"Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young join in one more cosmic tour "
By Scott Mervis Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette
Friday, March 17, 2000
Since Neil Young took his ball and went home more than a quarter-century ago, we've
been experiencing the most celebrated super-group of the hippie era in bits and pieces.
We got a bunch of CSN. A whole lotta Y. The occasional single S or N. Even a C, with a
P and R attached. Most of the time it's been a beautiful thing, sometimes cosmic, and
other times cosmically weird. Young continues to keep us guessing: He's turned up live
with Crazy Horse, the Shocking Pinks, a country outfit, Booker T and the MGs, with just
his acoustic guitars and with rowdy openers like Dinosaur Jr, Social Distortion and Sonic
Youth, who helped give him the "Godfather of Grunge" title.
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, who started without Young in 1968 and
carried on after he left the first time in 1971, rolled through town many times in the'70s
and '80s, showing flashes of brilliance and occasional turmoil. CSN diehards may recall
the Arena concert back in 1985 when Crosby, in the throes of drug addiction, kept
disappearing from the stage for long stretches, creating the rare occurrence of S and N
(previously, the only workable duo combos were the dangerous S and Y and the considerably
more wimpy C and N).
Then, out of the blue, in early '98, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, Young stepped on
stage with CSN to add some old ragged glory to "Ohio" and "Carry On."
Stills and Young would subsequently meet at Young's ranch in Woodside, Calif., to plan the
box set for Buffalo Springfield, the psychedelic-laced country-rock band they formed in
1966.
At the same time, Stills was doing sessions in an L.A. studio with Crosby and Nash,
sans label deal, recording a follow-up to 1994's "After the Storm." Stills
explains in the band's press material -- Crosby and Nash, the band's principal
spokespeople, were burned out on interviews by the time they got to Pittsburgh, so we have
to rely on other sources -- that the trio needed Young's electric spark.
"The songs we were doing were a little long on mellow. I thought we needed a bit
more energy, so I asked Neil if he would come down and play on a few tracks for us."
The next thing they did was continue breathing normally, because you don't hold your
breath waiting for Neil Young to show up. But sure enough he did, and when he walked in
with his guitar, he liked what he heard. When Crosby was wasting away in a Texas prison on
a drug conviction, Nash was turning his sights toward his camera lens and Young was
bouncing through genres like Tigger in flannel, there seemed to be little chance that the
four would ever find common ground. And if they did, could they ever get along long enough
to mount another tour?
Says Crosby, and again we lift from the Reprise release, "Neil listened to
'Heartland' and said, 'Hey, that's neat. Can I play on that?' And we all said, 'Are you
kidding? Of course.' Then he heard another one and said, 'I kind of like that one, too.'
Eight songs later, we all knew something special was happening. But nobody had given it a
name. After those first four days, when I drove Neil to the airport I asked him what was
going on and he said, 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' "It was a
full-fledged, four-letter reunion, the kind of harmonic convergence that sets off alarms
through the industry. It turned out that Young was working on a record himself (which we
eagerly await, along with that solo box set, Neil!) and had a harvest of songs he was
willing to share.
In the studio, Young re-introduced the concept of the four of them sharing one
microphone like they did in the old days, and also turned toward Stills with that wild
gleam in his eyes that said "let's jam."
"The way Stephen and I played is very similar to what we did in Buffalo
Springfield," Young told the lucky person who got to hang out with them and write the
bio. "We'd stand by each other, watching and listening to each other play and
interweaving what we do. It was really an extension of what we had started back with
Springfield, picking up that ball again."
Crosby obviously was tickled to watch the ball bounce around once more. "Neil
Young is so much fun to play music with I can't even begin to tell you," he told us
last fall. "He's a wonderful cat and CSN is a great band. And put them together ...
CSNY is like 7 pounds of stuff in a 3-pound bag. It's a wonderfully inventive event."
When it all was mixed and matched -- you can just imagine the negotiation process over
song selection -- they sent it to up to Neil on the ranch and waited for his verdict.
Young was on tour, but when he came back he cued it up and ... didn't like it so much. And
so they would meet again, this time on the ranch to record three new songs, including
Nash's "Someday Soon" and one of the record's more convincing rockers, Young's
"Queen of Them All."
"Looking Forward," unleashed last October to a nation hopped up on Kid Rock,
grooving on Santana and swooning over the Backstreet Boys, has not exactly generated
widespread feelings of "Deja Vu."
Maybe they needed one more meeting on the ranch. This very paper, in one of the
admittedly harsher assessments, would only give up one star, lamenting that most of the
lyrics were hippie-trite and that the music "tends to wallow in only the corniest
elements of the Woodstock-generation sound."
Nash's untimely boating accident, leaving him in a wheelchair with two broken legs,
didn't help the big marketing push. The tour was put on hold and so was people's urgency
to run out and buy the new CSN&Y. "Looking Forward" has only sold 260,000
copies.
None of that, however, spoils the delirium of seeing the boys back on stage together in
a four-way-street collision. The faithful will gladly endure a handful of so-so new songs
to get to absolute treasures like "Carry On," "Ohio" and "Long
Time Gone." Not only that, but the ageless Mr. Young is getting to roar through the
likes of his own "Southern Man," "Cinnamon Girl" and "Rockin' in
a Free World."
Though Crosby, on record and at Rosebud with his band CPR, appears to have lost nothing
of his gorgeous range, Nash sounds a little meeker on "Looking Forward" and word
is that Stills, while sparring impressively with Young on guitar, is not holding his own
in the vocal department.
In fact, in Minneapolis (where only Young was lavished with praise), one critic
reported that Crosby gave Stills the banned-in-the-NFL-throat-slash motion, cutting short
"49 Bye-Byes" and declaring "We can't do a song that good that bad."
