Crosby, Stills and Nash - The Forum, Los Angeles, CA, 6-29-1977

The short version is that there has never been a good sounding concert recording of Crosby, Stills and Nash (CSN) from their pivotal 1977 tour. But now there is. That's not due to a newly revealed recording. I took a pre-existing one and upgraded it with lots of audio editing. In my opinion, this now sounds as good as a typical soundboard from that era, or at least close to it.

I've been a big CSN (and sometimes Y) fan for many years. In my opinion, there are worthy concert recordings from all of their important years except for 1977. In terms of soundboards, two songs, "(He Play Real Good for Free)" and "Shadow Captain" were released on the 1983 official live album "Allies." That was because around 1983 Crosby was in a bad way due to drug addiction, so they had to go back to an earlier time to get some really good live recordings with him singing lead vocals. Those two songs are from a concert in Houston. There are live versions of some other songs from that same 1977 Houston concert on YouTube, but only part of a show. I wanted an entire show, with all the songs in the correct order. I kept an eye out for a worthy one for many years, but to no avail. There was one audience bootleg that was pretty decent, but it only included about 2/3rds of the concert.

I was aware of another audience bootleg from 1977 that was a full concert. It was Mike Millard, who was a reknowned bootleg taper. But, like most audience boots, it had many issues: too much echo/reverb, lots of hiss, crowd noise during songs, and so on. However, it occurred to me that, due to the advances in audio editing technology in recent years, I could probably get this one to sound good if I worked on it enough. 

So that's what I did, because I really, really wanted a good recording from this tour. I worked more on editing this than nearly anything else I've posted here. I ran every song through the MVSEP program at least three times, sometimes more. I also used Adobe's speech enhancer on all the talking tracks. But in the end, I got the result I was looking for.

I was particularly interested to hear songs from the band's 1977 album "CSN." It was the first CSN album since their debut "Crosby, Stills and Nash" in 1969. After "Deja Vu" as CSNY in 1970, CSN just couldn't get their act together enough to put out another album as a group, either with or without Y - Neil Young. But in 1976, Stills got divorced. After grieving, he quit drinking and focused on music with a passion he hadn't shown for years. he was the driving force behind the "CSN" album, which I think is excellent. It's actually their best selling album as a trio, even narrowly outselling their debut one. 

I was hoping for a lot of songs from their "CSN" album. Unfortunately, not that many, just four: "Just a Song Before I Go," "Cathedral," "Shadow Captain," and "I Give You Give Blind." The album was released only a few weeks earlier, so they may have figured the audience didn't know the songs that well. I was especially hoping for versions of "See the Changes" and "Dark Star," but I checked at setlist.com and there were many concerts this year where those weren't played. Oh well. At least there were a couple of nice rarities, especially "King of the Mountain," which never made it onto an album in the 1970s, and "As I Come of Age."

The three of them were firing on all cylinders for this album and tour. Unfortunately, that wouldn't last. Soon thereafter, Crosby's drug addictions got worse and worse, so they didn't tour much until they put out a new album in 1982. Even then, Crosby's participation was the bare minimum. He wouldn't get cleaned up until he was forced to spend a year in prison in the mid-1980s. That's a big reason why I wanted a live recording from 1977, because they wouldn't be really good again as a trio until about a decade later.

There's only one song with "[Edit]" in its title, even though I made a zillion edits overall. That one is singled out because the beginning of the song, including the first line of vocals, was missing. I filled it in using another recording from that year (from Lakeland, Florida).

Here's a great article about the 1977 CSN reunion, published earlier the same month as this concert:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-actual-honest-to-god-reunion-of-crosby-stills-and-nash-63934/

This album is two hours and 18 minutes long.

01 Pre-Road Downs [Edit] (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
02 The Lee Shore (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
03 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
04 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
05 I Used to Be a King (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
06 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
07 Just a Song Before I Go (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
08 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
09 Shadow Captain (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
10 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
11 Turn Back the Pages (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
12 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
13 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
14 Suite- Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
15 You Don't Have to Cry (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
16 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
17 Guinnevere (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
18 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
19 Our House (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
20 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
21 Cathedral (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
22 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
23 King of the Mountain (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
24 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
25 Crossroads - You Can't Catch Me (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
26 4 + 20 (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
27 As I Come of Age (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
28 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
29 Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
30 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
31 Blackbird (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
32 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
33 Critical Mass - Wind on the Water (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
34 Deja Vu (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
35 I Give You Give Blind (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
36 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
37 Military Madness (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
38 Carry On (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
39 Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
40 talk (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
41 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills & Nash)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/2Ce6Vs9i

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/vQ6zcy4Dc1PPOTg/file

The cover image comes from a concert at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, California, on October 22, 1977. It was in color already, but just barely. I used the AI program Ask Gemini to improve the color and the details.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Denver Coliseum, Denver, CO, 5-12-1970

Here's something I'm very excited to post. I put many, many hours of work into this, but I think it paid off. This is an audience bootleg of a special Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) concert that sounded pretty rough. But now, after some editing, I believe it sounds almost as good as a soundboard from the era. However, be warned that sometimes the sound quality is still rough sometimes. But you should have heard what it sounded like before. It's vastly improved.

This also was on the most pivotal concerts in the history of CSNY. So let me give some background. In March 1970, the CSNY album "Deja Vu" was released. It was a massive hit right away. Rolling Stone magazine would later put it on their list of the top 500 albums of all time. It would eventually sell eight million copies in the U.S. alone.

CSNY had toured in late 1969 into January 1970, but then they took an extended break. This Denver concert was supposed to be the first one of a big nationwide tour after that break to promote "Deja Vu." However, there was trouble brewing behind the scenes. CSNY needed a bassist and drummer to play live. So far, those roles had been filled by Greg Reeves on bass and Dallas Taylor on drums. But mere days before this concert, Reeves was fired by Stephen Stills. Stills later claimed that this was "because [Reeves] suddenly decided he was an Apache witch doctor." That sounds like a weird excuse, but it seems there's some truth to it. For instance, Nils Lofgren later said that during one of the sessions for Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" album in 1970, Reeves appeared covered head to toe in gold paint. Young explained the bassist was "doin' his Indian thing." And Reeves himself later said that members of CSNY "thought I was trying to put spells on them" due to his strong interest in Native American shamanism. He also dyed his hair red and did many other strange things.

But that wasn't the only reason he was fired. It seems there were some musical issues as well. Still later said that Reeves "freaked too much on the bass and no one could keep up because [he] did not play one rhythm the same. He could play bass imaginatively, but he has to be predictable as well." Furthermore, Reeves also wanted to sing some of his songs during CSNY concert. Stills thought that was "ludicrous, only because the songs weren't great. We'll sing any song if it's great, but not just because it happens to be written by our bass player."

Reeves was replaced by Calvin "Fuzzy" Samuel. Stills had just been using him as his bassist when he was recording his first solo album that year. But Reeves was fired late in rehearsals, so CSNY didn't have much time to rehearse songs with Samuel before their tour began. Furthermore, the band members were having other problems. Their massive success was leading to ego trips and lots of drug use. Also, David Crosby's girlfriend Christine Hinton died in September 1969, and it took him a long time to get over it. For instance, he was prone to just breaking into tears at random times during the recording of the "Deja Vu" album. On top of all that, eight days before this concert, four students were killed by the U.S. government's national guard at Kent State. It caused a nationwide uproar. It also led Neil Young to write the classic song "Ohio" in the days just prior to this concert.

So tensions were steadily rising for CSNY, and it all blew up around the time of this concert. The first half of the concert was all acoustic. That went pretty well, mostly. One issue was the sound system the band had paid to use for their entire tour was used for the first time, and it was terrible. If you listen to this recording, you can hear strange sounds in the background from time to time, much like fireworks going off. David Crosby even commented on those sounds and apologized for them before one of the songs in the acoustic set. But this continued occasionally for the rest of the concert. Furthermore, there were problems with the monitors, which means the band members had trouble hearing what the others were playing. You can hear Neil Young complain about that during the acoustic set as well.

