"Stephen had some great songs. I
had some great songs. Nash had some songs that were even better than ours." David
Crosby
In 1977 we finally got a follow up to the
debut album from the trio, and it was a very worthy follow up. Solo agendas seemed to be
gone and everyone brought their best songs. The material is very good, if not up to the
standard of the debut.
Graham Nash is in rare
form. This is his
best CSN album. Cathedral was the centerpiece of the album, an ambitious piece based on an
acid trip he took in Winchester Cathedral and the realizations he came to in the
process.
It hasn’t aged particularly well, and in parts it reveals Nash at his self
focused, cute, worst ("The day he died it was a birthday / and I noticed it was mine")
But it reveals the scope of Nash’s ambition on this album, and even in falling short
he does a solid job in Cathedral. CSN is always strongest when the focus is personal and
emotional. The best song here, Nash’s Cold Rain, is a beautiful, sad and evocative
piece about a gray, sulfur choked Northern England industrial town and the self left
behind in chasing your dreams ("Yes he lived here, but he left / When he thought
there was more / Than cold rain"). This is very real, straight out of Graham’s
life, and very powerful. Carried Away is almost as good. And, as expected, he provides a
great single with Just a Song Before I Go, a more grown up version of Pre Road Downs.
Crosby’s results are more mixed. His
song writing is beginning to show the strains of his lifestyle, and would not truly return
until the CPR debut album in the nineties. In My Dreams is a great effort in the spirit of
the first album. Shadow Captain is also strong, but there is something undeniably cold and
distant in Craig Doerge’s music and in the studio-perfect performance. It is a song
that begs to be stripped down, made more free, in the style of Crosby’s first solo
effort. The trend toward "outside" music writing which started with this song
would reach it’s ominous climax in 1990 with the abysmal Live It Up album. Anything
at All is amusing, pure Crosby rambling, but not really much of a song.
Stills provides some excellent moments as
well. See the Changes, a leftover from the last failed CSNY studio session, harks backs to
the fine acoustic moments of the past. Dark Star is a great song. Here Stills works his
Latin rhythm against Craig Doerge’s jazz/blues piano to great effect. I once heard a
Brazilian band in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico play a song that sounded remarkably like
this. Run From Tears is powerful and emotional, with Stills taking to electric guitar to
express his blues. I Give You Give Blind is a solid, rocking closer, though it suffers,
like Shadow Captain, from a certain slickness. Fair Game is the real clunker
here, very
ugly in it’s treatment of the ugly girl who is interested in his
crotch.
CSN proved they could still make fine
music. David Crosby’s muse was beginning to fade, but Graham Nash stepped up to
provide a great set of songs. If Stills was not up to the standards of his early seventies
work, he was well above the level of his recent Illegal Stills or the
Stills/Young
Band’s Long May You Run. This reunion, unlike the numerous aborted CSNY
reunions,
seemed like it could last. They could never matter as much again (CSN is at least
as good as Deja Vu, but carries nowhere near the cultural weight). But at least they could
make great music.
Raincheck.
