Crosby, Stills & Nash – Carry On (1991)

Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN) were a folk rock supergroup made up of American singer-songwriters David Crosby and Stephen Stills, and English singer-songwriter Graham Nash. When joined by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young as a fourth member, they are called Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY). They are noted for their lasting influence on American music and culture, and for their intricate vocal harmonies, often tumultuous interpersonal relationships, and political activism.

CSN formed in 1968 shortly after Crosby, Stills and Nash performed together informally in July of that year, discovering they harmonized well. Crosby had been asked to leave the Byrds in late 1967, and Stills’ band Buffalo Springfield had broken up in early 1968; Nash left his band the Hollies in December, and by early 1969 the trio had signed a recording contract with Atlantic Records.

Their first album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, was released in May 1969, from which came two Top 40 hits, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (No. 21) and “Marrakesh Express” (No. 28). In order to tour the album, the trio hired drummer Dallas Taylor and session bassist Greg Reeves, though they still needed a keyboardist; Ahmet Ertegun suggested Neil Young, who had played with Stills in Buffalo Springfield, and after some initial reluctance, the trio agreed, signing him on as a full member. The band, now named Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, started their tour, and played their second gig at the Woodstock festival in the early morning hours of August 18, 1969. The first album with Young, Déjà Vu, reached number one in several international charts in 1970, and remains their best selling album, going on to sell over 8 million copies with three hit singles: “Woodstock”, “Teach Your Children”, and “Our House”. The group’s second tour, which produced the live double album 4 Way Street (1971), was fraught with arguments between Young and Taylor, which resulted in Taylor being replaced by John Barbata, and tensions with Stills, which resulted in his being temporarily dismissed from the band. At the end of the tour the band split up. The group have since reunited several times, sometimes with and sometimes without Young, and have released eight studio and four live albums.

Crosby, Stills & Nash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and all three members were also inducted for their work in other groups: Crosby for the Byrds; Stills for Buffalo Springfield; and Nash for the Hollies. Neil Young has also been inducted as a solo artist and as a member of Buffalo Springfield but not as a member of CSN. They have not made a group studio album since 1999’s Looking Forward, and have been inactive as a performing unit since the end of 2015. Whether or not this break is permanent remains to be seen, as the group has often been inactive for years at a time.

Carry On is the twelfth album by Crosby, Stills & Nash, issued on Atlantic Records in 1991, generally for the European and Australian markets. It is a two-disc sampler of their four-disc box set, CSN, released two months previously in the United States and the United Kingdom. It features material spanning 1968 through 1990 from their catalogue of recordings as a group in addition to selections from Crosby & Nash, Manassas, and their individual solo albums. It was reissued on 30 June 1998 on the WEA International record label. This compilation should not be confused with the Stephen Stills box set of the same name released in 2013.

Where the box set is a more comprehensive overview, this one focuses on previously unreleased tracks, hits, and favorites. Of its 36 tracks, 13 had been unreleased previously, and nine contain all of the group’s Top 40 hits from the Billboard Hot 100. The group’s some-time partner Neil Young appears on eight tracks, including his own songs “Helpless” and “Ohio”. The previously-unreleased material includes studio recordings by the full quartet of “Helplessly Hoping” (originally released by the trio), “Taken at All” (originally by Crosby & Nash), and “The Lee Shore” (previously available only live).[2] The set also includes both the demo of “You Don’t Have to Cry”, the first recording they made as Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the three tracks from their most recent studio album as of 1991 that are also on the box set.