But things got a lot worse during the electric set. The problems with the sound system and the monitors continued, and were magnified in the full band setting. Furthermore, Samuel was struggling to keep up with all the songs he had just learned days earlier. 

Drummer Dallas Taylor later explained: "The tour had been booked during all of this chaos. And it was a multi-million dollar tour. And so [Samuel] came out, but we didn't get a chance to rehearse with him. By then, the Charles Manson [murder trial] stuff was going on; it just went very dark, very quickly. I think with the cocaine coming into the world, it just went dark and evil. So [Samuel], God bless him, he didn't get a chance to learn the songs."

Samuel himself later said, "I'd never been on stage with monitors before. I didn't even know who I was on stage with. Dallas I knew a little bit from [working on Stills' solo album], so we just had to bluff our way through. Neil was very uncomfortable because Stephen and I had played together a lot more."

Neil Young was so frustrated that he walked off the stage before the end of the second to last song, "Everybody I Love You." If you listen to the banter after that song, you can hear the other band members asking each other what happened to Young. Probably, they cut the concert a little short when Young didn't return during their final song.

Things then got even worse after the concert was over. The rest of the tour was immediately cancelled. Young was so upset that he threatened to leave the group. Taylor later said, "After the show, I got this phone call from Neil. He asked would you consider continuing the tour without Stephen? I didn't think about it: no." 

The next day, the band flew to Los Angeles. A crisis meeting was held with all the band members, plus record company executives and managers, like David Geffen, Ahmed Ertugun, and Elliott Roberts. Only Taylor had to wait outside. At the end of the meeting, he was told that he was fired. Taylor later said, "By then, it was about Neil taking over as leader, controlling the band. He was mad that Stephen fired Greg Reeves, 'cos he loved Greg. It's like third grade stuff. ... Neil said, well, if I have to work with Stills, then Dallas has to go, 'cos he knew I was allied. I mean, it's crazy stuff."

Indeed, during the recording of the "Deja Vu" album, Stills was taking copious amounts of cocaine for the first time. This led to him working in the studio for many hours a day, sometimes even going 24 hours or more without stopping. The only other person who could keep up with him was Taylor, who was also taking lots of cocaine. Whereas Young felt a connection to Reeves, probably helped by their shared interest in Native American culture. For instance, the very moment Stills fired Reeves, Young was there in the same room, and immediately told Reeves that he still wanted him to play bass on his solo album, "After the Gold Rush." 

So, almost certainly, Young didn't want Stills fired, and/or knew that wasn't a realistic demand. The two of them would later say multiple times that they were close friends, and they've had many musical projects together over the years. But, by making that initial demand, it allowed Young to get the compromise of getting Taylor fired, which reduced Stills' influence over the whole band.

Johnny Barbata was hired to play drums instead. Additionally, the cancelled tour dates were rescheduled. After two weeks of more rehearsals, the tour resumed. At first, things went okay. But soon, personality conflicts came to a head again. Stills, in particular, got even more carried away with cocaine and alcohol abuse, which led to megalomania. After a concert in Chicago in early July, Crosby, Nash, and Young decided to fire Stills. The tour staggered on for two more concerts before mercifully coming to an end. 

Nash then helped put together a double live album, "Four Way Street," which was released in 1971 and was a big seller. But CSNY was effectively finished, excepting a couple of spontaneous reunion concerts, until a 1974 tour. (And that tour is a whole other story, with even more problems.)

Decades later, Stills had this to say: "I just wish we could have held it together a little longer. But there were petty ego jealousies going on. Nash and I weren't talking. Neil wanted to be on his own. I had my solo album to finish. But we still could have done that and kept CSNY going. But we threw it all away for very fallacious reasons, I can see now. I mean, we were standing on the verge. And all of the freedom we wanted for our own personal careers would have still been available to us. But we couldn't put [aside] the trivial going on between us. If a voice of reason could have cleared that fog, we could have realized our full potential and CSNY would be mentioned in the same breath with the Beatles and the Stones. We also could have become rich enough to be creative. But I was the biggest fool. I thought the managers would come up with some strength. They didn't. So we lost it all, right there, that day, to indulgence. We lost it all." 

Ironically, just one day after this concert, and the same day the band fired Taylor, CSNY was told that "Deja Vu" had just reached the Number One spot on the U.S. album chart. So Stills is right to lament what might have been if they could have stayed together. 

So that's the story, the context of this concert. But I also want to talk a little bit about the song list, because it was an extraordinary one for the band. The previous CSNY concert was in January 1970, and none of them had done solo concerts, except for Young doing a few concerts with Crazy Horse in February and March. All four of them wrote a lot of new songs and began working on solo albums. Plus, there were some songs from "Deja Vu" that none of them had ever performed in concert before. This meant that lots of songs were performed to the public for the very first time, including many that were still unreleased. I did some research using the setlist.fm website. Here are all the songs that got their world premiere at this concert. The ones with asterisks were still unreleased at the time:

Tell Me Why*
Man in the Mirror*
Only Love Can Break Your Heart* 
We Are Not Helpless* 
Love the One You're With*
Carry On
Chicago*
As I Come of Age*
Southern Man*
Everybody I Love You

That's pretty incredible, considering how many of those songs have gone on to be considered classics! 

Furthermore, this was the first time CSNY performed "Everybody's Been Burned," a Byrds song written by Crosby, as well as "Bluebird," a Buffalo Springfield song written by Stills. I don't count those as premieres though, since they were performed live previously by the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. However, this was the sole time "Everybody's Been Burned" was performed in a CSNY concert, and one of only two times "Bluebird" was performed in a CSNY concert. (However, Stills wrote another song, "Bluebird Revisited," that was kind of an update of that song, and he did perform that in concert some.)

Oh, and another exceptional thing about this concert is that this was the one and only time "Everybody I Love You" was performed live by CSNY. Perhaps later there were bad feelings about that song, since it was the one where Young walked off the stage? I don't know. But also note that the lyrics of the song are actually quite different from the version on the "Deja Vu" album. Additionally, this was the only time "We Are Not Helpless" was performed in a CSNY. The song was written by Stills, but he also only performed it three more times in solo concerts all the rest of his long music career. 

Okay, this is turning out to be a long write-up, sorry. But now I have to address the sound quality issue. When I first heard this the bootleg of this concert, I noticed a lot of big problems. For instance, there was a tremendous amount of hiss. But I also sensed that most of them were fixable problems, and it was a better audience recording than most. (I've included a text file with the download zip that explains some about the origins of the recording.) I also was impressed that this was a complete recording, including all the cheering and banter between songs. For some reason, there are a lot of partial recordings of CSNY concerts from 1969 and 1970, and/or recordings where the banter wasn't recorded. (Tapers often did that in that era to save tape.)

The first thing I did was run all the songs through the MVSEP program to get rid of hiss. And boy, was there a lot of hiss! I've rarely ever seen that much hiss get cleaned up. So that was a big improvement right there. The next problem was there was a lot of reverb/ echo, especially on the vocals. So I ran all the songs through MVSEP again, first separating out the vocals and then running a dereverb filter on them. That helped a lot too.

But then I decided to go further, and really clean up the vocals. Since this was an audience recording, there was a lot of talking from people near the taper. In fact, at one point, one could hear a conversation where someone asked the taper if they were taping the concert, and then, finding out they were, asking if they could get a copy. So there was a lot of crud like that. I listened to each song carefully, and erased any vocals that came from comments in the audience instead of band members. I was able to get rid of most of it. However, sometimes people were talking at the exact same time band members were talking. I tried running songs with that problem through yet more filters which are supposed to separate talking from singing. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. 

