Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - Witching Hour - Non-Album Tracks (1973)

I've made nearly 20 studio albums in my alternate history of Crosby, Stills, Nash and/or Young. Out of all of them, I'm pretty sure this one is the biggest stretch to exist as an album. My alternate CSN(Y) albums generally have a lot of them together as a threesome or foursome. but this album only has three songs where a mere two of them are performing together.

I don't know the full story, but in the latter part of 1970, future famous singer Rita Coolidge got romantically involved with Stills, then soon left him for Nash. Crosby wrote the song "Cowboy Movie" about it. (Coolidge is the Indian girl.) That conflict, plus generally being overwhelmed by too much fame and drug use, meant there was very little combined CSN or CSNY activity from 1971 to late 1973.

So why did I make this CSNY album? In the early 1970s, CSNY were highly productive songwriters. Even though a lot of their material hasn't made it to the public yet, even in unreleased form, there are enough stray tracks from 1971 to 1973 to make up a good studio album. My goal was to gather up all their good songs from this period that weren't released on any of their official solo albums at the time. In fact, all but tour of these 14 versions are still unreleased (and only a couple more of them have been released in other versions). It's not really a "CSNY together" album, but I think it makes a good listen of songs that generally have been unjustly forgotten.

I made some notable edits on a couple of a songs that need some explaining. In 2009, Stills released the song "High and Dry" on an archival release of his Manassas era material. In fact, this is a medley of two musically related songs, "High and Dry" and "White Nigger." The title of this second song poses a problem! The Urban Dictionary defines "white nigger" to mean: "a white person who does not have the typical privileges associated with white people, and thus who is looked down on by 'normal' whites." So Stills didn't intend anything racist here, but instead it was supposed to be a typical "woe is me" blues sentiment. (Though it's hard to feel that sort of pity for him when he was rich and famous by that point.)

It was a different era than today. For instance, the famous rock critic Lester Bang actually used the term "white niggers" to describe "punks" before the phrase "punk music" caught on. Elvis Costello also used the term in his 1979 hit "Oliver's Army." ("All it takes is one itchy trigger, one more widow, one less white nigger.")

Even so, any use of the "N-word" today by a white guy such as Stills would understandably be seen as offensive by many people. So for the "Pieces" release, he took the entire "White Nigger" half of the medley and slathered it with fake crowd noise, no doubt to hide the embarrassing lyrics. One can tell, because there's a bootleg that has the exact same take of the song, only without the crowd noise.

I've gone a different route and simply edited out the offensive second half of that medley. But the officially released recording ends abruptly due to moving into the second song. So I took the very end of the medley, where it returns back to the tempo and chords of the "High and Dry" part, and edited in a better tail end for the song.

So that was one tricky song to deal with. Another tricky song is what's commonly known as "Mountain Song." In the early 1970s, a loose San Francisco-based musical grouping called "The Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra" (PERRO) played together in different formations on various musical projects. You can read about it at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_Rock_and_Roll_Orchestra

In 1971, Crosby, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, and David Freiberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service worked on "Mountain Song," but they never came close to a finished version. (Kantner would later release a very different version of it on a 1983 album, with him and Slick doing most of the lead vocals.) PERRO did four takes of the song that ended up on bootlegs. The versions were very rudimentary, with no soloing and generally just repeating of one phrase ("gonna make the mountains be my home") over and over again.

There was one promising take that had Crosby scatting over some complicated chord changes, but that ended after just a minute and a half. The version ended abruptly right when the song was about to move into the "gonna make the mountains be my home" part. So I edited the take with Crosby scatting to one of the takes that repeats that phrase. But I also cut the repetitions down to a reasonable amount, so the whole song is still less than four minutes long.

I was happy with the result, except for one thing: in the middle of the first part of the song, Crosby interjected over the music that he hasn't written more words, and he also juggled his talented scatting with calling out some of the chord changes as they were happening. (The others were clearly learning the song as they're playing it.) Luckily, there was another version of the song that went through the same chord changes, only without any of Crosby's scatting. So I patched in bits from that version to get rid of all of Crosby's talking.

So, yeah, I did a lot of meddling on this song, but I think the end result is much more listenable than any of the four bootleg versions. If you don't agree, you can find the unedited takes on various bootlegs or on YouTube.

It's a real shame that the song wasn't finished and released in the early 1970s, because it could have been a classic, especially if someone like Garcia had soloed on it. But it was probably left behind because it fell between the cracks of being a Crosby (or CSN) song, a Jefferson Airplane song, and a Grateful Dead song, and PERRO didn't finish an album for it to fit on.

In addition, I made a significant edit to the Stills song "Too Much Today." This extremely obscure song was played by him once on a French TV show in 1971 with a flutist joining in.  Unfortunately, after two verses the flutist is just starting a nice solo when the song gets cut off. That left the song only about a minute and a half long and feeling incomplete. So I edited it to repeat the first verse after the second verse, and then fade out with what little there was of the flute solo. I think it now sounds like a proper song instead of part of one.

I also edited about a minute and a half out of Crosby's "Is It Really Monday." I try not to do that very often, but this is mainly for my own listening enjoyment, and I felt the song dragged on too long.

This is a "Frankenstein" album of sorts, with individual pieces from all over that were never really meant to be together, but in my opinion it's a cohesive and enjoyable listen just the same, no doubt because all four of them were writing high-quality songs in the same general style.

Thankfully, in late 1973, CSNY got back together, both on stage and in the studio. So my next three alternate albums in this series will be very heavy with CSNY content on nearly all the songs.

Note that the sound quality of the two Young solo aren't quite up to my usual standards, coming from audience concert bootlegs. But I think the sound quality is worth it, given that they're good songs by him that haven't been officially released in any version yet.

01 Witching Hour (Stephen Stills)
02 Urge for Going (Crosby & Nash)
03 Come Along and Say You Will (Neil Young)
04 Everybody's Been Burned (Graham Nash)
05 I Am My Brother (Stephen Stills)
06 Is It Really Monday (David Crosby)
07 Sweet Joni (Neil Young)
08 High and Dry (Stephen Stills)
09 On the Line (Graham Nash)
10 Too Much Today (Stephen Stills)
11 Your Life Is What You Fill Your Day With (Crosby & Nash)
12 War Song (Neil Young with Graham Nash)
13 Thoroughfare Gap (Stephen Stills)
14 Mountain Song [Walking in the Mountains] (David Crosby & the PERRO)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16383849/CROSBSTLLSNSHYNG1973WtchngHur_atse.zip.html

Since this album is really each of CSNY playing separately instead of together, I made an album cover that pictures each of them separately. It was done in the spirit of the Beatles' "Let It Be" album cover, which also marked a group that was more four people going in different directions than an actual group at that point.