David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash take their huge
repertoire of songs that deal with social issues, our responsibility to
our children and ourselves, finding inner serenity, and matters of the
heart -- delivered in their immaculate, soaring harmonies -- on the road
on just about an annual basis.
And after more than 30 years, it's still rewarding, Crosby says.
"This will probably sound cosmic and weird and stupid, but I feel as
if it's what I was put here to do," Crosby said in a phone interview
from a tour stop in Camden, N.J. "If you're given a gift, and I
really feel as if I was, then I think it's really wrong not to use the
gift. I love playing."
CSN performs Sunday at Hersheypark Star Pavilion.
Crosby has been out on the road since July; before starting the CSN tour
this month, he toured with his side project, CPR, the jazz-rock trio he
formed with his son, James Raymond, and guitarist Jeff Pevar. Crosby was
reunited with Raymond in 1995 after giving him up for adoption 30 years
earlier. He called that tour "incredibly successful in that we played
some of the best music I've ever played."
"And then I get to come out on this one, and this is a huge amount of
fun, too," he said.
CSN had no problem with name recognition when they first got together in
1968; all three members had come from successful bands. Crosby had been in
the Byrds (that had hits such as "Eight Miles High" and
"Turn! Turn! Turn!"), Stills in Buffalo Springfield (with Neil
Young; its biggest hit was the protest anthem "For What It's Worth"),
and Nash in the Hollies (the English trio famous for songs such as
"Bus Stop" and "Carrie Anne").
They knew they were destined to perform together when Crosby and Stills
brought Nash into a recording session; they were working on two songs that
would become CSN standards, "Helplessly Hoping" and "You
Don't Have to Cry."
"When we heard him put on that third harmony, I thought I was gonna
die," Crosby said in a biography provided by the band's publicist.
"It was about the rightest thing I ever heard." He says
performing with Stills and Nash maintains its magic.
"Our voices aren't as good as they were when we were kids," he
said. "But judging what I'm hearing back from the house and judging
from the comments that I'm reading on the Net from fans, we must be
singing pretty well."
Their interpersonal relationship is also solid, Crosby said.
"We've gone through butting heads and arguing and not talking to each
other to being what we really are, which is brothers," he said.
"Our relationship's very good right now, so I'm very happy with it."
CSN's self-titled debut album was released in 1969. It contained some of
their most memorable songs, such as "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,"
"Guinnevere" and "Marrakesh Express," and reached No.
1 on the charts.
They played Woodstock in 1969 with Neil Young, and he would solidify the
relationship on record on 1970's "Deja Vu." That album generated
three Top 40 singles -- "Teach Your Children," "Our
House," and "Woodstock" (written by Joni Mitchell). The
double-live album "4 Way Street" followed in '71; it included
"Ohio," Neil Young's ferocious protest of the 1970 murders of
four Kent State University students.
The years that followed had the band doing solo projects and duet albums.
CSN&Y released the compilation "So Far" in 1974, and CSN
released "CSN" in 1977. The latter generated the band's most
successful song, "Just a Song Before I Go," which reached No. 7
on the Billboard singles chart.
"Daylight Again" followed in 1983 and the live album "Allies"
in 1983. They got back together with Young for 1988's "American Dream"
and were a trio again for 1990's "Live It Up" and 1994's "After
the Storm." That same year, they marked their 25th anniversary as a
group by performing at Woodstock '94. In 1999, Young came back into the
fold for the album "Looking Forward" and accompanying tour.
Crosby has always maintained that CSN would work in various combinations.
Performing with Young, whom Crosby calls "a force of nature,"
gives the group an especially different dynamic.
"CSN and CSNY are as different as chicken and cheese," Crosby
said. "And that's a good thing, because then when we switch back and
forth between them, it's fresh and exciting."
CSN was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Stills was
inducted that same year as a member of Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby had
been inducted in 1991 as a member of the Byrds. Crosby's pretty
unimpressed with the honor, though.
"That stuff doesn't mean doodly to me," Crosby said. "That
stuff and Grammys and all that stuff -- it's nice and everything and I
appreciate it, but ... that's not what we came to the party for."
The three keep busy when CSN is on hiatus. Crosby lends his talents to
several benefit concerts each year, but CPR is his great love and he
speaks of it with great enthusiasm.
"I think we're writing some of the best songs of my whole life,"
he said. "I get to play with my son ... and he is just astounding.
And I get to play with Jeff Pevar, who is one of the best guitar players
on the planet. ... We've worked at it now for about four years and now
it's got its own chemistry, and it's tremendously exciting stuff. It's
very difficult to pull off because it's very complex, but when we do pull
it off, it's astounding," he said.
Stills is working on a solo album. And he just completed an exhaustive
4-CD boxed set retrospective of Buffalo Springfield's work, a project
Young helped put together. Nash also is working on a solo album. He
recently started Nash Editions, a digital photographic printing company
that makes prints of his work and that of other artists.
Crosby says compiling a set list, considering the band's huge repertoire
of material, is a challenge.
"We sit there and we juggle them around and then we try them one way
and then we see how that works," he said. "By the time we're a
week or so into the tour, we've established the basic set list, and then
we swap things out night to night. And also sometimes we make line calls
-- we just get to a certain point in the show and somebody says, 'Hey,
let's not do that -- let's do THIS!' And we do it."
Crosby says the band tweaks its classic songs from time to time.
"You'll get to a point with a song where you're tired of doing it
that way," he said. "So what you do is you either change the
arrangement or change the key or change the tempo. ... And then, of course,
we have such a gigantic amount of songs that you know and love that we can
cycle through them.
"We're doing ones now that we haven't done for a long time, like 'Just
a Song Before I Go.' It was a hit, it was a great song, we didn't do it
for a long time, [and] now we brought it back," he said.
Incorporating songs from their various band and solo projects into the set
keeps things fresh, as does performing new songs. CSN is debuting Nash's
"Dirty Little Secret," about a 1921 race riot in Greenwood, Okla.,
this time around, and Crosby says he's having a lot of fun doing it.
"It was really bad and it was then totally suppressed -- nobody in
the United States seems to know it ever happened," he said. "The
blacks were doing very well in that town -- it was sort of like a center
of black enterprise at that point. And I think a lot of the whites were
really ticked off at them for doing that well and saw it as an opportunity
to teach them a lesson. And they did. And a lot of people died on both
sides."
Looking forward to the show and meeting some fellow Shorers...
Diane
Crosby, Stills & Nash still
in harmony 30 years later