True story: Mama Cass Elliott wanted to join the Mamas and Papas, but her voice wasn’t high enough for “Papa” John Phillips. Desperate, she followed them to the Virgin Islands, where a workman dropped a length of pipe on her head, knocking her unconscious. Call it a miracle, or a rare case of bad luck with happy consequences, but afterwards she discovered her vocal range had increased by three notes. I’ve attempted to replicate this at home, by repeatedly hitting myself on the head with a hammer, but thus far the only change I’ve noticed is I’m now the owner of a very lumpy head. But I’ll keep trying.
Anyway, I bring this up because I wish somebody would have dropped pipes on the heads of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Not to improve their vocal range, but to kill them. They’ve been at No. 1 on my “Most Annoying Band in History” list for so long keeping the list has lost all its grumpy allure.
Preening prima donnas with vireo voices, the two Americans and one Brit egotistically declined to take a proper name (e.g., The Wymps, Shrieking Pustule) like every other band, insisting instead upon putting up each of their names in lights—thus becoming the first of the “law firm” bands. Actually, the trio did have a band name, albeit one they only used amongst themselves. Their conspicuous consumption of cocaine—Nash once jokingly referred to the “600 grams” (or maybe he wasn’t joking) the band snorted while recording Déjà Vu—led to their dubbing themselves The Frozen Noses.
Anyway, the Three Nostrilteers formed after Crosby was unceremoniously dumped from the Byrds following an onstaged rant about government conspiracies, and Stephen Stills found himself at loose ends after the breakup of Buffalo Springfield. As for Graham Nash, he was frustrated with his band the Hollies, a middle-of-the-road “British Invasion” act, for refusing to record “Marrakesh Express” on the grounds that it was “too experimental.” So he jumped ship the minute he heard “the golden sound” produced when he first sang with Crosby and Stills at either Cass Elliott’s or Joni Mitchell’s house in the hippie playground of Laurel Canyon.
After failing an audition with the Beatles’ Apple Records, the nascent band signed with Atlantic Records, and in May 1969—a month that will live in infamy—released Crosby, Stills & Nash (just couldn’t hear their names often enough, I guess.) Meanwhile, it was as if poor Dallas Taylor, the band’s drummer, didn’t exist, and while his band mates are filthy rich and famous I’d venture not one out of 50,000 people could tell you who he is. To add insult to injury, on the original cover he could be seen peeking through the window behind the trio. On subsequent releases of the LP, however, he was gone, “disappeared” like one of the victims of Stalin’s purges. And that’s a drummer joke that isn’t funny.
Crosby, Stills & Nash instantly catapulted the band to stardom, and ultimately went multi-platinum, thanks to its “golden” harmonies and laid-back sound. CS&N was lucky enough to ride a new mellow wave sweeping the counterculture. James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King—it was as if after taking all that acid and speed all your average freak wanted to do was disappear into his own navel and suck contentedly on the soothing pacifier of the least threatening music possible. And if there has ever been a more nonthreatening album than Crosby, Stills & Nash—this side of Carole King, anyhow—I for one don’t want to hear it.
I was surprised to discover, first, that the songwriting on Crosby, Stills & Nash is relatively evenly divided. I was dead certain Nash, a proper and not-at-all pushy Englishman who probably takes tea with crumpets, would have gotten short shrift from his famously egotistical band mates. And second, that the 2006 reissue of the LP includes a cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” that is better anything but “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” on the original release. And I don’t have much to add besides that, so let’s talk about the LP, shall we?
Crosby’s “Suite: Judy Blues” is a work of genius and probably the best song CS&N ever recorded, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Or much, anyway. Its intricate construction, heavenly vocal harmonies, and fascinating guitar work make it a classic, and Stills’ bass—he played most of the guitar and all the bass and keyboard parts on the LP—is great. As is Taylor’s drumming. And the song moves, except for the slower passages that is, which is more than you can say for “Guinnevere.” I love Stills’ “Can I tell it like it is?”—he’s my favorite vocalist in the band, because he’s got stones and doesn’t sound like a bloody pipit. Finally, the end of the song is fantastic, with Crosby and Nash singing “Do do do do do do, etc.” while Stills sings in, uh, Spanish I guess, and throws is an “A ha! A ha!” like he’s dancing around a sombrero. I have my misgivings about the song, but I love singing along with it when it comes on the car radio, where I can make up my own words (“Sometimes it hurts so badly I must shriek out loud/Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!/I am homely”) and join in on the “do do do” section like a maniac.
