Music Platters: Crosby, Stills & Nash – Demos (Rhino/Warners)

Crosby, Stills & Nash – Demos (Rhino/Warners)

Author: stereonerd [11-07-2009 09:27]

Comes a time when every group with enough followers to justify the exercise, will release an album of demos. Usually, they’d called names like “Odds & Sods”, but Crosby, Stills & Nash have called a spade a spade and so we ge ‘Demos’.

I guess it depends how much value you place on these three aging hippies and their somewhat wilting flowery powery catalogue, and there will be those who contend that without Neil Young in the picture, that they’re about as useful as The Beatles without John Lennon.

Without getting into heated debate about the relative merits (or not) of CS&N, its worth pointing out that both Stills and Crosby were both fine singer-songwriters (in Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds respectively) prior to the formation of this super-trio. Happily, ‘Demos’ comprises 12 songs cut between 1968 and 1971, when the group was at its peak. So we get early versions of classic songs like ‘Marrakesh Express’, ‘You Don’t Have To Cry’, and even Stills’ ‘Love The One You’re With’, not to mention Crosbys haunting ‘Deja Vu’ and the somewhat less scintillating ‘Almost Cut My Hair’. (Fantastic title though).

To anyone raised in the punk era, CS&N typify the worst excesses of the hippy era, but they’re of tremendous socio-anthropological interest, because like Jefferson Airplane (another hippy band who thought they were literally going to change the world with marijuana, flowers and free love) they were right there at the apex of the social experiment that was ’60s counter-culture. The fact that it all went horribly wrong, and that Crosby inparticular quickly descended into decades of crazed drug dependence (chronicled in his excellent autobiography) doesn’t invalidate the original ideas behind their generation. But that’s an argument that needs more space than we’ve got here!

Suffice to say that if you’re familiar with the first two, rather great albums (the self-titled debut and ‘Deja Vu’) and would like to hear the genesis of songs from these albums, together with others from the period, you’ll find much of value in ‘Demos’. Hippy haters shouldn’t bother, unless they just want to snigger at the naivete of songs like ‘My Love Is A Gentle Thing’ and ‘Music Is Love’.

While the audio is predictably not slick, it’s been cleaned up so well that apart from the rough edges to the performances, the fidelity is stunning. Yes, there’s a little hiss, but that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the sounds themselves.

Oddly, it has an HDCD option, an audio format that was a predecessor to SACD, and which very few CD players have the right encoding.

The only sour note is the complete absence of liner notes. Anyone interested enough to purchase an audio document like this would expect to have a song-by-song backgrounder, or at the very least a link to notes on the web.

Personally, I reckon they should have added a free second disc of their famous backstage arguments, which are even more legendary in rock circles than those of Oasis’s Gallagher brothers. GARY STEEL

4 Stars