The 1969 song Crosby, Stills and Nash couldn’t create again: “We did not beat the first”
There’s no way of predicting what a band like Crosby, Stills and Nash were going to do when they debuted.
They were slowly outgrowing their individual bands, and even if they saw their supergroup as just an excuse to have a bit of fun in between their solo careers, they knew there was something special about the way that all of them sang together. But even when they were singing acapella in the studio, every member of the band knew the difference between a good take and a piece of magic that had been captured on the tape.
After all, every member had at least been aware of that kind of magic whenever they started working in their previous bands. Stephen Stills could probably feel the tingling on the back of his neck when hearing ‘For What It’s Worth’ for the first time, and even though David Crosby had his moments where The Byrds weren’t getting the sound that he wanted, there’s no one who was going to be complaining with what they did with ‘Eight Miles High’.
Every one of their individual bands had something new to offer, but Graham Nash was convinced that he could do better with his new friends. There was no way that ‘Marrakesh Express’ was going to be a hit with the rest of The Hollies, and if Crosby and Stills clicked with him from the minute that all of them harmonised on ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’ for the first time, it didn’t take long for them to start putting an album together.
But ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’ is still one of the most insane opening tracks that any of them could have hoped to make. Everyone was expecting something a little bit off the beaten path, but every single piece of the mix is well outside the parameters of pop songwriting. There was no way of thinking that a seven-minute song in a weird open tuning was going to become one of the biggest hits in the world, and yet those minutes seemed to fly by whenever anyone picked up that first record.
Most people were stunned at how well all of them worked together, but Crosby was more surprised that the band even got the song down at all. For a seven-minute epic, it’s not the most complicated tune in the world, but when trying to capture the spirit of the song, Crosby figured that they only had a small window to capture everything before they ended up with something that they were proud of.
The final track that we hear today wasn’t exactly perfect, but Crosby knew that kind of musical passion wasn’t going to happen again, saying, “When we got to the end of the record, we were listening back to everything, and Stephen said, ‘The song’s really good, but I think we can beat it.’”
Adding, “We said, ‘You’re crazy.’ But he was serious – ‘No, I think we can do it even better.’ So, over the course of two days, we recorded the entire seven minutes and 22 seconds of it over again. The entire thing, from scratch, another version. After we were done, we played them back, and we had to say, ‘Nope. We did not beat the first version.’ The first one had the mojo.”
Which makes sense considering the way that they performed the song live. There was no way of creating the clean harmonies that they had done in the studio, but hearing all of them playing together was a tough facsimile of what they could do. Nothing had changed about them, but the ambience in the studio was no longer there.
And since Neil Young wasn’t yet in the group to bring his rougher edge to the music, ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’ is the sound of CSN in their purest form. There was no instrument for any of them to hide behind, and after going through the wringer with their own projects, they were simply just a kickass folk rock band when they were left to their own devices in the studio.
