Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

RHINO The only CSNY album that matters, now packed with tons of extras.

How do you supersize a supergroup? The answer, for an initially reluctant Crosby, Stills & Nash, was to bring in Neil Young, as suggested by their Atlantic boss, Ahmet Ertegun. The resultant Déjà Vu, released in March 1970, was full of inspired songs and sold in its millions, justifying the line-up tweak on both critical and commercial levels.

Half a century on, the highlights have lost none of their lustre, be it Young’s expansive Helpless, David Crosby’s scatjazz title track, or the leaping harmonies of Stephen Stills’s masterly Carry On. The selling point of this four-disc set, though, is the addition of 38 extra tracks (demos, out-takes and such), many of which are being released for the first time. What’s abundantly clear is that each of the band members, to varying degrees, was squirrelling away material for their respective solo projects. Young’s exquisite Birds (here a duet with Graham Nash) would take full flight on After The Goldrush;

Crosby’s two attempts at

Laughing lack the eerie monastic ambience that defined its appearance on 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name; Nash offers a delicate prototype of Sleep Song, a year before Songs For Beginners.

It’s Stills who seems the most engaged with the sessions at hand. So Begins The Task and

She Can’t Handle It reach deep into his formative years as a folkie, while Know You Got To Run, the first song written for the album, only to miss the final cut, proves that he was among the most gifted blues-rockers of a golden generation.

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