In the end, some talking remains, for instance on the song "On the Way Home." But most of that is fairly low in the mix. For the more egregious remaining cases of audience members talking during singing, I used vocals from the CSNY concerts that year and patched them in. Typically, that was just for a line or two. For instance, in "Teach Your Children," someone in the audience had a coughing fit for about ten seconds while Nash was singing. So I got rid of that with the patching method. Really, every song here deserves to have "[Edit]" in their titles, due to all the line by line editing I did. But I've only marked the ones where I patched in bits from other songs. Oh, and I also got rid of some dead air between songs, especially guitar tuning. I also cut out some talking from audience members during quiet times between songs, if that was the only way to get rid of it.

In conclusion, this was a pretty disastrous concert. Nash even publicly said this after the concert, to explain the tour date cancellations: "The music was rubbish and we knew it. We had to cool ourselves out before we could get back again." But, in my opinion, most of the trouble happened in private, before and after the concert. The actual music was pretty good. That's especially true for the acoustic set, before the problems with playing with a full band with an unprepared bass player and bad monitors and sound system happened. 

And it certainly is a historic concert, with so many classics being heard in public for the very first time, and rare songs, as well as all the band drama. If you're a CSNY fan, I would consider this a "must have," even though some sound quality problems remain.

I can't resist ending with one more quote, this time by Young, summing up how the band broke apart in 1970: "[It was] because we had no idea what we were doing. It's not because there was anything wrong with anybody in the band. It was just, what we were confronted with made us be... it changed us. It changed us. The crowd. The adulation. The roaring sound. It changed us." 

And ooooooone more quote... this one from British music critic Barney Hoskyns: "I don't think it would have been possible for CSNY in 1970, 1971, to go on much beyond that. A break-up was inevitable. You've got four young guys, two of whom are certainly out of their heads on cocaine [Crosby and Stills]. It's petty stuff. These are guys who were not very grown up. And they're not very good at talking to each other. And resolving stuff."

This album is an hour and 50 minutes long. 

01 Suite- Judy Blue Eyes [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 Teach Your Children [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 On the Way Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 Helpless (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 Everybody's Been Burned (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Tell Me Why [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Man in the Mirror (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
15 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 Black Queen (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 Bluebird [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
18 We Are Not Helpless - America's Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
19 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
20 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
21 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
22 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
23 Pre-Road Downs (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
24 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
25 Carry On (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
26 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
27 So Begins the Task (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
28 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
29 Chicago (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
30 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
31 Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
32 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
33 As I Come of Age (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
34 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
35 Southern Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
36 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
37 Everybody I Love You (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
38 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
39 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CRbuc6Rc

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/T9pNrz1WmydF5Tc/file

The cover image is from a concert at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit, Michigan, on June 12, 1970. The original version was black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

Laughter, Love and Music, Bill Graham Memorial, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA, 11-3-1991, Part 3: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Here's the third out of four volumes of the 1991 Bill Graham memorial concert, called "Laughter, Love and Music." This one features Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY).

Bill Graham was pivotal to the career of CSNY, so it was fitting they were one of the headlining music acts for his memorial concerts. He was involved in most of the really key concerts for the band, from Woodstock to Live Aid. In 1970, when CSNY was just starting out, he called them "America's Beatles." That quote got a lot of mileage and really helped them. But probably his most important role was in 1974, when he organized their big reunion tour. 

Graham Nash told a interesting story relating to Graham in his autobiography "Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life." It relates to an episode at one of their Fillmore East shows in New York City in 1970. After a three-hour show and two encores, the band was in their dressing room, refusing to come out while the crowd was cheering for more. Nash wrote, "Bill Graham slipped a note under our door. It said: 'Your audience awaits you.' 'We’re not coming out, no matter how much you pay us,' Neil told Bill. The next thing we knew, a hundred-dollar bill came sliding under the door. As soon as Neil saw that, he shouted, 'Not enough!' Seven more hundred-dollar bills came sliding through at regular intervals. We were all laughing our asses off about it. Neil scooped those bills up and we went out to do another encore." 

That showed the lengths Bill Graham would go to in order to make sure the audience went away fully satisfied. I would guess that any other concert promoter would have figured two encores was plenty after a long concert, and kept all the money.

CSNY got together for a reunion album in 1988, "American Dream." But they only played about five concerts together from 1988 to 1990, all of them benefit concerts. Graham's death caused them to reunite again, after over a year of not performing together. It would be their last concert as a foursome until they went on tour in 2000. In this concert, they skipped the songs from their reunion album and stuck to their classics.

This album is 43 minutes long.

46 talk by emcee (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 Long May You Run (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 Southern Cross (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
55 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
56 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
57 Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
58 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
59 Ohio (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
60 talk by emcee (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Le4MDZsb

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/KA7dtrXCoVKLj0i/file

I have to admit I cheated with the cover. I couldn't find any good photos of CSNY together at this concert, and even only a couple of bad ones. They were spread too far apart on the stage. But I did find a good one of Neil Young and David Crosby on stage at this exact concert, so I used that one. I also found a good one of just Stephen Stills, also at this exact concert. So I cheated by using Photoshop to paste Stills into the image between Young and Crosby. Sorry if that bothers anyone, but I liked it better that way.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - VH-1 Storytellers, MTV-VH-1 Studios, Santa Monica, CA, 2-18-2000

The flood of VH-1 Storytellers albums continues. This time, it's a episode of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY).

In 1999, CSNY had one of their occasional reunions, putting out the studio album "Looking Forward." Like most later CSN and CSNY studio albums, it had overproduction issues and song selection issues, so it wasn't nearly as good as it should have been. But all four of them remained talented songwriters just the same. That can be seen by the two songs here from that album, "Dream for Him" and "Seen Enough."

Other than those two, all the songs were classics from the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was a mix of acoustic and full-band performances. This was one of the first concerts for the band's 2000 tour, their first big tour as CSNY since 1974.

As I've done with most of these, I had to do a lot of editing to fix the flow from song to song. For instance, oftentimes, the applause cut off abruptly, so I'd have to patch in more applause from somewhere else. I made an especially big edit for the song "Helplessly Hoping," which is why that one has "[Edit]" in its title. As this series usually did, it started part way through the first song. So I found a soundboard version from the band's 2000 tour, and used that to fill in the missing part.

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 Helplessly Hoping [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 Our House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 Guinnevere (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 Long May You Run (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 Dream for Him (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 After the Goldrush (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
15 Seen Enough (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/PdPZeHA7

I could have used a screenshot from this exact concert, but it would have been poor quality, based on a low-res video file. Instead, I used one from a concert in San Jose, California, on February 4, 2000, just two weeks prior to this concert.

Various Artists - Children of the Americas Radiothon, United Nations Building, New York City, and Palace Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, 11-12-1988

Here's another big benefit concert with a bunch of different famous musical acts. But this one was unusual in a couple of ways. For one, it was held in two locations simultaneously and broadcast live over the radio. And for the other, it's quite an odd selection of acts. I like all of them, but it seems pretty random to me to have, say, Pat Benatar followed by Al Stewart, then followed by Midnight Oil, and so on, which is what happened here. But hey, it's all good music, with excellent sound quality.

This benefit concert certainly had a good cause, which was to fund non-profits helping poor children in Latin America. This was the second annual concert for this cause. I don't know anything about the first concert or subsequent ones. But we know about this one because it was broadcast live on the radio, and a bootleg recording of it survives.

I made many, many edits to make this listenable. The concert took the form of a radiothon, which is just like a telethon, except for the radio instead of TV. And if you're familiar with telethons at all, you know they're notorious for constantly asking for donations. That's what happened here. Between acts, and even during acts, there were emcees giving pleas to donate, with the donation phone number in particular repeated endlessly. Even the musical artists would sometimes mention the phone number between songs. I got rid of all that because it's all moot now, with the number obviously no longer working. I stripped this down to just the music and the banter relevant to the music.

