“Never played one note”: The CSNY songs Neil Young never played
While the harmonies laid down by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were as free and easy as the Californian skies that they sat beneath, the road they ran on was fuelled by a juxtaposed machine of personalities. Somehow blending oil and water, they chugged along with relative smoothness, covering up the firing pistons of conflict that lived beneath the bonnet.
It wasn’t always the case, of course. When it was just Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the alchemy of their voices blending together to make one unified three-part harmony was symbolic of the artistic harmony they discovered. Stephen Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash were in many ways unlikely collaborators and came from different backgrounds, but when they played together, those differences were welded together to make a sonic representation of the tapestry of life.
It was a skill Neil Young could accomplish on his own, however. With his solo work, he garnered a well-earned reputation as one of the leading voices of his generation, telling stories that coloured in the lines of life while consistently crafting melodies that awoke something deep in the soul of music fans. But if history has taught us anything, simply placing talent alongside talent doesn’t always work.
And while the prospect of introducing Young’s songwriting prowess to the fold brought with it obvious excitement, Graham Nash was full aware of the pitfalls. “I know Neil’s a decent writer and I know he’s a decent singer, but I’ve never met him” he once said, speaking of the proposition of his introduction to the band. He added, “I don’t know whether I can be his friend, whether I could tell him secrets, whether I could hang with him. I’ve got to meet this guy before we fucking invite him into this band.”
His reservations were warranted, for Young had a fairly uncompromising reputation, essentially acting as the antithesis of the original band’s communal spirit. But his history working with Stills in Buffalo Springfield negated many of the personality misgivings and Nash later recalled that upon having his meet-up request granted, he understood where Young’s contribution could help the band.
Whether you prefer it or not is merely subjective, but Young brought something more edgy to the band’s soundscape. Plugging in and turning it up, the band’s barefoot tip-toe through Laurel Canyon soon became a leather boot stomp through Hollywood Boulevard, which resulted in more scathing political takes like ‘Ohio’.
But that seminal protest track came a year after Young’s first project with the band, 1970’s Deja Vu. And according to Nash, his contribution wasn’t exactly seismic. In a recent appearance on the Rockonteurs podcast, he said, “We already had ‘Almost Cut My Hair’. We already had ‘Teach Your Children.’ We already had ‘Our House.’ We already had ‘4 + 20.’ We already had ‘Carry On.’ We only got two songs from Neil, and he never played one note or sang a note on ‘Teach Your Children’ or ‘Our House,’” Nash continued. “So in a way, the best thing that ever happened to CSN was Neil, and the worst thing that ever happened to CSN was Neil.”
Ultimately, Nash represented the polar end of the band’s spectrum to Young and maybe the inclusion of the Canadian represents the end of the original band line-up that only got a year to bask in its greatness. And so his take-off sentence is a rather democratic take on an age-old question in classic rock: was CSN better with or without the Y?
