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Successes and Failures
Neil Young was brought into the line-up—along with a drummer (Dallas
Taylor, who had already appeared on Crosby, Stills & Nash)
and a bass guitarist (Greg Reeves)—ostensibly because the trio that did so well
in the studio needed to beef up the live shows. The band and its sound The increase of talent, responsible for creative tension on stage, proved disruptive in most other matters. The addition of Young led to a fundamentally different conception of what Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—as opposed to Crosby, Stills & Nash—were to be all about. They were to be a fiercely democratic formation, in contrast to the aristocratic line-ups rock music was breeding. The notion that they were not really a band, that each was free to work outside the group, was a beautiful, hippie type of thing originating in their previous bad experiences in bands; yet their own share of responsibility for those bad experiences seems not to have been considered; and for all their hippie ethos, sharing turned out to be a difficult thing to do, especially in studio work. As they spent an unprecedented two months recording, the different tempers came to the fore in personal wranglings. Since each was plotting a solo career, in the weeks they spent in the studio, they rarely worked all four together; several times, the band almost broke up over the tensions building in incessant bickerings, endless retakes, hours of remixing. (Stills’ perfectionism in the studio proved especially annoying to the others.) Withholding their best songs for solo projects—while nominally a band, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young published separately such extraordinary solo efforts as If I Could Only Remember My Name (Crosby), Stephen Stills and Stephen Stills 2, Songs For Beginners (Nash), and After the Gold Rush (Young)—they seemed to be four artists in search of a jumping-board. Crosby, Stills, Nash & and Young were on their celebrated “Carry On” tour when Déjà Vu came out in March 1970; but unofficially they already had broken up.
The tunes on
Déjà Vu abound in road imagery. Nash’s “Teach Your
Children” begins, “You who are on the road / must have a code that you
can live by,” and seemingly follows Stills’ introductory “Rejoice,
rejoice, we
have no choice but / To carry on” ( If, with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, American rock music was indeed beginning to discover and test its emerging political and economic power, then Déjà Vu hardly affords sufficient evidence in support of that grand assertion. For all its successes, the album sags in moments and falls short of showcasing the members’ talents. A collection of second-best solo efforts, it lacks the unifying bind, a concerted group effort. More often than not, the political awareness displayed and the political activism propagated were blue-eyed, of a hippie naivité that borders on the inane (e.g., “Everybody I Love You”) and is noteworthy chiefly for the strong emotional connection established with the audience. With regard to Young’s contributions, it might indeed have been better, as a critic quipped from hindsight, if the band had waited with the album for a few more months—until “Ohio” and “Southern Man” were written. Déja
Vu’s soaring sales demanded that the band retract from the
break-up, abandon solo aspirations, and join to go on a
grand tour of the big halls.
By May 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Even Graham Nash became insistent in the stage shows. Pounding the piano, he pleaded in “Chicago,” a song dedicated to Mayor Dailey: the worldWon’t you please come to Chicago, It’s dying—if you believe in justice It’s dying—and if you believe in freedom It’s dying . . . Stills also turned to pounding the piano,
adding to “49 bye-byes” the “poem” “America’s Children,” a drawn-out and
spiked-up (he
thought) rewrite of “For What It’s Worth.” The Four
Way Street, the live double album released in 1971, comes belated, a
post-mortem tribute to an outstanding series of concerts played by an extraordinary assembly of
musical talent in summer 1970,
just before Crosby, Still, Nash & Young disbanded once more. The title is
ominous—though the band’s performance, or what comes down from it in the
recordings, negotiates for once quite neatly the demands of yielding the
right of way
on an uncontrolled intersection, the dangerous crossing on the threshold
from the Sixties to the Seventies. All four
musicians (aided by replacements Calvin Samuels on bass and Johnny
Barbata on drums) contributed some of their best stuff. Nash did
“Teach Your Children” and “Chicago”; Stills, “Judy Blue
Eyes” and “Love the One
You’re With”; Young, in addition to “Ohio” and “Southern
Man,” did “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Don’t Let It Bring You
Down” ( After Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young broke up again in fall 1970, attempts at reunion were frequent, though usually short-lived and never really satisfying (especially when compared to Stills’ Manassas project or most of Neil Young’s subsequent activities). While the “Old Hippies” could still do those pretty harmonies, their songs became increasingly irrelevant, somehow out of tune with the pulse of the times, their chords and cadences but coated in bittersweet nostalga.
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changed as the
slick harmonies favored by Stills and Nash were counterbalanced by Young’s nervous, brooding
style; the smooth acoustic cords and Stills’ mellifluous organ were
challenged by Young’s driving electric guitar. Young’s sullenness and
versatility added depth and scope; the material and its presentation
reflected the increase of talent. Appearances on stage were at first shakey, if one is to believe the bootleg
ratings posted on the Internet—great
shows such as were witnessed at the Woodstook festival, in the
unprecedented series of sell-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles,
or at the Winterland in San Francisco were followed by some less than mediocre
performances, which wanted the precision needed for the complex vocal harmonies and
intertwining guitar riffs. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were billed, besides The Rolling
Stones, as a major attraction at the festival held at Altamont Speedway,
Dec. 6, 1969.
audio clip “Teach Your Children”
Young were
on the road in the U.S. and heading for Europe; and in
that summer, the spirit of Young’s two new songs made all
the difference. The stage shows were electrifying. “Ohio,” an
immediate response to the news of the killing of
four students at Kent State University (May 4), recorded and released within
a few weeks, parted ways with the sweet Sixties hippie naivité that had been
the hallmark of Crosby, Stills & Nash. There was a new urgency in the
rage over “Four dead in Ohio” (