I also did some edits to make this flow better. Oftentimes, as soon as a song wound end, the emcee's voice would come on with more pleas for donations. So I would patch in some more applause to give the songs a decent sounding ending. I didn't bother marking those edits with "[Edit]" in the song titles, 'cos I did it so much.

Some of the acts performed at the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles. Those were Jackson Browne, Midnight Oil, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY), plus earlier appearances by Graham Nash and David Crosby. All the other acts performed at the United Nations Building in New York City. Note that the crowd in Los Angeles sounds much larger than the one in New York City. I'm guessing only a few dozen were allowed into the United Nations Building for this, based on the clapping one can hear.  

The star attraction here was CSNY. They put out a new album in 1988, "American Dream," but Neil Young decided not to take part in a tour to support it. However, he did take part in a very limited number of concerts with CSN around this time. There was the Bridge Benefit in 1988 (which I have also posted here), the Bridge Benefit in 1989, and this. (There also were a couple more in 1987 and 1990 and 1991, if you want to go that far.)

It's quite possible that there was more to these two concerts that what was heard here. For instance, there was no introduction to the CSNY set, and I doubt they started with the new song "This Old House." It also seems odd that Midnight Oil would have been recruited but only played less than ten minutes of music. I'm guessing this is just the stuff that made it to the radio broadcast, and while music was broadcast from one location, we were probably missing the music taking place at the other location. If anyone has any more of it, please let me know.  

This album is two hours and 25 minutes long.

01 Teach Your Children (Graham Nash)
02 talk (Emcee)
03 I Love L.A. (Randy Newman)
04 Dixie Flyer (Randy Newman)
05 Sail Away (Randy Newman)
06 talk (Randy Newman)
07 Political Science (Randy Newman)
08 Short People (Randy Newman)
09 talk (Randy Newman)
10 I Want You to Hurt like I Do (Randy Newman)
11 talk (David Crosby)
12 Crow on the Cradle (Jackson Browne & Graham Nash)
13 talk (David Crosby)
14 talk (Jackson Browne)
15 Lives in the Balance (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
16 talk (Jackson Browne)
17 My Personal Revenge (Jackson Browne with Sangre Machuwa)
18 talk (Jackson Browne)
19 Fruita Almarga [Bitter Fruit] (Jackson Browne)
20 talk (Jackson Browne)
21 Lene Verde [Instrumental] (Jackson Browne with Sangre Machuwa)
22 talk (Graham Nash)
23 Rock Me on the Water (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
24 Powerful Stuff (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
25 talk (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
26 Look at That, Look at That (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
27 talk (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
28 She's Tough (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
29 talk (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
30 Wrap It Up (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
31 talk (Pat Benatar)
32 All Fired Up (Pat Benatar)
33 Run Between the Raindrops (Pat Benatar)
34 talk (Pat Benatar)
35 Let's Stay Together (Pat Benatar)
36 talk (Emcee)
37 Antarctica (Al Stewart)
38 talk (Al Stewart)
39 Princess Olivia (Al Stewart)
40 The Year of the Cat (Al Stewart)
41 talk (Graham Nash)
42 Wealth Is Virtue (Midnight Oil)
43 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
44 This Old House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
45 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
46 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 Name of Love (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 Tracks in the Dust (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 Don't Say Goodbye (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 Southern Cross (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
55 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
56 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
57 My Country 'Tis of Thee (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with J. D. Souther)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/DQZ2b6A2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/z8t3Ajl7bhZ3NZF/file

I found the cover image from some promotional art related to this concert. It's a drawing of all the major stars that took part. In the top row, from left to right: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In the bottom row, from left to right: Jackson Browne, Pat Benatar, Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, and Randy Newman. The banner at the top was in the original, but I changed the text there, and added more text at the bottom. 

I couldn't find any actual photos from this concert, so I'm lucky to have found this.

Live Aid - JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, PA, 7-13-1985, Part 6: Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Duran Duran, and Patti LaBelle

This is Part 6 of the Philadelphia portion of the 1985 Live Aid benefit concert. This one is notable for including a couple of big reunions. There's just one part to go after this. But then the London portion of Live Aid will follow.

Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980 when their drummer John Bonham died. They reunited for the first time for Live Aid. To fill Bonham's spot on drums, they used two drummers: Phil Collins and Tony Thompson (who was drummer for Chic, and then the Power Station). The set was considered something of a fiasco. Here's what the Wikipedia entry on Live Aid has to say about it:

"The performance was criticized for Plant's hoarse vocals, Jimmy Page's intoxication and out-of-tune guitar, a lack of rehearsal, and poorly functioning monitors. Plant described the performance as 'a f-cking atrocity for us ... It made us look like loonies.' Page later criticized Collins' performance, saying: "Robert told me Phil Collins wanted to play with us. I told him that was all right if he knows the numbers. But at the end of the day, he didn't know anything. We played "Whole Lotta Love," and he was just there bashing away cluelessly and grinning. I thought that was really a joke.' Collins responded: 'It wasn't my fault it was crap... If I could have walked off, I would have. But then we'd all be talking about why Phil Collins walked off Live Aid – so I just stuck it out... I turned up and I was a square peg in a round hole. Robert was happy to see me, but Jimmy wasn't.'"

Although there never has been any official album of Live Aid, a four DVD collection of video footage from the concert was released in 2004. Led Zeppelin was so upset at their performance that they didn't allow any of it to be used for the DVD. And they've avoided putting any of it on their own releases.

Personally, I don't think it's THAT bad. Yeah, it was a subpar performance, and the drumming didn't help, but I watched it live as a kid and I was very excited that Led Zeppelin reunited at all. They would reunite for another short set in 1988, which they also were disappointed with. Then they did a full show in 2007, which went well and eventually was released as an official live album.

The Led Zeppelin reunion was followed by a reunion of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY). Crosby, Stills and Nash did a set earlier in the show, then Neil Young had done a set. Their reunion set only lasted two songs, but it was better than nothing. The last time CSNY appeared on stage together was back in 1974. Young drifted away from the others mainly due to the serious drug addiction of David Crosby, which got really bad in the early 1980s when he became addicted to crack. At the time of Live Aid, Crosby was still in a bad way. I remember watching the reunion and being disturbed by how awful he looked. However, I suppose Young allowed the reunion because Live Aid was such a big deal.

It turned out 1985 was the lowest point for Crosby. He was arrested twice that year for drug and gun charges. He ended up serving nine months in prison later in 1985 going into 1986. During that prison time, he was able to quit drugs, and turned his life around. That led to another CSNY reunion in 1986, two shows in 1987, and then a new CSNY studio album in 1988, with lots more collaboration after that.

Duran Duran was super popular in 1985, explaining why they were billed even after big reunions by Led Zeppelin and CSNY. It would turn out to be the final time the five original band members would publicly perform together until 2003. Musically, the most notable thing about their set was a really bad note sung by lead singer Simon Le Bon during the song "A View to a Kill." This was dubbed "The Bum Note Heard Round the World" by various media outlets. Le Bon later said it was the most embarrassing moment of his career.

Personally, I don't think it was so terrible. It was only one note that lasted a second or two. But to spare you from having to hear it, I've done an edit to remove it. Since it took place during a chorus, I patched in a bit from a different chorus in the song, so it sounds fine now. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in the title.

The last act in this part of the song was soul singer Patti LaBelle. I must say I'm mystified why LaBelle got such a long set time - one of the longest of the whole concert - and why her set time was so prominent, late in the show. She sang lead vocals on "Lady Marmalade," which was a Number One hit in the US by the band LaBelle back in 1974. But she didn't even sing that song for Live Aid. Her solo career had only moderate success up until this point, with one gold album. (She would have a big hit record in 1986, but that was still a year into the future.) It's doubly strange when you consider all the musicians who weren't even allowed to perform at Live Aid because they weren't popular enough. For instance, soul singer Dionne Warwick, who sold way more records that LaBelle ever did, and had big hits in the early 1980s, was only allowed to introduce an act later in the show (Hall and Oates), and not sing at all.

