Déjâ Vu. CSN&Y, a digital conversation for three

Gary's Copy

Starting out as a short debate about CDs and DVDs no longer being sold at Sainsbury's...

Gary, 9 July:

Interesting article on the BBC News site about one of the leading supermarkets in the UK stopping selling CDs and DVDs…. Note the quote "Vinyl is incredibly fashionable and the CD has gone out of fashion. A lot of indies [independent shops] may be stocking less CDs than they used to, but they're still selling. There's this myth that the CD is completely dead.”

Mark, 11 July: 

Thanks - yes I saw this. Not surprised. Sainsbury's decision is the tail end of a depressing trend to cut the availability of music on the high street that goes back 10 years or more. The supermarkets have only been selling a desultory list of top ten albums so it is not a huge loss to culture. Different story  50 years ago in my teenage years in north Wales when I started buying records. I would be able to get my Beatles, Stones, ELP, Yes, Rory Gallagher albums in local shops like Boots the Chemists, WH Smiths and Woollies (as in Woolworths, not sheep). There was also a department store across the border in Chester called Browns which had an impressive range of vinyl racks slotted in between haberdashery and the menswear department. I would pop in there to get the new Wings album before getting my bus back home from school, hiding it amongst the text books in my bag so my father wouldn't spot it. There was also the occasional foray to Liverpool to save up for. This required a bus, a train and a metro to get to so required some intricate logistics. I used to head straight to one of Richard Branson's first Virgin Records shops which was above a shoe shop in Bold Street. There a dazzling and diverse musical vista opened up before my eyes and ears featuring weird independent labels, rarities, imports...... 

There is a similar thrill still to be enjoyed when I head now to the last surviving record shops in London like Fopps and Rough Trade  They provide an increasingly rare opportunity to see the world of music and its history in all its diverse genres and geographies laid out physically all around you. It's an experience that I don't think can be matched by the online retailers. So I hope that following the demise and disappearance of Virgin megastores, HMV, Tower Records etc (except in Japan....) these remaining shops can survive and thrive. 

That's why it's important to support Record Store Day! This year's Drop Day 2 coming up next Saturday (17th) so join the queue of socially distanced diehard music fans - and tick the list !  The CSN&Y Deja Vu alternate takes is top of mine.

... the discussion moved to (the Record Store Day re-release of) Déjà Vu.

Gary, 11 July:

I agree Mark, but I would say that the vinyl market does seem to be healthy?

I still have my copy of Deja Vu I brought back in the 70s although somewhat a little worse for wear over the last 50 years!😊

Trying to avoid the bloody soccer at the moment… but will be interested to see how Branson gets on in space later… I wonder if he is thinking about an orbital record shop?😉

Mark's two copies*

Mark, 20 July:

* Spot the big difference

 

It certainly looks a well-worn copy, Gary, which kind of works really because the textured sleeve design with gothic lettering in gold was intended to mimic the kind of old album of sepia photographs that falls apart when retrieved from the loft. I hope the vinyl is not so battered and you still find time to play it because I think the half century old music it contains has lasted incredibly well. And the lyrics still resonate:

 

"The sky is clearing and the night has cried enough

The sun, he come, the world to soften up

Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on",

It probably vies with the White Album as my most-played record. When I got my copy - later than you, in the early 1980s -  the harmony-driven optimism, gripping melodies and powerful musicianship totally blew me away. It seemed  comparable to the Beatles formula of disparate talents magically hitting off on each other to produce a masterpiece. Only Dallas Taylor who was the drummer is no longer with us: he passed away in 2015 (liver disease after a history of alcoholism and his wife's donation of a kidney to save him).  

I got my limited edition alternate takes album on Record Store Day 2 on Saturday (a strong sense indeed of deja queue outside Rough Trade just off Brick Lane) and I've been playing it over and over since. The sound of the record is tremendous, like you're in the studio: the edge of every note captured with crystal clarity. 

Of the tracks, the extended take of Crosby's thunderous Almost Cut My Hair  is a forerunner of the kind of extended jams that Neil Young can intoxicate you with. The take of Teach Your Children is an early Graham Nash run-through done before Jerry Garcia dropped by the studio to add his delicious countrified guitar licks which would give the song such tremendous lift. 

As for Neil Young's Helpless - what can you say: a masterpiece of evocation of memory of his Canadian roots with intriguing, slightly oblique poetry in the lyrics, and a unique musical arrangement that almost stops but hangs on with tantalising beauty. This take has some additional harmonica playing which intrudes a little on the measured interplay of piano and guitar so the released version stripped of the harmonica has the slight edge maybe. It's great nonetheless to hear this alternate take of a song that is a spine-tingling listening experience every time I put it on the turntable.

Yellow moon on the rise over Coulsdon this evening during a beautiful sunset but the big birds have yet to reappear stacked up on their descent into Gatwick. No choice but to carry on.

 

*You got it: the disappearing dog! 

Wout, 20 July:

I have to admit that I do not own a vinyl copy of Deja vu. Only a cd. Because of your emails, I wondered why that could be. My first thought was that when I started buying records seriously in the late 70s, this band certainly was a thing of the past. Just like I have no Led Zeppelin records except for the last one, 'In Through The Out Door'. Until the last couple of years. The only old records I bought new despite having the cds.

