Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Deja vu
Listen to an audio version of this review by Greg
Due to the recent death of David Crosby on January 18th, 2023, I am fast forwarding my intent to share what the album, Déjà vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young means to me. For it has been on my list to discuss for several months now. This album extracts so much emotion. It is with a heavy heart that I review this now, not long after Crosby’s passing.
There are revolutions every ten to twenty years. Examples are the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Technology Revolution, the Women’s Rights Movement, the Equal Rights Movement, the Revolution against the Vietnam War and so on…
Without a doubt, the chief musical revolution took place in the 1960s. Motivated by the United States’ involvement with the War in Vietnam, a divide quickly erupted between those who were in favor and those who were not.
I feel as if I lived during this time, even though I did not. It is hard to explain. Perhaps it’s the hours of films I have watched, or the books I have read? Perhaps it is the stories I have heard from my parents? Can you imagine being called to duty? Can you imagine being drafted during this time? I presume for someone concerned about the spread of communism in the 1960s, he considered serving as his duty.
I admire patriotism. My arms form goosebumps when I think about the people who fought and died for our country, so that I can watch a documentary, relaxing on my couch with an IPA in hand, and not have to think about someone storming through my front door, killing me, and taking my family away.
The 1960s and the Vietnam War were unlike any period in the last 100 years. The Anti-War movement was wide and strong. If you’ve ever seen Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary, you’d be sickened by what the United States Government kept quiet, to ensure widespread support for its involvement in the war.
I mean no disrespect to the men and women who risked or gave their lives during this war. You are my heroes. I owe you my heart and my soul. But the injustice brought forth by the U.S. Government during this period sparked heartbreak and outrage that was fueled heavily by the music of this time. Rock n’ Roll music was out at the front line, leading the charge and mass protest of the War, and there wasn’t any band who held that torch higher than Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
On March 11, 1970, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, otherwise known as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released their second album, titled Déjà vu. Recorded in Los Angeles and San Francisco between July 1969 and January 1970, it was produced by Wally Heider and released on the Atlantic Records label. Dallas Taylor, an American session drummer and Greg Reeves, a friend, and bass player, would also play on the album respectively. The album would include other “guest” musicians, including Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia, who played pedal steel guitar on Teach Your Children.
51 years later, in May of 2021, Rhino Entertainment Company remixed and re-released the album, but like my Beatles Revolver remix review, the reissued box set of Déjà vu includes 4 CD’s and 1 Vinyl LP containing 38 bonus tracks, delivering nearly two-and-a-half hours of music that includes demos, outtakes, and alternate takes – most of which (29 to be specific) are previously unreleased.
What can I say about this re-release? Where do I begin? I don’t know. I say this in every review, but I’m going to say it again and even raise the stakes here. This is one of the best reissues of a classic record I have EVER heard. It is tear-jerking. It is poignant, innovative, and revolutionary. It provides additional evidence to support why this band and its four members were in the front of the line during the 60’s music revolution.
As a follow up to their debut album, simply titled, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Déjà vu was the band’s first studio collaboration with Neil Young, who formerly joined Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield before moving on to a new project. It was Buffalo Springfield who released what is to this day, the rallying cry for the opposition to the Vietnam War, Stephen Stills’ masterpiece, For What it’s Worth.
All four members arrived in the studio with buckets of new material. As a result, this is truly a collaborative album from four musical powerhouses (Stills and Young coming from Buffalo Springfield, Crosby from The Byrds and Nash coming from The Hollies). What is challenging for me is determining whether their individual performances, which you can hear in the solo outtakes, were fiercer than their combinations. When asked which rock n roll bands had the greatest vocal harmonization, Crosby, Stills, Nash (…yes and Young) are at the top of the mountain. I would put The Beach Boys at second. Don’t agree? OK. Write to me and tell me your pick. Otherwise, listen to this album and sit down!
I cannot recall how many times I have listened to Déjà vu. Sixty? Seventy? You will not find an average or even below average song on this record. Every track exceeds expectations. In addition to the steady track listing including Teach Your Children, Almost Cut My Hair, Helpless, Woodstock, Our House, 4+20 and others, the BONUS tracks are what I NEED to share with you.
The album’s opening track, Carry On, gives you the galloping acoustic guitar riff you’ve heard a million times, followed by the thumping bass and the band’s four voices harmonizing to make the perfect chord. It’s fast. It’s rocking. It’s directive. Eventually the entire tempo changes and you really get a sense for their vocal alliance. The song ultimately picks back up into a grooving rock n roll song with a blues guitar solo. This is just music perfection at its best.
