(Credits: Far Out / CMA-Creative Management Associates / Atlantic Records)
Tue 23 September 2025 20:00, UK
The most important part of a supergroup like Crosby, Stills, and Nash is having good chemistry.
Each of them were already coming into the group fresh out of their old outfits, but the fact that they could click that well with each other was a strange miracle every time they harmonised. But even with those soaring harmonies becoming a fixture of their sound, there was always going to be some trepidation when it came to messing with the formula.
Granted, if you had a band that sounded as good as they did on ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’, there was no reason to think that there needed to be any tweaking. All of their songs played off each other perfectly, and considering David Crosby’s history of working with The Byrds, his ear for arrangements when it came to harmonies sounded immaculate when going through Graham Nash’s ‘Marrakesh Express’.
Everything sounded perfect, but therein lies the problem as well. The acoustic approach that they took fit in well with the folk-rock movement of the day, but they didn’t want to make the same boring acoustic ditties whenever they played, either. They were a rock and roll band, and it was about time that they started actually sounding like one when they began work on Deja Vu.
And while bringing in Neil Young was a stroke of genius, asking him to join any band isn’t a choice anyone should take lightly. Despite his reputation as one of the best rock stars in the world, Young could always be extremely fickle in his beliefs, and when listening to his own work in his solo career, he wasn’t exactly shy about making tunes that had as little adornment as possible.
That didn’t matter to Stephen Stills, though. He had already known Young for years being in Buffalo Springfield, and considering the massive noise his friend got out of his guitar every time he played, Stills knew that he was the edge that the band needed to keep moving. Nash definitely needed a little more convincing, but Crosby didn’t need to hear anymore once he heard tracks like ‘Helpless’.
By the time that the band started having their first jams with Young, Crosby painted a picture about how the first Young songs knocked him out, saying in 2022, “He knows I’m kind of on the fence, and he knows Stills is for it. That kind of makes me the decider. I didn’t say anything. That’s how it was, right? Neil sat down on the trunk of the car with me, the two of us, him with the guitar, and he sang ‘Helpless,’ ‘Country Girl’ and a few other things. And I said ‘I wanna work with this guy. This is too good.’ It was about the writing. It was all about those songs.”
But even if ‘Helpless’ became one of Young’s signature tunes in the group, ‘Country Girl’ is a lot more in line with what he was used to playing. Not all of it made the most sense, and it certainly didn’t follow the same song structures that you heard out of the hit parade, but the fact that every section had a hook appealed to Crosby in the same way that he listened to The Beatles’ more episodic moments.
And with Young secured, the band had the perfect balance between their soft and light sides. Nash could come up with ‘Teach Your Children’ and Young could come up with ‘Ohio’, but the true miracle behind Young was that he never seemed to be sacrificing a piece of his art for the sake of the rest of the guys. Despite having three equals beside him, he was always going to get his point across the way he wanted to.
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