Listen to David Crosby and Graham Nash on an early demo for ‘Déjà Vu’
David Crosby and Graham Nash were unlikely friends. Sure, they notoriously don’t get along these days, but there was no guarantee that they would have any kind of connection when they first met in the late 1960s. Crosby was a freewheeling Californian with loose morals and even looser compositions, while Nash was an organised Englishman who favoured hooks and simplicity in his writing.
But as the Laurel Canyon scene began to coalesce around them, the two casual friends who originally met when The Byrds and The Hollies shared tour dates began to hang out more often, frequently strumming acoustic guitars when visiting each other’s houses and running into each other at parties thrown by Cass Elliot and Joni Mitchell. At one of these particular parties, the duo was joined by a mutual friend, former Buffalo Springfield singer Stephen Stills, and the beginnings of Crosby, Stills, and Nash were in place.
But even before that fateful first meeting, Crosby was working on a composition that he had written with odd changes and heady lyrical imagery. It was through an open tuning that Crosby had stumbled upon which led to a creative breakthrough. “Once you start changing the tunings, anything is possible,” Crosby is quoted as saying in the video below. “Two of my best songs came from that same tuning. ‘Déjà Vu’ is the more adventuresome one.”
That particular tuning is E-B-D-G-A-D, or open Em11. Crosby used the same tuning for the track ‘Guinnevere’ on CSN’s debut album, but he decided to hold off on recording ‘Déjà Vu’ until the time was right. By the time the group reached their second album, they had brought Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young into the fold, and Crosby felt that it was the perfect time to take on ‘Déjà Vu’.
Crosby wanted the group to play the entire composition the full way through, including the difficult transitions that are interspersed throughout. “We played that fucker for nine hours straight or something like that,” Stills recalled. But the effort was worth it: ‘Déjà Vu’ was the album’s mystical centrepiece, putting forth themes of reincarnation and confusion that were emblematic of Crosby’s more spiritual side.
“I don’t believe in God, but I think the Buddhists got it right… we do recycle,” Crosby explains. “It feels right to sing. I completely believe it, so I can sing the shit out of it.”
Listen to Crosby and Nash on the song’s original demo down below.
