CSNY

February 15, 2019
An enthusiastic history of one of rock music's most significant supergroups.Rock journalist Doggett (Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone: 125 Years of Pop Music, 2015, etc.) traces his protagonists from their origins through their early success in the Byrds (David Crosby), the Hollies (Graham Nash), and Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills and Neil Young). As the author shows, the Los Angeles rock scene of the late 1960s was a meeting place for nearly everyone who came to prominence in folk or rock. Prime among them was Crosby, who strutted around in a cape and whose counterculture credentials included introducing the Beatles to LSD. After one night at a popular music venue, Crosby, Stills, and Nash came together for a stoned singing party that gave birth to a new sound. With the addition of Young and the band's appearance at Woodstock, the legend was underway as well as the melodrama of fights, breakups, reunions, and excess. Doggett frankly admits that he is a fan of the group, and he traces the band's career from concert to concert, recording session to recording session. In addition to providing the stories behind the better-known songs, the author spends plenty of time on their lives offstage, including their liaisons with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins. Throughout, Doggett does a solid job differentiating among the four members of the group, each an interesting, if not necessarily likable, personality. Young gets most of the blame for the group's breakups, though with four enormous egos, everyone receives a due share. The author backs it all up with voluminous documentation, including interviews with all the participants and ample quotations from contemporary reviews of almost every record and concert, including the members' solo projects. The narrative is eminently readable, with few dull passages, even when the protagonists are sulking during one of the band's numerous fights.A must for CSNY fans and anyone who remembers the era when it ruled the pop charts.

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March 25, 2019
As Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money) notes in this appreciative, attentive history of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the 1960s group spent roughly “two of the past fifty years as a functioning band” and the other 48 years “fending off questions about why they are no longer together.” Doggett zeroes in on that brief, musically fruitful period when David Crosby (who came from The Byrds), Graham Nash (of The Hollies), Stephen Stills and Neil Young (both of Buffalo Springfield) united to create chart-topping mellow folk-rock fronted with an “unearthly vocal blend.” In between tracking the ups and downs of the band’s relationships, particularly Young’s peripatetic unpredictability and Crosby’s weaknesses (“instinct, ego, vulnerability, and cocaine”), Doggett delivers a solid rundown of its artistic highs (the release of the 1970 Déjà Vu album) and more frequent lows (constant infighting and Stills’s arrest for narcotics possession). The group disbanded in 1970 but came together for a 1974 reunion tour, when they realized that performing to “Woodstock Nation” fans at least “guaranteed them a healthy income” on the nostalgia circuit. (Young recalls “the four of us and our handlers dividing up the loot and finding out exactly how much we made” after a Filmore show.) This honest, occasionally laudatory history will delight its baby boomer audience.

April 1, 2019

Longtime Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young (CSNY) fan and music journalist Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money) focuses on the formation and early years of "America's first rock supergroup," the unstable union of Graham Nash, formerly with the Hollies; David Crosby, Byrds member; and Stephen Stills and Neil Young, who played and fought together in Buffalo Springfield. Four started as three: Crosby, Nash, and Stills discovered their exquisite harmonizing at the home of Joni Mitchell, Nash's girlfriend at the time. They released their first album in 1969, then added Young to the lineup in time to perform at Woodstock. Using his interviews with CSN (but not Y) and friends and foes of the band, and incorporating those with material from the band's archives and secondary sources, Doggett writes of egos amped up on drugs, fame, and rock star privilege, who made beautiful music and spoke to and for their generation. The author's disdain of Young is evident, but the behavior of the other three is portrayed just as honestly and unapologetically, and the casual sexism of the time is not soft-pedaled. VERDICT For fans of the group and 1960s California rock lore; read with David Crosby's Long Time Gone (with Carl Gottlieb) and Jimmy McDonough's Shakey.--Liz French, Library Journal

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