We got into Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young before we got into the pre-Young trio of
Of course as arguably the world’s first true-blue supergroup, where each member already had a firm following before the band’s formation, this group comes with an impeccable pop pedigree. It was also, for a time, our favourite group. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so I hope to secure my safety by the rapid acquisition of information on the band and its members. I do know, however, that Graham Nash was the only British member, having cut his teeth with the Hollies. David Crosby was with the pioneering West Coast outfit, the Byrds, and Stephen Stills was with Buffalo Springfield. But who did Neil Young perform with before his short sojourn with CSN&Y?
I also know that the four were not necessarily always on the best of terms. Part of my upbringing entailed listening to a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention live album called Fillmore East – June 1971, during which the following became famous: “… three unreleased recordings of
Once we had savoured those CSN&Y albums, we would devour Stills’s solo albums, and at various stages in the 1970s and even the 1980s, the great Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums. Stephen Stills’s second solo album even included a line about apartheid
So who were these guys who became high-profile symbols of the golden era of modern music in the 1960s and ’70s?
As usual, I’ll rely on the Wikipedia website as a reliable, objective repository of information and analysis. Ah, and right at the outset they mention something I had omitted, but which is clear on the Four Way Street album: their political activism. Wikipedia describes them as a “folk-rock/rock supergroup” who were known for their “distinctive vocal harmonies and activist politics”. It says they have a “strong association with the segment of 1960s counterculture known as the Woodstock Nation”, which I presume refers to the 1969
What I had overlooked was the fact that Neil Young was also with Buffalo Springfield and it was a decision by Crosby, at the invitation of Stills, to fill in for an absent Young during Buffalo Sprinfield’s set at the June, 1967 Monterey Pop Festival – that famous Summer of Love event – that led to friction between Crosby and his fellow Byrds.
And Graham Nash? He had met Crosby when the Byrds toured the
Nash had become frustrated with the Hollies who, after several pop hits in the mid-Sixties, were struggling to adjust to the new, more progressive music scene. He decided to quit rather than work on their next project, an album of Dylan covers. Bizarrely, the trio auditioned with the Beatles’ Apple Records, and failed! They were, however, snapped up by Atlantic Records. In probably the first such case in rock history, they opted not to give themselves a name or, says Wikipedia, “to be locked into a group structure”. Instead, they used their surnames “to ensure independence and (as) a guarantee against the band simply continuing without one of them, as had both the Byrds and the Hollies after the departures of Crosby and Nash”. A management team of Elliot Roberts and David Geffen “would play key roles in securing the band’s success during the early years”.
Although we didn’t have it, their first album – Crosby, Stills & Nash – from 1969 was one of those that everyone knew of. The front cover had a picture of the lads seated on a couch on an outdoor porch. There was always a strong “country” feeling to the band, which was encapsulated in this cover, and later in that of Déjà Vu. Their debut album was “an immediate hit”, says Wikipedia. It contained two Top 40 hit singles and received good airplay on the new FM radio format. Hard to believe that FM was “new” in 1969. Wikipedia says the band used Dallas Taylor as a drummer, but that Stills handled “the lion’s share of the instrumental parts”. In order to tour, “now a necessity given the debut album’s commercial impact”, they needed new personnel.
With
It says the band were able to “straddle all the flavours of popular music eminent at the time, from country-rock to confessional balladry, from acoustic guitars and voice to electric guitar and boogie”. By April, 1970, with the Beatles no more and Bob Dylan “in reclusive low-key activity since mid-1966”, CSN&Y “found itself as the adopted standard bearers for the Woodstock Nation, vouchsafing an importance in society as counterculture figureheads equalled at the time in rock and roll only by the Rolling Stones”. Wikipedia adds that in their wake, “an entire sub-industry of singer-songwriters in California” were spurred on by CSN&Y, including Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and The Eagles – all managed by Roberts.
Then, probably predictably, after a highly successful summer of 1970, things started to fall apart. But recordings from their concerts that summer were turned into that famous double album, Four Way Street, which was released in 1971 and became “another chart-topper”. However, “the group would never completely recapture momentum as years would pass between trio and quartet recordings”.
While I’ll deal with individual careers later, it is interesting to note just how successful they were in the early 1970s, as they pursued their separate agendas. Between September of 1970 and May of 1971, all four released solo albums – Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name, which I have no knowledge of, Stills’s Stephen Stills, Songs for Beginners by Nash, and Young’s classic After the Gold Rush. All four reached the Top 15 on the album charts, with Stills doing the best at No 3. Indeed, he followed it up in 1971 with Stephen Stills 2, which also reached the Top 10. Crosby and Nash did a successful acoustic tour. Then, not to be outdone, in 1972 came Young’s famous chart-topping Harvest album, with the single Heart of Gold also reaching No 1. This album was a firm favourite in our circle, and interestingly includes all three of the other members on backing vocals. Another album we got into at the time was Stills’s next offering,
Then, apart from Neil Young’s meteoric rise throughout the Seventies, I’m afraid the other members seem to find themselves floundering. Wikipedia notes that a Byrds reunion album sold “marginally well”, while a “bleak” second solo album by Nash “in the aftermath of the murder of his girlfriend” spent just three weeks on the charts. A second
Wikipedia seems to endorse my view about Young, saying that returning to his solo career he gained “critical accolades during the remainder of the century and beyond, as he weathered and embraced changes in taste and style to be, along with Bob Dylan, one of the few rock artists from the Sixties still considered vital by the critical community in the early years of the new century”. To that list I would, however, definitely add one Van Morrison, of whom more later. I note too that Young and Stills combined for a tour and album, credited to The Stills-Young Band, and titled Long May You Run – a Young song. Given the bad blood dating back to the Buffalo Springfield days, it is not surprising that after their July 18, 1976, show Young’s tour bus “took a different direction”, reports Wikipedia. “Waiting at their July 20th show, Stills received a laconic telegram: Dear Stephen, funny how things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil”. Young’s management said he had a throat infection. Stills’s “copious drug use and collapsed marriage sent him into freefall”. Then, inevitably, he reached out to Crosby and Nash, whose Wind On The Water album was the only one by the quartet doing relatively well.
Homer
The Byrds.
The album (Homer) kicks off, in fact, with another classic from the era, the Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season), which I see was written by folk guru Pete Seeger, and is based on a biblical passage. One of the gentle voices making this lovely song belongs to David Crosby. But it is the second track on the album, Buffalo Springfield’s Bluebird, which is probably the pick of the bunch. It is another iconic Stills number, showing just what a huge talent he had from the outset. Always happy to meld searing electric guitar (Neil Young’s perhaps?) with his own bluesy acoustic guitar, Stills on this track creates a richly textured composition which again showcases his wonderfully laid-back approach. “Listen to my bluebird laugh. / She can’t tell you why. / Deep within her heart you see, / She knows only crying. / Just crying. / There she sits, a lofty perch. / Strangest colour blue. / Flying is forgotten now. / Thinks only of you. / Just you.” After this gentle introduction, we get a taste of the blues-rock side of Stills, as the tempo becomes more upbeat and assertive: “So, get all those blues, / Must be a thousand hues. / And be just differently used. / You just know. / You sit there mesmerized / By the depth of those eyes / That you can’t categorize. / She got soul. / She got soul. / She got soul. / She got soul! /Do you think she knows you? / Do you think at all?” There is a lovely section – indeed several – where Stills launches forth on acoustic lead guitar, prefiguring his exploits on the song, Black Queen, which so impressed us on his first solo album, Stephen Stills. The song seems to come to an abrupt end, only for it to start up again with Stills accompanied this time on banjo: “Soon she’s going to fly away. / Sadness is her own. / Reverse of a death of tears / And go home, / And go home.”
Rock ’n’ Roll Woman, another Stills Buffalo Springfield track, is more of the same superb stuff. He had a real knack for writing simple melodies and interesting lyrics. Here the vocal harmonies are again pure pleasure, while the combination of electric and acoustic guitars is achingly excellent. The grungy quality of that lead guitar has all the hallmarks of an early Neil Young… Anyone wishing to get a sample of this time should lay hands on this album, which also includes Lovin’ Spoonful’s lazy Nashville Cats, where John B Sebastian is at his most cool. Injecting some great British heavy metal are Led Zeppelin, whose How Many More Times, at 8:30 minutes is the longest track on the album. I thought the Steve Miller Band’s Brave New World (inspired by Huxley’s book?) was unfamiliar, until I listened to it again. The melody is as much a part of the time, and hence of my psyche, as, well, another track on the album I thought I never knew. Hearts and Flowers was a band from the time, and Rock ’n’ Roll Gypsies was an equally popular song. And what better song to provide some real bluesy grit than Cream’s Spoonful, where vocalist and bassist Jack
Stephen Stills
Stephen Stills was a major influence on me as a youngster. But who is he? The ever-obliging Wikipedia tells us he was born in
Wikipedia says Stills’s guitar technique comprised “sources in generic rock ’n roll, blues and country music, as well as the chordings familiar in the acoustic folk music scene”. Also, however, he was influenced by “his friend Jimi Hendrix”, and Latin music. He too would experiment with the guitar. Bizarrely, Wikipedia says he would soak the strings in barbecue sauce, or flip the pickups to mimic Hendrix playing a right-handed guitar left-handed. His acoustic guitar tunings were often unconventional. He also played piano, organ, bass and drums.
