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As though from some cobwebbed corner of your memory, these Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young tunes emerge as an instantly recognizable memory. The harmonies could belong to no other than this inimitable sixties and seventies band, acoustical as it gets, tightly harmonic as any folk or Rock & Roll voices could possibly become intertwined.
This compilation is a bit of a disordered mosaic, but who cares? CSN&Y are at their best with the haunting sounds of ‘Helplessly Hoping’:
Wordlessly watching he waits by the window
And wonders
At the empty place insideHeartlessly helping himself to her bad dreams he worries
Did he
hear a good-bye, or even
Hello
Assonance helps itself to tonalities that no other quartet of male human beings could replicate.
It is the spareness of this music that strikes one in retrospect. Ornamentation is absent. They don’t do all that they could with their voices. They simply do enough to engage the soul and, of course, the memory.
Love isn’t lying, it’s
Loose in a lady who lingers
Saying she is lost
And choking on
Hello
One of CSN&Y’s most winsome tunes is the odd tale of happiness that makes it into the canonical memory, an instrument much more receptive to angst, loss, and woe. But who can forget:
I’ll light the fire
You place the flowers in the vase
That you bought todayStaring at the fire
For hours and hours
While I listen to you
Play your love songs
All night long for me
Only for me …Our house is a very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
‘Cause of you
These guys must have known a tune like this couldn’t possibly sell, would instantly be dismissed as musical cotton candy, and would leave their reputation as a thoughtful band besmirched.
Yet they released it anyway, and it went and became permanently hummable.
Quite the contrary the enigmatic fight-or-flight story sketched out in ‘Southern Cross’. It was standing in South Africa’s Krüger Park, looking up at the Southern Cross (for the first time) that brought me back ’round to the iTunes Music Store, to downloading this album, and now to the re-hearing of these almost-eschatological, almost dissolute words:
… But on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away.
Think about how many times I have fallen.
Spirits are using me; larger voices callin’.
What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.
I have been around the world,
looking’ for that woman-girl
Who knows love can endure.
And you know it will …So we cheated and we lied and we tested.
And we never faijled to fail; it was the easiest thing to do.
You will survive being bested.
Somebody fine will come along
Make me forget about loving you
In the Southern Cross.
Is this prediction or wish, certainty or the desperation of a jilted lover hoping he won’t forever live with this ache? CSN&Y aren’t telling.
If the band was willing to risk whimsiness, they also took a chance on the side of sentimentalism, with equally good results. Witness the quintessentially benign ‘Teach Your Children’:
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.And you, of tender years,
Can’t know
The fears your elders grew by,
And so please help them
With your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.Teach your parents well
Their children’s hell will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked
The one you’ll know by.
One of the greatest uses of the tenor range by CSN&Y is undoubtedly ‘Just a Song Before I Go’, arguably their best song:
Just a song before I go,
To whom it may concern …She helped me with my suitcase,
She stands before my eyes.Driving me to the airport
And to the friendly skies.Going through security
I held her for so long.
She finally looked at me in love,
And she was gone.
Who knew where this song was going? Tragedy or triumphant? Love or irreversible separation?
Once again, CSN&Y are at their best when at their most enigmatic. The song ends:
Just a song before I go,
A lesson to be learned.
Travelling twice the speed of sound
It’s easy to get burned.
What happened? Silence, then a new track.
Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young were that rare phenomenon: an assemblage of great voices that together created a unique sound. I don’t mean ‘unique’ as in ‘cool’, but in its proper sense : ‘one of a kind’. One can venture influences upon CSN&Y from their foreground and one can, in retrospect, point to a number of artists who have picked up one or two of their characteristics. But there has been no CSN&Y tradition and—heaven be thanked—no recorded CSN&Y Impersonator conventions.
One has to look far afield to find a band that has imbibed their spirit: to Matchbox Twenty, for example. Admittedly, the sound is altogether different. How could it be otherwise, given the musical water that has passed under the bridge between these two fine acts?
Yet the poignance, the memory, the longing, and the predilection for harmony over, say, an imitable voice like the Stone’s Jagger is a thin line that might run from CSN&Y to MT without doing violence to the integrity of either one.
Listen to them back-to-back and see whether you agree. For that, you’ll need to pick up CSN (and Young’s) Greatest Hits. That’ll be a smart decision on its own.
Canter Bridge 
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