CSNY painted by Guy Peellaert in ‘Rock Dreams’
 
Although Neil Young apparently hated doing TV shows—one of the main reasons he supposedly left the Buffalo Springfield in 1967 was not wanting to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson—by 1969 Young had given a bit on this front, as he agreed to appear along with David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills on the This is Tom Jones TV show. CSNY did a short “You Don’t Have To Cry” and then the Welsh belter joined them, as was the custom on his program.

From Jimmy McDonough’s Young bio, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography:

September 6 also brought a surreal appearance on the This Is Tom Jones variety show, featuring Jones himself bellowing lead vocal on Crosby’s “Long Time Gone.”

“It was highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call’, said Elliot Roberts. ‘Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones show! What possessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit’. Crosby had this weed of doom… Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.’”

 

 
Given that nearly five decades have passed since this was taped, it’s actually pretty amazing. Nothing to be ashamed of, certainly. Tom Jones and his show might’ve been seen as somewhat “square” by the rockstar standards of CSNY—Nash would’ve been acquainted with the Welsh singer from his days in the Hollies, no doubt—but the man’s mighty lungs inspire the rest of them to keep up, it must be said. I love how (an obviously manic) Stephen Stills rises to the occasion with his, er, intense vocal contribution near the end. Bassist Greg Reeves might’ve only been fifteen years old when this was shot—look at how skinny he was—and that’s Dallas Taylor on drums. You’ll note how the expression on Young’s face goes from one of disdain/‘What am I doing here?” to “This fucking rocks” about halfway through. The goofy expression on Croz’s mug needs no further explanation.
 
More after the jump…

 
The coked-out megalomanical circus that saw David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young storm across America in the first and most decadent superstar open air stadium tour of the rock era was nicknamed the “Doom Tour” by Crosby because of the feuding, the drugs and the fact that a small army of promoters and hangeroners were sucking at their hyper-megastar corporate rock teets like there was no tomorrow. There had been big rock tours in the past, but CSNY’s extra ginormous 1974 outing—dreamed up by manager Elliot Roberts and put into action by rock promoter Bill Graham—was like plotting a military invasion of each new town that the show moved to. The beachheads were 50-70,000 seat football arenas, which saw stages erected and massive PA systems hooked up by a legion of roadies. Other acts on the tour included The Band, Joni Mitchell, Santana and the Beach Boys. The tour was so decadent that they supposedly had pillowcases with “CSNY” embroidered on them! Don’t even ask what the “coke budget” was.

The “Doom Tour” grossed $11 million back when $11 million was still a hell of a lot of money, but the principals only pocketed half a mill each after expenses (and the promoters, natch) were paid first. There’s an amusing “oral history” of the trek at Rolling Stone.com. Only Young kept both feet (literally) on the ground, traveling in a bus with his son Zeke and avoiding the insanity.
 
More after the jump…

Photo by Joel Bernstein
 
After the success of their monstrously popular Déjà Vu album, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “the American Beatles” as they were often called (never mind that one was a Brit and another Canadian) broke up in the summer of 1970, with all four members of CSNY recording solo albums. Soon afterwards Stills released his eponymous solo album which featured guests like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, “Mama” Cass Elliot, Booker T Jones, Ringo Starr, as well as Crosby and Nash, Rita Coolidge and CSNY drummers Dallas Taylor and Johnny Barbata. Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name and Nash’s Songs for Beginners appeared the following year. In late 1971, Stills teamed up with ex-Byrd Chris Hillman to form Manassas and Neil Young was up to all sorts of things at the time, being the prolific chap he’s always been known to be and producing some of his very best work.

In 1973, a black and white video recording was made of an impromptu CSNY set taped live at Bill Graham’s Winterland in San Francisco. It was originally a Stephen Stills and Manassas concert, but then some “very special guests” decided to show up. At the time Neil Young was on what could be called his Tonight’s the Night tour with the Santa Monica Flyers and Crosby & Nash were touring as a duo.

It’s sloppy, sure—and clearly none of them could be bothered to actually tune their fucking guitars—but the four hadn’t played together in well over two years at this point, although Young had jammed with Crosby and Nash at Winterland on March 26th, 1972 at an event called The Sheriff’s Benefit Concert, an attempt to raise funds for the problems faced by prisoners.