The original recordings were produced David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, with assistance from Howard Albert, Ron Albert, Stanley Johnston, and Paul Rothchild. Audio engineers on the original recordings include Stephen Barncard, Larry Cox, Russ Gary, Don Gooch, Steve Gursky, Bill Halverson, David Hassinger, Andy Johns, and Jim Mitchell. The original masters were recorded at the following studios: Devonshire Sound Studio, Wally Heider Studios, The Record Plant, Rudy Recorders, the Sound Lab, Sunset Sound, Sunwest Studio, and Village Recorders in Los Angeles; United Studio in Hollywood; The Record Plant in New York City; Wally Heider Studios, His Master’s Wheels, and Rudy Recorders in San Francisco; Criteria Sound Studios in Miami; Island Studios in London; and Stephen Stills’ late 1960s home in Laurel Canyon. The selections were compiled for this set by Crosby, Stills, Nash, Gerry Tolman, and Yves Beauvais, with additional research by Joel Bernstein. (wikipeia)

This two-CD set, issued for the European and Australian markets, has proved among the most popular of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s imports since its release in 1998. Not as hefty, physically or monetarily, as the 1991 four-CD box, it limits itself to the group’s hits and popular and important LP cuts — many represented by outtake versions and alternate mixes — interspersed with popular tracks from the work of Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and David Crosby (solo and partnered together), and adds what is mostly the best of the previously unissued Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young material from the box. It’s a good survey of the trio’s best moments and the three members’ most effective solo outings, and presents their most appealing side — one assumes that a future Graham Nash compilation will include room for tracks like “I Used to Be a King” or “Military Madness” and that Crosby’s best stuff off of his first solo album will be compiled that way as well. The inclusion of Crosby’s 1968 version of “Guinevere,” the early alternate mix of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and a handful of additional outtakes that surfaced on the box are the places where the set departs from a standard best-of, but that departure is justified and welcome, separating this set from the So Far album, and anyone who didn’t spring for the four-CD set will be delighted. There are no notes, but none are needed either, and the only drawback for some will be the fact that the stuff isn’t presented in remotely chronological order. (by Bruce Eder)

Personnel:
David Crosby (vocals, guitar, keyboards)
Graham Nash (vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion)
Stephen Stills (vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion)
+
Neil Young (vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards)
*
guitar:
Joel Bernstein – Danny Kortchmar – Michael Landau – David Lindley – Michael Stergis –  James Taylor

bass:
Jack Casady – Tim Drummond – Bob Glaub – Bruce Palmer – George “Chocolate” Perry –  Greg Reeves – Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels – Leland Sklar

keyboards:
Richard T. Bear, – Joel Bernstein – Craig Doerge – Mike Finnigan – Paul Harris – James Newton Howard

drums:
John Barbata – Russ Kunkel – Dallas Taylor

percussion:
Michael Fisher – Joe Lala – Efrain Toro, Jeff Whittaker
+
Tony Beard (drum programming)
Cyrus Faryar (bouzouki)
Jerry Garcia (pedal steel-guitar)
Wayne Goodwin (fiddle)
Branford Marsalis (saxophone)
John Sebastian (harmonica, backround vocals)
Joe Vitale (drums, percussion, keyboards, synthesizers, vibraphone, flute)
+
background vocals:
Joel Bernstein – Rita Coolidge – Venetta Fields – Priscilla Jones – Clydie King – Sherlie Matthews – Dorothy Morrison – Timothy B. Schmit

Tracklist:

CD 1:
01. C S N & Y: Woodstock (Mitchell) (1969:**) 3.54
02. C S & N: Marrakesh Express (Nash) 2.36
03. C S & N: You Don’t Have To Cry (Stills) (1968:†) 2.41
04. CS N & Y:  Teach Your Children (Nash) )1969) 2.54
05. Stephen Stills: Love the One You’re With (Stills) (1970) 3.06
06. CS N & Y: Almost Cut My Hair (Crosby) (1970; †) 8,51
07. C S & N: Wooden Ships (Crosby/Kantner/Stills) 5.27
08. C S & N: Dark Star (Stills) (1983; *) 4.58
09. C S N & Y: Helpless (Young) (1969) 3.37
10. Graham Nash: Chicago/We Can Change The World (Nash) (1971) 4.00
11. C S & N: Cathedral (Nash) (1977) 5-28
12. Stephen Stills: 4+20 (Stills) (1969; **) 2.11
13. C S N & Y: Our House (Nash) 2.59
14. David Crosby & Graham Nash: To the Last Whale…” (Crosby/Nash) (1975) 5.31
15. Stephen Stills: Change Partners (Stills/Crosby) (1971) 3.16
16. C S & N: Just A Song Before I Go (1977) 2.14
17. C S N & Y: Ohio (non-album single) (Young) (1970) 3.06
18. C S & N: Wasted On The Way (Nash) (1981) 2.50
19. C S & N: Southern Cross (Stills/R.Curtis/M.Curtis) (1981) 4.39