As Buffalo Sprinfield folded, Stills teamed up with Crosby and Nash to form Crosby Stills and Nash, and the rest was history. Their first meeting, as noted earlier, reputedly happened at the home of Joni Mitchell, who painted several artworks of the three and whose home is featured on the cover of their first album, from 1969, according to Wikipedia.
We did not have CS&N, but got to know large sections of it through its seven singles and hearing the songs played at the
Another classic from this album, Suite: Judy Blue eyes (written by Stills for his sometime lover, Judy Collins), reached No 21 in the
With Crosby, Stills & Nash reaching No 6 on the
When my wife Robyn and I finally got to see them live, in Port Elizabeth in the early 1990s – Stills had just hurt himself falling in the shower in Durban and Crosby had recently had a liver transplant – it was clear that Nash was the driving force, the real frontman of a band that was looking somewhat beleaguered, I have to say. The other two looked overweight and jaded, and they played very few acoustic numbers on that “Long Time Coming” tour. Again, sadly, it was a case of trying to recapture a glorious past that was gone, with nostalgia the driving force. But then again, these guys had to live, and having listened to them at various stages in their careers on that compilation DVD, it is clear they have retained that innate musicality which gives their harmonising such a distinct and beautiful quality.
But way back then, in 1969, the trio had put together an epochal album, which also included such classics as Wooden Ships and Helplessly Hoping. Written with Crosby and Paul Kantner, Wooden Ships is another all-time classic. Having just given it a listen on a CSN compilation tape, it again reinforced for me the magic that was the Stills/Crosby combination. It starts with what sound like harmonics plucked on the electric guitar, before the full rock sound kicks in, with lead guitar and organ prominent. Stills’s skill as a lead guitarist is probably undervalued. On this track, he is superb. It is he who opens the song with the lines, “If you smile at me, I will understand / ’Cause that is something everybody everywhere does / in the same language.”
Stills would revisit the spirit of release and respite on the superb Southern Cross from his album Daylight Again (1982), which I only discovered many years later. It is a song which has added import for those of us living in the southern hemisphere, because this is our celestial anchor. The lyrics are superb. They also underscore the fact that musicians often seem attracted to yachting. Our friend, Dave Tarr, sailed yachts around the world for their owners as a way of keeping the wolf from the door, and paid the ultimate price, as the sun ravaged his skin… But the attraction of sailing with the wind is immense, as this song so ably illustrates. “Oooh ... / Got out of town on a boat goin’ to Southern islands / Sailing a reach before a followin’ sea / She was makin’ for the trades on the outside / And the downhill run to
But back to that first CSN album. Helplessly Hoping was another of those songs which just grows and grows on you. It is one of those Stills classics which combine excellent songwriting with a lovely feeling for melody and a way with alliteration. But again, I have really only heard the melody and those titular words. What was the song really about? “Helplessly hoping / Her harlequin hovers nearby / Awaiting a word / Gasping at glimpses / Of gentle true spirit / He runs, wishing he could fly / Only to trip at the sound of good-bye.” Funny how wrong you can be. I heard “worthlessly watching”, but the next verse starts: “Wordlessly watching / He waits by the window / And wonders / At the empty place inside / Heartlessly helping himself to her bad dreams / He worries / Did he hear a good-bye? Or even hello?” After this playful introduction, the chorus is also a delight. “They are one person / They are one person / They are two alone / They are three together / They are for each other.” As usual, Stills can be relied on to inject some superb acoustic guitar into the song. “Stand by the stairway / You’ll see something / Certain to tell you confusion has its cost / Love isn’t lying / It’s loose in a lady who lingers / Saying she is lost / And choking on hello.” The song ends with that lovely chorus repeated.
Long Time Gone, Wikipedia says, was a response to the assassination of Robert F Kennedy. It, too, became a CSN classic, so let’s revisit those lyrics and see if the political references are evident. A Dave Crosby song, it features some superb lead guitar, making it one of the heavier folk-rock songs on the album. “It’s been a long time comin’ / It’s goin’ to be a long time gone. / And it appears to be a long, / appears to be a long, / appears to be a long / time, yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn.”
Stills was also the genius behind You Don’t Have To Cry, also from this album. His distinctive bass-heavy acoustic guitar is a feature of this song, which again features pedal steel guitar, although this isn’t mentioned on liner notes of the compilation cassette I have. “In the mornin’ when you rise / Do you think of me, and how you left me cryin’? / Are you thinkin’ of telephones, and managers, / And where you got to be at noon? / You are living a reality I left years ago / It quite nearly killed me. / In the long run it will make you cry. / Make you crazy and old before your time. / And the difference between me and you. / I won’t argue right or wrong, / But I have time to cry, my baby / You don’t have to cry, / I said cry my baby, you don’t have to cry / I said cry my baby, you don’t have to cry…”
Yet another absolute classic from a fine album, CSN is credited with having “established an aesthetic” for bands like The Eagles, Jackson Browne and post-1974 Fleetwood Mac.
In 2003 it was ranked No 259 on that Rolling Stone magazine top-500 albums list. It is significant that, looking at the track listing, I have heard every song on this except, perhaps Nash’s Lady Of The Island. Beside those tunes already mentioned, the album features Guinnevere, Pre-Road Downs and 49 Bye-Byes, another classic performed live on Four Way Street, which will be dealt with later.
Déjà Vu
And so to Déjà Vu. The first Crostby Stills Nash & Young album, it was released on March 11, 1970. I had just entered high school, and this was to be one of the great albums of my teens. Needless to say, it reached No 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. It also generated three Top 40 singles: Teach Your Children, Our House and
It is fascinating to read how Wikipedia describes the transformation that came over the band with the introduction of Neil Young. It says while the debut album was “more of a piece with its ringing harmonies”, Déjà Vu “presented disparity, sunny optimism giving way to dark corners. The absorption of Young into the group inserted a volatile missing element, a writer of oblique imagery, difficult to pin down, to counter the more earnest and direct aspects of his colleagues”. As noted earlier, the band “arrived” just as the Beatles were breaking up and Dylan was “keeping from being seen”. When Young’s Ohio was released as a single soon after this album’s release, it gave the band “absolute leadership” of the “Woodstock Nation”, with that influence spreading into “mainstream entertainment, lifestyles, and political movements”. The album was seen as not only “embedding counterculture values”, but also as being a harbinger of the new California-based musical sensibilities of the Seventies. Interestingly, I see
Regrettably, I don’t have a copy of the album any longer, but do have the songs in my head, and half a dozen tracks on that Carry On compilation tape. It is hard to try to take oneself back some 35 years to when this album first burst upon the scene, and recapture the spiritual impact it had on one. Also regrettably I only have part 1 of the Carry On compilation tape, and it does not include the opening track off Déjà vu, Stills’s Carry On. “Carry on, love is coming / Love is coming to us all …” As I said, it’s all still in my memory. This song is packed with an urgency which pervades the entire album – aided by that exquisite use of vocal harmony. Again, I am seeing these lyrics for the first time, and discover that from the outset I misheard several words: “One morning I woke up and I knew / You were really gone / A new day, a new way, I knew / I should see it along / Go your way, I'll go mine and / Carry on.” So this is about a relationship that has folded. Somehow it seems more prosaic, just the words, than when it is sung: “The sky is clearing and the night / Has gone out / The sun, he come, the world / is all full of light / Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice / But / To carry on.” I said prosaic, but isn’t that actually good poetry? The night has “gone out”, referring perhaps to the sky being cleared of stars as morning comes. He sees the positive side, a world full of light in which he has no choice but to rejoice and carry on. I never was quite sure what the next verse meant, but it sounded good: “The fortunes of fables are able / To sing the song / Now witness the quickness with which / We get along / To sing the blues you’ve got to live the tunes and / Carry on.” Then, after all that acoustic-guitar led vibrancy, the song slows to the harmonifed chorus: “Carry on / Love is coming / Love is coming to us all.” Here a new rhythm comes into play, before Stills spins more lyrical webs: “Where are you going now my love? / Where will you be tomorrow? / Will you bring me happiness? / Will you bring me sorrow? / Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams / What you do and what you see / Lover can you talk to me?” I think as a young teenager, I was incapable to even consider the import of these words of a man grappling with the vagaries of a love relationship. “Girl when I was on my own / Chasing you down / What was it made you run? / Trying your best just to get around. / The questions of a thousand dreams / What you do and what you see / Lover can you talk to me?” A brilliant opening track! If only I had the album and could actually hear it again.
