![]() ![]() Young's major contribution was, arguably, his blazing lead guitar work on the combo's rampaging version of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock". At least Young helped to complete “Everybody I Love You” by putting an ending on Stills’s “Know You Got To Run”, which, as an earlier take reveals, was just an infinite loop of headbanging chords. As for his grandiose “Country Girl”, perhaps intended to be a mini-symphony in the vein of “Expecting To Fly”, it adds up to less than its three separate parts. Young’s contributions never felt like his best work (no doubt he was saving them for his solo recordings), though "Helpless" exerts a kind of exhausted charm. Nash’s simple ditties, “Our House” and “Teach Your Children”, have outlasted their superficial tweeness and seem like messages in a bottle from a lost era, while the hanging chords, shifting time signatures and strange harmonies of Crosby’s title track evoke a state of mysterious suspended animation. Kudos, incidentally, to drummer Dallas Taylor and precocious teenage bassist Greg Reeves, only 15 when he played on the D éjà Vu sessions and already a veteran of recordings with The Supremes and The Temptations at Motown. This is also a Young-free zone, and a showcase for the multi-instrumental Stills (there’s an alternate version on Disc 4 featuring much more of Stills’s funky wah-wah guitar than on the final version). This worked outrageously well, the crowning inspirational touch being the insertion of a spectacular vocal chorale – the “love is coming, love is coming to us all” section – as the hinge between the two halves. The opening track, “Carry On”, was one of Stephen Stills’s finest moments as writer and arranger, as he fused together “Carry On” with a reworking of “Questions”, originally written for his previous band, Buffalo Springfield. No question, it has its episodes of brilliance. ![]() The resulting album is a milestone, though the way that it feels more like four singer-songwriters loosely collaborating than a cohesive band has sawn away at the collective ethic of the debut album. “He was never the same,” Nash remarked ( pictured above, Joni Mitchell and David Crosby). Nash had split up from his paramour Joni Mitchell (another of the extra gems here is a ragged demo recording of “Our House” by Nash and Joni, ending in peals of Joni laughter), Stills and Judy Collins had parted company, and worst of all, Crosby was in a state of trauma after the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton in a car accident. The recording of Crosby Stills & Nash had found the participants basking in the glow of musical and personal harmony, but the D éjà Vu sessions were quite the opposite. Turbulent times, mirrored in the frazzled mental states of the musicians. Only three months after D éjà Vu’s release, CSNY recorded Young’s song "Ohio", his searing musical news bulletin inspired by the shooting of anti-Vietnam war protestors at Kent State university. In between, CSNY had appeared at the Woodstock Festival, the symbolic high tide of the counterculture, but also at the accursed Altamont Festival on 6 December ‘69, now frequently (if glibly) cited as the day the Sixties died. Recording sessions began in Los Angeles on 15 July 1969, and ended at Wally Heider’s in San Francisco on 28 December, on the brink of the new decade. But Young proved to be the grit in the oyster, and whatever upheavals went into it, D éjà Vu stands as a monument to the hippy dream while also signalling the end of it. One can only speculate about the outcome if, instead of Young, CSN had managed to recruit Steve Winwood or John Sebastian, both of whom were approached (one little treat included here is CSN’s beautifully touching version of Sebastian’s wanderer's-return ballad “How Have You Been”). Once again, it’s part of Neil’s insatiable quest for control.” Young disingenuously commented that CSNY was “something that I did every once in a while.” He never played us all his songs… and he would take his CSNY tracks down to the studio, do overdubs and mix ‘em himself. While they were recording D éjà Vu at Wally Heider’s LA studio by day, Young would slip away to Sunset Sound studios at night to work on his solo album, After the Gold Rush.Īs Graham Nash told Young’s biographer Jimmy McDonough: “Neil was very Neil during D éjà Vu. While the original three added their harmonies to Young’s songs, Young was never part of the CSN chorus. It was originally released in March 1970, only some nine months after Crosby, Stills and Nash’s influential debut album, yet in the space between the two, the tectonic plates had somehow shifted.ĬS&N had now gained their Y in the brooding form of Neil Young, and the indivisible tightness of the original trio – so exactly mirrored in their radiant harmony singing – now had to find a way to accommodate the brilliant but obstinately solitary Canadian. ![]()
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