Neil Young, perhaps emphasizing his independence from the other three, doesn’t come onstage until the fifth number:

Setlist:
0:00:00 - Helplessly Hoping
0:04:31 - Wooden Ships
0:10:16 - Blackbird
0:13:36 - As I Come Of Age
0:16:42 - Neil joins in…
0:19:03 - Roll Another Number (For the Road)
0:23:39 - Human Highway
0:27:32 - New Mama
0:33:13 - And So It Goes
0:38:01 - Prison Song
0:42:48 - Long Time Gone
0:51:02 - Change Partners

 
If you just got a contact high after reading the title of this post, then congratulations. Take two tabs of acid and call me in the morning! But only after you’ve listened to the three tracks from Harvard psychologist and drug guru Timothy Leary’s album (which was recorded in 1968), You Can Be Anyone This Time Around.
 

Timothy Leary and his bass player

Leary recorded the album, in part as a way to raise cash to fund his ill-fated run for Governor of California against the then incumbent, GOP golden god, Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was “Come together, join the party” and his campaign song was supposed to be, “Come Together,” which was conceived specifically with Leary’s political aspirations in mind by John Lennon.
 

Learys and Lennons
 
Sadly, after Leary was arrested on December 26th, 1968 for the possession of two pot roaches (for which he was given a ten-year prison sentence, with another ten-year sentence tacked on to that due to a previous arrest in 1965, let that one sink in), his campaign went up in well, smoke.
 

Leary’s prison mugshot
 
Lucky for us, the 45-minute long, three-track record (which was allegedly recorded in one session that went on until the early morning hours at the Record Plant in New York City) that includes musical contributions not only from Hendrix (on bass guitar no less) but also Stephen Stills, drummer Buddy Miles, and John Sebastian, founder of The Lovin’ Spoonful, did see the light of day. Unlike Leary’s political career. 

Historically speaking, it’s one of the very first records to use “samples.” Sonic snatches from the catalogs of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and sitar maestro, Ravi Shankar round out the album’s unique “sound.” As if all that isn’t cool enough when it comes to rock and roll mythology—the record is actually a great listen…
 

 
Adam Payne, the prodigiously talented solo artist, leader of Residual Echoes and proprietor of Pacific Coast Editions, has discovered a shocking fact no one else dared suspect: “St. Elmo’s Fire” by Brian Eno and “Love The One You’re With” by Stephen Stills are two halves of the same song. As the primeval “man-woman of the moon” Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium was once cut in two by Zeus “like a sorb-apple is halved for pickling,” so these two recordings must have been sundered since time immemorial. Now, at long last, Payne has restored them to their original union.

“One Love The Fire, You’re With St. Elmo” may sound merely surprising at first blush, but it’s really going to fuck you up the next time you hear “Love The One You’re With” at the local CVS. The feeling that the song is somehow incomplete will gnaw at you until, on the drive home, you realize what you thought was missing: Robert Fripp’s quicksilver solo from “St. Elmo’s Fire.” And the next time you give your tear-stained copy of Another Green World a spin, you’ll wonder where those big, open, Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell acoustic guitar chords went. It goes downhill for you from there, cognitively speaking. Have you seen Videodrome? That’s your life a few months after hearing this.

Of the two artists, Stills is the one I imagine being touchier about intellectual property rights. But in this case, he would be hoist with his own petard! For how could he object to being paired with Eno, when he has so lately enjoined the listener to love whatever damaged, smelly person fate thrusts in his or her lap?

A related point: would Stills’ song also have been a hit with the title “Fuck The Date What Brung You”?
 

Photo: Joel Bernstein

Not only am I one of those people who gets all squirmy if a concert goes on for much longer than an hour, I tend to really hate live albums. So why did I spend six straight hours yesterday listening intently to CSNY 1974, the new 40 song live box set from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all the way through twice in back to back playings? Because it’s the best archival rock release of the year…

The coked-out megalomanical circus that saw David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young storm across America in the first and most decadent superstar open air stadium tour of the rock era was nicknamed the “Doom Tour” by Crosby because of the feuding, the drugs and the fact that a small army of promoters and hangeroners were sucking at their hyper-megastar corporate rock teets like there was no tomorrow. There had been big rock tours in the past, but CSNY’s extra ginormous 1974 outing—dreamed up by manager Elliot Roberts and put into action by rock promoter Bill Graham—was like plotting an invasion of each new town that the show moved to. The beachheads were 50-70,000 seat football arenas, which saw stages erected and massive PA systems hooked up by a legion of roadies. Other acts on the tour included The Band, Joni Mitchell, Santana and the Beach Boys.

