Déjà vu

Review of Déjà vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Back when supergroups were formed by guys who looked like they either lived on the street or hadn’t seen a bath in weeks. Man, how I love Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

The guitar-rocking, sideburn-sporting band, formed from members of The Byrds (David Crosby), Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills) and The Hollies (Graham Nash), first crossed paths in 1968. They sang together for the first time at a house owned by either Joni Mitchell or Mama Cass Elliot, a detail still debated to this day. What is known is that Stills started playing “You Don’t Have to Cry,” with Crosby and Nash joining in. It worked so well that Nash stepped out of The Hollies that December, moved to LA, and by early 1969 the trio was recording their debut album. Neil Young, Stills’ former bandmate from Buffalo Springfield, joined later that year, completing the lineup that would record Déjà Vu.

What better way to start off the album than with the high-energy “Carry On,” a track that for me personally sounds most like the band itself. It’s a heavy mixture of multiple acoustic guitars that each feel like they want to do their own thing, every one with a strong character of its own. David Crosby himself has described the band as intense and often crazy, and in this song it works beautifully. It’s such a big wall of sound, especially for the 70’s, with all the guitars blending into one, and that’s before you even get to the vocals from the entire group, the kind that make you want to pull up a chair next to a cozy campfire. Coming back to how the song captures the band, and to finish Crosby’s thought, the group really does find each other in a flow of creative force whenever they record together.

Graham Nash later recalled how the song came to be:

“I said to Stephen one day, ‘You know, we don’t have “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I know. We did it on the first record.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. We don’t have the song that guarantees that people won’t get up and take the needle off the record. And when you hear ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’ and we come to the end of it, I defy you to get up and turn the record off. You wouldn’t do that. We need that kind of song.’ The next day, he comes to me and he goes, ‘What do you think about this Willy?’ [sings opening notes to “Carry On”] and he played me ‘Carry On.’ It shows you the genius of Stephen Stills.”

And how right Nash was, because Stills’s “Carry On” is a genius opening track. It’s everything you want to hear when you first drop the needle on an album. It’s euphoric, deep with sound and layers. It’s one of those tracks with a rich cultural sound, filled with pure soul. But that’s the strength of these four combined, especially with the vocals from David Crosby, which we’ll get to soon.

“The origin of the song came from my recent infatuation with art. I had begun collecting photographs around that time, powerful images that had an emotional effect on me. One, in particular, was a Diane Arbus image of a boy in Central Park. It spoke volumes to me. The kid was only about nine or ten years old, but his expression bristled with intense anger. He had a plastic grenade clenched in a fist, but it seemed to me that if it were real the kid would have thrown it. The consequences it implied startled me. I thought, ‘If we don’t start teaching our kids a better way of dealing with each other, humanity will never succeed.” Graham Nash about the inspiration for “Teach Your Children” in his 2013 autobiography.

But Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young aren’t a group that just writes songs to be catchy. They were major political voices of the 70’s, a deeply turbulent time in the United States, and they never shied away from songs like “Teach Your Children.” It plays almost like feedback to future parents: teach your children how to build a better world, both for themselves and for others, which in turn makes it a lesson for the children too. It’s a lullaby version of a plea for peace, one that doesn’t force its way through but gently tries to guide.

“But I’m not givin’ in an inch to fear
‘Cause I promised myself this year
I feel like I owe it to someone”

Before I talk about “Almost Cut My Hair,” I have to admit that this is my most played song of all time. Yes, you heard me. It’s everything I love in music: imperfection, purity, rawness, and emotion. It just doesn’t get better than David Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair.”

David Crosby was a deeply troubled man. He had serious problems with drugs, and at one point he even went on the run from the police, sailing off on his boat for a while before deciding to come back. Had he not stepped off that boat, he would have ended up on the federal wanted list. He was a man who escaped death, and a man who lost his girlfriend in a car accident not long before recording “Almost Cut My Hair.” He was broken, he was angry, and he was sad.

Recorded in the final hours of the album sessions, the track is the complete opposite of everything around it. It’s raw and unpolished, with only Crosby on lead vocals and none of his bandmates stepping in to harmonize. What’s most impressive is that in his state of extreme emotion, he managed to lay it down in a single take. That’s why the track feels so raw. It’s literally a man in anguish, in pain, singing about his paranoid state of mind during a time, as mentioned earlier, filled with turmoil and fear. Even surrounded by some of the best folk tracks you’ll find anywhere, it stands out to me as the best song on the album.