CD 2:
01. C S & N: Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Stills) (1969; ** ) 7.29
02. C S N & Y: Carry On/Questions (Stills) (1969) 4.27
03. C S N & Y: Horses Through A Rainstorm (Nash/Reid) (1969; ‡) 3.39
04. Manassas: Johnny’s Garden (Stills) (1972) 2.47
05. David Crosby: Guinnevere (Crosby) (1968: †) 4.46
06. C S N & Y: Helplessly Hoping (Stills) (1969: †) 2.32
07. C S N & Y: The Lee Shore (Crosby) (1969; †) 5.30
08. C S N & Y: Taken At All (Nash/Crosby) (1976; † ) 2:54
09. C S & N: Shadow Captain (Crosby/Doerge) (1977) 4.33
10. C S & N: As I Come Of Age (Stills) (1981; †) 2.49
11. David Crosby: Drive My Car (Crosby) (1978; †) 3.51
12. Steve Stills & Graham Nash: Dear Mr. Fantasy (Winwood/Capaldi/Wood( (1980;‡) 7.04
13. C S & N: In My Dreams (Crosby) (1977) 5.12
14. C S & N: Yours And Mine (Crosby) (1990) 4.28
15. C S & N: Haven’t We Lost Enough? (Stills/Cronin) (1990) 3.07
16. C S & N: After The Dolphin (Nash) (1989) 4.54
17. C S N & Y: Find the Cost Of Freedom (B-side of the “Ohio” single) (Stills) (1970) 1.59

An asterisk (*) indicates a live recording, two asterisks (**) a previously unreleased mix, (†) a previously unreleased version, and (‡) a previously unreleased song.

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**

More from Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young):

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – So Far (1974)

So Far is the fourth album by Crosby, Stills & Nash, their third as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the first compilation album released by the group. Shipping as a gold record and peaking at #1 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, it was the band’s third chart-topping album in a row. It has been certified six times platinum by the RIAA, and is the second best-selling album by any configuration of the quartet in tandem after their 1970 studio album, Déjà Vu.

The album contains five of the band’s six singles to date, omitting “Marrakesh Express”, all of which had reached the Top 40. It is the first release on long-playing album of the single “Ohio” as well as its b-side “Find the Cost of Freedom”, and the only place both can be found on one compact disc. The other five tracks were taken from the band’s two studio albums, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Déjà Vu, although the other singles appear here in their album-length versions and mixes.

The album’s 11 studio tracks derived from a group that had only issued 22 to date. Graham Nash later insisted that the group was against the album’s release, calling the concoction of a greatest-hits album from two LPs and one non-LP single “absurd.” Atlantic Records wished to capitalize on the highly publicized and anticipated reunion tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1974, however, and such was the demand for any new product by the quartet that So Far topped the charts anyway and went gold immediately.

Young appears on only four of the album’s 11 songs: “Ohio”; “Find the Cost of Freedom”; “Woodstock”; and “Helpless.” He had only appeared on half the tracks of the Déjà Vu LP. The remaining songs without Young, with the exception of “Déjà Vu”, also appear on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Greatest Hits compact disc of 2005.

