Crosby, Stills & Nash, re-issued

They are one person. They are two alone. They are three together. Crosby, Stills & Nash will always be for each other.

In 1969, an entire US nation was ‘helplessly hoping’: the same year that Woodstock hit and man landed on the moon; Robert Kennedy was shot and 10,889 “Communist guerrillas” died in Vietnam. Anti-Nixon sentiment lingered in the Californian air like a claustrophobic fog. The sixties’ underworld (*aka – the youth*) was finally finding their voice.

Their fears and hopes were voiced by CS&N’s eponymous album, which delved into the folk roots of rock music and strapped it like a cathartic band-aid across a ruling class that had lost its way. CS&N would spectacularly lose theirs in the ‘Helter Skelter’ hell that followed the Charles Manson murders. The sea change, however, had already occurred.

Introducing David Crosby (godfather of social commentary, lynch pin and all-round hell raiser), Stephen Stills (ambidextrous guitar player, career-driven game-player and soul man) and Graham Nash (angel voiced peacemaker and bubblegum pop star). CS&N weren’t just a band – they were a super group made up of individual artists in their own right. Each member brought their own rhythm and demons to the table. And what a table it was…

The trio’s debut was truly born in Laurel Canyon – their debut success would signal a movement managed under the partnership of Elliot Roberts and David Geffen. From CS&N came Canadian songbird Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and…not forgetting…the lone wolf that came to define the era: Neil Young.

Looking back, David Crosby is quick to bring the romanticism down a peg or two. “Lately people have been looking back a lot, trying to analyze what happened; and that period of time, the ‘60s – has acquired the “rosy glow” that the aggrandizement of time can do to things…with Laurel Canyon – some people are making it into this mythical place, beyond what it was. Some of it was truly delightful. I enjoyed the hell out of it at the time.”

So, just what were the songs that came to define them? And where were they gloriously conceived? In February ’69, when the rain came to Laurel Canyon, David, Graham and Stephen headed indoors, and into Wally Heider’s studio on the corner of Cahuenga and Selma in Hollywood.

Studio manager Bill Halverson recalls, “they all showed up in Crosby’s VW bus. I asked them what they wanted to do. They said, “tonight we’re going to sing and play acoustic guitars.””

That’s exactly what they did – starting with Stills’ strangely-tuned (rather than the usual EADGBE, it favours EEEEBE instead) ode to ex-lover Judy Collins, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, which sparkles and spirals over an epic 7:22 minutes. No one could accuse Stills of not taking his shit seriously. He wasn’t nicknamed ‘Captain Manyhands’ in the studio for n’owt, compensating Nash’s adequate guitar skills by executing all bass parts, lead guitar, most finger picking and rhythm parts and unleashing the demon on the organ.

It was Stills’ focus that gave birth to the soaring guitar solo-intro (spiralling as it’s recorded backwards) on ‘Marrakesh Express’, which took Graham Nash’s inspired train-ditty to new levels. And who could forget David Crosby’s Monty Python-esque “whoopa-a-mess-a-hooga-hoofa-a-messi-goush-goush’ ramblings before Stills cranks in?

Where CS&N really mesmerised their captive audience was in their crystal-clear harmonies. As Hollies publicist sums up when he first heard album track ‘Bye Bye Baby’, “I don’t think my nipples have softened since.’

To all purposes, CS&N’s unashamed romanticism softened a nation’s nipples in one fell folk record. No track encapsulates their harmonised romanticism quite as succinctly as ‘Guinnevere’ – a medieval yarn that acts as an anecdote to ‘69’s troubled times. It’s a hypnotic composition that cuts through the ether like ice. Myth relents to timely reality on Crosby’s ‘Long Time Gone’, addressing the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Which brings us round full circle: humanity and political consciousness are never far displaced from this debut, rooted in David Crosby’s acute awareness of the band’s time and place.

The time was 1969. The place was Laurel Canyon. The band were CS&N. Forty years later, their debut still soars. Hoofa-amessi-goush-goush!

The Hippie Hippie Shake

 A few years late on the uptake, but what do you expect? It’s 738 pages for christ sakes…

Hands down, the definitive rock biography – a few darker shades of disturbing, but always with that trademark Neil Young humour threading through…I found parts of it devastating to read, but I guess that’s the whole deal. This isn’t some Waltons re-hash of the bygone era. It’s a book that defines the death of the existential hero who was celebrated on the pages of Albert Camus’ ‘The Outsider’.

