#Crosby stills deja vu full#

But these discs also give us a sense of how altered in mood and sequencing Déjà vu could have been - in essence, it could have been their own sprawling White Album, and perhaps all the better for it.įor instance, the box imagines what Déjà vu would have been like had it included Crosby’s “Laughing,” his take on George Harrison’s spiritualism, heard here in a not fully developed group version. CSNY archivists will enjoy the alternate take of Stills’ “4 +20” without the slight gulp in his voice on the final verse, or an “Our House” with Nash’s then-partner, Joni Mitchell, chiming in and also laughing when Nash screws up the lyric. Here’s where things get far more interesting.

#Crosby stills deja vu full#

The remaining discs constitute largely solo, acoustic demos of songs under consideration (disc two) or nearly completely full recordings that didn’t make the cut (disc three). But even that track adds another piece to the CSNY puzzle: the sound of these four (sometimes three) men at work in a studio, something we’ve rarely heard save for random bootlegs. None of these replacement takes is markedly different than the versions we know, save “Almost Cut My Hair”: here, Crosby’s voice doesn’t quite have the raspy attack of the released take and Stills and Young’s guitar-solo lobbing feels a little messier and more embryonic. David Crosby’s “Déjà vu” sports more homogenized harmonies that lack the ghostly beauty of those on the released take, but this “Our House” actually feels a tad more forceful in its delivery and piano.

That means we hear Stills’ stampeding opener “Carry On” with a few guitar lines excised at some point a folksier “Teach Your Children” without Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel or “Woodstock” with a less urgent Stephen Stills vocal but jauntier piano. The first disco offers up the expected shiny new mix of Déjà vu the sonic freshening-up is clearly felt on tracks like the closing “Everybody I Love You,” where the instruments sound punchier and crisper.Ī separate disc offers up the same song-by-song lineup (save for Young’s “Country Girl” suite) but in alternate mixes or outtake versions - the bizarro-world version of Déjà vu. But a sense of tension and terseness ran throughout most of its 10 songs - the perfectly timed soundtrack for an increasingly discombobulated generation grappling with life during Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and everything else hitting them at once.īut these four men, either at or approaching their creative peaks, also arrived with piles of new material, and this four-disc set attempts to bring order to it all. From the wail-of-sound harmonies on their rocked-out cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” to the living-room warmth of Graham Nash’s “Our House,” it had moments of brightness. The album that emerged from the charged and often fraught sessions largely lacked the sunshine-harmony joy of its predecessor, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Released in time for its 51st birthday (these guys always broke the rules, starting with the use of their names as a band), it asks you to imagine the ways in which one of the more beloved classic-rock albums could have been almost entirely unlike the album we’ve known since 1970.įor their first full-on studio collaboration with Neil Young on board, CSNY headed into Déjà vu in the summer of 1969 in various states of psychic fragility, cockiness, and apprehension. The boxes complement, rather than upend, the core record.īut in multiple beguiling ways, the 50th anniversary revisit of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vuoffers up a new twist. For your extra dollars, you’re handed an updated, sonically enhanced version of the original album, a smattering of alternate takes of its songs, maybe a few tracks that had been relegated to the vaults or a DVD with period footage. By now, the formula for blown-out editions of landmark albums is set in archival stone.