#DEJA VU ALBUM FULL#

Some of these songs by S, C and N should have made an album fortunately, a good amount did, just not this one. And even if there was wisdom in setting aside most of the material in favor of what landed on the album, a whole disc’s worth of Stephen Stills working out what was, for him in 1970, B-grade material still amounts to an A+ experience, if only for the sure ambiance of soaking in the vibe the band had going on and particularly the creative fire that was going on in Stills’ soul.

The outtakes disc consists of full-band versions of 11 compositions that didn’t make the record, and this particular CD is dominated by lost Stills cuts. The demos disc, aside from Young’s “Birds” (accompanied by Nash ), is fairly split between Nash, Stills and Crosby solo acoustic tryouts of songs that did and didn’t ultimately make the record - 18 in all.

Suffice it to say that none of the additional six minutes has to do with clipper near-misses and all of it is about the Stills/Young guitar interplay that for decades has been of rock’s greatest but most elusive elixirs. Presumably there’s more that he’s holding back for “Archives 3″… or “5.” But what we do get of Unheard Neil here also mostly falls into that price-of-admission-worth territory, whether it’s “Birds” - the noblest-sounding song ever written, maybe, about abandoning a chick - or the alternate version of Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair” that runs 10 minutes instead of the original album’s paltry four.

#DEJA VU ALBUM FULL#

Not that he seems exactly ashamed about it, either: You can find the full collection proudly offered on his NYA (Neil Young Archives) website, and the one previously unreleased number that he does sing lead on, “Birds,” has received its own lyric video with his Shakey Pictures production imprimatur. Neil Young.” And that hasn’t changed with this deluxe edition: Young reportedly pulled some of the bonus material that would have featured his voice and songs, and thus has even less of a presence among the demos and outtakes discs than he did on the original album. To hear CSNY at their peak was to know that angel choirs really do exist, with the possibility of an impending demonic guitar squall making it all the more heavenly.īut make no mistake: If this album were to be properly billed in the current parlance of the musical day, it would be “Crosby, Stills & Nash feat. Even Neil “Quitter” Young managed to stay long enough for the one-two-three punch of this album, the subsequent “Ohio”/”Find the Cost of Freedom” double-A-side, and the “4 Way Street” live album (and a quadruple punch, if you want to include the 1974 tour) to make us believe - heck, make them believe, too - that fleeting unity was worth every dirty look or dressing-room fight. And we largely believe it because, on enough of “Déjà Vu” to bolster anyone’s faltering faith, these guys did. We want to believe that lone rangers can lock in together. Yet there’s a reason supergroups endure as a fantasy, if not that much of a reality for the last 49 years or so, give or take a Wilburys, Highwaymen or Boygenius. “Deja Vu: 50th Anniversary Edition” from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Last year, on the occasion of the album’s actual 50th birthday last year, writer Steve Hochman had a very good piece in Variety demythologizing the idea of “Déjà Vu” as a group-effort ideal.) Probably anyone with the slightest CSNY consciousness now has a sense that there was a White Album aspect to the proceedings, with everyone in the foursome working up their songs individually outside the studio before bringing them in - or after after bringing them in, as Neil Young was known to take the tapes of the tracks he fronted with him after a session, to finish up on his own. IRL, it was in diminishing supply by the time “Déjà Vu” was being recorded in the latter stages of 1969, as Cameron Crowe’s generous liner-notes essay reminds us. Harmony was certainly the key word for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young all around… on the record. Maybe this modest, raw demo won’t mean that much even to most of their fans… but for a certain subset of us, it’s like an archeologist came up with recorded proof that gods not only walked the earth, but that they shared hippie-dippy moments of domestic tranquility before everyone got kicked out of the garden.

Deja vu album