The cover art was painted by the group’s friend and colleague Joni Mitchell. The album was reissued on compact disc some time in the 1980s, and again on September 20, 1994, after being remastered by Joe Gastwirt at Ocean View Digital using the original master tapes. It was reissued yet again, with no apparent additional remastering, on September 30, 2008. The album has been rendered relatively superfluous with the appearance of the Crosby, Stills & Nash box set in 1991, which contains all of these tracks with the exceptions of “Helplessly Hoping,” “Woodstock,” “Guinnevere,” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which are in either different versions or different mixes. (by wikipedia)

Unbeknown to most fans, So Far was a stopgap release, undertaken by Atlantic Records in the absence of a new Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album to accompany the reunited quartet’s summer 1974 tour. At the time, the members thought it was ridiculous to release a greatest-hits/best-of compilation distilled down from two in-print LPs plus the single sides “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom”; but propelled by the publicity surrounding the group’s massive stadium tour (the first exclusive stadium tour ever done in rock), So Far topped the charts and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, all without containing so much as a single new note of music. Ironically, the quartet had been working on what would have been, by all accounts, the best album in their history; as with so many other projects attempted by the four-man lineup, however, that album fell apart halfway through, amid clashes of egos and creative differences, and so there was So Far. Taken on its own terms, the album manages to be both enjoyable and frustrating, as well as virtually obsolete in the 21st century — the Joni Mitchell cover art is cool, and the presence of “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom” makes it attractive (until the 1990s, So Far was the only album to contain both songs); and a case can be made that it contains some of the better moments from Crosby, Stills & Nash and Déjà Vu.

The problem is that those were two virtually perfect albums, and the idea of excerpting parts of them for a compilation makes no more sense than, say, excerpting the first two Beatles albums for a “best of” on that band. Further, it’s not even a true greatest-hits or best-of compilation, with “Marrakesh Express” not present. And it is difficult to imagine anyone who enjoys this disc not enjoying the two complete albums even more. So, essentially, owning So Far serves no purpose except to get “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom,” which are also on Carry On and the Crosby, Stills & Nash box, both of which offer a lot more, dollar for dollar and song for song. For those inclined to buy it, however, the 1994 reissue (Atlantic 82648) of So Far is to be preferred for sound quality over the earlier edition. (by Bruce Eder)

Music from a period, long time ago … but not forgotten !

Personnel:
David Crosby (vocals, guitar)
Graham Nash (vocals, piano on 07. + 08., guitar, tambourine on 04.)
Stephen Stills (vocals, guitar, piano on 01. + 09., organ on 03. + 07., bass on 01., 03., 04. + 11.)
Neil Young (guitar, vocals)
+
Johnny Barbata (drums on 05.)
Jerry Garcia (pedal steel guitar on 04.)
Greg Reeves (bass on 07. – 09.)
Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels (bass on 05.)
John Sebastian (harmonica on 01.)
Dallas Taylor (drums )

Tracklist:
01. Déjà Vu (Déjà Vu, 1970) (Crosby) 4.13
02. Helplessly Hoping  (Stills) 2.39
03. Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969) (Crosby/Stills/Kantner) 5.28
04. Teach Your Children (Déjà Vu, 1970) (Nash) 2.55
05. Ohio (non-album single, A-side, 1970) (Young) .05
06. Find The Cost Of Freedom (non-album single, B-side, 1970) (Stills) 1,58
07. Woodstock  (Déjà Vu, 1970) (Mitchell) 3.55
08. Our House (Déjà Vu, 1970) (Nash) 3.01
09. Helpless (Déjà Vu, 1970) (Young) 3.38
10. Guinnevere (Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969) (Crosby) 4.39
11. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969) (Stills) 7.26

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**

 

Crosby, Stills & Nash – Same (1969)

Crosby, Stills & Nash is the first album by Crosby, Stills & Nash, released in 1969 on the Atlantic Records label. It spawned two Top 40 hit singles, “Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which peaked respectively at #28 the week of August 23, 1969, and at #21 the week of December 6, 1969, on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The album itself peaked at #6 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart. It was certified four times platinum by the RIAA for sales of over 4,200,000.Crosby, Stills & Nash is the first album by Crosby, Stills & Nash, released in 1969 on the Atlantic Records label. It spawned two Top 40 hit singles, “Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which peaked respectively at #28 the week of August 23, 1969, and at #21 the week of December 6, 1969, on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The album itself peaked at #6 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart. It was certified four times platinum by the RIAA for sales of over 4,200,000.