But it is what it is. If I could wave a magic wand and change Live Aid, I think I could have made a lot of changes to make it an even better concert, especially including more famous musical acts who were willing and even eager to play, but this is what we have. LaBelle certainly did a fine performance. It's just strange that she got to play six songs when other acts much more famous than her only were allowed two or three.

This album is an hour and 12 minutes long.

120 talk (Phil Collins)
121 talk (Led Zeppelin)
122 Rock and Roll (Led Zeppelin)
123 talk (Led Zeppelin)
124 Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin)
125 talk (Led Zeppelin)
126 Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
127 talk (Bill Graham)
128 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
129 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
130 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
131 Daylight Again - Find the Cost of Freedom (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
132 talk (Chevy Chase)
133 A View to a Kill [Edit] (Duran Duran)
134 talk (Duran Duran)
135 Union of the Snake (Duran Duran)
136 talk (Duran Duran)
137 Save a Prayer (Duran Duran)
138 talk (Duran Duran)
139 The Reflex (Duran Duran)
140 talk (Duran Duran)
141 talk (Bette Midler)
142 New Attitude (Patti LaBelle)
143 Imagine (Patti LaBelle)
144 Forever Young (Patti LaBelle)
145 Stir It Up (Patti LaBelle)
146 Over the Rainbow (Patti LaBelle)
147 Why Can't I Get It Over (Patti LaBelle)
148 talk (Bill Graham)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/FBMzMBSH

As with most album covers in this series, I've made room for four pictures, all of them taken at this concert. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin are on the top left, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are on the top right, three members of Duran Duran can be seen on the bottom left, and Patti LaBelle is on the bottom right.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (with Joni Mitchell) - Roosevelt Raceway, Westbury, NY, 9-8-1974

If you want just one full-length Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) concert recording, I would suggest this one. Although there was a lot of drug and ego trouble between band members backstage on their 1974 tour, the four of them were peaking in terms of songwriting and performance. And as a bonus, Joni Mitchell sang backing vocals on no less than nine of the songs.

This was the last night in the U.S. of CSNY's ill-fated 1974 concert tour. They only did one concert in 1974 after this, in London, Britain (which was their only appearance in Europe). Due to the troubles mentioned above, the four of them nicknamed this the "Doom Tour" amongst themselves, and they ran wild with 1970s superstar lifestyle excess. But despite all that, they had many good nights on stage, and this clearly was one such night. They played in front of 80,000 people as part of an all-day concert with Jesse Colin Young, the Beach Boys, and Joni Mitchell as opening acts.

The fact that Mitchell was an opening act helps explain why she joined in singing on a bunch of songs. I believe she did the same for the Wembley show, where she also was an opening act, but I don't think she did that on the other dates in the tour. By the way, the day of this concert, American stuntman Evel Knievel attempted to jump across Snake River Canyon in Idaho on a rocket-powered motorcycle. That happened to be broadcast on pay-per-view TV during Mitchell's set, and she actually took a break from her set to watch it for a few minutes, telling the audience that she was going to go watch some idiot commit suicide. (Knievel survived, but landed at the bottom of the canyon short of crossing the river.) Neil Young made a comment about the Knievel jump before one of the songs he played.

Unfortunately, I looked for the opening sets, but could only find this bootleg with worthy sound quality (or, in most cases, any versions at all).

This is a soundboard recording, and the sound quality is excellent. There were only a couple of snags. For one, a tiny section in the middle of "Deja Vu" was missing, but it seems it was only a few seconds long. It was during an instrumental passage, and I edited it so the missing bit won't be noticed. Also, the last part of "Black Queen" was missing, probably a minute or two. This was more difficult. But I used the version on the album "CSNY 1974" to bring it to a conclusion. That's why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

Speaking of the album "CSNY 1974," that's an official album released in 2014 that features highlights from this tour. It was a big triple album drawn from ten different concerts, but none of those concerts happen to be this one, so I'm pretty sure everything here is still officially unreleased. Personally, I usually prefer listening to entire concert recordings instead of live albums drawn from lots of different shows. If you feel the same, I'm pretty sure this is the best show from the tour, as the few other soundboards are incomplete or have other flaws. (For instance, there's a soundboard recording of the Wembley show too, but it was considered a disappointing performance.)

As with all the shows on this tour, the concert was broken into three sections. CSNY was backed by a full band for the first part and the last part, while there was a big acoustic section in the middle. The acoustic section is roughly from track 16 to 36. Each member got to do their own solo spot. Weirdly though, Crosby only did one song, while Nash, Stills, and Young each did three songs. But the solo songs weren't always really solo, others often joined vocals, including Mitchell on a few.

By the way, Mitchell's participation is a bit odd in that I didn't hear any banter between songs thanking her or even mentioning her. It's very possible that banter like that got cut out. (This also was the day that it was announced that President Ford pardoned former President Nixon for his Watergate crimes. Crosby told that to the crowd during the concert, and the crowd booed. But that's not on this recording, so at least some banter got cut.) But what also is a bit unusual is that she came and went from the stage at least seven different times. I figure that she only sang on the songs that she knew well and had something to contribute on vocal harmonies, and those were randomly scattered throughout the long concert. I find it particularly interesting that she helped sing "Our House," since that song was written by Nash about her when they had a romance around 1970.

This is quite a long concert. This album is three hours and nine minutes long.

01 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Immigration Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 Helpless (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
07 Military Madness (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 Johnny's Garden (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Walk On (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 Almost Cut My Hair (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
15 The Lee Shore (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 Time After Time (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
18 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
19 Southbound Train (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
20 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
21 Another Sleep Song (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
22 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
23 Our House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
24 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
25 Hawaiian Sunrise (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
26 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
27 Long May You Run (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
28 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
29 Ambulance Blues (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
30 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
31 Old Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
32 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
33 Change Partners (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
34 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
35 Myth of Sisyphus (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
36 Word Game (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
37 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
38 Suite- Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
39 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
40 Deja Vu [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
41 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
42 First Things First (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
43 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
44 Don't Be Denied (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
45 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
46 Black Queen [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 Revolution Blues (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 Pushed It Over the End (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 Pre-Road Downs (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 Carry On (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
55 Sugar Mountain (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Joni Mitchell)
56 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
57 Ohio (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.imagenetz.de/jeKeG

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6rMMex7V

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/f9nB9iMAMIHIH8U/file 

The photo used on the cover is from the CSNY Wembley concert a few days later (September 14, 1974). I couldn't find any good color ones from this exact one. I used this particular photo because it has Mitchell there with CSNY, and I thought it was particularly neat to see all five of them together. Neil Young's face was blocked by two microphones, but I did some tweaking in Photoshop so one can now see his eyes.

Also note that I found a concert poster for this exact concert. I based some of the cover art on the poster. However, I inverted the bright and dark bits to better match with the black background of the photo. I'm including the poster here, in case you want to see it. Note that the sketch in the middle was drawn by Mitchell, and was also used for the cover of the band's best of collection "So Far."

Various Artists - Bridge School Benefit 1988, Oakland Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, 12-4-1988

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm a big fan of the annual Bridge School Benefit Concerts, and I recently was given soundboard versions of most of the complete shows from 1988 to 1999. All I had of the 1986 show with excellent sound quality was the Bruce Springsteen set, which I just posted. But I have the entire 1988 show, so here it is. There has been a very good audience bootleg circulating for years, so good that one might even mistake it for a soundboard. But this is an actual soundboard and it sounds even better than that other version.

I have a particular fondness for this show, because it was one of the first concerts I attended, when I was a teenager. Consider the list of performers: Neil Young, Nils Lofgren, Billy Idol, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir (the two leaders of the Grateful Dead), Tom P. and the Heartbreakers, Tracy Chapman, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY). The vast majority of those are musical legends, in my book. 

