Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - American Dream - Alternate Version (1988)

It's high time I get back to posting my "alternate universe" CSN and CSNY albums, in which they stayed together and put out a lot more music than they actually did.

In 1988, there was an honest-to-god CSNY album, only their second, and the first one since "Deja Vu." Unfortunately, it was seen as a big disappointment, and rightfully so. There were several big strikes against it.

One was that although Crosby had finally recovered from his long years of crack addiction and was writing quality songs again, that wasn't reflected very much on the album. There were only two Crosby songs on it, and one of them was lousy ("Nighttime for the Generals.") Instead, he would stave most of his good songs for his solo album "Oh Yes I Can" the next year.  But worse was the fact that Stills was in the middle of a bad drug addiction of his own, and he was struggling to come up with good songs. Nash had too many cheesy ballads, and Young probably held back a lot of his best material.

A second big problem was that, even though the album was produced by Young, it succumbed to the typical 1980s production touches, like drum machines and too much synthesizers. That never fit CSNY's kind of music, and 1980s-styled production has fared badly since then. Basically, they were a group of aging guys trying and failing to sound modern and "hip."

On top of that, the album was simply too long. With the album becoming the dominant music format by 1988, one could put out an album as long as 74 minutes instead of the previous limit of 45 minute or so. This album was almost 60 minutes long. It would have been a much stronger album if they'd cut out about 20 minutes of the weakest songs.

Luckily, with 20/20 hindsight, I can fix most of these problems. I only kept three songs unchanged from the released "American Dream" album. CSNY didn't go on tour to support the album, but they did do a few short acoustic sets around the time the album came out. That allowed me to replace some of the songs with acoustic versions (with the crowd noise stripped away), thus avoiding the 1980s overproduction problem.

Of particular note is the version of the title song "American Dream," done at one of Young's Bridge Benefit concerts. (I was lucky enough to see that concert in person.) They did the song essentially in an acappella version, with only a little guitar strumming in one section, that was very different from the album version. I prefer it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of crowd noise, especially because Young started the song alone on stage, and then the audience went wild about a minute into the song when Crosby, Stills, and Nash joined him there. I used a touch of noise reduction specifically targeted reducing the crowd sounds, something I almost never do. But still, some crowd noise remains.

I cut down the length of the album, so it's only 47 minutes long. But at the same time, I replaced even more of the songs that went on the officially released album with other songs from the time I thought were better. Two of those were Crosby songs. Personally, I like his "Oh Yes I Can" solo album a lot, so I didn't want to take any songs from there. But I found a version that was done in a stripped down style that's very different from the album version. The other Crosby song I added, "He's an American," has strangely never been released in any form.

I also added an unreleased Young song from the late 1980s, "Interstate," that I just think is a really great song, even though it doesn't have CSN on it. I think its sound fits in with the rest, since I've turned the album into a mostly acoustic  one.

Keep in mind that CSNY actually had many more good songs in the late 1980s that I didn't include here, since I was mostly sticking to what was on the official album. There are so many that I've created another album just for those songs, which will be the next one in the series. Had they actually put all their best songs on their released album, it could have really been great.

By the way, I just came across a quote from Crosby about the album on Wikipedia. It supports the problems I mentioned above:
 
"The whole thing, the recording of American Dream, it got stretched out. And we did not have, really, the best group of songs to work with. Then, even though we did not have enough good songs, we ended up putting fourteen of them on the album! I think that was stupid."

01 American Dream (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Got It Made (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 Compass (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Name of Love (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 Don't Say Goodbye (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 This Old House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 He's an American (David Crosby)
08 Clear Blue Skies (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 Feel Your Love (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Night Song (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 Interstate (Neil Young)
12 Oh Yes I Can (David Crosby)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16408167/CROSBSTLLSNSHYNG1988AmrcnDrem_atse.zip.html

The cover art actually comes from a photo of a T-shirt sold at CSNY concerts around that era. (There also was a nearly identical CSN version.) All I really added was the album title at the bottom.