You’re not supposed to amiably agree with what it has to say. It’s supposed to wind you up in places…and it succeeds:

You cringe at Stephen Stills’ over-bloated insecurities masquerading as rock ‘n’ roll arrogance as you watch the Woodstock dream metamorphose into the drugs-fuelled nightmare it was inevitably going to become. The binges, the murders, the violence…all simmering under the pretence of “peace and love”. Whatever those words meant…’Shakey’ is really about delusion. It’s a tale of ego and excess. The only truth is the truth you find in the music. And even then, it sometimes eludes even that…

You laugh at the insane anecdotes that are offered up along the way: choice passages being Neil Young’s farewell telegram to Stephen Stills before he legged it off tour: ‘Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil’; in addition there’s a genius account of a noise being heard in the back of Neil Young’s hearse, quickly revealed to be an unravelling Bob Dylan in his ‘turban phase.’

Which brings me onto comment that perhaps at the centre of all of this (forgive me if I’m wrong in stating this but what the hell) are Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Cruising down Route 66 in that hearse. Evaders of truth? Yes…but ultimately torch-bearers for their generation. 

What struck me more than anything was the scene’s blatant testosterone-fuelled tunnel vision – a generation of Southern-Bible-Belted rockers wanking themselves off (and often wanking each other off) in the name of guitar rock. The whole book revolves around their hanging “attributes”…the women in their lives are always the silhouettes. Ever present, (say, with the over-domineering presence of Neil Young’s own mother) ever haunting, but ultimately shadows that fall behind in the proverbial lay-by of their own story.

As Neil Young once told his son Zeke when he started yelling “no no no” on his tour bus: “Look – we’re men. It’s okay for men to tell women no – that’s cool. But look around, Zeke – there’s no women on this bus. You don’t say no to a man.”

Or if we really want to highlight the offensive, in the words of Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro: “Rock and roll – I thought that meant Loot the Village and Rape the Women.”

Also surprising is Young’s ever-shape shifting political and social views: a singer that protest sings against the recent war in Iraq also is a staunch believer in the death penalty and infamously supported Reagan under the banner of “pro American patriotism.”

As the book goes onto highlight, Neil is none of things. What he is, is an isolationist. Perhaps the last of Camus’ outsiders. In the words of Elliot Roberts: “You never know which Neil Young you’re dealing with.”

In the immortal words of Shakey himself: innaresting…

CSNY til I die

CSNY. Wembley Stadium. 1974. What can I say? 

Having managed to track down a double-dvd bootleg of the gig in question, I am still in awe. Four hours of unbridled rock ‘n’ roll joy. Someone should be appointed to sit down each and every band gigging in 2008, make them sit their skinny-arsed jeans down and force them to watch this gem. A lesson in how it should be done and (dare I say) quite a depressing reflection on the live scene at the moment. Some people have called me a glass half-empty kinda gal, but I beg to differ.

Watching Stills (clad in a police shirt that oozes sexual arrogance) morph himself into a white Hendrix as he literally transubstantiates himself into his guitar only made me more sure of my stance on things. Imagine my sheer orgasmic delight when he told the thousands of long-haired Wembley-ites that he’d “just met someone a few days ago who I’ve been wanting to meet for years” before diving straight into ‘Blackbird’ with (could this get any better?) Joni Mitchell on backing vocals (yes, it can.) Kat’s cuppeth runneth over. Added to this, watching Neil Young in his aviator shades rocking out the old keyboards only pushed me slightly more over the precipice.

What’s my point? This band wasn’t just an unquestionable live force to be reckoned with. They weren’t just a rock ‘n’ roll band bashing out clumsy tunes about sex, drugs and…(fuck it, you know the rest.) This was a band with something to say – and whilst bands right now might consider it corny to “pontificate” about soldiers cutting them down, I consider it a cop-out that bands no longer have any desire to express themselves about anything that may demonstrate they have any degree of social/political/EMOTIONAL awareness, cowering under a math-rock misapprehension that actually celebrates wielding calculators and compasses instead of hearts and soul (Not naming any names. FOALS)

CSNY had Vietnam. We have Tibet. Have things changed that much? If anything, the time is even riper. So why is it being left to sixty year old rockers like Neil Young to keep on churning out the anti-war sentiment on records like ‘Living With War’? When did it become too corny to care?

(Can I just add at this point that I hysterically jump around the kitchen to AC/DC like everyone else, I’m not being a snob here. I’d just like to see a bit of variation. Back in Black forever. IDET.)

And If you haven’t had a listen to Neil Young’s last record ‘Living With War’, please click onto his anti-war video to ‘The Restless Consumer’. Don’t need no Madison Avenue War. Don’t need no more lies.