The “Doom Tour” grossed $11 million back when $11 million was still a hell of a lot of money, but the principals only pocketed half a mill each after expenses (and the promoters) were paid. There’s an amusing “oral history” of the trek at Rolling Stone.com. Only Young kept both feet (literally) on the ground, traveling in a bus with his son Zeke and avoiding the insanity, but suffice to say that the debauchery and rockstar egos—at least from the evidence on display here—didn’t interfere with the music, which is insanely good.
 

“Carry Me”

The musicianship on CSNY 1974  is first rate, better even than their earlier live album 4 Way Street as each member had creatively matured since the 1970 tour. In Stephen Stills we have one of the single most remarkable guitarists of the rock era. Don’t get me wrong, Neil Young is no slouch on the six-string himself, but with Stills—as opposed to with Crazy Horse—his ragged, idiosyncratic playing is obliged to conform to, fight against and to parry with Stills’ more structured and almost architectural guitar style. Musically at least, they bring out the best in each other, but it’s Stills who provides the foundation in CSNY that Young reacts to and then he in turn reacts to what Young does, and lemme tell ya, it’s breathtaking. If, like some people, you approach CSNY solely from the POV of Young’s perhaps more “aloof” contributions, these are some canonical performances by him here that I think any Neil Young freak would go absolutely nuts over. (Five of the songs in the set composed by Young—“Traces,” “Goodbye Dick,” “Love Art Blues,” “Hawaiian Sunrise” and “Pushed It Over the End” –appear on CSNY 1974 for the first time on any official release.)

For all the talk of the backstage feuds, there is simply no sign of this in the onstage camaraderie documented here, which is supportive, fraternal and joyously ecstatic. A good example of this comes with Stills’ delicate piano backing of Young on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” Other highlights of the set include several “solo” numbers: a simply smouldering take on Young’s “On The Beach,” a gorgeous rendition of Crosby’s confessional “Carry Me” (at that point still un-issued on record), Nash’s “Grave Concern” from his dark, nearly unknown Wild Tales solo LP and Stills’ motherfucker of a rip, spitting his way through a frantic “Word Game.”

There are various configurations of CSNY 1974 on vinyl, CDs, DVD and Blu-ray Pure Audio discs. Unless you have to have vinyl (and are a masochist who loves flipping six records over) I’d highly suggest going with the version that Rhino sent me, the Blu-ray, which has all 40 songs—there were three sets, two rock sets with an acoustic set in between—on one disc so you can just relax and take it all in for three hours. Another reason to opt for the Blu-ray set is that it sounds really, really good. Produced by Graham Nash and the group’s longtime archivist, Joel Bernstein, the set was culled from the tapes of nine shows that were recorded by Elliot Mazer, the tour’s audio engineer and others. The audio quality here is astonishingly good for 40-year-old live recordings to begin with, but it would be remarkable sounding if it was recorded yesterday. The acoustic guitars chime, the electric leads cut through you like a knife, Stills and Young’s duelling guitars complement and argue with each other. You’ve got the heavenly harmonies of Crosby and Nash mic’d so closely that you can hear their breath. The piano has presence and clarity as if it had been recorded in a studio and not at an open air sports arena in front of 50,000 screaming fans. You get the idea. At least when all of that money was flying out the door unaccounted for, they got these great recordings out of it. The mastering was done by Bernie Grundman (an audiophile mark of distinction) after it was mixed down by Nash, Bernstein and Stanley Tajima Johnston in 192-kHz/24-bit resolution. [To anyone who says that stuff doesn’t make a difference, I defy you to listen to the acoustic set on Blu-ray and tell me you’ve heard a more “intimate” sounding live recording, ever. I suspect that Nash and Bernstein presented their work to Stills and the notoriously picky audiophile Young with confidence. What else would there be for Neil Young to say other than “Hey, great job, guys!”?]
 

“Grave Concern”

To my mind CSNY 1974 is the “classic rock” release of the year so far. It’s so damned good that I can’t imagine anything coming along and topping it, either, but if that did occur, then 2014 will be a good year for rock snobs, overflowing with an embarrassment of riches like this and the Led Zeppelin remasters.

Like the majority of Amazon reviewers, Ima gonna give CSNY 1974 five stars. One woman writes that she bought it for her husband and gave it to him before they were going to go out and eat. They opted instead to stay home and listen to it all the way through. That was my reaction to it, too. I expected to like it, but I liked it so much that I spent six hours straight with it. Not listening while surfing on my iPad, but listening to it. Listening intently and digging the shit out of it. In summation: CSNY 1974 is fucking good. You want a box set to feel like a good value and Christmas day simultaneously and this one truly does.

