Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Everybody's Alone (1969)

For a complete lowdown on unissued Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs then head over to Paul's site for CSN and CSNY, but I wanted to post this album as I've had this bootleg CD for many years and it's probably the unofficial album that I play the most. Crosby, Stills & Nash's first self-titled album was released in May 1969 and was an immediate hit, spawning two Top 40 hit singles and receiving key airplay on the new FM radio format. With the exception of drummer Dallas Taylor, Stills had handled the lion's share of the instrumental parts himself, and although it was a testament to his talent, it left the band in need of additional personnel to be able to tour, now a necessity given the debut album’s commercial success. Retaining Taylor, the band decided initially to hire a keyboard player, and Stills at one point approached Steve Winwood, who declined. Atlantic label head Ahmet Ertegün suggested Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young as a fairly obvious choice, and despite initial reservations by Stills and Nash (Stills owing to his history with Young in Buffalo Springfield, and Nash due to his personal unfamiliarity with Young) the trio eventually expanded to a quartet with Young a full partner. With Young on board, the restructured group went on tour in the late summer of 1969 through the following January. Between tour dates the band convened at Wally Heider's Studio between June and November 1969, and laid down some tracks for a proposed second album, although as it turned out most of the songs remained unreleased until the box sets started to appear. The recordings are all in superb quality, and highlights include beautiful alternate recordings of 'Triad' and 'The Lee Shore', a gorgeous in-studio take of 'Blackbird', and a lovely rendition of the Fred Neil track 'Everybody’s Talkin’', which Harry Nilsson made popular on the 'Midnight Cowboy' soundtrack. I've made a few edits to some of the songs and trimmed the track listing, but I've kept the basic layout of the cover, and just upgraded it by replacing the black and white photos with colour ones. I've also re-titled it, as 'Studio Archives 1969' was a bit bland. Paul has spread these songs over a number of his albums, so you could treat this as a sampler, and if you like what you hear then there's loads more out there for you to enjoy. 

Track listing

01 How Have You Been (John Sebastian cover) Recording Date Unknown 
02 Everyday We Live (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
03 Everybody's Talkin' (Fred Neil cover) Recording Date Unknown 
04 Sea Of Madness (Studio Take) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
05 Triad (Acoustic Studio Take) Recording Date Unknown
06 The Lee Shore (Different vocal take) Recorded at Stephen Stills' Home Studio 1969 
07 I'll Be There (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
08 Blackbird (Beatles cover) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
09 Ivory Tower (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
10 Everybody's Alone (Neil Young) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969. 
11 You're Wrong Baby (Graham Nash) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969
12 30 Dollar Fine (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Ohio (1970)

On May 4th, 1970, the Ohio National Guard open fire on college students at Kent State University who were protesting the slaughter of innocent Cambodian civilians by the US military industrial complex. Neil Young wrote a song about it and CSNY rush released it as a single at the end of the month, with 'Find the Cost Of Freedom' as the b-side, and it turned out to be the last CSNY studio recording for 18 years. Despite being banned from many radio stations, it soon became the anthem to the protest movement, so here we'll expand the non-album single into a full-length LP using their solo albums recorded that year, with each track having to include at least two of the members. This is my third revision of the album, and this time I decided to add 'Southern Man' from Neil's solo album 'After the Gold Rush', as it was a regular part of CSNY's set list and includes Stills on background vocals. I removed Stills' 'We Are Not Helpless' which now seems a bit over the top on this otherwise rather somber and serious album, which was recorded during a year of political turmoil, personal heartbreak and Richard Nixon.
Side one opens with the promiscuity anthem 'Love the One You're With', recorded in London by Stills who then added Crosby and Nash's background vocals later on back home. Nash's heartbreaking 'Simple Man' is about his breakup with Joni Mitchell, providing a stark contrast to the upbeat opening number, and taking us deeper into the emotional caverns of the album. 'What Are Their Names?' comes next, providing a rather ominous segue into the title track featuring all four members, followed by the b-side that had actually been played at Woodstock the previous August, but not recorded until May of 1970. That would make a good end to an album side right there, but we'll fill up the remaining space with another heartbreaking Nash song featuring Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar and a gospel-infused Stills number.
Side two begins with 'Music is Love' with both Crosby and Young on vocals, followed by Crosby, Young and most of The Grateful Dead on 'Cowboy Movie'. and the album ends with 'Southern Man', which most likely contains Stills on background vocals, and fits nicely into the overall theme of domestic turmoil, both at the national and personal level. The cover is based on the US 'Ohio' single picture sleeve.

Track listing

01 Love the One You're With

02 Simple Man 

03 What Are Their Names

04 Ohio

05 Find the Cost of Freedom

06 I Used to Be a King

07 Sit Yourself Down 

08 Music is Love 

09 Cowboy Movie

10 Southern Man 

From The Album Fixer October 2016. All notes and opinions are his.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - War Songs (1972)

With the sad demise of Album Fixer's site we've lost a massive library of great imagined and reconstructed albums. He always put a lot of work into the concepts and sequencing of his posts, and although he didn't include links to the albums, part of the fun was tracking down the songs and compiling them yourself. In doing this I've always found the Russian site http://musicmp3spb.org invaluable, as it has a database of literally millions of albums, and they are split out into album tracks, so that you can download a song at a time if that's all you need. It's great not to have to download a whole album just to get one song, and so this one was relatively easy to put together.
The story behind the album is that in May 1972 Neil Young called up Graham Nash and asked him to come over and sing on a new song he'd written called 'War Song', which was written to support George McGovern's anti-Vietnam War presidential campaign. It didn't help as McGovern lost in a landslide defeat, but the premise was - what if Young and Nash had called in Crosby and Stills to record some more protest/political songs for an album named after the single.
CSNY have always had a lot to say for themselves, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that this could have happened, and this is what it could have sounded like.

 Track listing

01 Immigration Man 
02 Johnny's Garden 
03 War Song 
04 Games 
05 Military Madness 
06 Where Will I Be?
07 Change Partners 
08 Chicago/We Can Change The World 
09 Page 43 
10 Stranger's Room 
11 Soldier
12 Sugar Babe
13 Southbound Train 

In memory of Album Fixer I might post a few more of his reconstructions later, with links to my attempts to compile them. Bob Dylan's 'Down In The Flood' was one of his better efforts, and also one of mine in doing the cover, so I might do that one next.