Graham Nash David Crosby Part 2; or a great-sounding record deconstructed; or a case study in LCR mixing

I’ve seen Crosby, Stills & Nash. They’re groovy. All delicate and ding-ding-ding.

Jimi Hendrix

Jimi wasn’t wrong. CSN were delicate and ding-ding-ding; particularly in an era of heavy freakout records, Crosby, Stills & Nash could scarcely have sounded more different. Jimi’s own music sometimes traded sonic clarity for head-turning effects or the raw spontaneity of a captured moment. Such a mindset was pretty alien to the CSN way of working.

How did they achieve this?

When I hear the records the Crosby, Stills & Nash diaspora made together and separately in the early to mid-seventies, the word that springs to mind is lucidity. The parts are largely simple, recorded in a relatively no-fuss manner, with little in the way of trickery, and presented in mix in the most straightforward way possible. They’re bright without being cutting and harsh. They’re warm and intimate but not sludgy and ill-defined. There’s strength and muscularity there, but never in a way that overwhelms the music.

By the time Bill Halverson recorded and co-produced 1972’s Graham Nash David Crosby — by which time he’d already worked on Crosby, Stills & Nash, Déjà Vu, Stephen Stills, If I Could Only Remember My Name and Songs For Beginners — he’d got the CSN thing down to an art. There are great songs all over the album, as we discussed on Sunday, but there are also great performances and sounds. And while Halverson gives Stephen Stills a lot of credit for the sounds on the CSN debut, Stills does not play on Graham Nash David Crosby; the sounds come from Halverson and from the musicians, who as we noted the other day, comprised the very best players on the West Coast/Laurel Canyon scene: Craig Doerge, Danny Kortchmarr, Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel; Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead; CSNY veterans Johnny Barbata and Greg Reeves; the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Chris Ethridge and Traffic’s Dave Mason.

Doerge, Kortchmarr, Sklar and Kunkel are known collectively as the Section. When you listen to James Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt or Jackson Browne, it’s the Section you’ll hear. They were a key component of the sounds of the records made in LA for about a decade, starting in around 1971. No wonder they also called these guys the ‘Mellow Mafia’. Peter Asher had brought Kunkel and Kortchmarr in on drums and guitar for Sweet Baby James, looking for players who wouldn’t get in the way of Taylor’s vocal or intricate acoustic guitar playing. After that record’s success, the pair were involved in the recording of King’s Tapestry. Completed by pianist Doerge and the truly remarkable bassist Lee Sklar, the Section appeared as a full unit on the Jackson Browne and Nash and Crosby records, and later with Ronstadt and Carly Simon too.

On Graham Nash David Crosby, it all came together. A great group of musicians, playing strong songs and recorded by one of the best in the business at the top of his game.

Let’s look at a couple of songs. One thing you might notice listening to pre-1980s records is that the stereo image tended to be wider. There’s an approach to mixing often called LCR. LCR stands for left, centre and right. What it means is that elements within the stereo image are panned to those points only. Nothing is panned a little bit left, or a little right, or to 10 o’clock, rather than 9. There are advantages to this method. It’s bold, it clears a lot of real estate in the centre of the stereo image for the stuff that sells the song or holds it together (usually bass drum, snare drum, bass guitar, principle rhythm instrument if there is one and lead vocal), making the mix feel spacious, and it tends to provide a stereo image that feels stable even if you move around relative to the fixed positions of your left and right speakers. It’s something of an old-school technique, a legacy of an era where some mixing desks allowed you to rout tracks only to the left or right channel or both. It started to disappear a bit in the 1980s, an era where – coincidence or not – the craft of record making began its slide into the rather dispiriting mess we have today.

When you listen to say, Girl to be On My Mind, which has some fairly big drum fills from Russ Kunkel, you can hear a drum sound that appears to be a very narrow stereo (probably an XY overhead pair with close tom mics, breaking the LCR ‘rule’, panned to the positions where they appear in the overhead image), with an LCR mix constructed around it. Piano on the left, rhythm guitar on the right, bass and lead guitar in the middle, a stereo organ, and all vocals in the middle. It’s well balanced and extremely spacious. Everything has its place. It is, as I said up top, lucid, with a great sense of depth. While allowing for some lovely details – the manually ridden vocal delay at the end of the bridge for example – it’s extremely unfussy. Bold Southern European brush strokes, if you will.