The one artist that the crowd looked at skeptically was Billy Idol, because all the performances were supposed to be acoustic or at least semi-acoustic in nature and one doesn't think of "Billy Idol" and "acoustic" in the same sentence. But he played a genuinely acoustic set and get a good reaction.

The soundboard recording was generally great, but it had some problems. I mostly fixed them. The most glaring problem was that portions of two songs were missing: "Comes a Time" by Neil Young and "Gates of Eden" by Bob Dylan. Luckily, I had that very good audience bootleg I mentioned above. I used that to patch in the missing bits, which is why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. I also used that audience bootleg to fill in some other missing bits, such as intros to a couple of the performers. (The voice making the intros belongs to actor Timothy Hutton.) But some intros either didn't happen or are missing from both versions, for instance with Bob Dylan's set. With Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the recording cut in part way through the artist name in both versions, only a couple seconds apart.

One great thing about soundboards is that the songs are clear because there's very little crowd noise. But, taken to extremes, that can be weird when there's almost no cheering when the songs end. Strangely, there was a lot of variability with the crowd noise in this soundboard recording: sometimes the cheering sounded normal, and other times there was almost no cheering heard at all, especially at the ends of sets. So I used the audience bootleg version to patch in more applause whenever necessary, using the actual applause from that song. As a result, the applause may vary a bit from song to song, with some guess work on my part as to how loud the reaction actually was, but there should be a decent crowd response after each and every song.

Another thing I did was trim some dead air. For instance, the Tom P. set started with over a minute of guitar tuning. (I'm not using his full name due to copyright issues.) I cut all that out. I also cut back on some of the cheering. For instance, the applause might go on for two minutes after a set ended, but I'd cut that after only a minute. I figured this concert was long enough as it is.

Note that Neil Young, who brought the concert together along with his wife Pegi Young, played a short set to start the show. On the last number, "American Dream," Crosby, Stills and Nash walked onto stage during the song to sing harmony vocals. That's why you get a huge surge of applause partway through the song, even on the soundboard version, because the audience recognized who they were. Then Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came back to do the last set of the night. By the way, I've previously posted the CSNYset at this blog, together with their 1986 Bridge School Benefit show. I'm keeping that post up if you just want their set.

Here's some other random notes. Billy Idol was backed by a couple other musicians, but still basically had an acoustic sound. Bob Dylan was assisted only by guitarist G. E. Smith. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead were also assisted by bassist Rob Wasserman. When Tom P. performed at the 1986 Bridge School Benefit, it was just him on stage. But this time he was assisted by all of his backing band, the Heartbreakers. So that was more of a semi-acoustic set, especially due to the presence of some drumming. Also, if you look closely at the credits, you'll see that Neil Young backed Nils Lofgren for a song, and Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir for a song. He played harmonica and sang backing vocals. Finally, Tracy Chapman and Nils Lofgren joined CSNY for the very last song, "Teach Your Children."

This album is three hours and 52 minutes long. That makes it the longest album I've posted at this blog so far, beating out a 1975 Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder concert by only one minute. Currently, I'm only offering it as a single download. But if there's a demand to break this up into pieces, I could do that too.

01 talk (Neil Young)
02 Comes a Time [Edit] (Neil Young)
03 Sugar Mountain (Neil Young)
04 This Note's for You (Neil Young)
05 talk (Neil Young)
06 American Dream (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 talk (Nils Lofgren)
08 Dreams Die Hard (Nils Lofgren)
09 talk (Nils Lofgren)
10 Live Each Day (Nils Lofgren)
11 Believe (Nils Lofgren with Neil Young)
12 talk (Nils Lofgren)
13 Keith Don't Go (Nils Lofgren)
14 No Mercy (Nils Lofgren)
15 talk (Billy Idol)
16 Untouchables (Billy Idol)
17 talk (Billy Idol)
18 Sweet Sixteen (Billy Idol)
19 talk (Billy Idol)
20 Bo Diddley (Billy Idol)
21 talk (Billy Idol)
22 To Be a Lover (Billy Idol)
23 talk (Billy Idol)
24 Prodigal Blues (Billy Idol)
25 San Francisco Bay Blues (Bob Dylan)
26 Pretty Boy Floyd (Bob Dylan)
27 With God on Our Side (Bob Dylan)
28 Girl from the North Country (Bob Dylan)
29 Gates of Eden [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
30 Forever Young (Bob Dylan)
31 talk (Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir)
32 Wang Dang Doodle (Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir with Neil Young)
33 Friend of the Devil (Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir)
34 Throwing Stones (Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir)
35 Ripple (Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir)
36 Even the Losers (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
37 talk (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
38 Blue Moon of Kentucky (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
39 talk (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
40 The Wild One, Forever (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
41 talk (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
42 Refugee (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
43 talk (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
44 Don't Come Around Here Anymore (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
45 The Waiting (Tom P & the Heartbreakers)
46 talk (Tracy Chapman)
47 If Not Now (Tracy Chapman)
48 What Child Is This (Tracy Chapman)
49 Fast Car (Tracy Chapman)
50 Mountain O' Things (Tracy Chapman)
51 All That You Have Is Your Soul (Tracy Chapman)
52 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
55 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
56 This Old House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
57 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
58 Southern Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
59 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
60 Don't Say Goodbye (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
61 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
62 Compass (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
63 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
64 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
65 Southern Cross (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
66 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Tracy Chapman & Nils Lofgren)

UPDATE: On June 8, 2023, the link has been removed due to a request by people associated with the Bridge School Benefits. Sorry about that.

The cover is the promotional poster for this concert. I cropped it and stretched it horizontally a bit to get it to fully fit into a square shape.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Live at the Fillmore East, June 1970

A few weeks back, I posted a concert that was meant to gather up all the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) live material from 1969 (other than Woodstock) that's in excellent sound quality. Here's basically the same idea, except for 1970. This is a big concert album - two and a half hours - that took a lot of effort to put together, so I hope you enjoy it.

CSNY was a volatile combination, consisting of four stars who had big egos and tended to use a lot of drugs. They broke up briefly in early May 1970. You can hear them talk about it some in their between song banter here. Then they would break up again in early July 1970, after the end of their short tour. Luckily, while they were still together, they decided to film and record their shows at the Fillmore East in New York City, from June 2nd to June 7th. 

Apparently as I write this in November 2021, there are plans afoot to put out a new release based on these Fillmore shows. But with the way CSNY aren't talking to each other anymore, who knows when or if that'll happen. This can tide you over until such a release hopefully makes this obsolete.

The Fillmore shows were the main raw material used in making the live album "Four Way Street," released in 1971. However, a few other concerts were used: three from the Forum in Los Angeles (June 26th through 28th) and one from the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago (July 5th). Luckily for my purposes, several of the Fillmore shows have emerged on bootleg with excellent soundboard quality. These are from the June 4th, 5th, and 6th shows. There doesn't seem to be any bootleg from June 2nd. There are bootlegs from June 3rd and June 7th, but they're audience recordings of only middling quality.

Due to what's available, I decided to base this mainly on the June 6th concert, since it was a particularly good one with particularly good sound quality, to my ears. But I've added in songs not played that night from the June 4th and 5th shows. 

But since they're so much overlap between this album and the official "Four Way Street" album, I wanted to make sure all the songs from that are here too. It turns out though that four of the songs from that album (including the bonus tracks) weren't even played during the Fillmore East run. Those seem to come from the Chicago show on July 5th (though one or two might have been from one of the Forum shows). There's no good bootleg of that show, so I've used the versions of those four songs from the "Four Way Street" album.

As I explained with my 1969 CSNY live album "The 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival and More," they've had a certain pattern to their concerts. The first set of the concert would be all acoustic. That would start with CSN doing a song or two without Young. Then Young would join them for a couple more songs. Then each of them would get a solo spot for a song or two. The four of them would come together briefly at the end of the solo set. Then all four of them would be together for the entire electric second set. 

