CSNY “American Dream”
Why, America? Why?
In the early 80s, during the spring of Classic Rock radio in America, Steve Miller Band and Kansas cassettes were doled out to pre-teens as board-approved listening. One important notch up from those hitmakers were greatest hits compilations from certified legends like The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers. But if you were especially refined in your tastes and diligent in your consumption, you could reach the Mount Rushmore of American Rock. Atop that peak sat bands like CCR, The Doors and CSNY. Or sometimes just “CSN.” Yes -- it was confusing. But it was unequivocal. Our Boomer parents had spoken. There was a hierarchy and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were held up in the most rarified air.
There were many more important artists born into and out from the counterculture in America. There was, of course, Dylan. We had Soul music -- Aretha, Marvin and Motown. We had Sly and the Family Stone. We had James Brown. We had Simon & Garfunkel. We had Jimi Hendrix. And, while they may not have been cool or politicized, we had Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. Rock bands, however, are a different thing. At their best, they could represent utopian idealism in a way that a solo artist cannot.
America at the end of the 1960s -- Woodstock, Vietnam, Manson, Martin Luther King -- signified something so huge, iconoclastic and generational. And yet, in retrospect, the greatest of the American Rock bands from that era were more important than they were objectively great. England had The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and The Kinks. That’s a Mount Rushmore. That’s, perhaps, the Mount Rushmore. America’s version was, by comparison, contrived and, maybe a little sad. Our bands were perfectly good. Occasionally great. But we so desperately wanted them to mean more. To be greater. To be more important. Why, America? Why?
Of those iconic American bands from the late 60s, none was more curious than Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. For one thing, CSNY is only half American. Neil is, of course, Canadian. Graham Nash is English. Additionally, CSNY was barely a 60s band, forming in 1968 and adding the Y in 1969. But, perhaps most curiously, is the band’s recorded output, which suffers in both quantity and quality. As a trio, the group mustered five albums over thirty years. As a quartet, they produced only three. In their first run, they made a fine eponymous debut, a superior follow-up (“Déjà Vu”) and then imploded just in time to rush out a famous live album (“4 Way Street”) and a premature greatest hits compilation. CSNY was canonized on the basis of two studio albums. And, not just canonized, but lionized. As a child, we knew no better. The band’s instruction to “Teach Your Children Well” was prophetic and quite literal. We were taught to love them. Because Mom and Dad said so. But, now fifty years removed from their debut, the fallacy of this conspiracy is unmistakable. What did so many Americans have at stake with CSNY? Why did they need to matter so much? What did we all have to gain and lose?
While those not-rhetorical questions hang for a moment, let me press pause on snark and just state emphatically: I believe that CSNY was, at one time, a great band. That moment may have been brief but the magic was not all sleight of hand. There is something undeniable in the combination of Nash’s gentle Pop with Stills’ heavy-but-clean Blues, Crosby’s ragged Folk and Neil’s singular voice and tone. Their three part harmonies are genuinely, and consistently, beautiful. And, once upon a time, the members not named “Neil Young” could write songs. “Wooden Ships,” “Suite Judy Blue Eyes,” “Carry On,” and “Our House” are all elite performances. Even “Almost Cut My Hair,” the rare Crosby stand-out, is elevated by his bandmates. Between 1969 and 1971, CSNY was something.
There’s also the matter of their politics. CSNY is thought of as standing on the right side of history. Neil Young was the iconoclast who wrote “Ohio,” in a righteous fever. Stephen Stills wrote the anti-war anthem, “For What It’s Worth.” And David Crosby was the charming, outspoken Hippie poster boy who extolled freedom of all makes, but especially those of Love and recreational drug use. Collectively, they cut the image of the counterculture, on the brink of both triumph and dissolution. One part of me loves what the group represented and the beliefs that inspired their art. Another part of me knows that they were each very flawed men, prone to pettiness, ego and the consequences of too much freedom.
