As it has been nearly three months since I last posted in my occasional A Classic Album series it feels about time for another. There’s a very big clue as to what it is in the picture of the album sleeve at the top, so I’ve wrecked any suspense I might have been able to create. But then subtlety was never my strong point! As always, my album choice is one that I bought when it first came out, loved and played it to bits, and it even won my Mum’s seal of approval: she much preferred it to Paranoid!

The eponymous Crosby, Stills & Nash album was the debut release by the recently formed ‘folk rock supergroup,’ as the music press loved to call them, and came out on 29 May 1969. It contained ten tracks, which as usual is slightly too many for me to play in a post, but I’ll give links to the ones that miss out, for the sake of completeness. They first got together in late 1968, after David Crosby had been ‘invited’ to leave The Byrds, Stephen Stills’ band Buffalo Springfield had broken up, and Graham Nash had left The Hollies. They found an immediate rapport, based a lot on the way they found their voices harmonised, and spent the early months of 1969 recording this first record.

The album opened with a seven minute epic, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, which was written in the form of a classical suite by Stephen Stills for his former girlfriend, singer/songwriter Judy Collins, and the lyrics to most of the suite’s sections consist of his thoughts about her and their imminent breakup, which had then happened by the time this came out. As the way to announce yourself and your new band, though, it is hard to find anything better:

A trimmed down, four minute version of this track was the second single taken from the album, in September 1969, and it peaked at #21 in the US and #11 in Canada, though it didn’t make the UK charts.

The first single was the next track on the album:

I’ve featured CS&N before in my Listen To The Band series, and this is what I said about this one back then: Marrakesh Express was the first single taken from the album, released in July 1969 and reaching #28 in the US and #17 in the UK. It was written by Graham and Wikipedia gave the details: “Nash recalled his inspiration for the song occurring during a Moroccan vacation he took in 1966. On the trip, Nash traveled by train from Casablanca to Marrakesh. He began the journey in First Class, surrounded by people he found to be uninteresting – as he described it, they were all “ladies with blue hair.” He decided the compartment was “completely fucking boring,” so left his seat to explore the other train carriages, and was fascinated by what he saw.” The imagery of ducks and pigs and chickens is what he did see on the journey, making the song a kind of mini-travelogue. He had offered it to The Hollies, but they rejected it as not being sufficiently commercial. I think it found its proper home in the end, anyway.

The next track was a real beauty, written by David Crosby:

In an interview in 2008 with Rolling Stone David remarked that Guinnevere is about three women that he loved. One of them was Christine Hinton, a former girlfriend who was killed in a car crash when a cat she was taking to the vet escaped from its box and leapt onto her lap while she was driving, and a second was Joni Mitchell. He declined to identify the third, though she is thought to be Nancy Ross, a girlfriend who had left him in 1966 for Gram Parsons, who was known for drawing pentagrams on the wall, hence the reference to that in the song. He thought it might be his best song and who am I to disagree?

Side One Track Four was You Don’t Have To Cry, another good example of the way their voices worked well together. They debuted the album at that year’s Woodstock Festival, in August, and this is what they did there:

Side One closed with one that I’m linking to, in the interests of space, but it’s another good one, written by Graham Nash and featuring guest backing vocals by Mama Cass Elliot:

Pre-Road Downs

Side Two began with a song co-written by David and Stephen with Paul Kantner, of Jefferson Airplane. This is Wooden Ships:

“

As Wikipedia has it, Wooden Ships “was written at the height of the Vietnam War, a time of great tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, nuclear-armed rivals in the Cold War. It has been likened to Tom Lehrer’s We Will All Go Together When We Go and Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction, in that it describes the consequences of an apocalyptic nuclear war. According to the liner notes, the writers “imagined ourselves as the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilisation.” So now you know!

The next track was:

Lady Of The Island

This was written by Graham in the late 1960s, and is notable for taking its inspiration from fellow folk musician Joni Mitchell, with whom he was romantically involved at the time. It was also the only song from the debut album not performed during their Woodstock performance, so I feel it’s OK for me to just link to it! Graham wrote it while he was a member of the Hollies, who rejected it as being too personal. Along with their rejection of Marrakesh Express this was the cause of him leaving the Hollies.

Side Two Track Three is another beauty, this time written by Stephen, and again I’m going with their lovely performance at Woodstock:

Helplessly Hoping was the B-side to the Marrakesh Express single – what a bargain, if you didn’t already have the album! It was another written for Judy Collins, amidst Stephen’s struggle to cope with their break up. They say that great music can come from heartache, and this is a prime example of that.

I’m just linking to Side Two Track Four as well:

Long Time Gone

This is one of David’s songs, and if you follow the link you’ll see him taking lead vocals on their Woodstock performance, for which a certain Mr Young had joined them onstage.

Four of the album’s ten tracks were written by Stephen, along with the co-written one, and another of his closed the record out:

Judging from the lyrics, this is another that Stephen wrote after he lost Judy Collins. It might seem a little harsh to call Gram Parsons a ‘drifter’ but Gram’s pairing up with CS&N girlfriends, and his subsequent history and demise might put some context on that, and he didn’t stay long with Judy anyway.

So there you have it. One of the all time great debut albums, which in my view has stood the test of time well. It peaked at #6 in the US, selling more than 4m copies there and going 4x Platinum, and has gone Gold for 100,000 sales in the UK, though it only reached #25 here, and went Platinum in Australia, where it got to #10. It fared best in Canada and The Netherlands, reaching #2 in both countries. It may be 56 years old, but is still one that I return to, and I think that is a mark of how much I love it. I hope you do, too.

See you again for Song Lyric Sunday? 🎶