Here’s the rub: a mix this good is not achievable with a half-assed arrangement. Pan LCR with an arrangement that didn’t balance in the rehearsal room and it won’t balance on record either. A lot of young mix engineers are scared of LCR mixing as they haven’t worked with musicians that give them arrangements that create this natural internal balance. Or they’ve tried to create a wide stereo mix out of two or three elements (in a sparse mix, you’ll have a hell of a time creating a coherent whole if you insist on panning the acoustic guitar out on the left and the vocal in the middle, with a mono echo on the right – but then, there are some complete wingnuts crashing around out there).

If you’re into the details of record making, and God me help I am, Graham Nash David Crosby is a treat. It sounds so good, it’s actually a little depressing hearing a modern record after it. I don’t think I’m simply romanticising the old-school methods here; I hear few records that are played as sensitively and mixed as lucidly as this now, where the details are all so clearly audible, where the sounds themselves are so rewarding. But then, I’ve never been one for a big, soupy wall of sound. I like clarity and audible detail. Halverson, Henry Lewy, Alan Parsons, Ken Caillat, Roy Halee, Tom Flye, Ron Saint Germain…

Bill Halverson

Graham Nash David Crosby

Long-time readers may recall that I’m a big David Crosby fan. Yeah, he’s an easy punchbag, but he’s also been a fearless musician, staking out a musical territory that is his alone: voice, tunes, chords, scat singing, sound, mood and atmosphere – all of them his. He imitates no one, and you have to respect that. He may have the smallest body of work of any musician of his stature, he may have wasted the latter part of the seventies and all of the eighties in a cocaine haze, but I’ll take 25 David Crosby songs over 200 of almost anyone else’s, thanks very much.

This week a cover spread on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s infamous 1974 world tour prompted me to pick up Mojo for the first time in getting on for a decade. This is a period I’ve got reading material on already (Shakey, Barney Hoskyns’s Hotel California), but it came with a CD of stuff from the upcoming live album (compiled painstakingly by Graham Nash over several years), so I dug into it over the course of a journey home, the train journey courtesy of Southeastern lasting nearly twice as long as it should.

Among the article’s sidebars was a round-up of CSNY-related records from 1970-1974, in which After the Gold Rush, Stills, If I Could Only Remember My Name, Harvest and Graham Nash David Crosby and On the Beach all received rapturous, 5-star reviews. If you’re reading this blog you’ll probably know all of these already, but if any of them is unfamiliar to you, it’ll probably be Graham Nash David Crosby, a 1972 collaboration between Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

Just kidding. It’s by Graham Nash and David Crosby.

“Now oddly overlooked, this is the most blissfully lovely of all the CSNY side projects,” reckons Mojo. Yes, I’d agree with that. I bought it looking for another couple of those precious David Crosby songs. If you like the Cros, you’ll end up buying a lot of records with a lot of crap on them to get at the one or two moments where he was on peak form. But to my huge surprise, I ended up loving almost all of Graham Nash David Crosby.

It helps that there’s no Stills; it’s not that his songs are always terrible, though he is by a distance my least-favourite writer and singer in CSNY, but without Stills in there, the mood is more low key. C&N aren’t trying to take over the world; they’re just trying to express themselves and impress each other. What really hit me about the album, though, was the quality of Nash’s work. I’d never previously liked his songs all that much. Marrakesh Express is not for me. Our House even less so. Teach Your Children is a lovely tune, but sickly sweet, and swallowable only rarely. Yet, his voice, presented alone, retains a surprising Mancunian bluntness, and it’s this quality that pervades much of his solo album Songs for Beginners and on Graham Nash David Crosby. Southbound Train, Stranger’s Room, Frozen Smiles (with its accusatory pay-off, “You’re supposed to be my friend”) and the beautiful Girl to be on My Mind are all great songs with far less hippie-dippyness than his contributions to Crosby, Stills & Nash and Déjà Vu – being confused and a bit pissed off suits Nash well. Only Blacknotes betrays any of the childlike whimsy that sinks some of his work elsewhere.

(photo by Henry Diltz)

Crosby, meanwhile, is on magisterial form. All his contributions reward repeated listenings and detailed study: Whole Cloth, the harmonically confounding Page 43, Games, The Wall Song and the delicate, gorgeous Where Will I Be?, which with its distinctive polyphonic organum-style harmonies is very much in the mould of Orléans and I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here, from If I Could Only Remember My Name. Crosby would have made a good 12th-century French monk.