(Did I mention that there’s a separate DVD of video performances shot at Wembley Stadium and at Landover, MD’s Capital Centre? That’s awesome, too.)

Here’s something fascinating, a black and white video recording of an impromptu CSNY set taped at Winterland in 1973. It was originally a Stephen Stills and Manassas concert, then some “very special guests” showed up. At the time Neil Young was on his Tonight’s the Night tour with the Santa Monica Flyers and Crosby & Nash were touring as a duo. It’s sloppy, sure, the four hadn’t played together in over two years at this point, but it’s history, baby! Neil Young, perhaps emphasizing his independence from the other three, doesn’t come onstage until the fifth number:
 

 
“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is a suite of four short songs written by Stephen Stills about his soon-to-be-former girlfriend, folk singer Judy Collins, known for her piercing blue eyes. The song was the first number that Crosby, Stills & Nash performed when they took the stage at Woodstock (Neil Young bailed on most of the acoustic numbers) and indeed it was only the second time they’d ever played together in public, as they nervously admitted to the vast Woodstock audience.

Stills had dated Collins for two years and was well aware that he was probably about to lose her to actor Stacy Keach. He wrote the song as a way of working through his sadness over their impending break-up.

Judy Collins (recently seen in a very controversial episode of Girls) told of her reaction to hearing the song for the first time:

“[Stephen] came to where I was singing one night on the West Coast and brought his guitar to the hotel and he sang me “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the whole song. And of course it has lines in it that referred to my therapy. And so he wove that all together in this magnificent creation. So the legacy of our relationship is certainly in that song.”

It is a magnificent song, let there be no doubt, but you have to smile when considering the satisfaction that the dumped Stills must’ve known when “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” became a staple of FM radio play, literally for decades afterwards.

Judy Collins titled her 2011 autobiography, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.
 

 
I sometimes think Stephen Stills gets short-shrift in an annals of rock history. Not that I feel sorry for the guy wrote “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” who is generally regarded as one of the greatest living guitar players (Still is #28 according to a Rolling Stone poll), or who was/is a member of one of the biggest grossing rock groups of all time (CSNY, of course), it’s just that Stills made so much great music that’s seldom heard today and known mostly by middle-aged rock snobs, when that music should be as well-known as as the classic material he recorded with his fellow famous folk-rock compadres.

Case in point, the wicked double album Stills recorded with Manassas, with its rock, country, blues, bluegrass and Latin-influenced tunes. That album tears it up, but this live set, recorded in Germany in 1971 for the MusikLaden TV show is even better. It’s Stills at his very best—playing Jimi Hendrix-level guitar leads throughout—and what a band: Chris Hillman (The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Bros.), the great Dobro player Al Perkins, Dallas Taylor on drums, Calvin “Fuzzy” Sameul on bass, Paul Harris on keyboards and a very “Greg Brady”-looking Joe Lala on drums.

Listen to this one LOUD people. If you don’t groove on this, I jes’ cain’t help you (but I’ll continue to try. I’ll promise I will still try).
 

 
After the jump, CSN perform “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” at Woodstock, becoming musical legends in the process…

 
Although they recorded but three albums, Buffalo Springfield was one of the most influential rock bands of the 60s. This Fall, surviving Buffalo Springfield members Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay are reuniting to perform at Young’s annual Bridge School benefit concerts on October 23rd and 24th in Mountain View, California.

Furay told Rolling Stone that got he a text message from Young that read, “Call me.”

“I called and he asked me if I’d be up for a reunion at the Bridge School Benefit,” Furay says. “He said, ‘If you’re into it, I think Stephen [Stills] will be into it.’ The three of us then arranged a conference call, chit-chatted for a few minutes, and planned it all out. The last time I was onstage with them was the last Buffalo Springfield show at the Long Beach Arena back in 1968. Our lives have gone in different directions and I wouldn’t say that we’re close friends, but we’re friends and its an opportunity for us to get together again for a good cause. I’m very excited.”

Rick Rosas (from Neil Young’s band) will sit in for the late Bruce Palmer, with CSN drummer Joe Vitale filling in for Dewey Martin who died in 2009.

Below, David Crosby performs in stead for an MIA Neil Young as Buffalo Springfield sing their million-selling single, “For What It’s Worth” at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Introduced by Peter Tork of the Monkees.
 
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