The original counter-culture’s message lingers in Almost Cut My Hair. David Crosby gives a vocal performance for the ages. Strip this song down, take out the electric instruments and drums, and you have the clearest of clear messages. This is David’s letter to the revolution. When he sings, “I owe it to someone”, he’s singing to the men and women who were affected by the same dishonesty coming from the US Government and he owes it to the soldiers who fought. “It’s us against them”, he’s saying. “Almost cut my hair”, he says; “happened just the other day. But it didn’t and I wonder why. I’m going to let my freak flag fly”.
If you want to break down immediately, place the needle on Graham Nash’s, Right Between the Eyes. “A man’s a man who looks a man, right between the eyes”. These words blaze a trail right through the artificiality and the messages the public were receiving from the Government. I get incredibly emotional when I hear this song, not because I lived during the revolution, but I tie my own meaning into it. This track inspires me to honor honesty and always live by the notion that the people I love in this world, deserve nothing but my honesty, twenty-four hours a day. Graham Nash said that this song is a confession to a friend. It never appeared on a studio album; it was released on the band’s 1971 live album, 4 Way Street, recorded on their tour in 1970.
How Have You Been is another tear jerking, knee buckling track that resumes the formula. You can choose to listen to the lyrics and connect with them. You can let the guitar and the harmonization take you up into the clouds never to be seen again as you float away into eternal peace. Written by fellow musician and revolutionary colleague, John Sebastian, the track is a lullaby. It is a “thank you” to the people who welcomed John despite the city he walked through during his long trip, traveling the world in search of eternal peace.
“And how have you been, my darling children
While I have been away in the west
Though you are strangers I feel like I know you
By the way that you treat me and offer to feed me
And eagerly ask if I’ll stay for a rest”
No question – my favorite track on this album is David Crosby’s demo/outtake of Laughing. It’ll be hard for me to form many words for this one. Just listen to what he created, all by himself. Like Right Between the Eyes and How Have You Been, this song was not a part of Déjà vu. Crosby released it a year later on his first solo album, 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name. That version, however, is electrified, not the solo acoustic edition that’s included on the 2021 reissue. It’s still astonishing, but the power this version brings, is uncontested. It’s likely Crosby’s songwriting was influenced by the pain and suffering he experienced after the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton in a 1969 car accident. David said during this time he felt safe doing a lot of drugs and spending time in the studio, writing and recording.
Déjà vu’s success contributed to the achievement of the four albums released by each of the members soon thereafter, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush in 1970, Still’s self-titled debut in 1970, Crosby’s, If I Could Only Remember My Name, and Graham Nash’s, Songs for Beginners. BAMM BAMM BAMM BAMM. Including Déjà vu, this was a one, two, three, four punch. BAMM!
I can remember floating on my friend Art Sable’s boat on Keuka Lake in Hammondsport, NY in the summer of 1999. A lot happened that summer. It was my first foray into the real world. I had just graduated college and was hopeful for my future. But if I’m honest, I was also nervous. What would the future bring? That summer JFK Jr. and his wife, Caroline Kennedy died in a tragic plane crash. The groundbreaking film The Blair Witch Project was released to critical acclaim. I can remember for about a week thinking it was a true documentary as opposed to a fictitious tale. The phone area code in my hometown changed, a big deal for me. Columbine, the very first mass school shooting, a sensational tragedy, took place only a few months before the summer, sparking copycat school shootings throughout the world. Woodstock ’99, an insult to what I believed American culture had matured to become, took place on an air strip not far from my tiny apartment in western, upstate New York, and my grandfather, the son of a first-generation immigrant from my chain of the Potters family to arrive in the United States from Europe, died after complaining of chest pain at the breakfast table. He was 79. I was heartbroken.
With a heavy heart, I can remember looking out onto the hills of Keuka Lake, where the grapes were harvested and wine was made, listening to 4+20 on Art’s stereo that was connected to his boat. This was the beginning of my love affair with the band. Perhaps quite later than many reading or hearing this review, but it’s never too late to have your life changed by music. I can recall the afternoon sunlight reflecting off the wake, and the feeling of calm that reverberated through my body as I listened to the lyrics of Stephen Stills’ 4+20. For a time, while I floated on that vessel, the song eased my pain and sadness until it was time to go to work at the restaurant.
