"Deja Vu again"
Review, UK Guardian.
Adam Sweeting
Friday October 29, 1999

Crosby Stills Nash & Young are back with a new album and a spirited collection of hairstyle choices. Adam Sweeting turns back the clock

There's no mistaking the portly middle-aged man with the walrus moustache beached on a sofa at the Dorchester hotel, plucking the chords of Neil Young's Ohio on an acoustic guitar. It's David Crosby, just arrived from New York with his buddies Stephen Stills and Neil Young to indoctrinate the European press with positive vibes for the new Crosby Stills Nash & Young album, Looking Forward. "Almost cut my hair", Crosby sang in 1970, but he never did get around to it, even if those Laurel Canyon locks are receding speedily backwards from his forehead.

I'm looking forward to my chat with David, but it's not to be. Bludgeoned by jet-lag, the Croz will doze off during an interview with VH-1, and then retire to bed. Since there's no Graham Nash, who's recuperating from a bizarre boating accident in Hawaii that has left him with pins in both legs and a plate in one ankle, it's left to Stills and Young to keep that freak-flag flying.

The relationship between the pair has shifted over the years. Where they once fought hammer and tongs for artistic control (fist fights and walk-outs were common during their mid-60s days in the Buffalo Springfield, around the time when Young wrote a song called Out of My Mind), now they banter with each other like a pair of old boxers reminiscing about knockouts, concussions and broken noses. Young is stringy, whiskery and wearing a trilby hat, and radiates an air of complete certainty. Stills doesn't look like the slim, blonde guitar-picker of three decades ago, but he seems delighted to be back in harness with the maverick tunesmith from Winnipeg, even if Young sometimes has to shout into his one good ear to get his point across.

You could hardly accuse the fabled foursome of over-exposure. In 30 years, Crosby Stills Nash & Young have managed to record a grand total of three studio albums, including the new one. Even when you throw in the 1971 live album Four Way Street and a couple of compilations, the quartet's catalogue hardly squares up to to their lingering legend.

Young can't think of a particular reason why now was the right time for one of CSNY's rare reunions. "I really don't know," he shrugs. "Everybody was ready for it. Crosby, Stills and Nash were in the studio, they'd taken out a loan to finance the record. They'd dumped their record company and they were making the record on their own, so I figured, 'Well hey! If they're doing that, it shows they're really into it "

Young was so impressed he joined the band. He began contributing guitar and vocal parts to the other three's songs, then brought in some new material of his own. Without making a formal announcement, they found themselves in the middle of the first new CSNY album since 1988's American Dream.

The freshness and ambition of Déjà Vu is sadly long gone, but Looking Forward at least finds Stills recapturing some long-lost form on the fiery No Tears Left and the Dylan-evoking Seen Enough, while Young hits one of his finest mellow grooves with Slowpoke. Crosby - lucky to be seeing the inside of a recording studio at all after his 1994 liver transplant - revisits the mystical horizons of Wooden Ships with his new song, Dream For Him. All in all, a fairly satisfactory result.

"We'd stay focused on each song, and we'd keep working on it until it was finished," Young explains. "We didn't let any record company guys in, we didn't tell anybody what we were doing, and we told people to leave if they did show up. It worked well for us because we had no pressure. We never even talked about being CSNY or even doing an album. We waited until we were finished and we knew what it was."

CSNY have never functioned as a tightly-structured band in the same way as The Byrds, the Buffalo Springfield or The Hollies, the former homes of the four members. CSNY was a gathering of equals, making music collectively when the spirit took them, dissolving to return to solo work in between. In the original Woodstock dawn of 1969 it looked like the perfect arrangement, but like a hippy-style marriage, it soon revealed gaping flaws.

The foursome had egos and ambitions to match their talents. Money, fame and drugs were like kerosene sprayed on the fire of the group's clashing personalities. They couldn't live together, but they were never quite the same when they split.

Yet despite a long list of broken promises of a comeback, something has continued to bind CSNY together, however tenuously. Nash and Crosby have always remained firm friends, while the original grouping of Crosby, Stills and Nash has performed fairly regularly over the last 25 years. But it's the brooding, mercurial Young who has always been the critical ingredient. Despite the brilliance of Stills' solo material in the early 70s, it's Young who has enjoyed the most critically acclaimed solo career. Crosby Stills and Nash is a nostalgic way to spend an evening. When Young climbs aboard, it becomes an event.

So, Neil and Stephen, you've learned how to play together without smashing guitars over each other's heads? "That was all blown out of perspective," roars Young. "You got to remember we were 22-years-old, under enormous pressure, with everything happening at once. We reacted like normal people, a coupla guitar players. We're fine. This is gonna be a great tour. We've never reached our potential and I think we can now."

But Stills, feeling mischievous, can't help remembering how plain cussed the young Neil used to be. "The Youngbloods went on Johnny Carson instead of the Buffalo Springfield, and they made such a scene that Carson wouldn't have a rock band on his show for five years," he bellows. "They replaced us on the show when you baled out!"

Young almost looks sheepish. "Yeah, well I baled out of that show because I felt that musically we were very young, and I think we'll leave it at that. Let's move on. Y'know, when you get Stills and I together we can go on and on." But in this new dawn for CSNY, Stephen has the healing balm ready. 

"It's all very charming in retrospect, because I do know where Neil was coming from. He was thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm going to be trapped in a group.' A very healthy goddam fucking instinct, quite frankly."

The pair's reminiscences of the Buffalo Springfield have been sharpened by the compilation of a Springfield box set for release next year. The band was one of the most influential of the 70s West Coast era, but its recorded legacy has been shabbily treated, until now. "We got every baby step and first little demos that we did, and we're just gonna put them out there," Stills declares.

The Springfield was a classic specimen of a talented young band being handled by vastly unsuitable management. "We mixed the first album in mono, and then stereo hit," says Young. "We're going 'What the hell is stereo? We mixed it already!'." Our managers went in and mixed the whole album in stereo - in an afternoon! We sounded like the All Insect Orchestra."

Now, they are concentrating on being CSNY again. Maybe for the last time, maybe not."It's like Crosby says, the most precious currency of all is time, so he's trying to get it all in," says Stills. "I'm starting to get that disease myself. It's like yeah, let's go! It's not like were gonna lay down and daydream about it. Come on, get up! Get on the bus!" And carry on.

• Looking Forward is released this week on Reprise.