As good as they briefly were, CSNY was ultimately a series of fits and starts. At their very best, they were a more interesting, more cerebral and more technically deft version of The Grateful Dead. However, even on the sunniest of days, on their very best albums, they were less inspiring than perhaps their closest comparable -- The Band. CSNY does not have a song cycle approximating “Music From the Big Pink,” or The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” or even Love’s “Forever Changes.” Musically -- as in the music that they released -- CSNY were never the very best at what they did. Symbolically, CSNY were not Dylan. They were not The Velvet Underground. If CSNY were all English, they’d be waiting in line between Traffic and Blind Faith. For decades, here in America, they buckled while they regressed creatively. Whereas The Dead, at least, survived for over three decades CSNY could not survive three years without breaking up. Their feuds and the “what ifs” are no doubt a large part of their myth, but their legacy far outweighs the breadth and depth of their oeuvre. As recently as the 1980s their discography was still deemed high art and in the 2000s their tour filled stadiums.
Some of this oversized reputation is, of course, a product not of the band per se but of the men in the band -- their solo careers, their potential and their individual soap operas. Neil Young evolved to become the titan of the quartet. He was also the final addition to the band and the first to exit. His voice and his guitar tone were not obvious fits for CSN, but he was a necessary counterbalance to Crosby and Nash’s softness and to Stills’ virtuosity. It goes without saying that a major factor in CSNY’s enduring legacy is the intermittent presence of Neil Young.
Stephen Stills is the next most salient ingredient. When he joined CSN, Stills was already superstar. He wrote and sung “For What It’s Worth” with Buffalo Springfield when he was just twenty-one. And, in 1970 and 1971, he released two top ten solo albums, one of which included the smash hit “Love The One You’re With.” In CSN, Stills was dubbed “Captain Manyhands,” for his ability to play any part in any song. In contrast to Nash and Crosby, who were great singers and competent dabblers, Stills was something of a prodigy. Moreover, his career functionally stalled in the late-70s and then regressed almost to the point of popular irrelevance by the late 1980s. Part of it was the drugs. Part of it was an apparent loss of muse. But, taken as a whole, Stills represents one of Rock’s great “what if” stories.
Unlike Young and Stills, Graham Nash was far less musically daring. Nash could write lovely, almost quaint, Pop songs and ballads. His voice was gentle, but with character. And he was a genius with harmonies. And while those harmonies are a dominant feature in CSNY, they do not, unto themselves, make a great song or a great band. CSNY was not a barbershop quartet. And, frankly, when they sounded like one, they were hardly interesting. Nash was a major force in the band, in part, because of his reliability and decency. He was never too high or too low. But, in his songs for CSNY and in his solo career we hear a pleasant, but middling, writer with a lovely voice. The reunions of CSNY can be attributed, in part, to Nash’s kindness rather than his unique musicality.
And that, of course, leaves David Crosby. Croz is among the most confounding figures in the story of 60s Rock. He had pedigree, having played with and been fired from The Byrds. He was an L.A. original, seemingly always knowing where drugs and girls could be found. And he had the look, with his mustache and wild hair. He had a lovely voice. But, then again, so did thousands of less famous men. What David Crosby had, perhaps as much as any American Rock star from that era, was the ability to get attention. Whether it was through the people he knew, his political positions, the provocations he made, the drugs that he consumed or the tantrums that he threw, David Crosby had an outsized persona. This skill was in no way matched with his talents as a player or songwriter. Between 1971 and 1989, Crosby released two solo albums -- one of them passable and the other less so. In between, he broke up bands, broke up marriages, got arrested, nearly died, got sober and was resurrected, only to infuriate his CSNY bandmates time and again. Unlike Stephen Stills, Crosby is not a “what if” story. He is a “how did that happen” story?
Perhaps more than any of its members, the mythification of CSNY can be tracked back to their manager and record label founder, David Geffen. A brilliant and ruthless music business tactician, Geffen invented a Pop product that, previously, Bob Dylan had only implied. This product was “the artist.” Geffen’s clients were not bands or groups so much as they were “artists.” They were treated accordingly. They were marketed accordingly. Bands received unprecedented accommodations. Their members could get their own solo contracts and advanced in addition to the deals they struck as a group. Sometimes the work of his artists was genuinely inspired. Often, it was not quite that. But it didn’t matter. David Geffen sold a generation on the archetype of Bob Dylan and the notion that magical artistry could be conjured and mass produced. David may well have believed this lie. Regardless of how mercenary he was in business, there was something idealistic in his motives, as well. What survives fifty years later is less the question Geffen’s sincerity and more the efficacy of the claim. American Boomers believed it. Deeply. And they shared the idea with their kids. Bands, and especially their bands, were great artists. They taught their children well.