That cassette tape, from 1991, is full of details about each of the 20-odd songs on it. And it tells us that the next track on Deja Vu, Teach Your Children, features Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar. Now that steel guitar sound which kicks of this song has, for me, long been considered a hallmark of the album. I noted, while researching the Grateful Dead, that a song on one of their albums sounded similar to Teach Your Children. Now the reason is revealed: it was Garcia’s pedal steel touch on both songs. This Graham Nash song was, of course, another of those epoch-defining tracks. While Nash may have had a stronger commercial leaning than the others, he proved with this song that he too could tap into the youth revolution that was under way, and that he was better than most at articulating in a poetic way some of those sentiments. Of course we loved the fact that we were being enjoined to “teach your parents well”. But let’s see precisely what we were hearing. “You who are on the road / Must have a code that you can live by / And so become yourself / Because the past is just a good bye.” This seems to reference the itinerant hippie, or rock musician, lifestyle, where people are “on the road” a lot, a bit like gypsies. But what was he saying in that first chorus? “Teach your children well, / Their father’s hell did slowly go by, / And feed them on your dreams / The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.” Because I had a sickly father, who died when I was 17, I naturally heard “health”, not “hell”, because my father’s health did in fact rapidly go by. I understand feeding them on your dreams, though I don’t necessarily agree with it, but the next line makes little sense. The next two lines are suitably vague, and somewhat sentimental: “Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry, / So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.” As an old toppie now in his early 50s, with sons about the age I was when I first heard this, I can relate to the next verse: “And you, of tender years, / Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by, / And so please help them with your youth, / They seek the truth before they can die.” And so to that famous role-reversal verse: “Teach your parents well, / Their children’s hell will slowly go by, / And feed them on your dreams / The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.” I wonder if Nash simply reversed the subject and object to cause a stir, since the rest of the words are the same…
The next song is prefaced with words which sound like “I’ll now proceed to entangle the entire area”, though the lyrics I gleaned off the web for Almost Cut My Hair don’t include that introduction. David Crosby put into words something that everyone felt acutely at the time, but few spoke about: the importance of your hair. Sure, there had been the musical Hair, and every self-respecting hippie sported long, luscious locks. But in Almost Cut My Hair,
Was this a strong album or what? Next up was Helpless, the first Neil Young track on an album with CS&N, and it definitely gives them another, grittier, dimension. Young’s distinctive high-pitched vocals also became a fresh source of interest for fans like ourselves. There is a curious echoing in the electric guitar, played by Stills, on this track. At times I wondered if it wasn’t some kind of steel guitar. But the notes on that cassette do not refer to Garcia playing on this track. I referred earlier to Wikipedia’s description of Young as “a writer of oblique imagery”. And it is that literary element, I believe, that sets him apart and which brought such an important quality to the group. Young, who apparently has some Native American blood in him, seems to have a close affinity with nature, which he translates into his songs in a manner that is, for me, a thing of great artistic beauty. This quality permeates all his songs, making him, in my mind, one of the truly great musical artists of our time. “There is a town in north
In a final three-line verse, he sings: “Baby can you hear me now? / The chains are locked and tied across the door, / Baby, sing with me somehow.” This again I never heard properly. I though he said the chains had “long been tied across the door”. But it mattered not. This was a superb song, with Young laying down his distinctive folk-style acoustic guitar base, around which the others worked their magic.
That’s four crackers. But then, or course, there was
The title track was typically Crosby, totally unconventional, with the song starting with a complex piece of vocal harmonising before he launches, at a fair gallop, into the famous lines: “If I had ever been here before I would probably know just what to do / Don’t you? / If I had ever been here before on another time around the wheel / I would probably know just how to deal / With all of you.” Consider that this is about déjà vu.
Nash was a great writer of accessible, likable, catchy melodies. Even my mother enjoyed Our House, as I’m sure most people did. It just spoke of such a peaceful, happy place at a time when the world was in such turmoil. It is the Nash piano and virtually solo vocals which define this track, although it wouldn’t be CSN&Y without beautiful harmonising throughout. The opening lines set the scene: “I’ll light the fire / You put the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.” The melody then kicks in: “Staring at the fire / For hours and hours / While I listen to you / Play your love songs / All night long for me / Only for me.” A good old love song, then. “Come to me now / And rest your head for just five minutes / Everything is good / Such a cosy room / The windows are illuminated / By the sunshine through them / Fiery gems for you / Only for you.” It is simple, effective, songwriting, and people loved it: “Our house is a very, very fine house / With two cats in the yard / Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy / ’Cause of you / And our la,la,la, la,la, la, la, la, la, la, la …” If only life was like that. If only love could banish the hardships and make things easy.
The introspective quality of Stills’s 4 + 20 appealed to me, not least because it was such a simple piece, with Stills accompanying himself on a single acoustic guitar. How I would have loved to be able to play that song properly! Born in 1945, Stills would have been 24 in 1969, and this song is about those first years of his life. “Four and twenty years ago / I come into this life / The son of a woman / And a man who lived in strife / He was tired of being poor / And he wasn’t into selling door to door / And he worked like the devil to be more.” All the time, Stills gets that guitar to perform little nuances I found impossible to replicate in my amateurish attempts. “A different kind of poverty now upsets my soul / Night after sleepless night / I walk the floor and I want to know / Why am I so alone? / Where is my woman can I bring her home? / Have I driven her away? / Is she gone?” Here again, one gets the import only when reading the lyrics. His poverty is one of loneliness. Sadly, for the third line I would hear “Am I driven to the wedding”, not “Have I driven her away?”, which means I completely missed the point. He’s driven further in the next verse: “Morning comes the sunrise / And I’m driven to my bed / I see that it is empty / And there’s devils in my head / I embrace the many coloured beast / I grow weary of the torment / Can there be no peace? / And I find myself just wishing that my life would simply cease.” Not a good verse for teenagers having existential crises. I always heard “devils in my hair”, which was foolish, but I liked the image of unruly hair. But now I see he returns to the bed and finds it empty, his lover gone. The devils in his head are of rage and the many-coloured beast could well be a combination of green jealousy and any manner of heart-felt emotions. At that age, at any age, these matters of the heart can drive one to extremes. Ask me, I’ve been there a few times. Interestingly, the version of this song on that Carry On tape is also an “unreleased alternative mix” from 1969. While it sounds somewhat less polished than the final product, it is remarkably similar.
Neil Young’s Country Girl suite – Country Girl, Whiskey Boot Hill; Down, Down, Down; Country Girl (I Think You’re Pretty) – adds gravitas, with Young exploring avenues the others never come close to reaching. Musically, lyrically, aesthetically, Young had it all: “Winding paths through tables and glass / First flowers bloom / Now watch the summer pass / So close to you.” It is poetry, with words selected and placed like precious jewels in a crown. “Too late to keep the change / Too late to pay / No time to stay the same / Too young to leave.” What I like about those lines is that they are not prescriptive. There is a deliberate ambiguity about what he’s saying that means the lines never grow old and tired. “No pass out sign on the door set me thinking / Are waitresses paying the price of their winking / While stars sit at bars and decide what they’re drinking / They stop by the die because it’s faster than sinking.” I’ll never fully fathom those lines, but at the time we’d sing along – often incorrectly – for all our worth. “Find out that now was the answer to answers / That you gave later / She did the things that we all did before now / But who forgave her?” We seem now to be getting into the relationship realm. “If I could stand to see her crying / I would tell her not to care / When she learns of all your lying / Will she join you there?” All this as the song steadily builds up till there is a great release of emotion and energy: “Country girl I need to (you, sure?) back / Got to make you understand / Have no lovers in the city / Let me be your country man / Got to make you understand / Got to make you understand / Country girl.” For what it’s worth, I heard “Country girl I believe you’re pretty…”, which rhymed with “city” later on.
Finally, the Stills/Nash composition, Everybody I Love You, brings the album to a fitting climax. It is a fast-paced rocker, another of those unique compositions which these guys seemed to churn out at the height of their powers. “Know you got to run / Know you got to hide / Still there is a great life / Engrained deep within your eyes / Open up, open up / Baby let me in / You expect for me to love you / When you hate yourself my friend la la la ...” Here, of course, I heard not “engrained deep within your eyes” but “lingering deep…”. It matters little, except that engrained is a far more powerful image. Then the chorus: “Everybody I love you / Everybody I do / (oh yes) / Though your heart is an answer / I need your love to get me through / (oh yea, I really do now) / When I tell you I love you / (when I tell you) / You can believe that it’s true / (oh yes it is).” The harmonies pour out from those lyrics as if one were hearing the song itself, so engrained – that word again – is this song in my memory.