“Marrakesh Express” is sprightly but hopelessly dated sounding—the days when hippies trekked to Marrakesh are long gone, and “Marrakesh Express” sounds like a souvenir of that time, like a rusty roach clip or fading train ticket. And it’s a wimpy souvenir at that. Why, even the great Jim Gordon—who sits in on drums—doesn’t do much but a humble little shuffle. Stills’ keyboards annoy me, as does the unnaturally high pitch of his guitar, and besides the bouncy beat the only the only thing I really like about “Marrakesh Express” is Nash’s jibber jabber before the song starts. It’s hard to make out, perhaps because it’s nonsense, but he sounds stoned and the last thing he says is “Kush Kush,” a species of pot presumably popular in Morocco. It’s the single moment of levity on an album by a band that took itself very, very seriously.
What can I say about “Guinnevere” other than that it fills me with atavistic horror? This crawling slice of Renaissance Faire tripe (yes, tripe can crawl) irks me more than any song this side of Pentangle’s “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.” In other words, it’s the second most irksome song in my entire world. Its tone of high seriousness and solemn vocals about a green-eyed lady who draws pentagrams and evidently finds the singer invisible are too infuriating to be unintentionally hilarious, and the vocals are so hushed, and the guitars so quietly strummed, that it makes me want to shoot the peacocks wandering “aimlessly underneath an orange tree.” It would make the perfect soporific if it weren’t so danged pretentious and fey. I might listen to it if my name was Parsifal and I wore a suit of armor to work, but as it is it’s an annoying anachronism, which you might just love if your tastes run to madrigals and merkins.
“You Don’t Have to Cry” is another song that’s simply too busy for its own good, although the melody’s nice enough and the guitarists do some interesting things, none of which have anything to do with rock. Basically this one’s a pop song dressed in CS&N’s uncanny three-part harmonies, and while the pop song isn’t half bad you really can’t really hear it over all the hushed and pretty vocalizing going on. About the one good thing about this one is its subject—it’s a warning against living the straight life, because it will literally kill you! And I think Stills, who wrote it, is right. So quit your job, save your life, and toke up!
I wish Nash’s “Pre-Road Downs” was about ‘ludes, but it’s not a half-bad song nonetheless, although Nash sounds shrill—especially when he actually, and this is amazing for these guys, gets excited towards the end—and I’m not crazy about the sound of the guitar, which lacks heft and balls and sounds sorta like the guitar equivalent of the boys’ singing. That said, “Pre-Road Dawns” contains the only cool line on the whole album, to wit: “Don’t run the time approaches/Hotels and midnight coaches/Be sure to hide the roaches.” Hide ‘em? We used to swallow them back in the day, but I’m talking about a time when weed was $30 an ounce, and one could afford to be cavalier about the stuff. And before I forget, Cass Elliott sings backup on the song, although for the life of me I don’t hear her—or rather I hear somebody, but it just sounds like one of the guys.
The post-apocalyptic “Wooden Ships” (which was co-written by Crosby, Stills, and The Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner, and also shows up on that band’s LP Volunteers) is, once you get beyond “the silver people waiting on the shoreline,” probably the second best cut on the LP. Stills’ guitar has an actual edge to it, and he even plays a redeemable solo, and the organ is cool. And I love it when the trio sing, “We are leaving/You don’t need us” because it gives me the opportunity to say, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” Still, this is the only song off the album I can actually listen to with something approaching real pleasure. I don’t listen to it, on general principles, but you get my point. Now if there were just some way to graft Jorma Kaukonen’s great guitar playing on the Jeff Airplane version onto the CS&N version, we’d really be talking!