CSNY arrived at the very moment when the Hippie promise was at stake. Would their generation’s legacy be the end of Vietnam and the birth of Civil Rights? Or would it be Altamont, Manson and a two decade hangover? In the beginning of 1968, the counterculture was still dreaming of rainbows and flowers. However, by the end of 1969, the dark was approaching. CSNY represented a generation holding its breathe before sunset. It was a breathe that was briefly healing. It was a breathe that soon became most irregular. It was a breathe that sounded more like a cough for most of the 1970s. And, by 1988, it was just the faintest of breaths. It was not literally the end. But it certainly sounded like a last gasp.
Whatever its origin or its promise, the myth of CSNY functionally died on November 1, 1988 with the release of “American Dream.” “American Dream” is just the second studio album recorded with all four members. It was an album that, for nearly two decades, fans desperately hoped for but feared would never come. It arrived seven years after CSN’s last, unexpected hit single, “Southern Cross.” That song, which imagines a constellation of stars high above Stephen Stills’ luxurious sailboat, did not feature Neil Young or David Crosby. However, it did keep the band’s fading heartbeat alive. In the years that followed, David Crosby bottomed out, culminating in a 1985 prison stint. While Crosby tried to put one foot in front of the next, Neil Young promised him that he’d reconvene CSNY if Crosby could stay clean. Years later, with Crosby out of prison but in failing health, Neil Young made good on his word. It was the right decision. It may have been the only decision. But, for the band and their fans, it was not a good creative decision.
“American Dream” was recorded over the course of a year, in between solo albums and personal obligations. As a result, it has the feel of a patchwork record, the sum of misfit ideas that did not make sense for the respective solo artists. Neil Young is the nominal hero of an album that is frequently weighed down by the tepid songwriting and cloying politics of the other three quarters. CSN no longer serve Young’s music. They burden it with Stills’ penchant for synthesizers and vocals that are soft where Neil should be ragged and rusted. When the songs get into trouble, which is frequently, Nash and Crosby push a giant, three part harmony button. When the middle-aged men sing about love, they sound like divorcees. When they sing about politics, they sound insincere. And when they sing about the plight of the poor, they sound smug. “American Dream” is not a Hippie fantasy. It’s when the sober listeners who were left realized that the dream may have actually been a nightmare all along; and that their heroes may have always been Yuppies at heart.
Hanging over “American Dream” is the sense that Young is the band’s golden goose who was being asked to sustain the others creatively and financially. Crosby certainly needed the latter, while Nash and Stills had not sniffed musical greatness in roughly a decade. And, true to form, Neil wrote four of the fourteen songs on the album alone and co-wrote three more with Stills. Of Neil’s songs, “Name of Love” and “Feel Your Love,” stand tall. Both are familiar, bittersweet tracks that would fit in admirably on “Harvest Moon” if only his bandmates would kindly exit. “Name of Love” is more jaunty while “Feel Your Love” has more twang. On both, CSN insist on big, saccharine harmonies in an effort to dress up something that sounds better naked.
On the title track, also written by Neil, the singer considers the corruption of the American dream by Reagan-era celebrity charlatans. The song features several snapshots from these stories, delivered over a slight bass line and a whistling woodwind that is probably a synthesizer. It’s a song that is steeped with the same half-baked political wit from Neil’s “This Note’s For You,” released that same year. Although it was a nominally successful, “American Dream” did not make it onto Neil’s solo album. And there is good reason for it -- it’s lightweight, unsubtle and kind of annoying.
“This Old House” is Neil’s update to Nash’s “Our House,” nearly two decades later. Its chorus harmonies are gargantuan and, frankly, quite beautiful. And yet there is something not quite right sincere about the story of a family who has their house taken away by the Man from the bank. While there is something nostalgic and delightful in it, it also sounds unfathomable that four men who live in multiple mansions pretend to not understand how mortgages work. I can stomach it from Bernie Sanders and I greatly admire Neil Young, however, there is a hollowness to the sentiment that gets in the way of what might be the album’s best song.
As was his custom, Stephen Stills filled songs in with sharp, bluesy guitar and wonky synthesizer. Without Stills, CSN was barely a band. In 1988, with him, they had a past prime, alpha male who liked to race speed boats and tinker with new sounds. After the age of twenty-five, Captain Manyhands searched tirelessly and unsuccessfully for another great song. On “American Dream,” he plays admirably as a utility man and Neil’s sometimes accomplice. But, when he tries to stand alone, he stumbles.