I notice from Wikipedia that another key contributor on this album was one John Sebastian, who played harmonica, making it another of those great Californian collaborations. Déjà Vu was, for us, one of the defining events in the development of modern music. But of course there was more to come, and that was in the form of the band’s formidable live double album, Four Way Street.
Four Way Street
While I listened to this album over and over at home, I’ll always associate it with a weekend when, somehow, a group of us teens and early twenties managed to house-sit a home in Abbotsford, which is a lovely hamlet up the Nahoon River in East London. I must have been about 16 or so, and I recall that the lounge curtains were never opened, while the hi-fi must have played music almost constantly at high volume the entire weekend. Heaven knows what the neighbours must have thought. There was much lying around and, no doubt, a fair amount of dope smoked. It never even occurred to me at the time, but the odd bit of sex probably occurred in the bedrooms too. I don’t recall eating really. It was mainly about the music. Dave Tarr, that great fiddle player I’ve mentioned earlier, arrived from his family home nearby and I recall a jam session, with him on, of all things, the recorder. But Four Way Street was the record of choice for me that weekend. It was such bliss to lie around with like-minded souls and get into this music to the exclusion of all else.
I did just that again now, in my lounge, ace out. I had picked up the same vinyl double album at a second-hand shop and it was miraculously unflawed by severe scratching. The first two sides are the acoustic music, and generally the more popular. And Side 1 starts off with the end of a song, the signature da da da da, da-da, da da-da da on which the group ends Stills’s Suite: Judy Blue-Eyes. Did I read somewhere earlier that this song was about Judy Collins, she of the iris blue irises? They probably left this song off in its entirety because it had been such a major part of the recent
Teach Your Children was already a big hit by this stage, so Nash knows he will evoke a positive response when he announces: “This is from our second album…” Again the acoustic guitar work is magnificent, as are the vocal harmonies. At one point, Nash urges the audience to sing along on the chorus, while at another there is an endearing chuckle mid-sentence. But then a vast mood change comes, as Nash, it must be, introduces David Crosby. There is a long, witty exchange between the two, which goes along these lines. “I’m not sure what sort of a mood David’s in, but whatever happens will be whatever happens.” At one point,
Again, the guitar work is top-drawer stuff, as he eases into this quiet, contemplative song. But what exactly did he sing? A lyric search has yielded this: “Wheel gull spin and glide ... you’ve got no place to hide / ’Cause you don’t need one.” Isn’t that beautiful? But, sadly, it probably no longer applies today, as environmental degradation has placed even the freest of seabirds at some peril. But let’s enjoy
Ironically, Graham Nash, a British expat, often comes across as the most vehemently political of the four. And none more so than on the next song,
And that is how Side 1 ends, only for the magic to continue on Side 2. Again, the opening sounds are unorthodox, with a lazily strummed guitar accompanied by whistling. It is introduced with the words, “This is a song you have not heard, of Graham Nash’s”. But then things go awry, and two voices start singing where, it seems, only one should have. The repartee between the two – Nash and Crosby, perhaps – is crisp and witty, as Nash questions how they could have started on the same number, or such-like. It is here that we first heard about mumblety peg, or suchlike, because one of them says: “He’s quicker than most normal human beings. Don’t want to play mumblety peg with him, he’ll steal your leg.” (A quick google reveals this is an old game whereby a knife is pegged into the ground as two players face each other.) Nash then introduces the song, which is probably what he wanted to do at the outset, saying simply that “this is a song about changes that everybody goes through at the same time”. Finally, he can start singing: “My head is hanging heavy with the thoughts of him in mind / ’Tis sacrilege for us to take advantage of the blind / So, tell before you come to me from out of yonder skies / A man’s a man who looks a man right between the eyes.” What is he on about? Look, we loved this song, but I was never sure what it meant. I’m no wiser after that first verse. Does he intend assaulting this guy? “And the pain that we can bring to him / I don’t think he could beat / Please don’t ask me how I know / I’ve just been up that street.” Still sounds confrontational, and remember Nash was not a big, muscular oke. “And all the people living there / Have been silenced by their own lies / A man’s a man who looks a man right between the eyes.” Nash finally taps into the love for astrology which shows like Hair! popularised: “And talking’ from experience I know how he would feel / Waking up and finding that his one love wasn’t real / But the age of truth will soon appear, Aquarius arrives / A man’s a man who looks a man right between the eyes.”
Neil Young’s popularity is immediately apparent on the next song, which needs and gets, no introduction, apart from that bluesy, grungy opening acoustic guitar sound, before his voice rings in high and true: “Hello cowgirl in the sand / Is this place
at your command / Can I stay here / for a while / Can I see your / sweet sweet smile / Old enough now / to change your name / When so many love you / is it the same? / It’s the woman in you / that makes you want / to play this game.” Then that tricky bit of chord-changing and picking, before the next verse: “Hello ruby in the dust / Has your band / begun to rust / After all / the sin we’ve had / I was hopin’ that / we’d turn back / Old enough now / to change your name / When so many love you / is it the same / It’s the woman in you / that makes you want / to play this game.” The band he speaks about here is surely not a music band, but a wedding band – since she is “old enough to change her name”. Where does he take this? “Hello woman of my dreams / This is not / the way it seems / Purple words / on a grey background / To be a woman / and to be turned down / Old enough now / to change your name / When so many / love you / is it the same / It’s the woman in you / that makes you want / to play this game.” The applause is long and sustained, as a humble-sounding Young repeats simply, “Thank you, thank you”, before introducing his next song, with a decided dose of sardonic humour. Speaking in his typically laid-back voice, he says: “Here’s a new song that’s guaranteed to bring you you right there on, it’s called Don’t Let It Bring You Down. It sort of starts off real slow, then it chisels out altogether.” Another Young, classic, he powers that unique voice into the lyrics: “Old man lying by the side of the road / With the lorries rolling by, / Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load / And the buildings scrape the sky, / Cold wind ripping down the alley at dawn / And the morning paper flies, / Dead man lying by the side of the road / With the daylight in his eyes.” It’s not a pretty scene, but a little humour helps, as the chorus follows: “Don’t let it bring you down / It’s only castles burning, / Find someone who’s turning / And you will come around.” Where to next? “Blind man running through the light of the night / With an answer in his hand, / Come on down to the river of sight / And you can really understand, / Red lights flashing through the window in the rain, / Can you hear the sirens moan? / White cane lying in a gutter in the lane, / If you’re walking home alone.” A tragedy has occurred, but he leaves it at that, concluding with the chorus repeated.
Then, in another interesting interlude, Young speaks of the next performer, who thus far on the album has not yet really been the focal point. “Right now, I’d like to bring on a friend of mine who has been a friend of mine probably longer than I’ve known anyway now that I come to think of it … We’ve had our ups and downs but we’re still playing together – Stephen Stills!”
