Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Silver and Gold - Non-Album Tracks (1989)

A couple of days ago, I posted the 1988 CSNY album "American Dream," but an imagined version from an alternate history where they didn't make all the mistakes they did, and where they recorded a lot more albums together than they did.

That album stuck fairly closely to the track list of the actual "American Dream," with a few exceptions. Mostly, it was a matter of selecting different versions to make the album have more of an acoustic sound. But actually, from about 1987 to 1989, CSNY performed a bunch of other songs that were just as good as the best songs from that album. That has allowed me to make this companion album from that time period, which I imagine would have come out one year later, since some of the songs date to 1989. (Technically, one song is from 1990, but that's just because that version had better sound quality than a version from 1989 that I could have used.)

Happily, a majority of the songs on this alternate album actually involve all of CSN or CSNY. Most of these are due to occasional benefit concert done by CSNY around that time. Unfortunately, in a couple of cases the sound quality isn't that great due to the source being an audience recording, but I figured that was more than balanced out by the performance, and getting the whole group together.

For instance, the Neil Young songs "Silver and Gold," "Long Walk Home," and "Nothing Is Perfect" all came out on his solo albums eventually. But I think these songs are better served with CSN vocals added to them. In particular, I believe "Silver and Gold" would have become a latter day CSNY classic had they put it on "American Dream." Instead, Young didn't put it on one of his own albums until 2000, and the ho-hum performance of that version caused a lot of people to miss the song.

In some cases though, I chose solo performances to fill the album. But I didn't want to overlap with the songs on any really good solo albums, such as Young's 1989 album "Freedom." Thus, the two solo Young songs I chose, "Razor Love" and "Cocaine Eyes," were done by him in solo acoustic renditions in concerts around this time, but not put on any of his albums. ("Razor Love" would eventually be released in 2000, while "Cocaine Eyes" did get released at the time, but on an EP called "Eldorado" only released in Japan, and it was done in a very different version.)

Unfortunately, Young drifted away from CSN for the next ten years, rarely even showing up in concert with them. So this series will continue with some CSN albums for a while. But in my opinion, they are markedly better than the ones CSN actually released in the 1990s.

01 Silver and Gold (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Chippin' Away (Crosby, Stills & Nash with James Taylor)
03 Tracks in the Dust (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Cocaine Eyes (Neil Young)
05 Chuck's Lament [A Child's Dream] (Crosby, Stils & Nash)
06 Long Walk Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 House of Broken Dreams (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
08 Nothing Is Perfect (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 Feed the People (Stephen Stills with Graham Nash)
10 Lady of the Harbor (David Crosby)
11 Razor Love (Neil Young)
12 My Country 'Tis of Thee (Crosby & Nash with Michael Hedges)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16408171/CROSBSTLLSNSHYNG1989SlvrndGld_atse.zip.html

I don't know when and where the photo I used from the cover is from. But it seems pretty certain to me that it's from the late 1980s.