"CSNY2K in the Heartland"
United Center,
Chicago
April 14, 2000
by Steve Silberman
Steve Silberman wrote liner notes for Crosby
and Nash's Another Stoney Evening, and for the new CD releases of Wind on the Water,
Whistling Down the Wire, and Crosby/Nash Live. He also co-produced the Grateful Dead's box
set So Many Roads (1965-1995), and is a contributing editor of Wired magazine.
Ganesh: Remover of Obstacles
There's a strange odor in the basement of the United
Center, strange that there's any smell at all in the industrially efficient hallways
backstage at the arena, which is normally used for Bears and Blackhawks games. The
corridors -- constructed for load-in and load-out -- are a purgatory between public and
private space when you're walking from where the fans are to where the band is, behind
layers of security, check-offs, meaningful glances, lists, escorts. As I enter the
dressing room area, a different smell takes over, just as unexpected: incense. I walk into
David Crosby's dressing room and discover that it's been transformed into a Tibetan
meditation hall.
The light is not a strobing cold gray cast down from the
ceiling, but a glow produced by Victorian table lamps shaded by hand-dyed cloths. The
walls of the room have become a tent, candles making islands of light in the intimate
darkness. Crosby and his wife Jan lounge on a couch talking to two friends from
California, a handsome couple radiating ease who have flown in for the shows, the last
two-night stand on the CSNY2K tour. Buddhas of black metal glisten in the corners of the
room. It's Jan who's made the room into a shrine, putting handmade carpets on the floor,
lighting the incense. She asks David if he wants some tea. Yes, he says -- the Nepalese
kind, with a little peppermint. They ran out, so he'll take the other kind, also with the
peppermint. Not a big problem.
It's hard too imagine too many big problems in that room,
the way it is. You'd instantly see that you were blowing something out of proportion. It's
Jan who makes sure that David surfaces enough in the tributaries of conversation to know
that he has to put on a new shirt or sign something. Everything will get done by meeting
it half-way. Thus the image on the wall, on the tangka, painted on silk: the
elephant-headed god-man Ganesh, remover of obstacles.
Then I realize what the smell in the halls was. It was
sage, burned by native Americans to cleanse the air of bad mojo and unquiet spirits.
Someone must have walked around the hallways in the basement of the United Center,
"circumambulating," as they say, as if the smoke would transform the arena into
sacred space.
It was Jan.
Angels
When the band starts up, the magnitude of the sound makes
your ears go out of focus for a few minutes, as if you turned a corner and suddenly came
up in front of a mountain. It's so huge -- all those guitars. When the noise
coalesces into air-sculpture, you start to hear the conversation. There's Stephen,
articulate barbed wire. And Neil: explosions at the bottom of the bottomless pit.
Neil gives CSN what they need to go beyond being merely
the Triumph of Goodness over the universe of Jive. He gives them a counterplayer --
something more complicated and fearsome than goodness. He raises the stakes. When Crosby
sings about being paranoid, Neil gives voice to the white-knuckled fear. He calls Stills'
bluff. Nash's homilies float over the wrestling in the pit: Neil and his dark angels. When
Neil and Stephen face off at center stage, the sound implodes into a furnace of feedback.
It seems impossible that the guitars aren't shedding beards of sparks.
Notes scribbled in darkness, song by song
Carry On
snarling power... none of their road miles lost behind
them...
Southern Man
ominous chords... the "black snake moan"... Neil
streaks out of the clashing like a bat with kerosene-soaked wings...
Stand and Be Counted
David's voice is very strong, but the song is too much
like a public radio announcement for me, like "Nighttime for the Generals"...
too self-congratulatory
Pre-Road Downs
great riff, Nash tough enough to write this piece of punk
pop early... surprise licks at the end...
Heartland
first acoustic tune, suddenly you hear the wind blow
through the guitar strings... Nash's genius in the phrase "any given day,"
playing with the colloquial so you become aware of it like Lennon did, installing it in a
perfect melody hook like McCartney, so you learned the little lesson forever...
Nash's pure & Stills's whiskey weathered voices blend
in the vowels...
49 Reasons
inspired choice! Stephen lets out little whoops after
certain phrases, little exclamations of blues ache... blues was what Stills brought to the
alchemy.
Before Slowpoke, Neil says: "I'd like
to congratulate you on your unbelievably great rail yard. It's very well laid out, like
many other things in this city." What a great thing to say! Perfectly concrete and
sensible, precise noticing of what's great about where he is -- turned into a gift for
Chicago.
Marrakesh Express great pop ending
Have Some Faith in Me
Almost Cut My Hair
"I feel like letting my freak! flag! fly!"
"I'm not giving in an inch to fear" means
nothing unless the fear is in the music... Neil is the fear, the dragon...
"When I finally get my SHIT together"
Roaring wall of firemusic, Crosby riding jazz chords over
the molten magma... the best performance of this ever...
Cinnamon Girl
Helplessly Hoping
barbed-wire guitar
Our House
finally in the great CSNY living room of everybody's
dreams, just four voices & the home instruments... not just sense of history but history,
these four voices that made the Byrds & the Hollies & Buffalo Springfield &
CSNY & Manassas & all later incarnations, you'd want to be in their living room if
you just knew them as sublime musicians of wisdom-age, Nash once the voice of the boy
(like the youngest asking the Four Questions at the Passover seder) white-haired now,
seasoned handsome... Neil angled in his chair, a living calligraph... Crosby, considered,
natural Buddha...
a living room the size of the United Center...
