“The world fucking changed”: The first song that Crosby, Stills and Nash played together
I still remember the first time I heard the Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonies. In my family house, there was a compilation CD boasting all the big names: Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell. Nestled between were the three names together and a song labelled ‘Helplessly Hoping’. Curious about the title and the band name, I played the song and subsequently changed the course of my listening habits forever.
Their voices were a gateway into the sun-drenched hills of Laurel Canyon, where my musical heart has since lay. Despite my deeply cynical nature, it’s a time in life I’m wholeheartedly willing to idealise without any stipulations. Yes, there were dark societal clouds looming in the Californian distance, but as far as I am concerned, in the magic hills of that sacred canyon lived the finest musical minds we have had the privilege of enjoying.
So for my own sanity, I wish rumours of the canyon’s bleaker reality would come to the surface, but unsurprisingly, they never have. A rich community of free and easy musicians were tangled up in relatively lighthearted love triangles while making music was, by all accounts, as good as it sounded. Especially for a hardened Brit like Graham Nash, who must have been counting his lucky stars to have found himself in the fruitful pits of music’s greatest community.
But it was the soaring tone of Blackpool’s favourite son that joined this harmonious band of brothers. Visiting his girlfriend Joni Mitchell, in Lauren Canyon in 1968, Nash heard the budding harmonies of two male voices: Stephen Stills and David Crosby. While his initial curiosity was fuelled by the presence of two men at his girlfriend’s house, fate soon intervened.
“I wasn’t happy about that, but it was David and Stephen. They were having dinner with Joni. At one point, David goes: ‘Hey, Stephen, play Willy [Nash’s nickname] that song we were just doing’, and they were doing a song called ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’. I say: ‘It’s a great song—play it again’. They play it again. I say: ‘That’s really a great song—do me a favour and play it one more time’, and the third time I added my high harmony and the world fucking changed from that moment. And that’s what Joni was the only witness to.”
There’s a subtle irony that the greatest three-part harmony came from an initial feeling of dissonance, a sense of anger towards these unknown voices with the potential to upset Nash’s domesticity. There’s even more irony in the fact that any of Nash’s frustrations were tempered by nothing more than the medium of song, for when these three finally joined forces and released their first album, that was the very intent of their music.
It was a peaceful and hopeful antidote to a more global sense of frustration. A pocket of sunshine taken from the hills of Lauren Canyon, and shone on darker corners of the world, with earnest advices on not crying, doing well for others and teaching children well.
