161. Crosby, Stills & Nash, "Crosby, Stills & Nash"

 


Weirdest thing: I really love this album (well, I used to really love this album, back when, now I guess I just really like it) but after the operatic over-the-topness of Pulp's Different Class yesterday, it seemed a little wan and delicate.  And this is a great album!  That Pulp album just kinda blew me away I think.  Anyway, enough about that.

Look at those dudes on the cover.  Left to right, Graham Nash is 27, Stephen Stills is 24, and lovable fuckup David Crosby is 28.  And these guys had already been in other wildly successful groups!  Great story about the cover: they found an abandoned house in West Hollywood (just sit with that idea for a minute), shot the picture, then came up with the name for the band and went back a few days later to shoot it again with the guys in the correct order and the house had already been demolished.  There's some kind of metaphor there but I can't figure it out.  (The house is now a parking lot, btw.)

Side one, song one: "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," written by Stills, which remains a fantastic song to this day with one of my favorite opening lyrics ("It's getting to the point/Where I'm no fun anymore," imagine singing that at 24 years old) and the kind of harmonies that would be the band's signature.  It really is a suite, with four distinct sections that flow together organically without sounding pasted together, a really beautiful song.  (The "Judy" is Judy Collins, who was busy leaving Stills for Stacy Keach.  Stars, they're just like us.)  The song was one of two singles from the album, the other being "Marrakesh Express," a song that I have never really liked for reasons I'm not sure I can put my finger on.  (Iggy Pop said it was "the worst song ever written," so I guess I'm not alone.)

There are some other gems on this record.  I like the chorus of "Pre-Road Downs" a lot, a nice descending vocal about, I guess, life on tour:

Don't run the time approaches
Hotels and midnight coaches
Be sure to hide the roaches

"Long Time Gone," a Crosby song, speaks to how dire things felt in the late 60's.  Ironically, it still feels about right:

It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a long time gone
And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Time, yes, a long, long, time before the dawn

"You Don't Have to Cry" has a special place for me because I used to sing it to my kid, even though when she was 3 she wasn't "thinkin' of telephones/And managers, and where you got to be at noon."  And then there's the last song, "49 Bye Byes," which will always be connected in my mind to a very specific time, the end of college, when I was pining for a girl who did not feel the same way about me, and listening to this song and just bumming out about it.  ("You better tell me baby/Who do you/Who do you love").  The song itself, one of the more rocking songs on the album, has a cool circular structure, so it keeps looping back on itself, perfect for a confused kid.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yeah, but lower probably.  This is like a 200's-300's album.

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