Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - The 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival and More (1969)

Here's something I'm especially proud of making. In my opinion, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) peaked early. They formed in 1969, and 1969 and 1970 were arguably their best years. However, when it comes to live material, there isn't that much that was recorded with great sound quality. 

I've already posted the CSNY set at Woodstock, which is a complete, great performance that sounds fantastic. But other than that, there's only parts of shows that have soundboard quality. I've collected all the best bits (not counting the Woodstock stuff) to make a kind of ultimate CSNY 1969 concert recording. It's two hours and 24 minutes long, and it's killer all the way through.

Virtually no live CSNY performances from 1969 are officially released, other than the Woodstock show (which can only be had as part of a massive box set), and a few songs here and there. I ended up only using a single such song, "I've Loved Her So Long," from Neil Young's "Archives, Volume 1." For the rest, I had to rely on bootlegs. Strangely, there are five CSNY boots from 1969 that are soundboards, but all of them are partial shows. 

The closest to a complete show comes from the Big Sur Folk Festival. At first glance it looks like a complete show, but this is an illusion, because CSNY actually played twice at that festival, on September 13th, and then again on September 14th, and the popular bootleg from this festival combines the two into one. Even then, it's incomplete. For instance, at one point, there's a spoken introduction to the song "I've Long Her So Long," but the song isn't there. To make matters worse, some parts of the shows sound great and seem to be from a soundboard, and others not so much, and seem to be from a high quality audience recording.

In addition to Big Sur, there are portions of three other soundboard bootlegs. There are six songs from Chicago on December 13th, six songs from Detroit on December 14th, and six songs from Houston on December 18th. Weird, huh? And they're all different songs, though some are incomplete. After those, the sound quality drops dramatically, to just average or poor sounding audience bootlegs.

So I used the Big Sur shows as the basis, and then added in as many songs as I could from the other soundboard concerts to create one big concert containing everything really worth hearing (not counting Woodstock), without ever using the same song multiple times. CSNY was pretty consistent in how they did their concerts, dividing their shows in a first acoustic set and then a second electric, full band set. And within those, there was a natural order. For instance, the acoustic set had them doing some songs together to start the show, then breaking off into individual mini-sets featuring just one member, then getting back them all together again for a song or two before ending the set. Because of this, I was able easily add in the extra songs where they more or less belonged.

Where things got more complicated is with the banter between songs. CSNY was very chatty in this time period. They talked before virtually every song, and sometimes talked for a few minutes. I wanted to replicate this aspect of their concerts too, because it showed their personality and camaraderie. Most of the time, the version of the songs I used had banter that went with the songs, so I used those. But in some cases the banter was missing, or it had sound quality issues. In many of those cases, I was able to find banter from some other show. For instance, the version of "Wooden Ships" here comes from one of the Big Sur shows. But banter before it had lots of hiss and crowd noise. I found different banter from the Chicago show where he explained the meaning of the song in depth, with much better sound quality, so I used that.

I put a lot of time and effort into making the best cohesive sounding concert with the limited raw material I had. Because I was mixing sources, I had to work to make sure the end of one track fit with the start of the next one. I did a lot of editing to make sure a song wouldn't end in the middle of audience applause or something like that. I also worked to improve the sound quality as much as possible. 

I discovered a new trick with Spleeter, which is that for banter tracks only, the vocals are usually put on one channel and the hiss on another channel. So I can just delete the hiss channel, and I can get rid of hiss better than any other noise reduction type tool. (It only works for banter tracks, because if there's music, the hiss ends up on the same channel as some of the music.) One thing I couldn't fix though is that some of the banter tracks have a lot of echo and/or reverb, and other such tracks don't. That can vary from time to time, so just try to ignore that.

I'm happy to say that I managed to find nearly all the important songs CSNY played in 1969. If one looks at the setlist.fm list of songs they played that year, and how many times they played them, there are only a few I missed that they played more than once: "49 Bye-Byes - America's Children," "Find the Cost of Freedom," "Broken Arrow," and "How Have You Been." I got really lucky! (One of the soundboard sources did have "49 Bye- Byes - America's Children," but half or more of it was missing, so I skipped it.)

