Crosby, Stills and Nash - Wooden Music - Non-Album Tracks (1969)

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young... Sigh! What great musicians, yet what lost potential. Of all the major musical groups I love, I think CSN(Y) are the most frustrating for me. With only a few exceptions, drugs, ego, money, and so on kept these four talented men from making music together as they should have.

Thankfully, we can at least partially make up for the roads they didn't take. I've created about 20 CSN(Y) albums that should have been yet never were, and sharing them is one of the main reasons I've made this blog. I've essentially created an alternate history where the three or four of them frequently got together to make great albums.

How did I do it? I've had several rules. I don't want to use music from their all too few great albums together ("Crosby, Stills and Nash" in 1969, "Deja Vu" in 1970, "Four Way Street" in 1971, "CSN" in 1977, and "Daylight Again" in 1982). Also, I don't want to use songs from their various prominent solo or duo albums. However, there is a big caveat to that: I will use a song if it's done in a markedly different way than on a studio album. For instance, perhaps a song was done just by one of them on a solo album but done by all four of them in a bootleg. That would be fair game.

I've drawn from various archival releases, bonus tracks, bootlegs, and live shows. When it comes to live shows, there were times I was able to find a soundboard quality performance with no crowd noise overlapping the music, and then I edited out the clapping at the end to make it sound like a studio take.

It'll take a while for me to post all my "alternate universe" CSN(Y) albums, but I'll start here and work forward chronologically.

Back in 1969, CSN had gotten together for the first time and were musically on fire. Of course the "Crosby, Stills and Nash" album released that year is an all-time classic, but the three of them had many more great songs at that time. There easily was enough for a second album for the trio to record before they hooked up with Neil Young to create CSNY. Back in that era, it was hardly unusual for a group to put out two albums in one year (or this could have come out in early 1970).

As it so happens, all the material I have to work with from this time is acoustic in nature, with one or more of them playing guitar. So I decided to call the album "Wooden Music," because that's the term Crosby had for acoustic music (played on wooden guitars).

The one problem I have with the music from this time.is that many of the songs were done by just one of them. In a perfect world, there would have been versions with all three of them singing together, but we'll have to make do.

I'm not interested in historical accuracy so much as creating albums that I personally enjoy frequently listening to. (And if you enjoy them too, then great, but I'm doing this mainly for myself.) To that end, I've created some artistic liberties. I included a demo of Crosby playing his Byrds song "Lady Friend." However, the demo was only about a minute and a half long, and it comes to a stop in a bad place, due to him forgetting the words. So I took the chorus from earlier in the song and seamlessly added it to the end to give the song a better ending.

I got more ambitious by editing two Stills songs. With his solo version of "Change Partners" on the "Just Roll Tape" album (recorded in 1968), it seemed incomplete to me without harmonies on the chorus, since that's how it's been performed the vast majority of the time ever since. Thus, I found a version of the song performed by CSNY at Winterland, San Francisco, in 1973, and I managed to isolate the vocals from that version and add them into this version. (Young was there, but he didn't sing on the song, effectively making it a CSN version.) I think it worked pretty well, though my audio editing skills are very basic.

I did the exact same thing for the Stills song "So Begins the Task." I've always imagined that song as one CSN performed acoustically. Unfortunately, they rarely or never played it that way, instead preferring to play it with a full band, and at a faster pace than how Stills did it for "Just Roll Tape." Stills released a version on his 1972 album "Manassas," but that lacked the CSN harmonies. The best CSN version I could find was them performing the song at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, on August 31, 1969. But that was an audience recording with less than stellar sound, and I was only partially successful at isolating the vocals from the bass, drums, electric guitar, and so on. Thus, I've included the CSN version I've made at the end of this album, but be warned that the CSN vocals have some issues. You might like it, or you might think it's not up to stuff, in which case don't keep it with the rest of the album.

I hope that by putting these edits on the Internet, somebody with better audio editing skills than I have will eventually come along and make better versions. In my opinion, "So Begins the Task" is a great song that gets overlooked, probably because they never recorded it acoustically as they should have back in their glory days, despite it being written in 1968.

Even with the edits I made to those two songs, only seven of the 16 songs on the album are song by two or more of CSN. I've tried to spread those around to give the album a group feeling. All the alternate albums after this are much more group efforts. However, I think the album is unified by the all acoustic sound.

As I usually do, I've included details on where all the songs come from in the mp3 tags. But I'll make special note here of the fact that "Everybody's Been Burned" is performed by Crosby solo on guitar in 1964! It was recorded by the Byrds in 1967, yet the solo version included here was made even before the Byrds were formed. What's remarkable is how far ahead of its time it is. In my opinion, it sounds exactly as if Crosby played the song solo in 1969, which is why I've included it.

One thing I've tried to do with all my CSN(Y) alternate albums is to include a mix of songs by each member, scattered carefully through the album so one rarely hears two songs by the same person in a row. Unfortunately for this album, there isn't enough songs as I'd want from Nash, so I included his song "Be Yourself" from 1971. It's a solo demo, so it may well have been written and/or recorded before 1971. Even with that addition, only three of the 16 songs are written by Nash.

01 Do for the Others (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
02 Right Between the Eyes (Graham Nash)
03 Laughing (David Crosby)
04 How Have You Been (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
05 Be Yourself (Graham Nash)
06 Everybody's Talkin' (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
07 Triad (David Crosby)
08 Change Partners (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
09 Lady Friend (David Crosby)
10 Sleep Song (Graham Nash)
11 My Love Is a Gentle Thing (Stephen Stills)
12 Everybody's Been Burned (David Crosby)
13 Bumblebee [Do You Need a Place to Hide] (Stephen Stills)
14 Song with No Words [Trees with No Leaves] (Crosby & Nash)
15 Blackbird (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
16 So Begins the Task (Crosby, Stills & Nash)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16383334/CROSBSTLLSNSH1969WodnMsc_atse.zip.html

The cover shows CSN recording in the studio in 1969. The original was black and white, so I tinted it to make it more interesting.