Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Denver Coliseum, Denver, CO, 5-12-1970
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]
02 talk
03 Teach Your Children [Edit]
04 talk
05 On the Way Home
06 Helpless
07 talk
08 Everybody's Been Burned
09 talk
10 Tell Me Why [Edit]
11 talk
12 Man in the Mirror
13 talk
14 Only Love Can Break Your Heart
15 talk
16 Black Queen
17 Bluebird [Edit]
18 We Are Not Helpless - America's Children
19 talk
20 Love the One You're With
21 talk
22 talk
23 Pre-Road Downs
24 talk
25 Carry On
26 talk
27 So Begins the Task
28 talk
29 Chicago
30 talk
31 Wooden Ships
32 talk
33 As I Come of Age
34 talk
35 Southern Man
36 talk
37 Everybody I Love You
38 talk
39 Long Time Gone
(all tracks just shy of 40 are by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
