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5. Rolling Stone-CSNY-August 15th, 1974 6. Rolling Stone-CSNY-August 29th 1974 8. Rock on the Road 1-CSNY-1974 9. Rock on the Road 2-CSNY-1974 13. Sounds-CSNY-September 1976 18. Record Collector-Crosby-1989 19. Dirty Linen-Crosby & Nash-1998
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Far Crosby & Nash David Crosby and Graham Nash met in 1968, joining with Stephen Stills, and later Neil Young, in what was probably the most famous folk-rock "corporation" of all time. Stills and Young carried over a volatile chemistry from Buffalo Springfield, but Nash and Crosby formed a special bond that was on a quieter, airier plane, and built on a dead-on harmonic synchrony that bordered on the extrasensory. Crosby still marvels at their chemistry. "It's to a degree that's very hard to describe," he said. "I think Graham's the best harmony singer there is. I tell people it's me, but secretly, between me and you, I think it's him." Nash described it this way: "Left turn on a dime? That's one of the things I've always loved about Crosby. I'm so close to David that on more than one occasion I know he's going to make a mistake on an upcoming line so I make the same mistake. Crosby looks at me because he knows that I knew he was going to screw up. It's very rare that you have a relationship with a musician like that." When CSN&Y stopped touring in 1971, Nash and Crosby went out on a short duo tour, without amplifiers or a rhythm section. The tour featured a wealth of material from Nash's and Crosby's recent solo albums, as well as a wealth of then unrecorded tunes that became the basis of their first duo record, Crosby-Nash. A bootleg, A Very Stony Evening, was recorded from the audience at one of these California concerts. The illegal release captured a fine performance that blended witty repartee with rare songs and those incredible harmonies. Twenty-seven years later, this low-fi document has been supplanted by a glorious aural document of a different concert from the same tour, captured on one-inch, 8-track reel-to-reel tape and mixed to digital two-track. The new CD, Another Stony Evening, was a labor of love for audio wizard Stephen Barncard, who worked on Déjà Vu, engineered Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name and parts of Nash's Songs for Beginners, co-engineered the ABC Crosby-Nash records of the mid 70's with Don Gooch, and also, among many other Bay Area treasures, the Grateful Dead's landmark 1970 recording, American Beauty. Barncard found the master reels of the show in Graham Nash's extensive tape archive, which remains the most comprehensive collection of CSN's music. "Stills has his own set of tapes, but Graham was the only one who from the very very beginning started collecting. He's known as a collector of antiquities and old photographs, guitars, great stuff. It seemed only natural that he would also save some of the great moments on tape. And he did it completely for the music. He's been paying the storage bills, at least $5,000 a year, maybe more. This is the first payoff from the vault. His diligence made the box set possible," Barncard said. Nash explained how he became an archivist. "Someone's gotta do it, it might as well be someone with passion and a decent sized memory. My friend Jerry Tolman and I put the Crosby, Stills & Nash boxed set together. [Barncard also was involved in the box set project, remixing and locating lost tapes.] I wanted to make sure all the tapes were in order so I had this archivist come in and catalogue everything, all the personal tapes I have, all of Stephen's, all of David's, and put them into chronological order and [later] onto a database. It was during that time that we found the original 8-track of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion show, which was reported to have been the genesis of A Very Stony Evening, back in 1971." When Nash and Barncard listened to the UCLA tape, they were in for a surprise. "It wasn't the same record. It was from the same series of shows -- I think David and I did about six of them -- but it wasn't Dorothy Chandler. Right now there are a couple of tapes missing -- I'm trying to track them down at Atlantic -- so I'm not sure which show it was. [Barncard has since determined that is the second of two shows from the Berkeley Community Theater on October 15, 1971.] When we found the original tapes we went into A&M and recorded it. Barncard did a lot of work preceding it all and after mixing, putting it into his computer and taking out silly phrases, coughs, all that sort of stuff. I thought it was a very nice concert." Barncard put that tour into a historical context. "In 1971 Graham and David released their first solo albums. Graham had recently moved to San Francisco and David was living up in Sausalito on his boat. It was a pretty nice scene and a good opportunity for both of them to grow at that time." Crosby was pleased when he heard the tapes. "I flat love it. It's hard for me to talk about it without being totally immodest. I love it, it's a great example of the essence of why I love singing with Graham Nash. It's just us and the songs. As soon as you get on stage, you can sort of tell whether the audience is with you or not. If they're with you, you feel like you're on the front edge of the wave. It's very much like riding a wave, the surge is there, the timing's right, you drop in, and you're off and gone. That's kind of the way it was. We got on, and we could feel that they were with us and that it was working. There was a sense of freedom there, of complete abandon to the music, and fearlessness." According to Crosby, the unique vocal parts on some of the tunes arose spontaneously. "We just kind of launched off and went for it." Barncard listened carefully to all of the 8-track tapes from the tour and decided to go with the Chandler show. "There was one from Boston, one from Carnegie Hall, and one from Dorothy Chandler," he explained. "By this time I had heard about the A Very Stony Evening bootleg that was rumored to have been from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion show. Somebody sent me a scan of the cover and somebody else sent me a DAT of the old bootleg A Very Stoney Evening. I had also made a rough DAT of the 8-track recording from the Dorothy Chandler show and picked