A huge part of what’s so appealing about the album is the lucid, spacious engineering of Bill Halverson and Doc Storch, and the ensemble playing of the backing musicians, a who’s-who of the early-1970s West Coast scene: all of The Section (Craig Doerge on piano/keyboards, Danny Kortchmarr on guitar, Leland Sklar on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums), as well as the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh, CSNY veterans Johnny Barbata and Greg Reeves, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Chris Ethridge and Traffic’s Dave Mason. The drumming throughout is stellar, with sounds that do the performances ample justice. Kunkel, in particular, is on especially impressive form on Nash’s Girl to Be on My Mind and the tricksier Crosby compositions Games and Page 43.

If you’re agnostic about Graham Nash or David Crosby, this album may just convert you. If you like either of them and haven’t yet heard this, remedy that now, please.

(photo by Joel Bernstein)

Last Dance – Neil Young

Last Dance is the highlight (but for some the nadir) of Time Fades Away, the out-of-print live album that began Young’s ‘Ditch’ trilogy. The story behind the live album is pretty well covered by Jimmy McDonough in Shakey, and has been covered in other places too, but here’s a quick version of it for the uninitiated.

After making Harvest, Young went on tour with the same band who’d featured on that record: Kenny Buttrey and Tim Drummond on drums and bass, Ben Keith on pedal steel and Jack Nitzsche on piano. Danny Whitten was supposed to play with them too, but his heroin use was out of control so Young sent him home. Whitten overdosed fatally shortly after, casting a pall over the tour and inspiring Young to write Don’t Be Denied.

Inevitably after such an event, the mood in the camp was dark, and it was immediately aggravated by haggling over money. Buttrey was a studio player from Nashville, and he informed Young that to drop his session work and hit the road he’d need $100,000, a figure which Drummond and Nitzsche then demanded too. Young matched Buttrey’s fee for all the band members, but was upset at the way Drummond and Nitzsche had handled the situation, confronting him during rehearsals rather than coming to speak to him privately. Nitzsche later said that the tour never recovered from this incident.

That wasn’t the last of Young’s problems. Buttrey, as a studio player, was unused to the physical demands of driving a rock band along every night on a stage (for 62 dates and with few nights off), and unprepared for the lifestyle or the craziness of touring; musicians as a general rule save their worst excesses for the road and tend to be more focused and together when recording, so this was quite a culture shock. Unhappy with Young’s behaviour and his constant demands that he play louder, Buttrey quit mid-tour, to be replaced by Johnny Barbata (of CSNY and the Turtles), who appears on all the full-band material on Time Fades Away. Nitzsche, meanwhile, one of the few people in Young’s circle prepared to go toe to toe with him, was drinking too much and had a bad attitude, chafing under Young’s heavy-handed leadership.

The stories that have come out about this tour, coupled with Young’s own comments (‘I had this band of all-star musicians who couldn’t even look at each other. It was a total joke’), had me prepared for a dismal, dirgey, tuneless assault from Time Fades Away. In fact, the music is both more delicate (three of the album’s eight songs feature Young alone at the piano – check out Love in Mind: it’s beautiful) and more upbeat than the record’s reputation suggests. The title track and Yonder Stands the Sinner, complete with Nitzsche’s pounding piano, are almost reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s New Orleansy choogling, albeit with Young singing in his trashed Tonight’s the Night voice. I can understand why the crowd in 1972 who just knew After the Goldrush and Harvest might have been taken aback at the roughness of some of his vocals, but Young’s singing is no more off-key here than on Tonight’s the Night, and is certainly more tuneful than, say, Dylan backed by the Hawks in 1966, so there had been plenty of precedent in rock’n’roll for such non-bel-canto singing.

Most unexpected given its reputation was Last Dance. McDonough makes it sound like a self-nullifying, caterwauling death march of a song (a ‘grating headache’, he calls it). On Time Fades Away (perhaps the versions played at other shows on the tour were more extreme and negative in vibe – I haven’t heard them all), Last Dance actually strikes me as capturing a familiar mood in Young’s music: summoning the strength to begin again after something important has come to a shattering end.

Still, the Time Fades Away myth is a powerful one. Maybe, to be cynical for a moment, that’s why Young insists on keeping it out of print. It’s a good Neil Young record, and in places – Last Dance being one of them – it’s excellent, but the reality doesn’t really match the myth. If you’ve heard Rust Never Sleeps (and certainly if you’ve heard Eldorado, Arc or Weld) you’ll probably find it quite tame.

And Elliott Mazer mixing the snare in the left channel and the rest of the drums in the centre is just as distracting and eccentric as it is on Harvest.

Neil Young and his infamous Gibson Flying V,  Time Fades Away tour.