Old Man
this is it... it's too good because it's just
itself...
"doesn't mean that much to me
to mean that much to you"
"rolling home to you" -- the "You"
might as well be capitalized, lover & God as one, when you're all alone you roll home,
to God or lover or muse...
A Dream for Him
one of those great endless Crosby modal riffs that could
permutate for hours... Neil comments on David's vocal with his guitar, the whole
organism alive & listening...
CSNY are Avatars of Sincerity in the lineage of Ginsberg,
Whitman, Emerson...
Looking Forward
"songs fill the air
but there's no singer there"
Someday Soon
After the Goldrush
The church of CSNY
music as transmission from telepathic Martians
Guinnevere
Crosby's beauty
a being half-Chinese, half-woman, with comet-tail hair and grinning eyes
Guinnevere is not one woman or even three but the anima
mundi, the Great Muse or Soul of the World, the mystery animator, dancer of the sacred
dance all high art praises... Dante's Beatrice
Nash wooes his Muse with charm and opens his heart...
Stills lectures her, is tormented by her, seduces her... Crosby creates a Muse with her
own purposes, her own motivations... she sneaks out in the middle of the song in Universal
Night to paint symbols on the garden wall... her thoughts remain mystery to the singer...
in the alembic of the '60s sexual liberation and gender questioning this Divine Female
substance was created in the imagination -- a Muse that doesn't have to answer to anyone
created life, a woman, free, beyond him --
"She shall be free"
at song's end the singer gets to merge with her, in the
merging they're both free
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
"Don't let the past" is Nash's emphatic moment,
his face-off with the whole CSN legend...
Stephen's anguished "Yes and I LOVE you" is
supposed to be the final desperate cry of the solitary animal surrendered to Love -- the
harmonies there are unnecessary, turn the phrase into just another destination in a
song...
"it's my heart that's-a sufferin'
that's-a dyin'
that's what I have to lose
" screamed to the limit...
no one made acoustic music this aggressive, not the Cat Stevenses nor the Jackson
Brownes nor the XTCs...
except for Saint Drake
amazing, Stills can spin solos out of silver, so you see
them hanging like a ball of mercury in front of your eyes...
Stills conducts warfare in the truth zones
Nash wants to fuck it -- OK love, pure love...
Afterwards they just sit there soaking up the applause --
it's shameless.
Out of Control
a slight exodus to the pissoirs
another minor Neil song that sounds like a major one
Seen Enough
Acoustic, raw, Stills burns it up, his voice turned into
barbed tumbleweed.... best possible setting for nonsense about "silicon diodes"
and "killer geeks"...
[Later in the Tibetan meditation dressing room, Crosby
introduces me to Stephen as a guy who writes for Wired magazine, he jokes "Oh you're
the guy I wrote that song about!" Then confides he wanted to lose the line about
"Powerbook potentates" but friends thought it was funny so he kept it. Should
have gone with his instincts.]
Teach Your Children
fuller than the encore versions at many CSNY shows --
hearing it in a different place in the rotation is hearing it new.
Everyone sings "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as
the roadies rearrange the stage back for electric, Crosby walks to the edge of the stage
blowing a huge burning fistful of sage...
Woodstock
the supernova
complete machine gun
meltdown
beards of sparks
8 Miles High
Neil's most incendiary punk
is the perfect comment on Crosby's most alienated Zen riff
Kyle says, "Buffalo Springfield does the Byrds!"
Ohio
amazing coda
lights the meaning
Love the One You're With
Stills tutored by friendship with Neil & vice versa
two voices that keep each other honest
what two friends work on is not each other
but a third thing:
the friendship
Rockin' in the Free World
forget the mumblers,
the stylists,
all you need is a guitar threatening to melt
and Neil's voice --
Chicago
great spontaneous jam, Stills would have stretched it even
farther if Nash hadn't come back to the verse
Long May You Run
like a spiderweb
hung with dew
in a dusty shaft of sunlight
Gifts
Someone leaves a hand-carved banjo for Crosby in the
closet in his room with a note.
His assistant comes in with another envelope from a fan.
"-- Another paternity suit!" Graham laughs.
Someone else wants David to sign posters. "I hate it
when this stuff ends up on eBay ," he says.
Later, someone asks David for a sperm sample to sell on
eBay.
I meet Dolf and Jeroen of the "4 Way Site"
website backstage, witty Dutch guys. I remember writing David a letter in 1983. It was
hard to imagine that he would ever actually see it. I wrote: "I don't doubt that this
letter will never sift up through the ranks of people designed to keep your from the
burden of ten thousand people telling you how much they love your music -- but I know the
last year has been especially difficult." With the Internet, fans actually have a
prayer of getting a message through -- a more natural humane exchange of intimacy and
interest.
Alchemy
Their music is best when it's stretching to learn
something new, and worst when it's complacently expounding on a truth they already know --
with certain exceptions.
So much range: No one else goes from a whisper and
one guitar to interplanetary detonations.
All that said, it's luck just to hear them together -- to
be in the living room when the song begins.