Accompanying himself on piano, the song is titled 49 Bye-Byes/America’s Children, and it combines the gentle with the aggressively political. And, as angry young teenagers, we loved it’s brittle, anti-establishment sentiments. The song starts quietly, beautifully: “49 reasons all in a line. / All of them good ones... / All of them lies. / Driftin’ with my lady / we’re oldest of friends. / Need a little work, and there’s fences to mend.” The mood switches: “Steady girl, she was my world. / Till the drifter come, now she’s gone. / I let that man play his hand. / I let them go, how was I to know? / I’m down on my knees. / Nobody left to please.” The song deviates substantially from the original, with an apparently new verse drafted in: “Now it’s over, they left in the spring, / Her and the drifter looking for beautiful things.” His enunciating of that word, beautiful, is indeed beautiful. Then, however, he launches into the political, up-tempo America’s Children, first getting the crowd – it is no longer an audience – whipped up by saying: “I want you to clap your hands … all right, come on and clap your hands … and a little bit louder now…”. Then he embarks on a section of For What It’s Worth: “Oh, you know there’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear / Yes there’s a man with a gun over there / Telling me I got to beware / And we got to stop children, what’s that sound / Look what’s going down / Ahh look what’s going down / All right.” The next verse is as challenging. “What a field day, what a heat / Must have been a thousand people standing in the street / Singing songs and carrying signs / Come on, mostly say ‘hurray for our side’ / And we got to stop children, what’s that sound / Everybody look what’s going down / All right, what’s going down ah yes.” This evolves into what must be America’s Children, which is almost talking blues, or early rap: “Well it looks to me like there’s a few politicians hanging around children / Perpetrating some kind of myth on us all all right / Talking bout what a drag all the kids are yeah aahh / Cause they got the guts to get out in the streets and tell the truth every day aahh yes / Making it a little hot for them, you know all right / But you know that we’re all just out there proving to / Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew and Richard Dailey and all them other, / well whatever you want to call them / That America is still the home of the brave oh yes it is / And you got to be brave children / How many is it that they shot down already? / Something like seventeen of us. / But you know we gotta do it / We gotta keep on keeping on / Because if we don’t do it nobody else is gonna / But you know if we can’t do it with a smile on our face / You know if we can’t love in our hearts then children we ain’t got no right to do it at all / Because it just means we ain’t learned nothing yet / We’re supposed to be some kind of different Ahhh / Whoa Whoa Whoa oh yes / And I don’t know if I want white America to remember or to forget / That Jesus Christ was the first non-violent revolutionary / Dig it ohh Dig it ooh right on Dig it yeah.” We really dug that bit. It reminds me of a poster that a local Catholic priest in
Then, with Stills having instilled some adrenalin, the side ends with him saying they’re going to do one more song, “then we’re going to take a break then come back and play electric music and boogie”. And that song is one which in a way captured the spirit of the sexual revolution, precipitated by the Pill, and captured in the “free love” sentiment which did the rounds in the late sixties. It was called Love The One You’re With, and I’ll be seeing the lyrics for the first time, because I know the opening lines have always eluded me: “There’s a rose / In a fisted glove / And the eagle flies with the dove / And if you can’t be with the one you love / Honey, love the one you’re with.” It was not a sentiment which sat well with those who had what they hoped was a “steady girlfriend/boyfriend”. And later, when we were forced into the military, it was something which could cause incredible heartache. But let’s follow Stills’s philosophy further. “If your guy can’t come to you / And you don’t remember who your talking to / Your concentration slips away / Because your baby, he’s so so far away…” That chorus then kicks in again. Then, as that acoustic guitar whirrs away: “Don’t be angry / Don’t be sad / Don’t sit cryin’ for good times you had / There’s a girl right next to you /And she’s waiting for something to do / So if you can’t be with the one you love / Love the one you’re with.” Finally, his voice becoming more insistent, Stills concludes: “Turn your heartache into joy / She’s a girl and you’re a boy / Get together, make it tonight, / You ain’t gonna need no more advice / Just love the one your with …” Then follows that virtual CSN&Y signature melody: “Da-da, da-da, da da da-da-da-da” as the song draws to a close. The frightening thing about this song is that many young people took it as a philosophy for their lives. It virtually indoctrinated people into believing that virtues like honesty, respect, fidelity and faithfulness to a partner were redundant. I think it backfired badly for many.
Before looking at, or rather listening to, the electric half of Four Way Street, it is probably a good time to see what Wikipedia has to say about it. As probably noted earlier, the album reached No 1 in the
Interestingly, I see there is now an expanded edition out, which included Stills’s Black Queen from his debut solo album, Laughing from
Incredibly, their next joint album, CSN, was only released six years later, in 1977. By that time, they were pretty much history as far as we were concerned, though Neil Young’s work would live with us throughout the seventies and into the early eighties.
But back to Four Way Street. I have to admit I was never as attracted to the electric music half of this set than the acoustic stuff. The reason, upon giving it a fresh listen, is that there is less variety, less nuance. With Calvin Samuels on bass and Johnny Barbata on drums, it left the others free to man those electric guitars and organs. And at times you get the feeling each of the guys is trying to outdo the other as they kick up an electric storm. Side 3 starts with the up-tempo Pre Road Downs, a Nash composition, and at 2:48 minutes the shortest song on the last two sides. I barely heard the lyrics way back then, and listening again found them difficult to decipher. A quick perusal reveals a story of love. It starts: “I have kissed you / So I’ll miss you / On the road I’ll be wantin’ you / But I have you cause I love you / And you have me ’cause you love me too. Yeah.” The other verses have similar sentiments, but that chorus is interesting: “Don’t run the time approaches / hotels and midnight coaches / be sure to hide the roaches.” To the uninitiated, this may seem like a reference to creepy crawlies. Instead, having been down that road a bit, I guess we’re talking spliffs, reefers, joints – or whatever else you call a marijuana cigarette. Long Time Gone, a
As witty as ever, Neil Young introduces the marathon Southern Man (13:15 minutes) by saying that it is “usually a really long song”, and that they are going to do it “really slow”. For the first time on this side, you get real full-bodied guitar chords and bass notes coming through, giving the song a rounded quality missing on the preceding tracks. Then that incredible voice adds its weight to matters in one of rock’s most powerful indictments of racism: “Southern man / better keep your head / Don’t forget / what your good book said / Southern change / gonna come at last / Now your crosses / are burning fast / Southern man.” What a cracking opening verse. He cleverly mixes metaphors, with the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan now being seen as crosses burning as symbols for the imminent end to their racist reign of terror. Young, his voice straining with emotion, paints a picture of the
Side 4 starts off in similar vein, with Neil Young’s surprise hit single,
Stephen Stills had a knack for generating a lusty, lively rhythm, and Carry On is no exception. One of the hits from Déjà Vu, the band uses this as a chance to really let rip. A screaming wah-wah lead guitar, slashing cymbals and pulsating bass set up a long, jazzy, funky jam session which at times borders on the repetitious. Once the audience has been subdued by this wall of sound, it comes as an immense relief – and a wonderfully judged contrast – when one of the guys announces that “this is wooden music again, so you’ve gotta be cool, otherwise you won’t hear it”.
Stills’s acoustic guitar gymnastics on Find The Cost Of Freedom are one of the highlights of this album. Probably two thirds of this 2:16-minute song are taken up with that ripping, rippling acoustic guitar introduction. Finally, the guitars quieten, and the group sing those haunting Stills lines: “Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground / Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down.” This is repeated a capella, before one of the band says a quiet “goodnight”. But I have since discovered that the song is longer. The full lyrics go: “Daylight again, following me to bed / I think about a hundred years ago, how my fathers bled / I think I see a valley, covered with bones in blue / All the brave soldiers that cannot get older been askin’ after / You / Hear the past a callin’, from Armegeddon’s side / When everyone’s talkin’ and no one is listenin’, how can we / decide?” This seems to be about native American Indians and how they were decimated by the early
Part of the mystique surrounding Four Way Street lay in its sleeve design. As mentioned earlier, the inside of this gatefold double-album consists of a black and white photograph of the four literally in the dressing room of probably the Fillmore East. It is a grainy picture showing an animated Graham Nash, second from left, chatting, his hands gesturing expressively, while Stills, on the right, seems to look on attentatively, though he does also seem distracted. Crosby, just to Nash’s left, his hairy chest pouring out of an open-necked tie-died shirt, looks away pensively, while Young, almost chopped out of the picture altogether on the left, has his face resting on his right hand. They are sitting on a wooden bench such as you’d expect at a railway station, with a couple of bottles of (probably) booze between them. The cleverest part of this picture is the cheap steel coat-hanger in the foreground, the triangle of which frames Nash and
Later albums
I was not aware till now that in 1974 CSN&Y brought out a compilation album – which went to No 1 in the
The group finally got back together to make an album, sans Young, in 1977. CSN, it seems, was released in the nick of time, before the Punk revolution overturned the reign of the Mellow Mafia from the US West coast. It reached No 2 in the
Young the youngest?
Was Neil Young the youngest of the four? My guess is that they were listed as a group in terms of their age, with
Stephen Stills
The fact that I only really got into the solo work of Stills and Young is no reflection on the other two. They may well have produced equally impressive work. Indeed, from the few CSN songs I’ve heard from the 1980s, it seems they both kept their hands in with song-writing, and retained that innate musicality and penchant for vocal harmonies which was their stock in trade. But for us, in the early 1970s, it was the two younger members of the band, the 1945 guys, who made the biggest impact. It is hard to believe that people born, what, 63 years ago today as I write in 2008, were young and at the cutting edge of music in the early 1970s. Both would have turned 25 in 1970, putting them at the height of their creative powers. And it was Stills who, after our infatuation with those CSN&Y albums, kept us as firm fans with his first solo album, the self-titled Stephen Stills, from 1970, which just happened to feature guest appearances from two icons from the late sixties: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Indeed, Wikipedia notes that Hendrix’s appearance on Old Times, Good Times was possibly his last recording before he died. Stills dedicated the album, released after Jimi’s death, to James Marshall Hendrix.
Interestingly, Wikipedia tells us that other guests included “Mama” Cass Elliott and Ringo Starr, who is credited only as “Richie” on the songs, To A Flame and We Are Not Helpless. Crosby and Nash also, as usual, helped out on vocals, as did Rita Coolidge and John Sebastian. The old CSN&Y firm of Calvin Samuels and Johnny Barbata did much of the rhythm section, though clearly not all.
Before getting into this album again, a snippet of unconfirmed info from Wikipedia, which says Stills was a close friend of Hendrix. Apparently Stills was approached to play bass when the Jimi Hendrix Experience was being formed – but Stills’s manager allegedly did not pass on the message, fearing this would spell the end of Buffalo Springfield. Nevertheless, Wikipedia says they remained close friends, and socialised and jammed together, right up until Hendrix’s death. Another group Stills might have ended up in was The Monkees. He auditioned, says Wikipedia, for the band in 1966, but dropped out “partially because his already-thinning hair and bad teeth made him look too old for the part”, and also because he would have ended up signing away his music publishing rights.
Super Session
Before getting to that first solo album, I have to mention an earlier omission: Super Session. This album, arguably one of the all-time classics from the late-Sixties, brought together three musicians who were, many would say, a match for
Stephen Stills
And so to that first Stills solo album. Firstly, it must be said that most people bought it for that opening track, Love The One You’re With. I have a vinyl copy of the album, bought at that second-hand shop in
The cover features a delightful photograph of Stills, up to his calves in snow, seated on a piece of wood, beside a toy giraffe, strumming his guitar, with a cigarette clutched between the pinkie and right finger of his right hand, which was a popular thing to do when you smoked and messed around on the guitar. His outdoors image is reinforced by a black and white picture of him looking like a polo player on a horse on the back. Commendably, there are comprehensive details of the musicians who contributed to each track.
Before giving the album a spin, it is interesting to note, from Wikipedia, that the song We Are Not Helpless “was written in response to Neil Young’s Helpless”. They say that Love The One You’re With peaked at No 14 in the Billboard Hot 100 in December, 1970, while another single, Sit Yourself Down, reached No 37 in March, 1971. The album peaked at No 3 and has been re-released on CD. All the songs were written by Stills.
Thanks heavens Stills did not become a Monkee. This was a man meant for more important things, and some of the best of them are on this album. Love The One You’re With may have been a commercial success, but it was on Stills’s terms. He has not pandered to the whims of popularity. The song’s lyrics clearly struck a chord, but the song itself is by no means a pop song. It starts which quickfire acoustic guitar and organ, both Stills, before launching into those famous lyrics. With most of those famous names mentioned above on backing vocals, the choruses are full-voiced and powerful. There is also a strong Latin American influence, with Jeff Whittaker’s congas. The song, it must be noted, has a totally different feel to the folk treatment it received on Four Way Street. It would change many more times at live concerts down the decades.
This album is full of lovely contrasts. After that hectic opening track, things mellow into the folk tune, Do For The Others, on which Stills plays his usual impeccably tasteful acoustic guitar, as well as bass and percussion, and of course vocals. Stills was not overly extrovert, so the songs are almost internalised as he sings them. This gives them a vulnerable, incredibly sensitive quality. It is great, then, to read finally what he was singing: “Round, round, up and down / All along the lonely town / See him sinkin’ low / Doesn’t see the joy there is to know.” Then the chorus: “And he cries from the misery / And he lies singin’ harmony / She is gone there is no tomorrow / It is done so now he must borrow / The life of his brothers / And living in sorrow / Must do for the others.” This is indeed a sad song of lost love: “A chill wind hits his face / Was that a tear I thought I saw a trace? / Loving people everywhere / Where is she? / he is not there.” Then that mournful chorus again. A great feature of this song is his acoustic lead guitar and finger-picking style. Truly, like drawing is to art, so the acoustic guitar is to good folk-rock music. It is the bedrock on which all else is built – though the piano sometimes serves that purpose too.
Church (Part Of Someone) is a slow, bluesy piece where Stills’s vocals are much to the fore, almost ballad-like. “You see, it’s my thing / To be part of someone / As a true friend is part of me / You know that there’s so much / Oh, little girl, we’ve got / to tell each other / About the whole world / And most especially / one another, oh yeah, / all right.” Then, getting more into the idea, he continues: “And you know, and you know?” before launching into the chorus, along with an actual chorus: “And it’s hard, yes it is / It’s hard, yes it is / And I wonder / I wonder could it be a dream?” The song becomes increasingly insistent: “And you know that the / self made man, babe / Is truly shallow / He knows he’s no one / But who he wants to be / So while you still sing, baby / You got to tell me, baby / Is it your thing to be / part of anyone? / Anyone, anyone…”
And then, to Hendrix. The good thing about Old Times Good Times is that Hendrix does not seek to dominate. This is a Stills song, and Jimi behaves like a good guest, bringing just the right touch with his tight riffs during the vocals, then some meteoric lead breaks between verses. It’s a fast-paced rock song, the lyrics of which I never listened to too closely, because all ears were on Hendrix. So what was it about? “When I was young and needed my time alone / Jump in the pirogue, pole down the Bayou /
As the song winds down to silence, an electric guitar with wah-wah pedal starts off quietly before becoming an excellent bluesy melody. What I can’t be sure of is whether this is Clapton or Stills, who is credited with playing “basic guitar” on the track, along with keyboard and vocals. Because whoever is playing this is indeed superb, as the vocals are wrapped around that steady, Ry Cooder-like riff: “Think I'll go back home / Think I’ll go back home / Think I’ll go back home / Back where I belong / Think I’ll go back home.” Those lines I always got, but what came next? “Nothin’ for me here / Nothin’ for me here, child, no there ain’t / Nothin’ for me here / People trapped by fear / And you can’t get near.” Again, it is the song of a tormented soul, the lifeblood of the blues: “Lived with you I felt / Lived with you I felt, child / Lived with you I felt / I was by myself / I was someone else.” Where does he go from here? “ Babe, come home with me / Babe, come home with me now / Babe, come home with me / And I’ll make you see / Yes, I’m gonna set you free.” It all seems lost. But then there is a sea change, a sudden breath of something fresh, a new mood to the song: “When I woke up this morning / I found that I was alone, yeah / Till I called your number / They told me there’s no one home again / Baby, what does it mean? / Is it like it seems?” Well, the song may have changed, but sadly the story still seems to end unresolved. Which brings me to the question of the sudden interjection of some really heavy, non-wah-wah lead guitar at the end. Is this Stills or Clapton? Because it does rather overwhelm all else, more’s the pity.
The gentle beauty of Stephen Stills is evident from the outset on Side 2, with the song Sit Yourself Down starting with slow, almost soulful piano: “When I get restless, what can I do? / When I need someone I think about you / I got to move on, not fade away / I’m only just growing a little each day.” I’m not sure I enjoyed those full-voiced choral choruses, but I suppose they do add a change of mood, pace and volume. I had not known what precisely was sung here, so let’s check: “ (Hold it) I got to quit this runnin’ ’round / (Hold it) Never gonna get rid of these blues / (Hold it) I got to find somebody to love / Slow me down, yeah / My, what a time (Look out now) / Sit yourself down, take a look around.” This is repeated three more times before he indeed, settles down again: “When I get older, mellowed down / Get myself settled on a patch of ground / Takin’ it easy, live every day / Me and the raven, we make our way…”
We first encountered To A Flame as the B side to the single of Love The One You’re With. It, too, is soulfully beautiful, and features that famous Beatles drummer, Richie. Indeed, the drumming is pivotal on this track, where heavy bass drum thumps are heard throughout, alongside great guitar and piano. This was an introspective, reflective, contemplative song. I found it on a website written sans capitals in the e c cummings mould. This is how it looks: “drawn to a flame / she is far away / out of reach / will she burn her wings / i can only watch / out of touch / out of my mind.” It is such a revelation to see the written poetry, not just hear snatches. “i wish i could tell / if she’s all right / feeling fine / lucky for me / I’m not a jealous man / out of hand / out of my mind”. Stills was, like so many of the great songwriters, one who thought deeply about his experiences, and wrote about them with meaning and feeling: “when this love is over / start again / find a new friend / fall in love again.” I like that idea of first finding a woman as a friend, then falling in love. “get yourself high on someone / and then wave goodbye / don’t you cry / go ahead break your heart / but don’t fall apart / it’s like saying goodbye / to
But of course all this was building up to one of the great Steve Stills classics. The sort of hardships Stills endured, possibly linked to his early loss of hair and poor teeth, along with no doubt much turmoil in terms of relationships, seem to come out best when he gets behind an acoustic guitar and plays the blues. Black Queen was performed live, and it blows you away. Here is guitarwork of the highest order, while the Stills voice is at its most expressive. “This is a song about a card game,” he says by way of introduction, while already he is warming up on that guitar, playing some alarmingly powerful notes, before he settles into a bluesy rhythm – da da da-da-da daa da … I wonder if Hendrix heard this, because I think he would have loved it. Before launching into the lyrics, Stills hums and groans along with the notes he is playing, then he lays it on us: “Black queen, holding hearts / Black queen, tear the game apart / Black queen, don’t you know? / Can’t beat aces all in a row, black queen, no you can’t / Have mercy black queen / Don’t you go mess with the black queen, no.” What is the symbolism here? “Black queen, see the whole hand / Black queen, where’s your black man? / Black queen, if he ain’t in the hole / Black queen, you got some more to show me, black queen / Oh, get on me black queen / Oh, Lord, have mercy, black queen / She’s called to beat me clean / Black queen, where’s your bank roll? / Black queen, where did it go? / Black queen, the truth is hard / Black queen, you’re playin’ foolish cards, black queen.” It is impossible to do justice to such a visceral, gut-wrenching song by merely repeating the lines. These are couched in a medium that is uniquely Stephen Stills, culminating in a brilliant acoustic lead break. There are snatches of this sublime quality on a song like Cost Of Freedom, but this is the unvarnished McCoy, all 5:28 minutes of it.