The Big Sur shows were unusual in a couple of aspects. One oddity is that, during the CSNY set, they brought up Dave Mason, who recently left Traffic, and let him perform two of his songs. They even backed him up on the second one. I'm pretty sure that was the one and only time CSNY ever did that, at least in the 1969 and 1970 time frame. I chose to keep those songs in, since I like Mason and they're good songs.

Also, the Big Sur shows were filmed for a documentary movie and soundtrack, which was eventually released with the name "Celebration at Big Sur." In the movie, you can watch a scene in which CSNY gets heckled by an audience member. Stills left the stage to talk up close to the guy, and ended up getting in a tussle with him. The bootleg included all of this scene, which lasted several minutes. However, I cut the whole thing out. The main reason is that the audio quality of that second was particularly poor, and it mostly was just lots of crowd noise. But later on in the show, when Stills had his solo spot, right before the song "4+20," he spent about a minute talking about the heckler and his response. I left that in, because the sound quality was much better, and his commentary was interesting.

In 1969, CSNY varied the songs they played during their acoustic sets quite a lot, but they played pretty much the exact same songs in the same order during their electric sets. The result of that is the acoustic set is super sized with all the songs I gathered from here and there. Whereas I only added two extra songs to the electric set over what they played at Big Sur.

A few tracks have "[Edit]" in the title. The only actual song I edited is the Dave Mason song "Only You Know and I Know." There was a missing section near the end. It was during an instrumental section, so I managed to patch it using another part of the song where the same section was repeated. I also did a lot editing of the banter between songs. Sometimes I cut out portions that were boring, such as lots of guitar tuning or prolonged silences. Occasionally, I moved things around to have the flow from song to song make more sense. I added "[Edit]" to the ones where I made the biggest changes.

In addition to all the soundboard sourced songs I mentioned above, there are two songs where I used audience boots as the source. These are two songs that I simply thought were really cool, and I decided the sound quality was good enough for them to fit, even though they do sound slightly worse than the rest. Those two are "Mr. Soul" and "Go Back Home." They're interesting rarities. If setlist.fm is correct, CSNY only ever played them twice. (However, there's a better sounding version of "Mr. Soul" in the Woodstock concert.)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. The sound does vary from time to time. But considering the poor quality of most 1969 CSNY bootlegs, this is the cream of the crop, all in one plus (minus Woodstock, of course).

Finally, I was so pleased with the result I made here that I decided to do the same thing for CSNY's 1970 concerts. I've taken the best of the best recordings, mostly from the Fillmore East, to make one ultimate concert for that year too. Look for that to be posted soon.

01 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Suite- Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Blackbird (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 On the Way Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Mr. Soul (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 Guinnevere (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
15 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 Triad (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 talk [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
18 Lady of the Island (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
19 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
20 Our House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
21 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
22 Country Girl (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
23 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
24 Birds (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
25 talk [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
26 I've Loved Her So Long (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
27 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
28 Helpless (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
29 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
30 Black Queen (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
31 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
32 4+20 (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
33 Go Back Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
34 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
35 You Don't Have to Cry (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
36 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
37 World in Changes (Dave Mason & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
38 talk (Dave Mason & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
39 Only You Know and I Know [Edit] (Dave Mason & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
40 Pre-Road Downs (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
41 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
42 So Begins the Task (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
43 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
44 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
45 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
46 Woodstock (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 Bluebird Revisited (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 Sea of Madness (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 Down by the River (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.imagenetz.de/gzZHa

As I mentioned above, the Big Sur Folk Festival was the subject of a documentary movie. I could have used some still shots from that for the album cover. However, the film quality was rather low-res and blurry. Instead, I found a few excellent photos of CSNY in concert in San Diego in 1969. 

But the problem there was I couldn't find a single good photo showing all four of them. So I used one with Crosby, Stills and Young as the basis. Then I used another one of the San Diego photos to crop out Nash and stick him in the middle of the photo. So yeah, it's kind of a fake, but consider that Nash was right there wearing those clothes with that lighting, just out of frame. I probably combined two photos that were taken at the same spot only minutes apart.

In case you're curious, here are how the two raw pics look separately. I didn't use the bottom one, even though it has all four of them, because Stills' head is turned away from the camera, and Crosby's head is partially blocked.