The Joy of CSN & Y

Somewhere in 1967 I started listening to FM radio.  1967 & 1968 were the heady days when FM was outlaw radio.  DJs played what they wanted, when they wanted.  This special moment on the airwaves allowed the Chambers Brothers to be matched up with Muddy Waters and the Nice.  It was the era of smoking a joint before heading off your first class at 8:30 in the a.m.  It was fringed leather jackets and long hair, back when long hair meant something. 

8 track tapes played in 1963 Chevy Impalas. As you were driving around back country farm roads everyone was listening to Led Zepplin or Yes cranked up to the highest volume possible.  Each month it seemed car radios improved.  Every time the radio got better somebody bought one and dropped in their cars.  Guys carved out holes in the space between the back seat and the trunk and dropped the biggest bad assed speakers they could find into those slots.  I remember one guy just mounted a set of full sized component stereo speakers into his back seat.

There in the midst of a time where music was political as it has not been in many years. Narrow was the window when who you listened to said so much about who you were. Right that in those few days when music was politics suddenly there dropped an LP like none other I had ever heard.  In March of 1970 Crosby, Still, Nash and Young released Déjà Vu. The sound of that record was seismic in its impact of the listener and on what would happen in the years that followed.

The album opened with Stephen Stills anthem “Carry On.” A sampling of the lyrics shows the urgency with which the album was bursting:

Carry on, love is coming, love is coming to us all.

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?

Every lyric, every line was vivid and conveyed stories that were layered and to which you could craft a relationship with your own life.  But it wasn’t the lyrics, it was the sound.  Bill Halverson and Wally Heider Studio #3 provided the genesis for a wave of multi tracked harmonies as nuanced and beautiful as anything that had every come before.  It wasn’t just a quartet layered and layered atop itself into a perfect blend of harmonies.  Those voices lay atop the roughest meanest guitars slingers about, and yes I mean Stephen Stills and Neil Young. Neil’s and Stephen’s licks were transcendent.

Driving the back roads that summer we had the eight track blasting Woodstock at top volume.  Drinking little Rolling Rock ponies and smoking $40 an ounce Columbian weed we learned every single lyric to every single song.  Hey as the years went on Humble Pie, Alice Cooper and the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers got played to death too.  But nothing sounded like that CSN & Y tape.  It was in a class all by itself.  Its tales took you to places, to Woodstock, to North Ontario and wherever else a vaguely country motif might lead.  Hell we all wanted to get back to the earth; we all wanted to get back to the country once we heard that record.