David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young proved that when you put four people who can write, play guitar, and harmonize in the same room, magic can happen. CSNY, as they came to be known, also proved that when you put these four people in the same room, the egos, addictions, relationships, and pressures of the industry they face can also tear the group apart.<\/p>\n
The four-piece supergroup found themselves somewhere in the middle with their debut album, D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu, which went No. 1 in mid-May 1970 following its March 11 release. The album\u2019s first three singles, \u201cWoodstock\u201d<\/a>, \u201cTeach Your Children\u201d<\/a>, and \u201cOur House\u201d<\/a>, became Top 40 hits. Even today, these songs remain some of CSNY\u2019s best-known.\u00a0 D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu was a kind of sonic blueprint, showing the rest of the world what a four-piece acoustic band should sound like.<\/p>\n Yet, ironically, the band felt far removed from the idea of an ensemble. When members weren\u2019t dealing with drama amongst themselves, they were struggling to reconcile breakups and, in Crosby\u2019s case, the devastating death of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton. If Crosby, Stills & Nash, the debut of the three-piece before Young\u2019s addition, was romantic and hopeful, D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu was far moodier and darker<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Members of CSNY Recorded \u2018D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu\u2019 Separately<\/p>\n One of the most surprising elements of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young\u2019s debut, at least in this writer\u2019s opinion, is the fact that they recorded so much of the album separately. Members would record their individual parts alone in the studio, and an engineer would bring them all together. The airtight harmonies and intricate guitar work of D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu would make a listener think they were all live-tracking in the room together. Even the general expectation that a band records an album with everyone present would lean into this assumption.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not how sessions operated from the summer of 1969 to midwinter 1970. As Stills said of D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu to Hit Parader in 1971 (via Ultimate Classic Rock<\/a>), \u201cGetting that second album out of us was like pulling teeth. That\u2019s why it took 800 hours to produce and why the first album took 600 hours. There was song after song that didn\u2019t make it. Others had to be worked on an awful lot.\u201d<\/p>\n Even more ironically, one of their best-known hits\u2014and one of the only tracks CSNY recorded in the studio as a bona fide band\u2014was a song that none of them wrote. Even stranger, the person who did write \u201cWoodstock\u201d, an ode to the cultural event of the decade, wasn\u2019t even in attendance. The songwriter, Joni Mitchell<\/a>, was watching footage from the festival from her hotel room in New York City.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, none of these missed connections or emotional, mental, or logistical hurdles seemed to faze the album\u2019s success. D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu topped the charts in the United States, Canada, and Australia and hit the Top 5 throughout Europe.<\/p>\n Photo by Tom Copi\/Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young proved that when you put four people who can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[279762,88,216,2156],"class_list":["post-648496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-crosby-stills-nash-young","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-rock-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}