The track that sounds most naked and angelic, “Helpless,” was written by Neil Young and serves as a perfect contrast to “Almost Cut My Hair.” It’s just as fragile as the previous song but far gentler, with Young taking lead vocals while his bandmates lend their voices to soft backing harmonies, leaving plenty of space for Young to actually sound vulnerable.

“Woodstock,” written by Joni Mitchell, is the song that David Crosby has called the one that best captured the festival itself. The irony is that Mitchell wasn’t actually there. She couldn’t make it because she had a planned appearance on The Dick Cavett Show and her management worried she wouldn’t be able to get in and out in time, so she watched what she later described as the major event of her generation unfold on television instead. Her lyrics paint the festival as a kind of Garden of Eden, where everyone there was part of one greater organism, part of something far bigger than themselves during a time when all you saw on the news was Vietnam propaganda and death. It’s a great song, and you can easily picture Joni Mitchell singing it at Woodstock herself. Just keep the camera off Neil Young while she does, he wasn’t exactly a fan of being filmed back then.

“If I had ever been here before I would probably know just what to do”

While “Almost Cut My Hair” was a last-minute, single-take miracle, the title track “Déjà Vu” was anything but. It’s by far the most experimental track on the album, with layers of vocals I’d call closer to progressive rock than folk, all mixed beautifully so they either feel far away or come rushing straight at you. The guitar work, with moments of tapping on the frets, the shifts in tempo, and the way the song moves from section to section, all sit close to progressive rock too, just without stretching out into a ten-minute epic. A heavily reverbed bass runs throughout the track and gives the whole thing an atmospheric, almost weightless feeling, which fits the theme perfectly. Crosby’s interest in reincarnation was the major inspiration for the song, and fittingly enough, you’ll probably end up with your own déjà vu listening to it, since it’s the kind of track you can listen to multiple times a week without ever getting tired of it.

“It was a very important time in my life. I mean, to live and love Joni Mitchell was incredibly special to me. And to be able to write a song about my actual home where I lived was very comforting for me.” – Graham Nash

It’s just such a cute song. “Our House,” written by Graham Nash, is in my eyes a song inspired by the richest feeling you can have in the world. It’s about how happy Nash is with his home and his partner Joni Mitchell (just imagine sitting at their dinner table). The inspiration came from something as simple as going out shopping, finding a vase in an antique store, and placing it back at their house. It’s funny that on an album filled with politics and raw emotion, the song that left the biggest cultural footprint for most people is the most domestic one. It shows that CSNY were comfortable in more than just one sound.

Not to be biased, but “4 + 20” is the only song on the album where Crosby doesn’t appear vocally, and it’s probably the least memorable track. Written and performed solo by Stephen Stills, it’s essentially just a Stills solo piece. It’s not a bad song, it’s very human and fragile, but it just doesn’t quite stand up against the rest of the album.

The strongest Neil Young contribution to Déjà Vu, “Country Girl” is a three-part suite made up of “Whiskey Boot Hill,” “Down Down Down,” and “Country Girl (I Think You’re Pretty).” It opens with a doomy, classical-tinged piano line, and am I the only one getting strong Doors vibes from it? Originally pieced together from a track Young had been working on for his solo career and another he’d written for Buffalo Springfield, the suite gets perfectly adapted and upgraded into a proper Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young track.

Where “Carry On” opens the album with acoustic guitars, “Everybody I Love You,” co-written by Young and Stills, leans on electric guitars and pushes more toward a rock and roll sound. It’s theatrical too, breaking into multiple distinct parts. The closer’s biggest strength is that you actually hear the band split apart, with each member getting more space to bring their own personality to the finish. Vocal moments come from everyone, and the guitars sit in that broken-up sound that comes from blending acoustic and electric textures together.

Whenever someone asks me about folk, or about a boyband for that matter, these balding, crazy lunatics are always the first ones to pop into my head. They’re one of the best examples of a supergroup coming together to create something special and then breaking up almost immediately after. If my life is going to feel like one long Déjà Vu, I’m glad this is the one.

Featured Tracks

Déjà vu

Our House

Teach your Children