The CSNY song Neil Young has always regretted: “We screwed up”
It’s hard to imagine that Neil Young has done much egregiously wrong in his career, and due to the fact that there are very few missteps in a vast recorded catalogue across several projects, it’s understandable that he’s managed to maintain the public perception that paints him as being relatively infallible. However, when things haven’t quite been up to scratch, Young himself is the first to admit that he’s underperformed or done something wrong.
He doesn’t exactly regret his time alongside David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash in the famed folk rock supergroup, even if it was a relatively short-lived initial run that was marred by disputes and clashes of personality between members. Their sole album before Young departed the group for the first time, Déjà Vu, is regularly cited as being not only one of CSN(&Y)’s best releases, but one of the finest things Young has ever contributed to in his career as well.
While this may be a landmark release in the history of folk rock, the band were also quite comfortable without Young’s presence, having released the self-titled Crosby, Stills and Nash only a year before in 1969 and made a similar impact. However, on one of the most beloved tracks on Déjà Vu, Young had plenty of gripes with the outcome of the recording, which he sees as being one of the biggest regrets of his time with the band.
It’s never easy performing a cover of a song in a completely different style, because despite all intents to make it your own, you’ll also be torn on how many of the original elements you want to retain in order to keep it recognisable and faithful to the original. When the group chose to record their own version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’, which she’d written in 1969 but not yet released as her own song, there were aspects that Young was keen to keep intact, and that he was disappointed to see scrapped during sessions.
The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young version of the track was the first to be released, beating Mitchell’s version that appeared on Ladies of the Canyon by a month. While her version that she’d been performing during live shows was a restrained and jazz-inflected folk song, the version that the foursome recorded was considerably more upbeat and rock-oriented.
Initially, Young was satisfied with how the recordings had gone and even went as far as to praise his bandmates for their individual contributions. “Stephen sang the shit out of it,” Young claimed of the original recording. “The track was magic.” However, he would then criticise Stills for a decision that ultimately tarnished the brilliance of his earlier performance. “Later on, they were in the studio nitpicking,” Young continued. “Sure enough, Stephen erased the vocal and put another one on that wasn’t nearly as good.”
“I didn’t realise until later on,” he concluded, “but when I heard the original vocal again, oh, we screwed up. We were trying to be good. We tried. Big bummer. Never should have done that.” While the version that’s known by audiences may not be as good as what Young heard Stills do in the studio, it’s one of the most definitive interpretations of the song, and remains loved by fans around the world.