On “Got It Made,” he coerces Neil to join him for a weird, breezy, synth-heavy indictment of smugness, coming from a singer who may not be the most credible of judges. On “Drivin’ Thunder,” Stills finds something of a heavy groove in a big Country Blues number about driving fast, giving it to the man and never, ever, going back to driving school. It’s a competent, bar band Rocker, the sort of thing you might expect from Bruce Willis at the Hard Rock Cafe, not from one of the most famous artists of his generation. Together again for the album’s finale, “Night Song,” Stills and Young almost manage to locate some “feel.” Stills sounds dark and the song has a bottom, something that Nash and Crosby seem allergic to. It’s by no means a great song, but the album closes stronger than it opens. As farewells go, it’s not half bad.
In between, we get a couple servings from Nash, which function as palette cleansers, and a couple from Crosby, which function as a reminder of what great music does not sound like. Nash’s songs are notable for their ease and softness. “Clear Blue Skies” feels like an obligatory ballad for the environment and “Don’t Say Goodbye” is similarly paced, though decorated with more strings. Both songs are tender and plaintive and just a tick shy of Air Supply. They do almost nothing to add or subtract from the album’s overall pleasure but do remind us that, left to his own devices, Graham Nash made pretty, but middling, AM radio fare.
“American Dream’s” low points are, unsurprisingly, the David Crosby tracks. It’s hard not to sympathize with the stalwart Hippie. He was sober, newly married, out of jail and in poor health at the time of this album. And, in spite of everything he has said and done, and everything he has allegedly said and done, Crosby still has his charm. Unfortunately, charm is not an essential skill for songwriting. On “Nighttime for the Generals,” Croz imagines a secret cabal of generals, bankers, CIA and congressmen plotting an assault on our freedoms. Over some very 80s synth, some serious Stills’ guitar and a plodding bottom, Crosby unconvincingly plays frontman. The politics sound contrived and dated, even from the lens of 1988. It’s a par performance on a sub-par song. And yet, it’s the best Crosby had to offer the album. His other track, “Compass,” is just a meandering tone poem. It features literally no rhythm or discernible melody. Van Morrison could possibly pull off the trick if he were singing about silence or the mystic or an inner growl. Crosby, however, is singing quite literally about his pain and the woes of being lost in middle age. There is a sad moan to it all, from a man who was literally ill at the time. Alas, “Compass” points to why Crosby never released much solo music. It was not because he was high or in jail or busy playing a supporting role. It was because he was not good at writing songs.
At fourteen songs and nearly an hour, “American Dream” was a product of its time -- an era when expensive compact discs demanded more material and when the overindulgences of famous men were celebrated. On the basis of nostalgia and blind indoctrination, the album went platinum, in spite of its generally terrible reviews. It was another could have been happy-ish ending for a group of men that could barely stand each other. CSNY broke up again after “American Dream.” They quickly went their separate ways, denying fans of a stadium tour.
Years later, CSN would make two more albums together, mostly out of necessity. In 1999, Neil would return for one last CSNY album and a victory lap tour that was a quarter century in the making. A generation of true believers filled stadiums in dozens of cities around the country. The rake was huge. And so, in 2006 they did it all over again.
By 2019, all of the members of CSNY had divorced the women that they had dedicated “American Dream” to. All, that is, except for David Crosby. For his part, Crosby found a shallow well of inspiration, making a handful of really mediocre solo albums, staying married, starring in his own documentary film and managing to deeply insult all of his bandmates. That year, Graham Nash, the most genteel member of CSNY and Crosby’s number one apologist, confirmed that none of his bandmates were speaking with Croz.
Boomers and the children of Boomers: be free. Nearly thirty years after “American Dream,” it is much easier to deconstruct the myth of CSNY. Some of the underlying structure was Geffen. Some of it was the promise of the men. Some of it was the stakes of the generation. And, yes, some of it was the music. But most of it was not the music. If you want that, head back to Dylan, or Marvin, or Aretha, or The Beatles, or The Stones, or The Who, or The Kinks, or The Velvets, or Love, or Sly, or Credence, or (can’t believe I am writing this, but) The Doors, or the dozens of other bands from the era who may be less famous or less intriguing but who made greater music.