The solo careers of Crosby, Stills and Nash begin

The CSN trio was really well-assorted: the Englishman Nash was the ecologist hippy a bit naïve, Crosby was the psychedelic and Stills was the rock-blues guitarist. And it was evident in the three solo debut albums – of Young’s career we had already talked about – which came on the wave of Déjà vu’s great success, with this one by Stills who was the first to come out.

 

The group would soon break up – 4 way street will come out posthumously – and Stephen had decided to buy a house in London, formerly Ringo Starr’s, to stay away from trouble and gossip. Once there, of course, he didn’t stop playing, and as he got into the world of music, he started to record this record. Who were his friends? To begin with, in “Go back home” the soloist is Clapton and in “Old Times Good Times” even Jimi Hendrix, to whom the album is dedicated, having disappeared before its release. And when he came back to the USA there were others waiting for him: David Crosby and Graham Nash (Young at the time, not at all), Booker T. Jones, John Barbata and Dallas Taylor… The result is an album that, as we used to say, is quite linked to its characteristics, but in the end not so far away, for example, from Déjà vu: from the opening track that we’ll see again on 4 way street, to the sweet Do for the others dedicated to Crosby’s missing wife, to electric blues, gospel… so much stuff!

 

Curiosity: but what is a giraffe doing on the cover, in a snowy landscape? “Cherchez la femme!”: he never confirmed it, but it seems that it was a present from Rita Coolidge, who, as we had already seen, broke up with him to get in with Nash. The photographer, the famous Henry Diltz, did not want to even know about it, but he was inflexible…

 

 

Translated by Edoardo Graziani, Andrei Aldea and Sara Francesca