I did get a second thought though. That in the end I do not like the solo output of the original three members. On Woodstock e.g., an album that I did get to know circa 1972 as a friend of mine had it and we played it endlessly, I could not get through 'Suite': Judy Blue Eyes' and totally raved after 'Sea Of Madness', a song never released anywhere else, I think. Always the Neil Young fan, even then, before I knew any better.

I did start buying some albums second hand, circa 1990, so I have the first album without Neil, I have 'CSN', but not Deja Vu, maybe because it wasn't for sale where I was looking? I have the first two Stephen Stills solo albums. the first David Crosby, and already had Graham Nash because I liked his two hit singles of 1971, 'Chicago' and 'Military Madness'. Even one Crosby & Nash album. They have one thing in common, all are very little played albums.

I have Deja Vu probably for over 20 years as cd, but it is also not often played. I'll play it again soon. Perhaps 51 years down the line, gives me the opportunity to reappraise it.

Now the story. When my son was born, my, now ex, wife had to go into surgery immediately and I was left behind with this little human being lying in some sort of scale, blood everywhere around us. I was looking into these big, dark brown eyes that were staring intently at me. I put my little finger in his hand and we were just looking at each other.

A cleaning nurse stepped into the room and without saying anything she turned on the radio. The song that came on was the first single I owned. My aunt gave me Ricky Nelson's 'Hello Mary Lou' because I always wanted to hear it and my mother could play it at home for me as well. One year old and already totally captured by music. It never left me. But this story is about the second song that came on.

The radio played Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. It could have been any song and it would never have made an impression on me. It was 'Teach Your Children'. A more befitting song after being alone with your first born right after childbirth is hard to imagine. Here I had been telling him about the first song he heard being alive and what it meant to me. Next I promised him to do my utmost in teaching him. Looking at how he's turned out, it's safe to say that my ex-wife and I did alright.

Also, he loves music as much as I do, with a major difference. I don't think he even spent €100 in his life on music. Owning music is a thing of the past for a lot of youths. They have You Tube and Spotify. This seems to be enough and in a way it is of course. I still feel the romance of holding an LP in my hand, looking at the sleeve, reading it for xth time. Not our youth, but that's a different story.

I will go and listen to Deja Vu once again after many years. Who knows what happens?

Mark, 25 July:

CSNY: Sea of Madness is a curiosity in Neil Young's oeuvre because there still hasn't been an official issue of a studio version. It doesn't feature on the Deja Vu 50th anniversary 4-cd deluxe boxset so maybe none exists. The live version on the Woodstock soundtrack  turned up on the first Neil Young Archive box in 2009 with a curious note explaining that that performance was actually recorded at the Fillmore East in New York a month after Woodstock in September 1969, so not at the festival itself.

Of the contemporary CSNY solo albums I recommend revisiting the first David Crosby album If I Could Only Remember My Name which despite its lousy title is now widely recognised as an impressive companion piece to Deja Vu.  Indeed S, N & Y all contribute to various tracks as do Jerry Garcia and other members of the Dead and also several members of Jefferson Airplane. So an impressive ensemble of San Francisco's finest and for me the album sums up that sun-bleached era of west coast music in a truly beautiful way with luscious harmonies and mesmerising arrangements.The stand-out track for me is Laughing so play that first and spot Joni Mictchell's beautiful background harmonies in the crescendo (a rare album guest appearance for her - she was hanging out with Crosby at the time). There is also a Beatles connection: I read somewhere that this song (which Crosby recorded again with less flair for the disappointing 1973 Byrds short-lived reunion album) was a message to George Harrison about disillusionment with the Maharishi (who had been derided by some sceptics as the "giggling guru" - hence the title).  I thought I met a man / Who said he knew a man / Who knew what was going on / I was mistaken..... A stunning song that always succeeds in sending symphonic psychedelic shimmers up my spine.

David Crosby is still going strong as he approaches 80 and he is in remarkably good voice too apparently. After an erratic career and a personal history that matches only Marianne Faithfull's for steep descents into near oblivion, he's now enjoying a late career resurgence that started with the 2014 nick-eponymous album Croz. His new album For Free (named after a vintage Joni Mitchell song that he covers from her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon), earned a four-star review in yesterday's Financial Times (I haven't sold out but the Guardian had in our local supermarket). This was one more than that for the latest release (on the same day) by another west coast veteran, Jackson Browne: the gloomily-titled Downhill from Everywhere. The "glowing vocal harmony redolent of the golden age of CSNY" suggests For Free is worth checking out too. And as you may have seen, Joni Mitchell's wondrous archives are at last now opening up. 

Altogether now:

   

"All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)

And the sky is gray...... "

Lookin' out the window here in Coulsdon, I see the summer of love has indeed clouded. 

California dreamin'.....

 

PS - I think I've just invented the word "nick-eponymous"! I can't immediately think of one but there must be other examples of album titles that are the artists' nicknames. Answers in an email please!

Wout, 26 July:

I'm listening to the new David Crosby right now. Jazzy, of course, but a quite potent sound and certainly so for an 80 year old.

Gary

Mark

Wout