Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Long May You Run - Non-Album Tracks (1976)

The CSNY alternate universe album series continues with "Long May You Run." This one was a lot more difficult to make.

For the 1974 and 1975 CSNY albums, I was able to use mostly CSNY versions for the songs, thanks to so many of them being played on the 1974 CSNY tour. But by 1976, CSNY were working on a new batch of songs (with some exceptions, such as the title track).

What's intriguing is that CSNY recorded all sorts of songs together around this time, enough for a double album.

The songs recorded by them include:

Western Witches
Talk Too Much
Talk to Me
Last Hundred Years of Freedom
Let Me Down
After Hours
Separate Ways
No One Seems to Know
Traces
Beaucoup Yumbo
Will to Love
Time After Time
Treetop Flyer
Little Blind Fish
Mutiny
Taken at All
Dancer
plus, all eight songs that would come out on the Stills-Young "Long May You Run" album, except "Guardian Angel."

That's 24 songs already. In addition, it's likely that some more of the songs on the 1976 Crosby-Nash album "Whistling Down the Wire" were done by CSNY. Plus, there were other songs done live by Stills and Young when they toured that year, such as "Evening Coconut," "Too Far Gone," "Stringman," and "Campaigner," so those may have been contenders too.

The first six songs in that list have never been released in any form by any of CSNY, nor have any of them ever been played live. Furthermore, of the remaining songs, only six of the CSNY versions have become public.

As a result, despite all the potentially great material that must exist in somebody's private archives somewhere, I don't have enough to go on for a full album of just CSNY performed songs. So I've done the best I could. I figure that the Stills-Young album "Long May You Run" would never have existed if the CSNY album with that name came out instead, so I can break my usual rules and use some of the exact takes from that album. The only problem is, many of the songs on that album aren't very good. It was widely considered a disappointment when it came out, with critics suggesting that Stills and Young were keeping some of their best songs for their own projects, which undoubtedly was true.

To make matters even more difficult, Young was always the most prolific of the bunch, and he was especially prolific in the mid-1970s, so a majority of the songs in the list above are by him. In fact, a lack of good Crosby and Nash songs was one reason the CSNY project was cancelled, because they were under pressure to put out an album before starting a tour at a certain time.

I've done the best I could with the material I had to work with. But I'm mindful of the fact that if more of this material were ever released, one could make a very different album. And since so many songs were recorded by CSNY, even if some were clunkers, I'm sure there would have been plenty of songs to make a great album, one that contained songs that are still unreleased in any form today. Let's hope that this material gets released in the years to come.

I ended up using five songs from the Stills-Young album, but only one of them ("Guardian Angel") is the exact same take as on that album.

In 2020, Neil Young's "Archives, Volume II" box set was released. That contains the CSNY versions of "Midnight on the Bay" and "Ocean Girl." The only problem with that is "Ocean Girl" simply isn't a very good song, and the CSNY version didn't improve much on the previously known Stills-Young Band version. Since there were so many strong contenders here, I used "Midnight on the Bay," but relegated "Ocean Girl" to a bonus track.

The "Archives, Volume II" box set also has a great Stills-Young Band version of "Separate Ways," so I've used that instead of the Neil Young solo version I had here before. And it turns out there are two excellent CSNY versions of the song "Human Highway," one recorded in 1973 and one recorded in 1976. I've put the 1973 version on my earlier album in this series, also called "Human Highway." Because of that version being on that album, I feel CSNY wouldn't have put the same song on another album three years later. So the 1976 version is only included here as a bonus track.

Additionally, I came across more information that the Nash song "Mutiny" was recorded by CSNY, and it was considered an especially strong version. Unfortunately, the CSNY version hasn't been officially released or even bootlegged, and it's never been performed lived by Nash. So I've included the Crosby & Nash version from their 1976 album "Whistling Down the Wire."

01 Long May You Run (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Make Love to You (Stills-Young Band)
03 Mutiny (Crosby & Nash)
04 Foolish Man (Crosby & Nash)
05 Midnight on the Bay (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 Black Coral (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 Taken at All (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 Separate Ways (Stills-Young Band)
09 Dancer (David Crosby)
10 Guardian Angel (Stills-Young Band)
11 Out of the Darkness (Crosby & Nash)

Human Highway [1976 Version] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Ocean Girl (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16383857/CROSBSTLLSNSHYNG1976LngMyYuRn_atse.zip.html

The album cover is a picture of CSNY rehearsing in Young's backyard of his California in the mid-1970s. He had a stage that allowed them to play outside.