The album was a very strong debut for the band, instantly lifting them to stardom. Along with the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and The Band’s Music from Big Pink of the previous year, it helped initiate a sea change in popular music away from the ruling late sixties aesthetic of bands playing blues-based rock music on loud guitars. Crosby, Stills & Nash presented a new wrinkle in building upon rock’s roots, utilizing folk, blues, and even jazz without specifically sounding like mere duplication. Not only blending voices, the three meshed their differing strengths, David Crosby for social commentary and atmospheric mood pieces, Stephen Stills for his diverse musical skills and for folding folk and country elements subtly into complex rock structures, and Graham Nash for his radio-friendly pop melodies, to create an amalgam of broad appeal.

The album features some of their best known songs: “Helplessly Hoping”, “Long Time Gone” (a response to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy), “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (composed for Judy Collins) and “Wooden Ships” (co-written with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane).
Stills dominated the recording of the album. Apart from drums, handled by Dallas Taylor, he played nearly all of the instruments on the album. Nash played acoustic guitar on two tracks and Crosby rhythm guitar on a few. Stills played all the bass, organ, and lead guitar parts, as well as acoustic guitar on his own songs. “The other guys won’t be offended when I say that one was my baby, and I kind of had the tracks in my head,” Stills said.

The singles:

David Crosby bristled over the plan for “Long Time Gone” as he thought he should at least play rhythm guitar on his own song. Stills convinced him to go home for a while and when he returned Crosby was won over by the music track that Stills and Taylor had recorded. In a more recent interview, Crosby contradicted his earlier statement, stating that he had played guitar on the track.

The group performed songs from the album at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. In late 1969 the group appeared on the Tom Jones TV show and performed “Long Time Gone” with Tom Jones sharing vocals.
This album proved very influential on many levels to the dominant popular music scene in America for much of the 1970s. The success of the album generated gravitas for the group within the industry, and galvanized interest in signing like acts, many of whom came under management and representation by the CSN team of Elliot Roberts and David Geffen. Strong sales, combined with the group’s emphasis on personal confession in its writing, paved the way for the success of the singer-songwriter movement of the early seventies. Their utilization of personal events in their material without resorting to subterfuge, their talents in vocal harmony, their cultivation of painstaking studio craft, as well as the Laurel Canyon ethos that surrounded the group and their associates, established an aesthetic for a number of acts that came to define the “California” sound of the ensuing decade, including the Eagles, Jackson Browne, post-1974 Fleetwood Mac, and others.

On the cover the members are, left to right, Nash, Stills, and Crosby, for no particular reason, the reverse of the order of the album title. The photo was taken by their friend and photographer Henry Diltz before they came up with a name for the group. They found an abandoned house with an old, battered sofa outside, located at 815 Palm Avenue, West Hollywood, across from the Santa Palm car wash that they thought would be a perfect fit for their image. A few days later they decided on the name “Crosby, Stills, and Nash”. To prevent confusion, they went back to the house a day or so later to re-shoot the cover in the correct order, but when they got there they found the house had been reduced to a pile of timber.

Dallas Taylor can be seen looking through the window of the door on the rear of the sleeve. In the expanded edition, however, he is absent. The original vinyl LP was released in a gatefold sleeve that depicted the band members in large fur parkas with a sunset in the background on the gatefold (shot in Big Bear, California), as well as the iconic cover art. A long folded page inside displayed the album credits, lyrics, track listing, as well as a quasi-psychedelic pencil drawing.

