American Dream - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Author: Tom Hibbert
Journal: Q Magazine Issue #27
Date: December 1988

It has been suggested that this LP is the result of the compassion of Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young—a bid to keep their old chum Crosby (who's spent the last decade in a freebase fog, who's been to jail and who's nearly croaked more than once) on the straight and narrow and alive. There again, believe it or no, Crosby, Stills & Nash still haven't fulfilled the contract they signed with Atlantic 20 years ago—they owe the company this album. Whether they owe it to the world is another matter.

The results of the renewed studio collaboration are wildly varied as the four members pursue their individual musical predilections without regard to a cohesive whole (it has also been suggested that the atmosphere in the studio was, ahem, "heated"). Graham Nash, ever the quaint and dainty hippie, contributes four songs which range from the embarrassing to the even more embarrassing: "Don't Say Goodbye" is a toenail-curling piano weepie, "Soldiers Of Peace" sees the Mancunian with his "social conscience" hat on, and his "Clear Blue Skies" is the kind of dippy "aren't-trees-nice" song that makes James Taylor so annoying. Stephen Stills, meanwhile, is just coasting: his two songs, "Got It Made" and "That Girl," are set firmly in American AOR territory—pedestrian and forgettable—while a pair of Stills collaborations with Young, "Night Song" and "Drivin' Thunder" (a piece of J. Geils Band-styled, slide guitar-driven R&B bluster) are hardly more thrilling.

It is the songs of Neil Young and, more surprisingly, the old reprobate David Crosby that work best by far. Crosby's "Night Time For The Generals" is a typical "almost-cut-my-hair"-fashioned paranoiac's rant about the CIA eating all our babies or something, but its caustic rock and the singer's cross growling are really rather bracing; "Compass" finds Crosby in self-pitying frame, warbling over trippy acoustic guitars and phased harmonicas about how he has "wasted ten years in a blindfold"—quite moving actually, God bless him. And then comes Young singing of love ("Seal Your Love"—jaded and weary and beautiful), of unemployment ("The Old House"—a tongue-in-cheek blue collar country sing-along) and of love again ("Name Of Love"—cranked-up guitars, rough and archetypal Young).

AMERICAN DREAM, then, is just the hotchpotch we expected. Oh, but those harmonies are thoroughly evocative; the codgers' bodies may have run to fat, their faces may have seen lovelier days, but the voices haven't packed in quite yet.