I maintained this format. So I had, say, a solo acoustic Neil Young song, I knew to stick it in part of his solo portion of the acoustic set. The electric set didn't vary much, but the acoustic set did. As it happens, all of the songs from the electric set are from the June 6th concert that is the basis of this album. But I've bulked up the acoustic set with a bunch of extra songs from other concerts.

My main goal here was to make something that would merit repeated listenings. In addition to sticking to excellent sound quality, I did my best to trim the fat. That meant editing down the silences and guitar tunings between songs. CSNY were particularly chatty during this time period. There's talk before pretty much every song, sometimes for a couple of minutes. I tried to leave that stuff in, as I think it's interesting. I also did my best to boost the volume sometimes, because they didn't always speak closely into their microphones when talking.

By the way, on the subject of talking, at one point between songs, there's a mention of "wooden nickel," and then they talked for a little while about bootlegs. This is because by the time of this concert, a CSNY bootleg called "Wooden Nickel" had emerged and had sold a lot of copies, since there was no other live CSNY recordings available at the time. But, as they pointed out, it wasn't very good, mainly due to sound quality issues. The recording of the Fillmore shows and the release of "Four Way Street" later was essentially an effort to beat the bootleggers.

Another little point of clarity I want to mention is that at one point, Young mentioned the name "Halverson." That's reference to the fact that someone named Bill Halverson was recording the concerts to make a live album. So Young brought up Halverson's name as kind of a surprise joke, knowing that person was listening.

I hope that if and when an official Fillmore East box set comes out, they'll use at least one version of each song played at those shows. There are a couple that I couldn't include, because they were only played on the shows where there isn't a good recording. For instance, "Birds" was played on June 2nd only, and "Another Sleep Song" was played on June 7th only (and not bootlegged).

That said, there were a few particularly interesting and unique songs that I wanted to include that didn't have excellent sound quality. I did a lot of editing to bring them up to snuff, but one can only do so much. So I've included them merely as bonus tracks: "Bluebird," "Everybody's Been Burned," and "We Are Not Helpless." Although they don't sound great, I was able to use the sound editing programs Spleeter and X-Minus to make them sound better than they ever have before, in my opinion. For instance, both "Bluebird" and "Everybody's Been Burned" had big surges of applause at their starts when the audience recognized the songs. I was able to almost entirely eliminate those applause surges, and other crowd noise through the songs. By the way, each of those songs were only ever played once in concert by CSNY during that time period. 

01 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Suite- Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Blackbird (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 On the Way Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Tell Me Why (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Triad (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 Guinnevere (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
15 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 Simple Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
18 King Midas in Reverse (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
19 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
20 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
21 Laughing (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
22 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
23 The Lee Shore (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
24 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
25 Man in the Mirror (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
26 Chicago (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
27 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
28 Right Between the Eyes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
29 The Loner - Cinnamon Girl - Down by the River (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
30 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
31 Don't Let It Bring You Down (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
32 Cowgirl in the Sand (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
33 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
34 Black Queen (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
35 4+20 (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
36 49 Bye-Byes - For What It's Worth - America's Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
37 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
38 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
39 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
40 Love the One You're With [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
41 Pre-Road Dawns (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
42 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
43 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
44 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
45 Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
46 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 Ohio (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 As I Come of Age (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 Southern Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 Carry On (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
55 Woodstock (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
56 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
57 Find the Cost of Freedom (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

Bluebird [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Everybody's Been Burned [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
We Are Not Helpless [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.imagenetz.de/kEjru

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/hE3zhqzU

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/ugAyUCtCKob95aB/file 

The cover photo is actually taken from one of the June 1970 Fillmore shows, though I'm not sure which one. It looks a bit like a composite photo to me, as if the four of them were pasted in from different photos. For instance, Young is in blue lighting and the others are not. But that's the actual untouched photo.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - The 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival and More (1969)

Here's something I'm especially proud of making. In my opinion, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) peaked early. They formed in 1969, and 1969 and 1970 were arguably their best years. However, when it comes to live material, there isn't that much that was recorded with great sound quality. 

I've already posted the CSNY set at Woodstock, which is a complete, great performance that sounds fantastic. But other than that, there's only parts of shows that have soundboard quality. I've collected all the best bits (not counting the Woodstock stuff) to make a kind of ultimate CSNY 1969 concert recording. It's two hours and 24 minutes long, and it's killer all the way through.

Virtually no live CSNY performances from 1969 are officially released, other than the Woodstock show (which can only be had as part of a massive box set), and a few songs here and there. I ended up only using a single such song, "I've Loved Her So Long," from Neil Young's "Archives, Volume 1." For the rest, I had to rely on bootlegs. Strangely, there are five CSNY boots from 1969 that are soundboards, but all of them are partial shows. 

The closest to a complete show comes from the Big Sur Folk Festival. At first glance it looks like a complete show, but this is an illusion, because CSNY actually played twice at that festival, on September 13th, and then again on September 14th, and the popular bootleg from this festival combines the two into one. Even then, it's incomplete. For instance, at one point, there's a spoken introduction to the song "I've Long Her So Long," but the song isn't there. To make matters worse, some parts of the shows sound great and seem to be from a soundboard, and others not so much, and seem to be from a high quality audience recording.

In addition to Big Sur, there are portions of three other soundboard bootlegs. There are six songs from Chicago on December 13th, six songs from Detroit on December 14th, and six songs from Houston on December 18th. Weird, huh? And they're all different songs, though some are incomplete. After those, the sound quality drops dramatically, to just average or poor sounding audience bootlegs.

So I used the Big Sur shows as the basis, and then added in as many songs as I could from the other soundboard concerts to create one big concert containing everything really worth hearing (not counting Woodstock), without ever using the same song multiple times. CSNY was pretty consistent in how they did their concerts, dividing their shows in a first acoustic set and then a second electric, full band set. And within those, there was a natural order. For instance, the acoustic set had them doing some songs together to start the show, then breaking off into individual mini-sets featuring just one member, then getting back them all together again for a song or two before ending the set. Because of this, I was able easily add in the extra songs where they more or less belonged.

Where things got more complicated is with the banter between songs. CSNY was very chatty in this time period. They talked before virtually every song, and sometimes talked for a few minutes. I wanted to replicate this aspect of their concerts too, because it showed their personality and camaraderie. Most of the time, the version of the songs I used had banter that went with the songs, so I used those. But in some cases the banter was missing, or it had sound quality issues. In many of those cases, I was able to find banter from some other show. For instance, the version of "Wooden Ships" here comes from one of the Big Sur shows. But banter before it had lots of hiss and crowd noise. I found different banter from the Chicago show where he explained the meaning of the song in depth, with much better sound quality, so I used that.

I put a lot of time and effort into making the best cohesive sounding concert with the limited raw material I had. Because I was mixing sources, I had to work to make sure the end of one track fit with the start of the next one. I did a lot of editing to make sure a song wouldn't end in the middle of audience applause or something like that. I also worked to improve the sound quality as much as possible. 

I discovered a new trick with Spleeter, which is that for banter tracks only, the vocals are usually put on one channel and the hiss on another channel. So I can just delete the hiss channel, and I can get rid of hiss better than any other noise reduction type tool. (It only works for banter tracks, because if there's music, the hiss ends up on the same channel as some of the music.) One thing I couldn't fix though is that some of the banter tracks have a lot of echo and/or reverb, and other such tracks don't. That can vary from time to time, so just try to ignore that.

I'm happy to say that I managed to find nearly all the important songs CSNY played in 1969. If one looks at the setlist.fm list of songs they played that year, and how many times they played them, there are only a few I missed that they played more than once: "49 Bye-Byes - America's Children," "Find the Cost of Freedom," "Broken Arrow," and "How Have You Been." I got really lucky! (One of the soundboard sources did have "49 Bye- Byes - America's Children," but half or more of it was missing, so I skipped it.)