In a contemporary review, Rolling Stone critic Barry Franklin called Crosby, Stills & Nash “an eminently playable record” and “especially satisfying work”, finding the songwriting and vocal harmonies particularly exceptional. Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic in The Village Voice: “I have written elsewhere that this album is perfect, but that is not necessarily a compliment. Only Crosby’s vocal on ‘Long Time Gone’ saves it from a special castrati award.”

In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Crosby, Stills & Nash number 262 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. (by wikipedia)

The Crosby, Stills & Nash triumvirate shot to immediate superstardom with the release of its self-titled debut LP, a sparkling set immortalizing the group’s amazingly close, high harmonies. While elements of the record haven’t dated well — Nash’s Eastern-influenced musings on the hit “Marrakesh Express” now seem more than a little silly, while the antiwar sentiments of “Wooden Ships,” though well-intentioned, are rather hokey — the harmonies are absolutely timeless, and the best material remains rock-solid. Stills’ gorgeous opener, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” in particular, is an epic love song remarkable in its musical and emotional intricacy, Nash’s “Pre-Road Downs” is buoyant folk-pop underpinned by light psychedelic textures, and Crosby’s “Long Time Gone” remains a potent indictment of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. A definitive document of its era. (by by Jason Ankeny)

Personnel:
David Crosby (vocals, guitar)
Graham Nash (vocals, guitar)
Stephen Stills (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion)
+
Cass Elliot (background vocals on 05.)
Jim Gordon – drums on 02.)
Dallas Taylor (drums)

Tracklist:
01. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Stills) 7:25
02. Marrakesh Express (Nash) 2:39
03. Guinevere (Crosby) with Nash 4:40
04. You Don’t Have To Cry (Stills) Stills with Crosby & Nash 2:45
05. Pre-Road Downs (Nash) 3:01
06. Wooden Ships (Crosby/Kantner/Stills) 5:29
07. Lady Of The Island (Nash) 2:39
08. Helplessly Hoping (Stills) 2:41
09. Long Time Gone (Crosby) 4:17
10. 49 Bye-Byes (Stills) 5:16

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**

The story behind the song “Marrakesh Express”:

With 60s pop music going psychedelic, The Hollies’ Graham Nash wrote a song about the hippie trail in Morocco. But it had to wait till he teamed up with David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

By the late 60s, Morocco was fast becoming an essential stop-off point on the new hippie trail. It was a place frequented by seekers of all stripes, from travellers and the more adventurous tourists through to artists, writers, fashionistas and rock stars. They were all drawn by the exotica of this storied corner of North Africa, whose heady promise of spiritual enlightenment and hashish served to melt away the conventions of the West.

In 1966, Graham Nash made a pilgrimage of his own, one that sparked off one of his most famous songs. On holiday from his day job as leader of The Hollies, Nash bought himself a ticket and hopped aboard a train from Casablanca to Marrakesh. “I was in first class and there were a lot of older, rich American ladies in there, who all had their hair dyed blue,” Nash recalls today. “And I quickly grew bored of that and went back to the third class of the train. That was where it was all happening. There were lots of people cooking strange little meals on small wooden stoves and the place was full of chickens, pigs and goats. It was fabulous; the whole thing was fascinating.”

So rich was the experience that Nash poured it into a vivid piece of psychedelic pop: Marrakesh Express. Mellifluous, carefree and irresistibly catchy, the lyrics made reference to ‘animal carpet wall-to-wall’, ‘coloured cottons’ in the air and ‘charming cobras in the square’. But they also hinted at a vague sense of dissatisfaction with life, as if Nash was on some indefinable quest for something better. Particularly the lines: ‘Sweeping cobwebs from the edges of my mind/Had to get away to see what we could find.’