it out over the other two because it was the only show with just Graham and David -- at the others there were encores where Stephen would come out or Neil, or Neil and Stephen. In those days they never rehearsed that stuff, so it was kind of messy. "I made a CD length cut of the show and made up some CDs. I did all of this on my desktop with my Mac. I wanted to have Nash involved in the mixing, so we did a one-day session at A&M. I separately mixed the audience portions and then, over the course of three or four days, edited together pretty much the concert you hear now." Once the CD was ready for release, Barncard rejected the possibility of distributing it himself and turned to the Grateful Dead's label. "I had been following the Grateful Dead's success with their Dick's Picks series and started a relationship with Dick Latvala, who graciously sent me several different volumes of Dick's Picks. They're very interesting, completely verité. No editing -- there'll be six minutes of Garcia tuning. I called up Peter McQuaide at Grateful Dead Merchandising. The relationship between Crosby and Nash and the Dead had always been at a high level, so I thought Grateful Dead Records might be happy to have a product by someone completely out of left field to help them move towards being a real record company. When McQuaide heard it he really liked it. He took it to the board of directors -- which is pretty much the surviving members of the Dead -- and it was a unanimous `Yes.' " Getting legal permission for the release was uncharacteristically easy. "We had two songwriters, two publishing companies, no other players. They were free and clear from Atlantic." Barncard plans to continue to release stuff from Crosby and Nash's archives. Next he would like to release a 1973 Crosby-Nash Benefit Concert from the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. "It's a completely different flavor -- different humor, different songs. Again it's just the two of them. I recorded this one, had a few more mikes out there and a little more control over the sound." In the future, he would also like to release a CD of Crosby, Stills, and Nash's six-night stand at the Fillmore from last fall. But his pet project, and a considerably more challenging one, is a release of studio jams by the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra (PERRO), a loose aggregation of musicians including, among others, CSNY, the Grateful Dead and most of the Jefferson Airplane. "They were really nights that Crosby had booked for his solo record but Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick, and Paul Kantner, and many others would be recording in the other rooms at Heider's and came over to hang out. These people would show up and I'd just be adding mikes. I would let the tape roll, and be adding mikes while the tape was rolling. They'd just pull up a couple of chairs, so I'd put mikes where they were, I couldn't tell them where to sit. I didn't have any way to put up baffles. Someone would set up the drums in the corner, the bass would set up somewhere else -- it was a free-for-all. They started out without headphones -- in fact, a lot of it was recorded without headphones. They were just in the room playing for their own get-off. I was under strict orders from Cros to keep the tapes rolling. I'd just go out and get a roll of two inch, get another roll. I'd never worked like that -- those things were $150 each back then. But it was like `Hey, Atlantic's paying for it,' this guy is on top of the world. So every night I had a bank of machines ready for everything." In addition to alternate takes of material from Crosby's solo album, the PERRO sessions included a number of treasures, notably "The Mountain Song," a soaring Crosby-Garcia-Kantner collaboration. "Crosby led the players through the old folk tune, `Wayfaring Stranger.' They played it only once and never played it again. There's `Coast Road' with Laura Allan, and `King of the Mountain' with Craig Doerge. There's `Kids and Dogs'with Garcia. I've got Graham singing `Everybody's Been Burned.' There's `The Wall Song' -- the complete version with the Dead jam at the end. There are some scat singing things that were done at the same time as `I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here.' Crosby tried to top that tune." One of those turned into "The Last Whale," which preceded "Wind on the Water." Barncard has several hurdles to overcome before he can release the PERRO material. Some of the master tapes need to be tracked down and "some of Phil Lesh's spontaneous bass parts were not as good as they could have been and might need to be massaged with some digital magic or overdubs, if Phil is into it." Finally, the licensing, featuring over a dozen musicians on nearly as many labels, is a legal nightmare. "I feel, with a little manipulation, it could be made to feel live and spontaneous and complete," said Barncard, "but we're talking about a two or three month commitment here." While there might be plenty of archival material, upcoming releases from past recording sessions and concerts aren't the only thing occupying Crosby and his bandmates. Graham Nash is also incredibly busy, both in and out of the music business. He has made a name for himself in the art world, both as an artist and as co-owner of Nash Digital Editions, which produces high-quality reproductions of graphic art pieces. "It's not really a change," he explained. "People have asked me over the years, `How does a musician become a photographer or a sculptor or a collector or manager of a digital fine art press?' It's no different than writing songs. It's all my form of self expression. I've been making photographs longer than I've been writing songs. The first shot that I took that was in my show was an image that I made when I was 11. "I've always been an avid collector of photography and a lover of surfaces -- of print quality, of silver prints, platinum prints, palladium prints, and gum prints. When I was utilizing my computer -- my friend Mac Holbert, who was Crosby Stills & Nash's tour manager -- turned me on to the Macintosh, so I would use crude imaging software. I'd scan my stuff in, play around with it, and get some interesting results, but I couldn't get them off the screen. I tried photographing the screen, I tried thermal prints, I tried everything, and