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Crosby, Stills & Nash Deluxe Edition CD

The Crosby, Stills & Nash triumvirate shot to immediate superstardom with the release of its self-titled debut LP, a sparkling set immortalizing the group’s amazingly close, high harmonies.

Stills’ gorgeous opener, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” is an epic love song remarkable in its musical and emotional intricacy, Nash’s “Pre-Road Downs” is buoyant folk-pop underpinned by light psychedelic textures, and Crosby’s “Long Time Gone” remains a potent indictment of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. A definitive document of its era.

Crosby, Stills & Nash is the first album by Crosby, Stills & Nash, released in 1969 on the Atlantic Records label. It spawned two Top 40 hits, “Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which peaked respectively at #28 the week of August 23, 1969, and at #21 the week of October 25, 1969, on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The album itself peaked at #6 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart.

The album was a very strong debut for the band, instantly lifting them to stardom. It helped initiate a sea change in popular music away from the ruling late sixties aesthetic of bands playing blues-based rock music on loud guitars. Crosby, Stills & Nash presented a new wrinkle in building upon rock’s roots, utilizing folk, blues, and even jazz without specifically sounding like mere duplication. Not only blending voices, the three meshed their differing strengths, Crosby for social commentary and atmospheric mood pieces, Stills for his diverse musical skills and for folding folk and country elements subtly into complex rock structures, and Nash for his radio-friendly pop melodies, to create an amalgam of broad appeal. Eventually going multi-platinum, in addition to the above mentioned singles, Crosby, Stills & Nash features some of their best known songs in “Wooden Ships” and “Helplessly Hoping”. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was composed for Judy Collins, and “Long Time Gone” was a response to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

This album proved very influential on many levels to the dominant popular music scene in America for much of the 1970s. The success of the album generated gravitas for the group within the industry. Strong sales, combined with the group’s emphasis on personal confession in its writing, paved the way for the success of the singer-songwriter movement of the early seventies. Their utilization of personal events in their material without resorting to subterfuge, their talents in vocal harmony, their cultivation of painstaking studio craft, as well as the Laurel Canyon ethos that surrounded the group and their associates, established an aesthetic for a number of acts that came to define the “California” sound of the ensuing decade, including The Eagles, Jackson Browne, post-1974 Fleetwood Mac, and others.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 259 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Deluxe Edition CD includes bonus tracks: “Do For The Others,” “Song With No Words,” “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and “Teach Your Children.”

Tracks

  • Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
  • Marrakesh Express
  • Guinnevere
  • You Don’t Have To Cry
  • Pre-Road Downs
  • Wooden Ships
  • Lady of the Island
  • Helplessly Hoping
  • Lone Time Gone
  • 49 Bye-Byes
  • Do For The Others
  • Song With No Words
  • Everybody’s Talkin’
  • Teach Your Children