Happy 55th Anniversary to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu, originally released March 11, 1970.
It was a powder keg: Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and David Crosby, most of whom were famously stubborn, started a band after their previous groups had collapsed from dysfunction. They named the group after themselves instead of establishing a collective identity.
Meanwhile, the stakes were rising by the day as the group’s reputation—already strong on the basis of name recognition—grew as they impressed the Woodstock crowd at their second-ever performance, went on a national tour, and released a well-liked album first.
Then, Atlantic Records moved them to their new superstar line and they brought on Neil Young, an eminently talented songwriter and performer who was also—get this—famously stubborn.
Amidst all of this, Stills and Nash both went through breakups and Crosby’s girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a car accident. There was a lot going on.
Studio time did not go well. Dozens of songs got scrapped. Some, like the title track, were hard to solidify. Some tunes, especially Young’s, were recorded independently, with the rest of the band members brought in at the end to add vocals. It’s honestly incredible that CSNY ever put out Déjà Vu at all.
For some groups, intragroup tension yields cohesive work. The group seeks the best possible blends of individual talents into a singular vision. This is not what happened here. Déjà Vu is more of a White Album: a loose collection of ideas and visions held together by a barely-intact partnership. Barely an album, by barely a band.
But that disconnect is not merely about artistic preference—it’s about diverging visions of the countercultural movement that each of the musicians called home and that was already straining in 1970. “Our House” is Nash’s ode to a mellow, domestic tranquility with Joni Mitchell—a fiction in its own right, as the pair had already broken up by recording time—that captures the supposed simplicity of those days. Meanwhile, David Crosby rips through “Almost Cut My Hair,” which, through its distorted guitar work and anxious vocal, dredges up the paranoid, darker side of the movement.
Listen to the Album:
Elsewhere, the band’s cover of Mitchell’s “Woodstock” is exuberant, celebrating the sprawl and excess of the event and the generation. But Young’s “Helpless” yearns for something slower, more isolated, and captures a feeling of seeking escape from the inside of an impossible place—peace and love notwithstanding. Déjà Vu is a collection of masterful songs, but none of them are quite aware that the others exist. In some ways, that’s where the magic of the record is.
The album’s finale—and perhaps its most forgotten song—is “Everybody I Love You.” It distinguishes itself from the rest of the album because it feels vague and desperate, like a prayer, instead of the careful songcraft found elsewhere on Déjà Vu in tunes like “4 + 20” and “Carry On.” But in the album’s final, clamoring moment, all of that falls away into an extremely simple invocation of love. Sure, you can think of it as just-more-hippie-stuff, but the performance gets me to believe that the band is looking, still, for a unified path forward. All they’ve got so far is love, but at least they’ve got something.
Of course, this nebulous, fuzzy idea of love is best represented by the one thing everyone, even Young, needed the rest of the band for in the recording process: the group’s signature harmonies. These harmonies smooth over the menagerie of contradictions: the conflict between band members, the emotional turmoil many of them were feeling at the time, the different visions for the movement they were at the center of. With the performers all singing on most songs, the harmonies reveal that these tangled feelings live inside each person, with nobody representing just one point of view. Collectively, they offer a more unified vision of the band than the songwriting, or the individual band members, could ever conjure up on their own. And isn’t that the point of a group like this?
Listen: