Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Deja Vu

Released - March 1970

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash & Neil Young

Selected Personnel - David Crosby (Vocals/Guitar); Stephen Stills (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Bass/Percussion); Graham Nash (Vocals/Keyboards/Guitar/Percussion); Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Harmonica); Dallas Taylor (Drums/Percussion); Greg Reeves (Bass); Jerry Garcia (Pedal Steel Guitar); John Sebastian (Harmonica)

Standout Track - Almost Cut My Hair

On my review of Buffalo Springfield's second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, I was fairly disparaging about the sum efforts of all of Neil Young's collaborators across both that band and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which wasn't particularly fair of me considering I'd based that opinion solely on that one album and on CSNY's 1974 best-of So Far. I've since dug a little deeper and am willing to redress my opinion slightly, though I still maintain that Young is an infinitely more original and interesting musician than any of Crosby, Stills, Nash or Richie Furay, and I'm still not remotely moved to investigate the solo discographies of any of them - their partnership with Young remains the main reason I'm interested in any of them. Nonetheless, I am willing to concede that, far from being a collection of tired West Coast folk rock tropes as I half-expected them to be, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were capable of recording a genuinely brilliant album, and Deja Vu is just that.

As a brief side note - I've also recently listened to Buffalo Springfield's self-titled first album and so have heard "For What It's Worth," a song which, incredibly, I'd never heard before. As a result, Stephen Stills' reputation as a songwriter suddenly makes sense, as that song's a masterpiece. Its parent album is very middle-of-the-road, however, and I've yet to hear anything by Stills that comes close to it, but at least the respect he commandeers suddenly makes a bit more sense.

Anyway, on to CSN. In the wake of the disbanding of Buffalo Springfield, and of David Crosby's dismissal from the Byrds as a result of high tensions within the group, Stills and Crosby started jamming together and soon added the Hollies' Graham Nash to their lineup thanks to his skill with close-part harmonies, and recorded a hit album with their self-titled debut. Neil Young, meanwhile, forged out as a solo artist with his own self-titled debut, which failed to impress many people, but followed it up with the brilliant collaboration with new backing band Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which cemented him as one of the most serious and credible country-rock musicians around - one who was more interested in lengthy, hard rock jams rather than radio-friendly singles, more interested in doing things his way than anybody else's.

The Crosby, Stills & Nash album, by contrast, achieved great chart success and radio play, and the result was the need to expand their lineup in order to tour successfully, considering Stills played the majority of the instruments on the record. At the suggestion of their manager Ahmet Ertegun, they recalled Young to the lineup, and put out their great masterpiece, Deja Vu, as a quartet. Young's relationship with the others seems a strained and fractious one - he insisted on being given equal billing in the band's title if he were to be involved, but then occasionally sat out certain albums and tours from then on, causing the band's name to fluctuate depending on whether he was interested at the time or not. His contributions as a songwriter also seemed to be very dependent on whims - shortly after the release of Deja Vu he would record the blistering protest song "Ohio" pretty much as a solo record, and then casually let them put it out as a CSNY single. His attitude very much seemed to indicate that he found the context of CSNY occasionally interesting to work in, but that they ultimately needed him more than he needed them.

Nonetheless, and the obsessive Neil Young fanboy in me is shocked to say it, Young's contributions to Deja Vu aren't even the best on the album, and perhaps the presence of a genuinely credible, serious musician caused the others to up their game on the songwriting front and aim for more than just radio-friendly folk rock singles. I mentioned on my review of Buffalo Springfield Again that one of that band's failings was that it never quite gelled into what really felt like a single identity, instead lurching between the different styles and approaches of the main songwriters Stills, Young and Furay. The same is, of course, true of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but this time it doesn't feel like a missed opportunity - the entire supergroup concept is built around the idea of four different creative figureheads coming together to force their approaches to work in concert with each other, so the different tones and styles on the resultant album feel more like a deliberate attempt to do something interesting than like a band that's failed to find a strong identity for itself as it did with Buffalo Springfield.

For my money, the one who comes off best here is David Crosby, who contributes two of the album's very best songs in the hippie anthem "Almost Cut My Hair" and the title track. "Almost Cut My Hair" features fiery, angry guitar licks under Crosby's barking, guttural vocals. Its lyrical content is, in hindsight, almost a pastiche of late 60s/early 70s hippie counter-culture ("I feel like letting my freak flag fly!"), but Crosby pulls it off with such commitment and passion that it never feels corny. "Deja Vu" itself is a much more complicated song, one with less gutsy fire in its belly than "Almost Cut My Hair," but far more intricate in veering between the fast, syncopated, close-harmony intro to its slow, mysterious middle section. Those close harmonies that were a CSNY staple also get a good workout on Stills' rousing opening track, "Carry On," driven by the insistent strum of acoustic guitar. Stills' other contribution is the pleasant but not hugely memorable ballad "4+20."

Young, meanwhile, places his two contributions at opposite ends in terms of effort. "Helpless" is a bland, plodding piece of country rock that remains a live favourite in his repertoire to this day, a fact which always baffles me as I find it one of the most boring songs he's ever written. At the other end of the spectrum, he also offers the complicated multi-part suite of "Country Girl," a brilliant piece of epic, cinematic music that climaxes in perhaps the grandest, most overblown moment of the record in its stirring finale. Then, of course, there's Graham Nash. Perhaps it's unfair of me to have formed this opinion being totally unfamiliar with the Hollies and with Nash's work elsewhere in his career, but I always get the feeling with Nash that he was a totally different sort of musician to the others and probably couldn't believe his luck that he'd become part of a classic rock supergroup. His songs are jaunty, novelty little pop songs that are totally out of touch with the folk rock vibe on the rest of the album, and to me sound reminiscent of the sort of stuff Paul McCartney was contributing to later Beatles albums, the kind of thing John Lennon dismissed as "Paul's granny music." Don't get me wrong, it's not even that I dislike it - "Teach Your Children" is pretty bland, but "Our House" is genuinely fun and lovely in its wide-eyed, innocent silliness. It's just that his compositions stick out like a sore thumb and are clearly pursuing a different kind of tone than everything else, though that's not necessarily to the album's detriment. I just find it endlessly amusing that the man who wrote the lyrics "Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy 'cos of you - la la, la-la-la, la, la-la-la, la!" went on to write an autobiography called "Wild Tales - A Rock & Roll Life."

The final two songs on the album consist of "Everybody I Love You," a great little rock song and another album highlight co-written by Stills and Young (though it seems more Stills' work than Young's, being reminiscent of his excellent "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.") Then there's the cover of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock." Mitchell has since expressed frustration that David Crosby formed the opinion that she had written "Woodstock" about them after they returned from playing at the festival and told her about it, when it was actually an idea she was already exploring in her writing and then worked some of their own thoughts on Woodstock into it rather than basing the entire thing on their exploits. Indeed, the song is far less about the experience of a rock band playing the festival itself, and much more on the spiritual journey that that gathering of people represents - "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden" ties the song into a much more religious, redemptive arc than any story Crosby might have told her about playing a rock festival could have been. Nonetheless, the band, convinced the song was about them, decided to record an upbeat, hard rock cover of it. The idea itself is ludicrous - one of Mitchell's most intense, atmospheric and contemplative songs sped up to double speed and covered in intense guitar solos. Bizarrely, though, it works. It doesn't come close to the emotional intensity of Mitchell's original version from Ladies Of The Canyon, but they do manage to pull off making into an enjoyable rock song.

Deja Vu deservedly proved to be another big hit for the band, and cemented them as one of the biggest supergroups of the early 70s. As a result, the various solo albums each of its members put out later in 1970 all achieved massively increased exposure and acclaim, including Young's After The Gold Rush. However, the increased success of each of them as solo artists made it more difficult to continue operating as a collective going forward. Young, as mentioned above, relased "Ohio" as a CSNY record, but CSNY as a group would falter in the next few years as they all focused on their solo work, with the odd exception of the occasional tour or the release of So Far as a sort of stop gap in 1974. By the time the next album appeared (with Young noticeably absent) it was 1977 and it would be fair to say that interest had waned.

Track Listing:

1. Carry On (Stephen Stills)

2. Teach Your Children (Graham Nash)

3. Almost Cut My Hair (David Crosby)

4. Helpless (Neil Young)

5. Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)

6. Deja Vu (David Crosby)

7. Our House (Graham Nash)

8. 4 + 20 (Stephen Stills)

9. Country Girl: Whiskey Boot Hill/Down Down Down/Country Girl (I Think You're Pretty) (Neil Young)

10. Everybody I Love You (Stephen Stills & Neil Young)