Fifty years later, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young‘s Déjà Vu survives as one of the greatest rock records of the Woodstock era. One of the album’s tracks—”Woodstock”, written by Joni Mitchell—even helped define the spiritual and musical zeitgeist. On this past episode of CBS Sunday Morning, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash appeared (separately) to discuss the legacy of the album.
The rock supergroup that started it all came together in 1969 to record the album that would go on to sell over eight million copies. Prior to Déjà Vu, however, CSN was already an all-star group in its own right. Thus, when Stills suggested bringing in his old Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young to take the band from a “folk group” and transition to “playing rock and roll,” Nash originally demurred.
“I said, ‘why should we invite you into this band?'” Nash said of his initial meeting with Young. “And he looked at me and he said, ‘have you ever heard me and Stephen play guitar together?’ And I went ‘yeah, I have.’ He was in the band from that moment on.”
Along with the supergroup, however, came superegos. It is revealed that Young didn’t even record his songs for the album in the same studio as the other bandmates. Instead, he recorded his own tracks separately and brought them in for the other members to sing on, which Crosby described as “kind of snotty.” Young himself does not sing or play on “Our House” or “Teach Your Children”, both Nash songs.
Perhaps one of the other things that makes Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young such a mythical group is the knowledge that they will likely never perform together again. Instead, listeners are left with a snapshot of a particular time and place in American history when four of the era’s most prominent songwriters came together to create this musical document, before their egos and appetites tore them apart.
“You know, when that silver thread that connects a band gets broken, it’s very difficult to glue the ends together. It doesn’t quite work,” Nash muses. “Things that happened in me and David’s life broke that thread, and I can’t for the life of me put it back together.”
Watch David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash reflect on the good old—and not so good old—days of CSNY on CBS Sunday Morning. A special 50th-anniversary edition of Déjà Vu is available now.
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash speak
[Video: CBS Sunday Morning]