Everything You Need To Know

Everything you need to know about super-groups can be summed up in 5 words; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (4 words if you replace the word and with the symbol &). They might be the only combination who deserves the title. Everything you need to know about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young can be summed up in three words; Four Way Street (2 words if you use the numeral 4, which is really the album’s title). A double album of monstrous art and towering idealism. Listening to it is like opening a time capsule from a world nobody remembers anymore.

In many ways, all you need to know about the late sixties and early seventies flows from the grooves on that album.

You can feel the tension and remorse in the simple acoustic “Teach Your Children Well.” There is so much pain echoing through the circular advice. It rings with the shared hardship of parenting and childhood. All of the failures, shortcomings and missed opportunities are entwined with hope and promise, it’s more than a song, it’s a gestalt. It probably should be required listening at Lamaze classes.

My personal favorite is “Carry On.” Such a confusing song, I’m not sure what they’re trying to say. As far as I can tell it’s almost like couples counseling with a beat. It is so good, though who cares what they’re talking about.  And, it’s so long. If I start it when I get in my car I can make it home from work, or to work from home, and still have to wait for the last glorious echoes of wild, unabashed guitar to finish. I always get out with a smile.

“Chicago”, with its pointed and meaningful references to anti-war demonstrations, and the barbarous response of the authorities culminating in the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 still holds meaning today. As we watched peaceful demonstrators hammered with rubber bullets, poisoned with mace and flailed with batons the quality of the video was better, but the subject was the same.

There was tenderness, too. “Cowgirl in the Sand” echoes with unfiltered, raw remorse, painful lyrics of love lost.

“49 Bye Byes/America’s Children” starts softly, a lilting piano riff, mournful trails of lyrics wandering off into heartache. Slowly it fills with energy and explodes into an almost evangelical call to the faithful. They, Stephen Stills and Neil Young, borrow from their days together in Buffalo Springfield, and break into a few choruses of “For What it’s Worth.” A chilling reminder of the police state America was rushing toward in the sixties. He reminded the crowd, “Jesus was the first non-violent revolutionary.”

“Ohio” still holds the same power. If you could watch the videos of the police chasing peaceful protestors away from Saint John’s Church and Lafayette Park while escorting Trump to an ill-timed, ill-advised photo-op without thinking of the opening lines;

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

We’re finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio

You probably have different tastes in music, or politics, or both than I do.

This album was released in 1971. Fifty years ago. You could play most of it today and it makes as much sense as it did then.

A love song is always a love song and government violence toward the citizenry seems to be tragically permanent. But, listening to the music reminded me of the power in people, how they stopped a war. And it gives me some hope that maybe we can end some of the tragedies suffered today.

Maybe, listening to it is more like opening a newspaper and realizing we haven’t really learned anything. Voltaire was right when he said, “history does not repeat itself. Man always does.”

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This post is republished on Medium.

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