Indeed, it took both representatives to free Crosby from his Byrds deal with Columbia and negotiate with Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. “We needed somebody sharky,” said Crosby of the latter. They were also business-minded enough to make sure that they had proper management and live representation in the form of Joni Mitchell/Neil Young hip-executive Elliot Roberts and slick operator David Geffen. This eureka moment, combined with their genuine camaraderie, carried the band through the end of 1968 and into recording their debut for Reprise in 1969. It delighted us.” “It was one of those moments,” reflected Stills. “We had been in bands where we had done two-part harmony and some three-part, but there was nothing like the mix that happened when the three of us sang. It sounded great… I had by then a rough idea of what my part would be… When we heard ourselves for the first time, it was truly astounding that these three people from such diverse backgrounds can meld and come together with that sound.” “We just knew that it was good,” says Crosby in the same notes. In the liner notes to the CSN boxset, Nash recalls: “Me being a harmony freak and being the high harmony in The Hollies, when David and Stephen were singing You Don’t Have To Cry, they were singing the two parts and they started to show off because they wanted to show me that they had worked on it very diligently. The trio became immediate friends, but the moment of epiphany took a few weeks. Sacked from The Byrds because of his bad attitude, David Crosby was now collaborating with Stephen Stills, who in May 1968 had just dissolved Buffalo Springfield. In a feature he wrote for the Daily Mail in 2013, Nash described meeting Crosby and Stills: “they were refugees, like me, from successful, broken bands”. While touring the US with Mancunian moptops The Hollies, Nash, already feeling restricted by the pop format, had fallen in love with the burgeoning West Coast counterculture. To understand how Déjà Vu was made, it’s crucial to look at the nature of the CSN sound and how it came about. Now, 50 years since its release, is Déjà Vu just an old hippy relic or a true counterculture classic? But is a harmonious studio atmosphere mandatory for a great record? Surely, many of the greatest albums were created by artists who weren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye – think Abbey Road, Rumours, Never Mind The Bollocks… or The Wall. Talking to Robert Sandall for a Q feature in 1992, Nash was trying to sum up the fractured and competitive relationship between the four members of the folk-rock supergroup. Graham Nash’s perspective on the eight million-selling second album he made with David Crosby, Stephen Stills plus new addition Neil Young was always going to be biased. By the time of Déjà Vu that had all turned to shit.” “W hen we did our first CSN record, we were very much in love with each other and each other’s music. Hippy relic created by four warring egos or a timeless Americana classic? Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s second album sold by the bucketload, yet 50 years on it still continues to divide opinion.
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