Fumbling ahead - Disparities mar new Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album

By Al Brumley
The Dallas Morning News
October 26, 1999

 

Somewhere a surgeon has been hard at work attaching hearts to the sleeves of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.

It takes Neil Young to save Looking Forward, CSNY's first reunion album since 1988's American Dream, from a severe head-on collision with cranky midlife crisis and "wish I were still a hippie" pablum.

Mr. Young also provides most of the album's memorable hooks. And he's actually happy. In "Queen of Them All" he sings, "Well, I really don't know why I feel so good/But it's happening to me, so I knock on wood."

Meanwhile, his partners flounder with pathetically elementary attempts at some sort of "philosophy," as in Mr. Nash's "Heartland": "Life is hard enough, I know/But you can only do your best/To get it in your hearts and minds." In other words, hang in there, baby.

But really, what else could we have expected? Mr. Young is the only one of the four who has remained artistically - not to mention commercially - viable since the heady days of the early '70s when CSNY was competing with itself on Top-40 radio.

Still, whenever CSNY gets together, expectations run high. But Looking Forward feels like their lackluster version of The Beatles (a.k.a. "the white album") - not a team effort, but a chance for everyone to do his own thing, backed by his buddies. Of course, the same could be said of the group's earlier work, to a point, but Looking Forward is disjointed to the point of distraction, and the disparity in songwriting talent is glaring.

The album opens with Mr. Stills' "Faith in Me" - a calypso number, of all things: "Have some faith in me/'Cause we really do know better/And we do belong together."

Maybe the problem is that these guys don't have any huge targets anymore. The war in Vietnam is over, Nixon's dead and AIDS has put a damper on loving the one you're with. Meanwhile, nobody's really sweating a nuclear attack (even if the Senate did just vote down a treaty to ban nuclear testing), so the stockpiling of purple berries has subsided.

Growing older has made Mr. Crosby, Mr. Stills and Mr. Nash cloying and preachy rather than relevant and inspired. Mr. Crosby is especially at fault here. In "Stand and Be Counted," he sings, "I want to stand alone in front of the world and that oncoming tank/Like that Chinese boy that we all have to thank."

"Dream for Him," a mushy cross between "Wooden Ships" and "Teach Your Children," finds Mr. Crosby clunkily wondering how to explain the world's problems to his child: "You see, I want a world where I can tell him the truth/About everything from Jesus to John Wilkes Booth." Well, what's stopping him?

Hearing these songs side by side with Mr. Young's work - even if it isn't close to his best - just makes things worse. Mr. Young's lyrics read like poetry: "If the sky is fire and hell is blue/I'll cover you, I'll cover you."

The rest read like amateurish doggerel, as in this line from Mr. Stills' "No Tears Left": "They're deaf and blind and they cannot think/But now they want to be your shrink/Probing for the missing link and freaking."

The album ends with the odd choice of "Sanibel" by Denny Sarokin, a pretty enough tune fit for the Beach Boys about leaving town forever for "starlit nights on the isle of Sanibel." So now we've come full circle, from taking on the issues of the day to saying the heck with it, hopping the next Piper headed south and buying a hammock.

If this is looking forward, fans of CSNY would do well to look back.