But – and there's always a but to these – if skill was everything, rock and roll would never have existed. Sometimes, an artist is so good at expressing that burning thing inside them that skill doesn't matter. After that, it's up to the person with the ears to decide whether it's good or not.
It's hard to pinpoint why the second and third CSNY studio albums don't work. The songs are okay, but it's like they hired dull people to record them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2OcysPh77E
This is one of Neil's from “Looking Forward.” The actual name is Queen Of Them All, but it's one of those tongue-in-cheek Neil songs that, seeing it was written in the late '90's, could just as well be Queen Of The Mall. This album's not actually too bad, but it doesn't seem to have the drive of Deja Vu. In fact, most of CSN's output in the late '70's on through is kinda the same. I don't know, I just think Neil should be more pissed off singing this, and Stills should be trying harder to cut heads.
My personal recommendation would be to listen to the first two albums; “Crosby Stills and Nash” and “Deja Vu”; and then the two live albums from that era; “4-Way Street” and “CSNY 1974”. They also have an excellent box set that includes a lot of alternate takes and solo stuff. And definitely check out “Fifty By Four” on Amazon Prime or DVD.
Happily, they're still around, although they're quite elderly these days. It's likely we'll never get another chance to see them live, but that's what I thought before going to see Nash in Boston. So, who knows? They are definitely important, if any creative person actually is. It's just entertainment, after all, but these guys, this grouping, is the bridge between the folk and folk/rock movements to the singer/songwriter movement.
Here's one last little treat. This is from the box set I mentioned above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK3TIYG9mqM