What so often sets a good album apart is the track sequence. So when Cherokee kicks in with a quick tempo, big bass, horns and guitars stirring up the dust, it is a wonderful transition from the preceding, febrile five minutes. Then the song slows, and a beautiful flute – the first I’ve heard on a CSNY album – clears the air. “In my short time / I’ve loved, I’ve shined / And now I find / All my lovin’ just been blind.” And still that flute, crisp and clean, augments the vocals. “Southern girl, come on / You and me babe, gotta move on / My fortunes mean nothing / I never cared about fame / The dark eyed Cherokee / Like the raven she knows me / The secret she keeps / Like her soul so deep / Nothin’ ’round here get to me / Like the lady from Tennessee / Like the lady from Tennessee.” In the midst of all that there is a change of mood, as Sidney George, who played the flute, then takes up the alto sax for a brilliant solo. The song builds to a rip-roaring dénouement. Then, like something gently leaving a room, we are taken on the final journey of the album, We Are Not Helpless, apparently Stills’s answer to Young’s Helpless. It is acoustic guitar music again, with mellow vocals. This is a long, philosophical song, which when we used to listen to it, clearly either went over our heads, or we simply could not get its full gist: “We are not helpless, we are men / What lies between us / It can be set aside and ended / Ev’ryday we learn more how to hate / Shut the door / And then we tell ourselves we can’t relate / Only to the ones who are the same / Yet even they are diff’rent / And ever so they shall remain.” This seems like a realistic assessment of the difficulties of getting different cultures to coexist. The chorus goes: “All are strangers, all are friends / All are brothers, brothers.” The philosophising continues: “Open up, my friend, and learn to hear / For even lying / When it has nothing you should fear / If you cannot let yourself be known / By anyone / Then you are hiding and not whole / All are strangers, all are friends / All are brothers, brothers…” This is a call, a plea, from a representative of a youth clearly struggling with the harsh realities of global conflict. “We, your children, we would ask you all / Please do not hide your eyes / And listen when we call / We will whisper, shout or make a scene / We are the answer / For we can live the peace we dream / All are strangers, all are friends / All are brothers, oh yeah, oh yeah / Yes, America’s children / Are askin’ ev’rybody some questions about how it is / Yes, America’s children / Are makin’ it hard to look them in the eyes / America’s children / Are makin’ it hard to live lies, you know, whoa, it is / And America’s children / Are diggin’ that ev’rywhere children / Are diggin’ we live on the earth / We live on the earth, we live on the earth right now / Yes, and it’s right on, children of the earth, and it’s right on / Children of the earth, and it’s right on / Children of the earth and it’s right on, right on, yeah…” After getting into quite a frenzy during the later stages of that chorus, Stills calms to conclude: “This is what has made our nation free / For life is change / And only blind men cannot see / The new order is upon us now / It is the children / They have the wisdom to be free / All are strangers, all are friends / All are brothers.” Aah, the idealism of youth. But clearly the message went down well with the
Stephen Stills 2
It was with great anticipation that we awaited the arrival of Stephen Stills 2, his second solo album, which was released in 1971. Sadly, Wikipedia has no more than a “stub” about the album, which resonated with us staunchly anti-National Party, anti-apartheid teenagers, because there is a two-line mention of
The first thing to strike you is the quality of the gatefold album sleeve. It has a picture of Stills, in profile, looking out the window of an aircraft. Printed on lovely textured cardboard, the window is covered in raindrops. On the inside, again in profile and looking into a setting sun, he is shown sitting on top of a mountain, pointing to the west and surrounded by scenic mountains. And, for once, the lyrics to his songs were printed on the inside cover, albeit very small and not all that clear. Today I virtually need a magnifying glass to read them. My brother Alistair, or AB, and I, really got into this album, though today I’m not so sure I like it that much. Perhaps, if I give it a fresh listen, I’ll revise my views. You need to get back into the mind of a teenager in the early 1970s and imagine what it was like hearing this fresh off the record presses. Certainly, browsing at the song titles, there are so many evocative tracks that I know why it made such an impact back then. But does it come close to his first solo album?
Wow! Just listened to it, on a vinyl album, in almost mint condition, not a local pressing either, but imported from the
There is a jaunty electric-guitar led quality to the next track, with Clapton clearly stamping his mark on proceedings. Sadly, I was unable to find the lyrics for Nothin’ To Do But Today on the Net, and they are all but illegible on the album cover. Suffice it to say the song starts: “Been on the road to long…”, and, as Clapton’s guitar ranges, Stills sings “I’m a bluesman”.
The gentler side of Stills comes to the fore again on Fishes And Scorpions, which is launched with more subtle acoustic guitar, gentle bass and light cymbals. While today I disparage astrology, there was a time, as I’ve noted earlier, when we were very into it. Indeed, while studying ceramics at art school in the mid-1970s, I made a set of 12 bowls and decorated them with some arcane zodiac signs. This song seems like a very clever bit of poetry using astrology as its inspiration. “Fishes and Scorpions / In the morning sun / Dance to the changing seasons / Get away with none / Water sign in the air / Touch the earth with flame / See the friendly Sagittarian / Do you remember his name / Lovers of lions / Stay away at feeding time / Is all the Taurus takes / Mimicking life in rhyme…” The song then gets heavier, as other instruments come in: “And can you tell me / What does it do for you girl / And can you tell me / Who is it that you knew girl.” That lead guitar adds a dimension as he continues: “In the shadow of starshine / Everyone’s going blind / Lookout you don’t lose your mind / I don’t know if it’s a fantasy / It don’t mean too much to me / In the shadow of starshine / Everyone’s going blind…” The song then calms again for the final verse: “Gemini lady / Did you see me chasing you / I don’t think I did / I only tried to get through.”
Big notes on piano, brass and some fuzz guitar launch Sugar Babe, the next track. It must be remembered that we were young teenagers trying to find our way in the world, trying to understand how to live our lives. We were looking for gurus, for guidance, and Stills seemed to be saying things that touched on what we needed, wanted to hear. So this song again almost preached to us about a code for living: “You can do what you want to do / You can be who you want to be / Just remember that me and you / Ain’t all there is / To bein’ free.” Then, almost like a preacher, Stills tells us, as the chorus kicks in: “People need love / People need trust / People need one another / And that means us / My sugar babe / Believe me sugar babe…” Tell this to a teenager: “Everyone knows it ain’t easy / But when you get it all together in your heart / It’s the easiest thing to do to be pleasin’ / Folks ain’t made to live apart.” It’s stuff, I suppose, that we wanted to hear, but not from parents, preachers or teachers. Only our musician heroes could speak and we’d listen. “People need love / People need trust / People need one another / And that means us / Sugar babe.” The song’s tempo then picks up: “Let yourself be open honey learn to bend / Remember everyone gets scared, / But I’m still your best friend / When you forget about yourself, / And think of things to do / To make me happy then you love me girl / Like I love you.” Many of the lines of this song became embedded in our brains, like these about turtles. “How do turtles talk to one another / They just look, there’s no reason to cower / Just like people they’re drawn to each other / They don’t live in no ivory tower.” It’s not Shakespeare, but it made great listening, and still does. After singing the chorus again, in which his babe is named as Rita, he concludes: “So close, then again so far away / Where are the answers, I hear them every day / Lovin’ you from a distance never did make it anyway / So close, then again so far away / Here comes little Miss Bright eyes / Socking it to me every day / I got to get next to the girl / Or I got to get away.” Because in the end, he’s singing about a relationship. It just happened to have a wider significance for us desperately searching for a meaning to life.