There's speculation that Stills' shaky pipes is part of the reason they are avoiding
his ambitious "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." However, Nash, always the peacemaker,
explained recently that with the band making last-minute changes -- drummer Jim Keltner
replaced Joe Vitale, and CSN keyboardist Mike Finnegan was dropped to make more room for
Young's guitar -- they didn't have a chance to work on it.
"You can't just play the 'Suite,' " Nash told Web site Wall of Sound.
"It's seven and a half minutes long and four complete time signatures. It's not an
easy piece. We need to rehearse it." A few critics have weighed in that, "Suite:
Judy Blues Eyes" aside, it looks like Young is just propping up three tired, old
guys. Others have said, and we're even more dubious about this, that they play with the
fury of a punk band.
Robert Hilburn, of the Los Angeles Times, who caught the show in San Jose, took a more
moderate position: "There are two kinds of reunion tours: those that tarnish a band's
legacy and those that enrich it. The Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion is one of
the latter, a tour whose strengths reside in the sense of brotherhood and passion of the
musicians."
"CSNY
concert rocks in truly classic style"
By Scott Mervis
Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette
Monday, March 20, 2000
I don't know whether it's Wheaties, Geritol or Viagra, but I'll have some of what Neil
Young's having.
Not to take anything away from David Crosby, Stephen Stills or Graham Nash -- they all
sound fine and could look worse for rock stars pushing 60 -- but Young blew through the
Mellon Arena like a hurricane Saturday night, and you had to grab hold of something to
stay standing. When it was all over, Nash, the English country gentleman with his teacup,
would stroll through Young's wreckage as if he barely knew what hit him.
This was the first CSNY tour since 1974, and now that we've seen it, it's a shame it
was such a long time coming. There's an incomparable magic to the soaring harmonies of
CSN, and when you add the music and firepower of Y, you've got the classic rock of the
gods.
In fact, it was somewhere during that loose third set, as the FM standards hit
furiously, that it became clear that these were the guys for whom classic rock was named.
That's "classic" rock, as opposed to the dinosaur variety no one wants to hear
anymore.
Not only did we get the CSN hits, but Young brought his songbook, the Stills-Young team
created a mini-Buffalo Springfield reunion and, surprising everyone, was Crosby pulling
out "Eight Miles High" with Young going absolutely bonkers to be playing on a
Byrds song. Young hinted early on that this would be one for the ages.
"Pittsburgh," he muttered. "Pittsburgh's always good."
And it was.
The first set had a bit of a get-acquainted feel, opening with "Carry On"
then revving into "Southern Man," before settling into a new-album sampler of
Nash's lightweight "Heartland," Stills' Parrothead rock excursion, "Faith
in Me," and Crosby's "Stand and Be Counted," possible theme music for
Census 2000. Young fared the best with the more down-to-earth "Slowpoke," owing
a lot to the great "Heart of Gold."
A slowed-down "Marrakesh Express," minus the signature pedal steel, didn't
quite live up to Young's introduction: "When I came in this evening, I looked out the
window and saw a long, slow [freight train] rolling by those historic buildings along that
old P&L line. ... I felt good."
The first truly write-home moment came when Crosby stepped up proudly with "Almost
Cut My Hair," a song about personal liberty that shouldn't mean a thing in the year
2000, but somehow does. With his gorgeous tenor still fully intact, Crosby played up the
drama as Young attacked the riff with ear-splitting intensity. Young, wearing a tattered
black T-shirt with some Greek doctor's name on it, threw his head-banging, hair-flying
energy right into a "Cinnamon Girl," soundly slightly odd as a group effort.
One of the few criticisms of the tour has been directed at the vocals of Stills. Of the
four, he's always had the husky, bluesy voice, and now, well, it's more so. But not so bad
that he couldn't lead them, quite capably, through the harmonies of "Helplessly
Hoping," which opened the acoustic set.
At no time during the night did they seem more like a group of happy old hippies than
on Nash's sweet "Our House" and the sing-along "Teach Your Children."
Crosby showed us how deep his feelings go with the earnest "Dream for Him,"
written for his 4-year-old son Django, and sat alone with Nash for a mesmerizingly
beautiful reading of "Guinnevere." "Old Man," a song that Young
handles best on his own, again got the full harmony treatment, and was a littler weaker
for it. Young's other acoustic contributions were "Looking Forward," the new
album's tender and hopeful title track, and a haunting version of "After the Gold
Rush" that found him at the back of the stage working his wizardry on pipe organ and
harmonica.
Through the first two sets, they stuck with the standard set list. In Act 3, the weapon
we saw in Act I went off. They rocked through "Woodstock" as if it was Woodstock
'99 and roared through "Ohio" as if it all happened yesterday, with Crosby
yelling, demanding "I wanna know why!"
Young, now wearing a tattered white T-shirt on which he had scribbled "This note's
for you," became an overwhelming force that Stills, no slouch on his Flying V, didn't
even seem up to messing with. Young turned an almost 20-minute "Down by the
River" into a full guitar concerto, taking it further and deeper into Crazy Horse
territory, and refusing to let go, to the point where when he finally came back up for
air, chanting "be on my side ... be on my side," you'd better believe the crowd
of around 17,000 was.
By this point, they were playing with such abandon that it didn't matter if Stills hit
a bad chord or Nash came in too early or Young too late on a verse of the show-stopping
"Rockin' in a Free World." Who would have thought that a bunch of guys in their
late 50s known for sweet harmonies would come to town and rock the place until Young had
literally ripped the strings off his Les Paul.
They left without playing it Saturday night, so I'll say it for them: Long may they
run.