they all sucked. I found this machine by Iris Graphics, out of Bedford, Massachusetts. It was an ink jet printer that was printing photo-quality images, but on lousy paper because it was basically a proofing machine for magazines. Mac and I saw this machine and we thought, `This could print art if we made a few changes.' We voided our warranty in the first few minutes and we were off and running. Last year we did $600,000 in business, and we print for people as diverse as David Hockney and Francesco Clemente. We have a hell of a reputation because we're the best. I don't want to blow it out of proportion, but we're damned good at what we do because we care desperately." Another recent project of Nash's was Lifesighs, an autobiographical multi-media show that blended his interests in graphic arts, music, and computers. "We did six shows in Philadelphia and were working on a stage with a huge high definition screen and a wireless mouse and my guitar and a piano. I'd come out and start talking. Istart assembling images on the screen with my wireless mouse, and that information was going three thousand miles back to my computers in Los Angeles, where they were being assembled and sent back to me in Philadelphia in real time. It was an amazing technological event. I did get David to play with me live during the show -- he was in Los Angeles and I was in Philadelphia. We did `Chicago' together live -- it was fun." Crosby's two most recent side projects have remained within the music world. In 1996, he met his son, James Raymond, for the first time. Raymond's mother had never told her son his father's identity, but a parentage search he undertook at age 33 led him to Crosby, which floored the elder musician. "It's a thriller. It's amazing enough to find him at all, let alone that he should be a musician, let alone that he should be this Steely Dan level writer, amazingly passionate player fucking genius kid, and he is. You know, the odds against that are just a billion to one -- he's like a lightning bolt hitting my life. He's a wonderful young guy, and he and I and Jeff Pevar, my favorite guitar player, have hit a chemistry. "Both my son and Jeff are jazz level players. They have strong roots in the blues, strong roots in pop music, very wide palate of color players. If there were bands we would aspire to be like, they would be Steely Dan or Bruce Hornsby, and both of those are heavily jazz-influenced. "I almost feel like I'm getting away with something, or something illegal is taking place," Crosby continued. "I've been such a scoundrel and such a wild guy, and to be given yet again an incredible shot to make wonderfully beautiful music -- I feel incredibly grateful. We haven't even got this record out, and we've already gotten four songs for the next one, which just thrills me to pieces." Crosby's other passion at the moment is Stand Up and Be Counted, an oral history of social activism in popular music that is being developed both as a book and a documentary film. "The book is going to come out next year. We're frantically trying to scrabble the money together for the film. "The whole project is so important. There is a lineage here that took place from Seeger and Guthrie, down through the Civil Rights stuff, Baez and Dylan, down through the Vietnam era protests -- which is where I came in -- and then into the No-Nukes stuff, the Muse concerts, the people helping people stuff like Live Aid, the Amnesty International tour. Something happened here -- a thing grew up out of the cracks. Nobody mandated it at the government level -- `Thou Shalt Do Benefits' -- this was people standing up on their own hind legs saying, `I gotta do something about this.' When people do that, put somebody else's needs ahead of their own and get passionate about it, they really, really elevate themselves to a very high place and I love it when they do that. It's one of the things I find most admirable in humans. This is a history of people being willing to stand and be counted. It kind of writes itself -- we're talking about some of the most articulate people in the country and asking themselves about things they're willing to put themselves on the line for. "We did an interview with Pete Seeger that you wouldn't believe. He's so good, sitting there with that damned banjo in his lap -- `This Machine Kills Fascists' -- talking about Woody, talking about the farm workers, talking about life. Just so right on. We intercut him with an interview we did with Robin Williams! Talk about two guys with attitudes. We got some great stuff from Nash, from Phil Lesh, from Paul Kantner, from Carly Simon, from Neil, from Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Jewel, Robin, and Whoopie. We're going to do Bonnie and Sting and Elton and Paul McCartney, a ton of people. The first time somebody did an anti-war benefit was in 1879. We've done a little bit of research for this thing! The book is on Harper Collins and the funding is up in the air for the film." Aside from the individual projects Nash and Crosby are working on, there may yet be another Crosby, Stills and Nash collaboration. Nash is excited about the future with the group. "Right now we're unencumbered from any record contract, and I'm very glad about it. We are compiling new songs and a couple of interesting ideas about directions. As soon as David and Stephen come up with a couple of more songs, we'll go into the studio and record." Crosby echoed Nash's excitement. "Graham has got probably 25 great songs, I have a few, Stephen has some. We just want to take our time, rather than ending up with another situation we don't like." As the Crosby-Nash deal with Grateful Dead Records might suggest, they are open to new ways to disseminate their music. "I personally think the majors are dinosaurs, and there won't be any in another five years or so." Another Stony Evening has made Nash consider reprising the duo shows with Crosby. "In listening to the shows I began to realize just what it is about me and Crosby that's so nice. It's so soothing, in a way. A couple of years ago we did a Crosby-Nash show where we took requests for the entire show, and that was very loose and very enjoyable. So I'm going to talk to David this week and see about whether we should actually do some Crosby-Nash shows."
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