Saturday, May 12, 2018

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Human Highway - Non-Album Tracks (1974)

The next installment in the alternate history of CSNY is "Human Highway," one of the great lost albums. Lots of people have tried to put together versions of this album. Except in my alternate history, CSNY didn't make just one album in their mid-1970s reunion phase, they made four! Studio albums in 1974, 1975, and 1976, plus a live album to document their 1974 tour. So this is just the first of those four.

Typically, when people compile a lost album like this, they try to be as accurate as possible to what could have been released. For instance, while there is no known definitive "Human Highway" song list, Nash has mentioned that there would have been ten songs on it. Thus, people limit the songs to 10.

My approach is different, since I'm most interested in making albums I'll enjoy listening to repeatedly than being as accurate as possible. I figure if CSNY (or some variant) did a song in this time period, and that version is not on, or is significantly different from, any songs on their officially released albums, that's fair game. Also, I limit myself to the typical length of an album in that era, and I have to have a good balance of C, S, N, and Y songs (with S and Y usually getting a little more, because they were more prolific).

Using that criteria, I came up with 14 songs for this album, with all of them done in either 1973 or 1974. (It would be weird in my opinion if CSNY really did stick to only 10 songs, because these 14 songs only total up to 40 minutes.)

Unfortunately, very few CSNY studio takes of songs from this period have been officially released, and only a little more has found its way to bootlegs. What really allows me to make not one but three studios albums for this time period is the fact that they went on tour in 1974, and played lots of new songs as a group. Furthermore, that tour was very well documented in the triple live album released in 2014, "CSNY 1974." Time and time again, what I've done is taken songs from that release and edited out the audience noise to make it sound like a studio track. But I've also done this for some other live performances if they are in soundboard quality.

I think the end result is a fantastic album that would have sold millions and caused some of the songs on it to have become well-known classics. If I had a time machine and the power to make any "lost album" get found, I think I'd pick these mid-1970s CSNY albums. I'm not going to go into the tangled history why these albums didn't come to be, since you can find that information elsewhere. Suffice to say it was the usual problem of clashing big egos and rock star excess. Luckily, there's enough music left behind to make a close approximation of what could have been.

In the rare cases where I didn't use a CSNY performance for this album, it was either because of balance or sound quality, or both. What I mean by "balance" is having the usual ratio of songs by each of the four of them. For instance, I didn't have enough Crosby songs, but luckily there was a excellent sounding demo of an unreleased song by him from 1974 to fill that gap. 

CSNY recorded the song "Human Highway" twice in the 1970s, once in 1973 and once in 1976. Neuk Young's "Archives, Volume 2" box set has the 1973 version, so I've used that here. I've included the 1976 version as a bonus track on my imagined 1976 CSNY album "Long May You Run."

01 First Things First (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
02 Little Blind Fish (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 Human Highway (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 And So It Goes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 My Favorite Changes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 Grave Concern (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 King of the Mountain (David Crosby)
08 Love Art Blues (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 See the Changes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Prison Song (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 Mellow My Mind (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Time After Time (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 Myth of Sisyphus (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 New Mama (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16383854/CROSBSTLLSNSHYNG1974HmnHighwy_atse.zip.html

The album cover here uses a picture that was the actual photo they were going to use for the cover, taken in Hawaii. Someone else (sorry, I don't know who) ably added in the text and the record company logo.

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