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Tonight's the night. No, this is not about that working man, Bruce Berry, to whom Neil Young said "Hello on Miami Beach." It's my deadline to use fifteen MP3 credits on my Napster account, which don't roll over month to month. Tomorrow, I get fifteen new credits and can dawdle over those for the next thirty days.
During my download jag, I went in search of "Carry On," the opening song on an album I remembered from my youth. You know the one, with the vintage sepia photo on the album cover and David Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair," Neil Young's "Country Girl Suite," as well as a version of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" among the tracks. To my flawed memory, that album was performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I ran an artist search of the Napster library and all I could find was the dirty live version from "Four-Way Street." No dice on the studio cut.
On a hunch, I searched under Crosby, Stills and Nash and found what I was looking for in one of several anthology albums the label (I think it was Atlantic Records back then) repackaged to boost their bottom line. Well, that was that, but it got me thinking about the original album, and why it didn't show in the search. Thinking further along, I started wondering about the collaboration between those particular musicians.
I'm not a musician, nor am I any kind of Rock historian, so you can take this all with a grain of salt and correct any mistakes in the comments section. Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I'll say that Crosby, Stills and Nash were all about melody and harmony, two things that Neil Young seemed averse to in his massive solo compendium.
Don't get me wrong; I am a big fan of Neil's. He lost me for a spell on the release of "Comes a Time", but got me back with "Rust Never Sleeps." I just like it better when he fronts Crazy Horse. I bought "Harvest" when it came out, but looking at the album now, the only cut I really enjoy is "Words (Between the Lines of Age)." Don't comment on that. I don't want to hear about "Needle and the Damage Done." Captain Hook could make a twelve-string guitar sound as good. The point is Neil Young is Neil Young when he's rocking those three chords and burning out guitar pickups … very unlike CS&N.
Comparing the trio with Neil Young is like comparing a river with a beaver dam. His method of constructing a musical piece is structural and obstructive, while the other three flowed in separate, complementary layers. The connection between Stills and Young, from their early days together as members of Buffalo Springfield, is probably what spurred the idea of Neil joining them, but it didn't last.
Later on, Stills and Young got together one more time, as The Stills-Young Band, but that didn't last either. One album … a couple of memorable cuts ("Long May You Run" and "Fontainebleau" were my favorites) and then they went back to Manassas and Crazy Horse respectively. After that, CS&N would get together between David Crosby's hitches in prison and the whole Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young episode turned into a musical cave painting, with only that awful live album to stand as proof that it even happened.
I'm listening to Neil close out "Like a Hurricane" right now and I can't think of anything as opposite as "Marrakesh Express" or "Wooden Ships." There was that one album, and many instances of other musical masters from different disciplines combining in memorable performances, but sometimes the collaborative instinct in musicians finds the music to be an undermining influence.