“Four and twenty years ago
I come into this life
The son of a woman
And a man who lived in strife
He was tired of being alone
And he wasn’t into selling door to door
And he worked like the devil to be more”
I mustn’t neglect some of Neil Young’s songs he contributed to this album; Helpless, Country Girl and Everybody I Love You. Of course, the band would also choose to record a cover of Joni Mitchell’s, Woodstock, which like most other Crosby, Stills & Nash…..AND Young songs, was a large part of the 60s music revolution.
A slightly altered version of Helpless was released years later in 2009 on Neil’s, Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972). Country Girl which combined two Buffalo Springfield tracks, Down, Down, Down and Whisky Boot Hill joined Helpless on the Archives album.
To the producers, assistants, and the band members themselves, the atmosphere during the recording of Déjà vu was different from the first album, which was recorded while the band members were in outside romantic relationships. For the second record, the mood was dark, as each of those relationships had broken up in addition to Crosby’s girlfriend dying in a car crash.
This was also the beginning of a long “on again, off again” rift between band members, mostly between Young and the other three. The band criticized each other’s musical roles, causing hostility. In one instance, Crosby and Stills bickered back and forth regarding whether to leave Almost Cut My Hair on the record or not. Having written the song, Crosby of course, was in favor. Stills thought the vocals “sucked”.
Another concern was Young’s unwillingness to join the band in the studio in San Francisco during most of the recording sessions. Instead, he recorded his tracks in Los Angeles and had them shipped up north for Crosby, Stills & Nash to complete.
I was lucky enough to see Crosby, Stills, Nash AND YOUNG during a reunion tour in March of 2000. The venue was the old, Charlotte Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina. That night the four members reunited to play a total of TWENTY-NINE songs, including two encores. I had crossed that one off my bucket list, and I can remember leaving the venue after the show feeling as if I had just visited heaven, or at least my childhood vision of it.
Despite the reunion, the four members would continue having issues over the next several decades. In 2015 Graham Nash told a local periodical that CSN would never play together again, primarily because of this falling out with David Crosby. But in 2016, Neil Young told Rolling Stone he wouldn’t rule out another reunion. He said it again in 2017. A major incident that divided Crosby and Young was in 2014 when Crosby called Young’s girlfriend, actress Daryl Hannah, “a purely poisonous predator”. I could not figure out why he said that. Crosby later apologized in an interview with Howard Stern, which I remember listening to live. By 2021, signs began to point towards a possible reconciliation. Although no major talk of a reunion existed, the four members were at least praising each other to the media.
On January 18, 2023, David Crosby died at 81, ending any further reunion talk with all four members.
Because his health had been failing slowly for years, Crosby commented often he believed he was "probably going to die fairly soon". His funeral on his own horse ranch in Santa Ynez, California was planned at least three years prior, and Crosby noted he had hoped by then he would have resolved his issues with his former Byrds and CSNY bandmates so that they would attend.
A statement from Crosby’s family said that he died "after a long illness". Some friends had disagreed and noted David died suddenly in his sleep. Many had also attributed his death to complications from COVID-19.
After his death, Neil Young, perhaps the person who quarreled with Crosby the most, made a moving statement that summed everything up:
“David is gone, but his music lives on. The soul of CSNY, David’s voice and energy were at the heart of our band. His great songs stood for what we believed in and it was always fun and exciting when we got to play together. ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ ‘Deja vu’, and so many other great songs he wrote were wonderful to jam on and Stills and I had a blast as he kept us going on and on. His singing with Graham was so memorable, their duo spot a highlight of so many of our shows.
We had so many great times, especially in the early years. Crosby was a very supportive friend in my early life, as we bit off big pieces of our experience together. David was the catalyst of many things.
My heart goes out to Jan and Django, his wife and son. Lots of love to you. Thanks David for your spirit and songs, Love you man. I remember the best times!”
Déjà vu would make it to number 11 on the Billboard Charts in 1970. In 2003, Rolling Stone Magazinewould put Déjà vu at number 148 on their “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list. In 2020, a revised edition of the list was released, dropping it back to number 220. I’d like to see which albums released since 2003 would justify dropping this one back so far. But this may also be a testament to how many amazing albums exist today, more than we can get our hands and ears on.
If you’re going to invest in a new record or a new set of recordings, I strongly suggest getting the remastered, remixed 2021 edition. No, it is not the original, but it includes a remixedDéjà vu, plus the 38 bonus tracks, that I feel outweigh the first. Whichever you choose, if you choose to own at least one, you will own a piece of music history.