Nash’s “Lady of the Island” is an execrable song with absolutely nothing to be said for it, except that Nash’s vocals are exquisite in a way that I personally find quite painful. It’s a good general rock rule to avoid all songs with “Lady” in the title, because that “Lady” is a red flag that what you’re about to hear is pretentious, maudlin dreck. (Exceptions: D. Bowie’s “Lady Stardust” and Styx’s “Lady”—a real classic!) A slow tune with virtually no instrumentation, just Nash droning on and on to the occasional accompaniment of Crosby, might work if the melody were prettier, but it’s relatively nondescript. And none of the lyrics are absurdly bad, so I can’t even like it an ironic way. “Lady of the Island” certainly isn’t the worst song on Crosby, Stills & Nash—there’s no beating “Guinnevere”—but it’s certainly the dullest.
I wish I could say I like “Helplessly Hoping,” which is far from the worst song on the album and boasts some truly lovely vocal harmonies, but it’s too pretty by far for my tastes and nothing particularly interesting happens. It’s just a strummed acoustic guitar, more talk of ladies—at least this one is choking, like Cass Elliott on her apocryphal ham sandwich—and that damned singing, which is too perfect and too pretty and probably causes suburban choirmasters to swoon, and may cause rickets if listened to in excessive doses for all I know. I kind of like the section where they sing, “They are one person/They are too alone/They are three together/They are for each other,” which is clever and makes no sense whatsoever, but otherwise, zilch.
Stills—a difficult and even paranoid character, who would later claim in a moment of inspired craziness that he was once a CIA asset—wrote “Long Time Gone,” the LP’s only real rock song. The opening is cool and throbbing, and Stills’ guitar is menacing, as is the organ that accompanies it. And for once Crosby, who takes the lead, sings like he doesn’t have his balls in a vice. Furthermore the lovely-as-usual vocal harmonies don’t drive me crazy, because they’re secondary, and not the whole point of the song. It’s a paranoid tune, appropriately enough given both that Stills wrote it and it’s about the Robert Kennedy assassination, with Crosby singing, “You know there’s something that’s going on around here/It surely, surely, surely/Won’t stand the light of the day.” He also delivers a real hippie howler when he sings, “But don’t, no don’t, no try to get yourself elected /If you do you had better cut your hair,” following it with a very self-satisfied by this self-evident truth “Hmmm.” So now we know why Bobby Kennedy got popped: he was a longhair!
Stills’ “49 Bye-Byes” is a better than okay tune that moves instead of just standing around warbling. The threesome do some very interesting things vocally instead of just trying to blow you away with their three-part awesomeness, and Stills’ keyboard work is cool, as is “Invisible Man” Dallas Taylor’s drumming. And the song picks up quite nicely as it goes along, building to a powerful climax. On the negative side there’s yet another too-high pitched guitar solo, and another mention of a “lady,” but those are small quibbles regarding one of the LP’s least irritating songs.
Crosby, Stills & Nash is considered a masterpiece, I suspect because the vocals are astounding, the band’s sound was completely new, and the trio was capable of brilliance, as “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” attests. But to my ears too many of the songs are either too pretty, vacuous, or boring by far. In any event, instead of being the start of a great career, the album marked the beginning of the end. Because by the time CS&N was ready to tour, they made the inexplicable decision to bring Neil Young into the fold to beef up their sound, despite the fact that Young and Stills had done nothing but butt heads in Buffalo Springfield.
And after that, it was all over but the warbling. Egos exploded, drugs became a real problem, a death struggle over whose songs would go on follow-up Déjà Vu commenced, and Stills and Young went at it again. The camaraderie Nash likes to reminisce about was dead, kaput, and following the release of Déjà Vu—which included “Almost Cut My Hair,” a Crosby song so fatuous it’s a work of sheer genius—and a 1970 summer tour CSN&Y imploded, and that was that. You can call it a tragedy or the best thing that could have happened to rock’n’roll short of Simon and Garfunkel killing one another over a salt bagel.
Me, I was glad to see them gone, although they continue to come back, again and again, like a plague of pipits. But their golden sound and their golden era are both history, and the thing I love about history is that things usually end badly.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C-