The song itself was written during The Hollies’ Yugoslavian tour of June 1967. It was one of a number of new tunes that showcased Nash’s outward growth as a songwriter as he attempted to steer The Hollies away from the confines of the singles market into the more lysergic, experimental realm of peers like The Beatles and The Byrds – though the rest of the band didn’t all share his vision. Initially reluctant to record Marrakesh Express _at all, The Hollies only got as far as cutting a backing track at Abbey Road in April 1968. Nash, who remembers that “it wasn’t very good”, explains that he’d written a bunch of similar songs at that point – among them _Lady Of The Island and Right Between The Eyes – which The Hollies weren’t moved by either.

It wasn’t just the tunes. Nash’s burgeoning interest in the counterculture and its lifestyle meant he was the only band member to embrace LSD and marijuana. Allied to the fact that King Midas In Reverse, one of his finest compositions, had only been a moderate hit, Nash sought a move away. “Yeah, it was obvious that my career with The Hollies was coming to an end,” he says.

Not that Nash hadn’t planned for the immediate future. On his first trip to LA with The Hollies, in June 1966, he’d been introduced to the Mamas & The Papas’ Cass Elliot, one of California’s leading scenesters. She in turn had introduced him to David Crosby, ace harmony singer and songwriter in The Byrds. “I’d been in a showbiz environment with The Hollies,” says Nash, “but Crosby and The Byrds weren’t like that. So there may have been a cultural difference, but there weren’t any musical differences with us. I knew he was serious as a heart attack about his music, that The Byrds were a great band and that the modal stuff I was attracted to in their music was mainly down to David. When Cass introduced us, it was instant friendship.”

Crosby and Nash would bump into each other regularly over the next couple of years and, by the summer of 1968, both men found themselves at a critical juncture in their respective careers. Ever the egotist, Crosby had been ousted from The Byrds less than 12 months earlier. And while Nash had already decided to quit The Hollies, Stephen Stills’ tenure in dynamic LA rockers Buffalo Springfield had also come to a close. Stills and Crosby had been jamming informally for months before Nash was invited into the fold. The rapport was sensational. Grounded by Stills’ masterful guitar playing and achieving lift-off with their gorgeous three-way harmonies, Crosby, Stills & Nash were suddenly a serious concern.

In November 1968, Nash officially left The Hollies, heading out to California and taking up temporary residence at Crosby’s place. When it came to selecting songs for their self-titled debut album, Nash revived Marrakesh Express. Easily the most ‘pop’ song in the CSN canon, it was recorded at Wally Heider’s LA studio in February ’69. Stills’ guitar races along at a clip, echoing the literal rush of Nash’s Casablanca train and imbuing the song with a wondrous sense of buoyant optimism. There’s a smattering of nonsensical wordplay to begin, before Nash begins to sing in his warmest tones, exhorting everyone to climb aboard. You can almost feel the sunset through the windows.

Issued in May 1969, the album marked out Crosby, Stills & Nash as America’s first great supergroup and provided the counterculture with its definitive soundtrack. Marrakesh Express was released as the lead-off single and made the Billboard Top 30. Over here it reached No.17 and remains the only UK Top 20 hit of CSN’s entire career. It’s a song that continues to run on in its creator’s heart.

“I thought it was a funny song when I wrote it,” says Nash. “It’s not the greatest song in the world, but people still really like it whenever we sing it live. Whenever we need a little light-hearted, uptempo thing, that’s what we reach for.”

NASH, CASH, BASH

The late 60s found country titan Johnny Cash at the very peak of his commercial fame, hosting a hit show on TV and scoring high with his celebrated live albums Johnny Cash At San Quentin and Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison. He also hosted regular gatherings with his songwriting chums at his home in Tennessee.

One night in January 1969, he invited Bob Dylan, Shel Silverstein, Joni Mitchell and Kris Kristofferson. “We’d have a big circle with people passing a guitar around,” recalls Kristofferson. “I remember Graham Nash there with Joni Mitchell and nobody knew who he was. We thought he was just Joni’s boyfriend. Then he picked up the guitar and sang Marrakesh Express. Man, he knocked everybody out with that song.” (by teamrock.com)