(Credits: Far Out / Glenn Francis)
Thu 23 April 2026 3:00, UK
There was never any way to predict what would happen when David Crosby decided to form Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
The idea of a supergroup was still a relatively new idea, and even if all of them had had success working with their respective bands, it was going to be a gamble for all of them to quit their day jobs and see what they could get up to when they made more mellow music. But before they got Neil Young into the group, Crosby remembered going through a laundry list of names before landing on the version of the band that we know and love today.
When you look at all of them together, nothing about CSN says that they were absolutely meant for one another when they started. The Byrds and The Hollies were brilliant bands on their own, but the reason why Crosby and Graham Nash worked so well together, for instance, is because of how much they wanted to explore harmony. They didn’t like making traditional music, and Stephen Stills fit that mentality to a tee when throwing in some of his weird tunings.
If Young hadn’t joined when he did, though, there’s a good chance that the band wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as they eventually did. Young was going to be an extremely volatile presence to have in the group, but the fact that he was able to throw in more heavy topics into their songs was the perfect complement to when Crosby started making more complex harmonies on tunes like ‘Deja Vu’.
And when you look at the first record compared to Deja Vu, Young gave the band the edge that they needed. Say what you will about the first record, and it is fantastic, but there’s no real bite to many of the songs, and when you hear what Young made on ‘Helpless’ and especially ‘Ohio’, you can hear them slowly starting to put together something that was a bit more dirty than the traditional flower power music.
But if they had decided to stay a traditional hippy outfit, Crosby remembered the band mulling over bringing in John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful when they first decided to work, saying, “Yeah, John was a friend of ours, all of us. And we thought, ‘He can learn bass’. We did think about it and there were a few other people we wanted to try out for bass and drums, but it fell together the way it fell and I’m pretty happy about it.”
Granted, Sebastian’s role in the group would have been a lot different from what Young was bringing to the table. The Lovin’ Spoonful were a great band, but when you look at what they were making throughout the 1960s, it’s hard to think that the same musician behind tunes like ‘Summer in the City’ was going to be able to get a little bit more gritty when it came time to rally against police brutality at Kent University.
His voice was simply too sweet for that kind of music, but then again, it’s not like the management behind CSN were exactly golden, either. In fact, there was a good chance that the band could have been signed to Apple Records before getting passed on, and even if they had begun life as part of The Beatles’ offshoot label, would they really have been the same if they were put in the same kind of league as people like Badfinger and Billy Preston?
They would have loved to get all of their friends in the band with them, but if you look atCrosby’s point of view, everything seemed to fall into place exactly how it should have. Young was bound to be a handful when he first joined, but most people would settle for a temperamental genius than someone who wasn’t going to last from the moment they sang.