Then, suddenly, there’s a banjo being plucked. Expertly. Then that voice, that distinctive Stills sound, gets Know You Got To Run, a Stills/Hopkins composition, under way. It was another of those songs where we just got into the melody, the instruments, the voice, but not really the message. “Know you got to run / Know you got to hide / Don’t know who to follow / Who is on your side / Don’t know where you’re going / You won’t talk of where you’ve been / And I may see you tomorrow / Never more again.” Again, the immortal tale of love in turmoil. This track sounded superb on my old Sony music centre. After the first verse, an acoustic guitar joins on the left. “Seen you in the city / Seen you on the road / Your face is all a twisted / ‘Cause your brain’s a heavy load / Then you turn and ask me / How did I ever know / Talk about your searchin’ / Well I think it’s all for show.” Now the bass and oh-so-gentle drums kick in, building up to an understated crescendo. “Heard your mournful song / Heard your baleful cry / Seen the light of hunger / Lingering deep within your eyes / Talk about your sinkin’ / What a hole you’re in / You expect for me to love you / When you hate yourself my friend.” How well I remember dwelling on those lines as a teen. It was a chicken and egg dilemma though. Could you find yourself loveable if the one you love did not find you so? It is small wonder that these issues of the heart are the cause of so much heartache among mankind. Let’s see where Stills takes us, remembering that all this is couched in the most magnificent of melodies: “And you got yourself a potion / For to keep you from your sleep / In the dark and lonely hour / I heard you laugh and weep / You’ll always be runnin’ / Until you find your doom / Never face your lonely soul / Never face the gloom.” Gloomy indeed. The song concludes as it started: “Know you got to run / Know you got to hide / Don’t know who to follow / Who is on your side / Don’t know where you’re going / You won’t talk of where you’ve been / And I may see you tomorrow / Never more again.” A hallmark of this track is the acoustic lead that develops alongside that insistent banjo picking.
Side 1 concludes with some big brass sounds, as Open Secret gets under way. This is another side of the Stills persona, a mixture of folk-rock and Latin American carnival sound. But still Stills maintains that gift for interesting lyrics: “Does everyone have their dark side / Like the backside of a lover’s moon / Do we cry out for justice at sunrise / To be cleansed by confessions at noon / Have Mercy.” Isn’t that a great bit of writing? The chorus runs: “Still my heart is an open secret / Someone tell me have I been gifted or robbed.” There are other lovely lines: “Each new opening, a different time for closing / Will I sing my last symphony to an empty room?” After a lengthy sax solo, the song concludes up-tempo with a carnival atmosphere of congas and piano.
Side 2’s opening track’s title is unfamiliar. I wouldn’t know how
Predictably, as with the first album, the mood changes on the next track, which starts with solo acoustic guitar in the 4+20 mould. This is the Stills I relate to best. Quiet and introspective, vulnerable yet assertive, he turns Singin’ Call into a tour de force. “Listen to the sound of the night bird singin’ / I wonder who he calls / My fingers hurt so bad, it’s got me grinnin’ / And I wonder can I do it all.” I loved this section in my youth, which spoke of lapping up the great outdoors: “Hit a stretch of rapids in the rushing ragin’ river / Looking out for boulders and falls / A woman she watches from the top of the canyon / Hopin’ we don't drown us all.” Then a slight mood adjustment: “Help me now, I got to slow down / Hear my singin' call.” Another line from the next verse also lingers: Threw a shoe and took a bad fall. “Hurt myself bad on a run through the desert / Threw a shoe and took a bad fall / Long for the peace that the ancients bring me / Murmur of the lowlands shut my jaw / Help me now, I got to slow down / Hear my singin’ call.” The last verse is enigmatic: “Everyone knows there’s a price for the askin’ / Some people buy themselves a doll / Help me, sweet Jesus / I’m weary from the journey / I need to tell my brothers what I saw / Help me now, I got to slow down / Hear my singin’ call.” A truly beautiful song, anchored by that acoustic guitar which pounds along inexorably.
Then, with global warming and manifold other ecological disasters looming, it is interesting to note that, back in the early 1970s, Stills was writing forcefully about these very issues. Ecology Song starts with fast-paced horns and rhythm section. “Fortunes of time making up a rhyme / How do we save tomorrow / Given a voice can you make a choice / Is it black, is it grey, is it yellow / Mother nature made it green / Prettiest place you’ve ever seen / People don’t know what they need.” Then that chorus: “Open your window / What do you see / Do you remember / How it used to be.” Then an indictment: “All of this crying, while the earth is dying / It’s a shock they won’t stop because of the money / America is lost, figurin’ the cost / You can hang your head in shame / It’s disgusting.”
I always imagined Word Game as being at least 10 minutes long, because so much is jammed into it. In fact, it runs to just 4:13 minutes of pure genius. The acoustic guitar is played punchily, with a strong bluesy feeling. This is the closest Stills comes to a Dylanesque stream of consciousness-type song, and we loved it growing up. And not just because it disparaged apartheid
Marianne, the next track, is almost a sweet love song, by comparison. Clapton’s lead guitar is evident from the outset on this quick-paced blues-rock song, which could almost be construed as pop, were it not so technically brilliant, thanks in large part to the Clapton touch. “Can I get through to you now / Can I Marianne / What are you trying to do now / Come on Marianne.”
After that bit of fun, the album concludes with an interesting amalgam of songs on Bluebird Revisited. The song starts with slow piano and organ, horns and drums. This is another of those “beautiful” Stills songs. “The pain of losing you / Well it made me an angry man / Was there something else that I could do / Was it over, had I a chance? / So I listened once again / To my bluebird sing / Oh yes and children / How she made the mountains sing / Now it haunts me still / That gentle voice of spring / Oh my precious, my soul sister, / My blueyed sparrow / Come back, come back / I can put away the cages / Come back, come back / I can put away the rages / Come back, come back / Can we turn the next page, / Together.” As a keen bird watcher, I enjoy the metaphor. A woman can truly be a bird, free not caged. “Listen to my bluebird laugh, / She can’t tell you why / Deep within her heart you see, / She knows only cryin’ / There she sits a lofty perch / Strangest color blue / Flyin’ is forgotten now, / Thinks only of you…” This is when the song makes a dramatic change, as the congas and organ pick up the pace: “Get into all those blues, / Must be a thousand hues / And each is differently used, / You just know / You sit there mesmerized / By the depth of her eyes / I can tell you no lies / She’s got soul.” There’s a lovely trumpet solo about here, before he continues: “Soon she’s going to fly away / Sadness is her own, / Give herself a bath of tears / And go on home…” Then the song subsides back into quieter mode: “So I listened once again / To my bluebird sing / Oh yes and children / How she made the mountains ring / Now it haunts me still / That voice of spring / Oh my precious, my soul sister, / My blueyed sparrow / Fly back home.” The song, and the album, end with a trumpet soaring alongside some riveting lead guitar.
And I stand corrected, my earlier negative assumptions about this album well and truly quashed. It is one of the great Stephen Stills achievements; indeed one of the great albums of our times.
Manassas
Regrettably, I haven’t heard Stills’s next album,
Wikipedia tells us further that the sleeve notes say it was intended as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson and Duane Allman. A double album, it reached No 4 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. Stills, says Wikipedia, considers it among his best work. It is one I’d dearly love to hear again. Again, none of the tracks spring instantly to memory, but they surely would if I heard them. The list of musicians is awesome. Stills plays guitar, bottleneck guitar, piano, organ, electric piano and clavinette. Hillman plays guitar and mandolin, Al Perkins plays steel guitar and guitar, Calvin Samuels is on bass, Dallas Taylor on drums, Paul Harris plays all sorts of keyboards. There is even a place for Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman, while other instruments include fiddle, acoustic bass and harmonica.
Before getting onto Neil Young, it is interesting to read that Stills and the others battled to reignite the old CSNY fire, with numerous abortive attempts down the years. However, in 1977 there was a “semi-permanent CSN reunion”, and this persisted down the years. In 1997, Stills became the first person inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice in the same night, for his work with CSN and Buffalo Springfield. And I see he released a “critically well received” album, Man Alive, in 2005. Stills’s political side saw him serve as an Al Gore delegate from
My belief that much of his love-song writing was born of personal experience seems well founded. Wikipedia says songs like Bluebird, Suite: Judy Blue Yes, You Don’t Have To Cry and Bluebird Revisted “were inspired by his intense, on-again-off-again relationship with singer Judy Collins”. In a lovely quote from a 1971 Rolling Stone Magazine interview, the interviewer noted: “So many of your songs seem to be about Judy Collins.” Stills replied: “Well there are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them or turn them into literature. I’ve had my share of success and failure at all three.”
I had intended to deal with Neil Young here, but on second thoughts I think he is, in essence, a solo artist, and needs his own space a little later. Meanwhile, it is worth reflecting on how lucky we were that Young’s incredible genius was allowed, for a few short years, to flourish alongside that of
Because between them, these four musicians produced a body of songs that immensely enriched the lives of all who heard them.
1 comment:
Long live CSNY! Check this out:
http://www.myspace.com/marrakeshmusic
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