The Big Sur shows were unusual in a couple of aspects. One oddity is that, during the CSNY set, they brought up Dave Mason, who recently left Traffic, and let him perform two of his songs. They even backed him up on the second one. I'm pretty sure that was the one and only time CSNY ever did that, at least in the 1969 and 1970 time frame. I chose to keep those songs in, since I like Mason and they're good songs.

Also, the Big Sur shows were filmed for a documentary movie and soundtrack, which was eventually released with the name "Celebration at Big Sur." In the movie, you can watch a scene in which CSNY gets heckled by an audience member. Stills left the stage to talk up close to the guy, and ended up getting in a tussle with him. The bootleg included all of this scene, which lasted several minutes. However, I cut the whole thing out. The main reason is that the audio quality of that second was particularly poor, and it mostly was just lots of crowd noise. But later on in the show, when Stills had his solo spot, right before the song "4+20," he spent about a minute talking about the heckler and his response. I left that in, because the sound quality was much better, and his commentary was interesting.

In 1969, CSNY varied the songs they played during their acoustic sets quite a lot, but they played pretty much the exact same songs in the same order during their electric sets. The result of that is the acoustic set is super sized with all the songs I gathered from here and there. Whereas I only added two extra songs to the electric set over what they played at Big Sur.

A few tracks have "[Edit]" in the title. The only actual song I edited is the Dave Mason song "Only You Know and I Know." There was a missing section near the end. It was during an instrumental section, so I managed to patch it using another part of the song where the same section was repeated. I also did a lot editing of the banter between songs. Sometimes I cut out portions that were boring, such as lots of guitar tuning or prolonged silences. Occasionally, I moved things around to have the flow from song to song make more sense. I added "[Edit]" to the ones where I made the biggest changes.

In addition to all the soundboard sourced songs I mentioned above, there are two songs where I used audience boots as the source. These are two songs that I simply thought were really cool, and I decided the sound quality was good enough for them to fit, even though they do sound slightly worse than the rest. Those two are "Mr. Soul" and "Go Back Home." They're interesting rarities. If setlist.fm is correct, CSNY only ever played them twice. (However, there's a better sounding version of "Mr. Soul" in the Woodstock concert.)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. The sound does vary from time to time. But considering the poor quality of most 1969 CSNY bootlegs, this is the cream of the crop, all in one plus (minus Woodstock, of course).

Finally, I was so pleased with the result I made here that I decided to do the same thing for CSNY's 1970 concerts. I've taken the best of the best recordings, mostly from the Fillmore East, to make one ultimate concert for that year too. Look for that to be posted soon.

01 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Suite- Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Blackbird (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 On the Way Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Mr. Soul (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 Guinnevere (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
15 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 Triad (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 talk [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
18 Lady of the Island (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
19 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
20 Our House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
21 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
22 Country Girl (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
23 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
24 Birds (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
25 talk [Edit] (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
26 I've Loved Her So Long (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
27 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
28 Helpless (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
29 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
30 Black Queen (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
31 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
32 4+20 (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
33 Go Back Home (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
34 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
35 You Don't Have to Cry (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
36 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
37 World in Changes (Dave Mason & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
38 talk (Dave Mason & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
39 Only You Know and I Know [Edit] (Dave Mason & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
40 Pre-Road Downs (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
41 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
42 So Begins the Task (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
43 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
44 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
45 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
46 Woodstock (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 Bluebird Revisited (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 Sea of Madness (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 Down by the River (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.imagenetz.de/gzZHa

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/NZrb1YTu

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/yQk5DubxNLHGDJg/file

As I mentioned above, the Big Sur Folk Festival was the subject of a documentary movie. I could have used some still shots from that for the album cover. However, the film quality was rather low-res and blurry. Instead, I found a few excellent photos of CSNY in concert in San Diego in 1969. 

But the problem there was I couldn't find a single good photo showing all four of them. So I used one with Crosby, Stills and Young as the basis. Then I used another one of the San Diego photos to crop out Nash and stick him in the middle of the photo. So yeah, it's kind of a fake, but consider that Nash was right there wearing those clothes with that lighting, just out of frame. I probably combined two photos that were taken at the same spot only minutes apart.

In case you're curious, here are how the two raw pics look separately. I didn't use the bottom one, even though it has all four of them, because Stills' head is turned away from the camera, and Crosby's head is partially blocked.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Bridge School Benefit, Oakland Coliseum, Oakland, CA, 12-4-1988

In 1985, David Crosby kicked a very serious drug habit after serving nine months in prison. Young promised to reunite CSNY if Crosby ever got his act together, and he kept that promise. This resulted in the 1988 studio album "American Dream." To be honest, it wasn't that good, and certainly didn't live up to the hopes of their long-delayed reunion. But I would argue that most of the songs actually were pretty good, but the album was ruined by typical 1980s overproduction, which didn't suit the band at all.

Unfortunately, Young wasn't willing to go on tour to support the album. But CSNY did play the occasional benefit concert around that time, usually in acoustic format. I think their songs hold up much better in these concerts. Thanks to the acoustic format, the bad production issues are avoided, and CSNY shined in acoustic mode anyway.

Out of these several late 1980s CSNY benefit concerts, the one bootleg recording with the best sound quality has to be the 1988 Bridge Benefit concert. So that makes up the bulk of this album. But CSNY also played at the very first Bridge Benefit concert, in 1986. (It would become an annual event after skipping 1987.) That was a historically significant concert for CSNY, because it was only the second time they reunited since the 1970s, with the first taking place at the Live Aid concert in 1985. 

CSNY only played four songs in the 1986 Bridge Benefit show. Luckily, all four of them are different from the songs they played in the 1988 show. So I start this album out with the short 1986 concert, and then all of the 1988 concert. The only sang is that the sound quality for the 1986 concert isn't as good. It's fairly good, but it's an audience bootleg. Whereas the 1988 concert is a pristine soundboard bootleg. If the sound quality for the 1986 songs aren't good enough for you, just skip those, and you still have a decent length concert with the 1988 stuff.

For the 1988 Bridge Benefit, Young began the concert with a few solo numbers, which I haven't included here since it's just him. But for the last song in that set, "American Dream," CSN surprised the crowd by showing up shortly after the song began. This version is nearly acappella, and in my opinion it's way better than the studio version, again due to those overproduction problems. Too bad the crowd roars due to CSN showing up.

After that one brief appearance, CSNY left the stage. Then they didn't return until nearly the end of the show, after all the other acts. Most of this album is made up of their second and much longer time on stage together. By the way, Bruce Springsteen was the other big headline act for the concert, and CSNY joined Springsteen to sing backing vocals for his hit "Hungry Heart." I didn't include that here though since I decided a Springsteen song is a very different thing and wouldn't fit in with the rest. Plus, the CSNY vocals don't sound that distinctive on that song.

For both concerts here, I broke all the talking between songs into their own tracks. I generally boosted the volume a lot for that banter. In some cases, they were talking off mike to each other but by increasing the volume a lot I made it possible to clearly hear what they were saying. 

The 1986 concert is 17 minutes long. The 1988 concert is 47 minutes long. Added together, the album totals an hour and four minutes.

01 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
03 Change Partners (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
05 Daylight Again - Find the Cost of Freedom (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
06 Ohio (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
08 American Dream (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
11 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Love The One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
14 This Old House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
15 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
16 Southern Man (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
17 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
18 Don't Say Goodbye (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
19 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
20 Compass (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
21 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
22 Southern Cross (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
23 Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/PvDdFzEx

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good photos of CSNY from either the 1986 or 1988 Bridge Benefit shows. If you have one, please let me know. So instead I used a photo of CSNY at a Farm Aid concert in 1989. I also squeezed in the logo for the concert in the bottom left corner.