Crosby, Stills and Nash - Solo Demos, Volume 1: 1968

I've already posted about 20 Crosby, Stills, Nash and/or Young albums that form a kind of alternate history in which they released a lot more music together than they actually did. This is the start of a  series of three albums that's kind of an addendum to that. For the first few years CSN were together, they recorded a bunch of solo demos. When the demo songs were unique, I included them on one of those alternate history albums. But that still left a bunch of demos of well known songs. So I've gathered those up into their own albums.

By luck, there's enough material for one album dealing with 1968, another with 1969, and a third for both 1970 and 1971. This, obviously, is the 1968 one. What's interesting about that is that CSN hadn't joined together yet. All three of them were leaving or had left their original bands (the Byrds for Crosby, Buffalo Springfield for Stills, and the Hollies for Nash). While they searched for what to do next, they continued to write and record demos of new songs, which is what we have here.

This album is rather short, at 32 minutes. I could have made it longer by including songs from Stills' archival album "Just Roll Tape, April 26th, 1968." But if you're into this sort of music, you should have that album. It's really good. The three Stills songs here are different versions from different sources.

The album is dominated by Crosby, who wrote and sings five of the ten songs. But that's just luck in terms of what has become publicly available. Apparently, all three of them wrote lots of songs in 1968, some of which they would record until years later. But we only have a smattering of the demos. That's especially the case for Nash. Apparently, he wrote some songs in this time period that still haven't been released in any form.

Three of the performances are officially unreleased. But in terms of sound quality, I don't think you can tell which ones those are.

01 Deja Vu (David Crosby)
02 49 Bye-Byes (Stephen Stills)
03 Horses through a Rainstorm (Graham Nash)
04 Games (David Crosby)
05 Marrakesh Express (Graham Nash)
06 Guinnevere (David Crosby)
07 You Don't Have to Cry (Stephen Stills)
08 Long Time Gone (David Crosby)
09 49 Reasons [49 Bye-Byes] (Stephen Stills with David Crosby)
10 Wooden Ships (David Crosby)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100312/CrosbSN_1968_SoloDemsVolume1_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is a publicity photo of CSN from 1969.