“Such a human song”: the CSNY track Stephen Stills said always stood alone
With Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in their ranks, Traveling Wilburys was probably the most star-studded supergroup of all time. However, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young gave them a run for their money when it came to quality music and longevity. Though they became more prominent than the sum of their parts, the four members joined following successful endeavours throughout the mid-1960s.
Graham Nash was an Englishman who found fame as a co-founding member of The Hollies. Meanwhile, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young and his American companion Stephen Stills made significant tracks as members of Buffalo Springfield. Though the band is best known for the 1966 single ‘For What It’s Worth’, they were far from one-hit-wonders, with a healthy back catalogue well worth checking out. The final corner of the square was filled by David Crosby, who joined the supergroup after a successful stint playing with The Byrds.
With a successful solo career underway by the late 1960s, Young was absent for much of the band’s history, necessitating the truncated name Crosby, Stills & Nash. Despite Young’s limited contributions to the supergroup, he was deeply involved in their most prominent masterpiece, Déjà Vu. A monumental moment in the folk-rock movement, this album was home to memorable tracks written by all four members and even a beautiful cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.
Neil Young contributed two solo credits to the album and also received a co-writing credit for ‘Everybody I Love You’. Speaking to Rolling Stone in a 1970 interview in promotion of Déjà Vu, Young discussed how he preferred to record his songs all in one go, like a live performance, rather than separating vocal and instrumental tracks. “My two songs, ‘Helpless’ and ‘Country Girl’, I did the lead vocal while I was playing, all at the same time, so the drums and bass, guitar and piano were all going at once, and I was singing the lead, so my things sound different, from overdubbing.”
During the sessions, Young noticed a kindred spirit in Crosby, who also liked to record all at once. “That’s the way I like to do it, and David likes to do it that way too, ’cause he likes to get off, he really likes to get off,” he said. “One of David’s songs, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ – yeah, that’s the name of the song – there’s gonna be a lot of reaction to that song”.
‘Almost Cut My Hair’ was one of Young’s favourite songs on the album and, as far as he was concerned, the peak of Crosby’s writing. “It’s really Crosby at what I think is his best. It’s like all live, three guitars, bass, organ and drums, and it’s all live, and there are no overdubs, one vocal and the vocal was sung live – we did it in San Francisco at Wally Heider’s.” The Canadian loved the jam-like qualities of the recording. The song’s prominent use of distorted electric guitar riffs would feature prominently in Young’s subsequent work with Crazy Horse.
Young and supposedly Crosby weren’t quite so enthusiastic about some of the other songs on the album that the band recorded in multiple takes with overdubs. “Then there’s the other way of recording, which is the way they recorded their first album [1969’s Crosby, Stills & Nash]. And on this second album, there are about five songs that sound sort of like the first album.”
One song everyone seemed besotted with, however, was ‘4 + 20’. The two-minute track was written by Stills, who recorded a one-take demo with just his vocals and a guitar. Like Young, his former Buffalo Springfield bandmate, he was saving some of his songwriting attempts for his solo endeavours. However, when he showed the song to the other three, they persuaded him to include it in Déjà Vu. After agreeing to make it a CSNY song, Stills asked Crosby and Nash to sing harmony parts, but they refused. “They told me they wouldn’t touch it,” Stills recalled. “So it always stood alone.”
The song is short yet powerful, documenting the poignant path of “an 84-year-old poverty-stricken man who started and finished with nothing,” as Stills explained in the CSN box set liner notes. Given famous pothead Crosby’s association with the song and its hippie-era release, many fans assume the song’s title pertains to the celebratory day for marijuana on 4/20. The true meaning is much more innocent: it refers to the famous ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ line.
Discussing Stills’ songwriting effort in David Browne’s 2019 book Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nash noted how Stills’ original take framed the story of the old man perfectly. Allegedly, Stills tried to record a second take to correct the unintentional gulp between the words “I” and “embrace”. However, Nash and Crosby vouched for the original version with the gulp. “It was so human and on such a human song,” Nash said. “We convinced Stephen to use the first take.”
