CSNY: The EP "Ohio"

Original released on EP Atlantic 02-61
(PORTUGAL, 1970)

CSNY: "Déjà Vu" & More 8 Bonus Tracks

Original Released on LP Atlantic SD 7200

(US 1970, March 11)

This is a special expanded edition from CSN&Y’s “Déjà Vu”. You’ll find eight bonus tracks which came out for the first time in 1991, inside a 4 CD Box intitled “CSN”. I think that the right place for them is here, following the ten original songs of this classic album. For their sophomore release, David Crosby (ex-Byrds), Stephen Stills (ex-Buffalo Springfield) and Graham Nash (ex-Hollies) called on the help of fellow Buffalo Springfield alumnus Neil Young, who had just released "After The Gold Rush", one of his best loved works. His voice adds a not unwelcome sourness to the choirboy harmonies of CS&N’s debut, his cranky guitar work pushes the band squarely into the rock half of the folk-rock movement. And yet Neil Young isn’t the story here, just an interesting chapter in it.

As brilliant as it is, "Déjà Vu" is a balancing act. CSN&Y wasn’t a band so much as an open market where each member could shop their finest wares. Competitive natures may have spurred them on, and they clearly benefited from bartered skills, but we should have seen the planets slowly slipping from alignment. They wouldn’t approach this level of artistry again as a unit, instead splintering off into solo ventures and earlier couplings. But the serendipitous moment was captured for eternity, and "Déjà Vu" won’t let us forget.

The album took nearly 800 hours to record, and circumstances were less then auspicious. Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton had died in a car accodent in September 1969 – he remained grief-stricken and took solace in heroin; cocaine and booze abounded during recording; the four musicians squabbled – the moody Young was often absent – and Nash was forced to play peacemaker. Somehow they created a masterpiece, one that encapsulates the spirit of American West Coast culture in the early Seventies. With peerless vocals, dynamic musicianship, and topnotch songwriting, little wonder the album catapulted to Nº 1 in the United States.

Most of the music, apart from the quartet's version of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," was done as individual sessions by each of the members when they turned up, contributing whatever was needed that could be agreed upon. "Carry On" worked as the album's opener when Stills "sacrificed" another copyright, "Questions," which comprised the second half of the track and made it more substantial. "Woodstock" and "Carry On" represented the group as a whole, while the rest of the record was a showcase for the individual members.

David Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair" was a piece of high-energy hippie-era paranoia not too far removed in subject from the Byrds' "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man," only angrier in mood and texture (especially amid the pumping organ and slashing guitars); the title track, also by Crosby, took 100 hours to work out and was a better-received successor to such experimental works as "Mind Gardens," out of his earlier career with the Byrds, showing his occasional abandonment of a rock beat, or any fixed rhythm at all, in favor of washing over the listener with tones and moods.

"Teach Your Children," the major hit off the album, was a reflection of the hippie-era idealism that still filled Graham Nash's life, while "Our House" was his stylistic paean to the late-era Beatles and "4+20" was a gorgeous Stephen Stills blues excursion that was a precursor to the material he would explore on the solo album that followed. And then there were Neil Young's pieces, the exquisitely harmonized "Helpless" (which took many hours to get to the slow version finally used) and the roaring country-ish rockers that ended side two, which underwent a lot of tinkering by Young — even his seeming throwaway finale, "Everybody I Love You," was a bone thrown to longtime fans as perhaps the greatest Buffalo Springfield song that they didn't record. All of this variety made "Déjà Vu" a rich musical banquet for the most serious and personal listeners, while mass audiences reveled in the glorious harmonies and the thundering electric guitars, which were presented in even more dramatic and expansive fashion on the tour that followed.

WALLPAPER:"CSNY"

WALLPAPER: "CSN&Y On The Road Again"

CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG - Teach Your Children (1970)