Sneak Previews of Forthcoming Books of Special Interest to Southern Californians : Crosby, Stills, Nash, According to Crosby : ‘We learned early on that feel is everything.’

WE WERE inventing the music. We tried to be as fearless as we could. We tried to have a rule that we would try almost anything. When (our first) record was done, we listened to it and said, “You know, the ‘Suite’ (“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”) feels great, but it’s got a lot of little rough edges in it, and it’s seven minutes and 22 seconds of music.” So we recut it. When we were done, we said, “Wow, that’s good!” Then we played the original, and the original was still better. The feel was better. The second one, which you will never hear, was much glossier, more polished. (But) the truth of the matter is that the first one had “the feel.” We learned early on in the process that feel is everything. The other advantage that we had all along is that the three (or four) of us all write wildly divergent material. We write so differently that it gives us what I like to call a much wider palette out of which to paint the album. Most groups have one person who can write, and he writes a ballad and a rocker and that’s it. We write an incredible spread of stuff--it’s really soup to nuts--and that gave us an incredible advantage. “Carry On” is a strong song on anybody’s record. When you put it next to “Teach Your Children” and put that next to “Deja Vu”--when you’ve got those three in a row and follow them with “Country Girl,” you have an unfair advantage. And that’s what we had on that first album; that’s what we’ve had since then: songs. We’ve always tried to do only the best songs we had.

The best part about cutting the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album was the fun that we had. We were buddies. We hung out together. We were very different even then, but we were friends and we used to love, more than anything else, blowing people’s minds. We would invite people over to the studio and say, “Sit down, listen to this,” and then we would play them “Wooden Ships” and they would go, “Aurghhh. How he do dat?” This was our greatest joy because we were all egotistical little show-offs.

As I remember it, we put out the album and I took off and went sailing. We went to the Bahamas and I wasn’t around when the thing got big. But I heard--it filtered down to Florida, which was way behind the times in those days. All of a sudden it was all over the radio. I missed the excitement of L.A., in the biz, getting saturated with winning. It’s probably a good thing, given my ego.

Copyright 1988 by David Crosby and Carl Gottlieb.