CSN (but not Y) concert

[jrtom]

This past Tuesday, Megan and I went to a Crosby, Stills, and Nash concert (she'd bought me tickets for my birthday). (It was in Viejas, which is about half an hour east of San Diego proper. Nice venue; it was outside, and there were only a few hundred seats so (a) we weren't deafened and (b) we could actually see their faces.)



Songs in italics are ones I wasn't previously familiar with.

Carry On
Marrakech
Long Time Gone
Feed The People (Stills)
Cathedral
Don't Dig Here
Military Madness
Old Man Trouble (Stills)
Deja Vu
Woodstock
Helplessly Hoping
Lay Me Down
Grace (Raymond)
Jesus of Rio
Southern Cross
Chicago
Love The One You're With
Almost Cut My Hair
Wooden Ships
encores:
For What It's Worth
Teach Your Children

The bad news: Stills' voice is not gone, but it's on its way out. It works pretty well for blues (Old Man Trouble) but some of the signature harmonies didn't quite work. Also, though I'm not as familiar with who sings what voice part in CSN(Y) as I could be, they appeared to be missing the top line for much of the concert. (Megan and I filled in on occasion, out of a sense of artistic necessity. Unfortunately, no one thought to bring us a microphone.)

That's pretty much all the bad news, though. Stills still rocks on the guitar (hell, most of the band does). (Personally, although I realize the quasi-necessity of playing stuff off his two-week-old album, I would have liked to hear him do "Treetop Flier"; it's got a kickass steel-string acoustic guitar part.) Nash can still hold down the upper register, although I can tell he has to work at it, and . Crosby...man, he's a phenomenon: I don't think his voice has noticeably deteriorated at all.

Although the "headline members" of CSN could put on a decent concert with no additional band, their band definitely kicked ass. Jeff Pevar is one of the best electric guitar players I've heard, and their keyboard player (I forget his name, but he's been playing with them since forever) has a nice touch. Their other keyboard player, James Raymond, is decent, but with the exception of the one piece of his noted above, his part didn't come out of the texture much.

Going into the concert, I knew that one of the band members was the son of one of C, S, or N...but I couldn't remember which. So my brain had a background task of trying to figure out who father and son were...and my guess turned out to be only half right: James Raymond is David Crosby's son (apparently adopted at birth; they only met when Raymond was in his 20s or so, and already established as a musician). (Megan and I had guessed that it was Jeff Pevar.)

As you can see, I only recognized about 2/3 of the songs. Which is OK: three of them were new (the two Stills pieces plus "Don't Dig Here") and one was by Raymond.

Remarks on specific songs:

• "Don't Dig Here" is actually sort of a musical joke of sorts (along the lines of "Hot Frogs On The Loose" by Fred Small if you're familiar with that one): Crosby had heard that the folks in charge of preparing Yucca Mountain to be a place to stash nuclear waste were soliciting proposals for warning signs...that were supposed to remain intact and understandable for 30,000 years. So he wrote a song to do the job. :)
  
• "Cathedral" kicks ass; I liked it by far the best of the songs I didn't know. It makes a very interesting foil to "Jesus of Rio", if you want to look at it that way.
  
• "Wooden Ships": I've now seen two independent indications that it is intended to be understood as a post-nuclear-holocaust (not just very-far-the-hell-away-from-war) song, including this (alternate) set of lyrics. I found this out after the concert. As a side note, Nash made a slight...edit...to the lyrics: "There's just one thing I want to know/Who LIED ABOUT THE WAR?" (I mean, he powered his way through that line, and held "war" for ten seconds or so. Didn't quite fit the mood of the song, but, well, dang.)
  

A good show; I'm glad I went. Many thanks to Megan for the present. :)

Comments

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

I have been a huge CSN (not so much Y) fan since the late 80s. I've seen them live once. It's been killing me that I missed them this year: one concert in VA that I couldn't get to and one here so expensive ($300) that even if I felt like spending the money I could never speak to myself again if I'd spent it. I'm glad you had fun. :)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

$300? The website for the venue ( http://www.ste-michelle.com/Sub_Concerts.cfm ) said $50/$80. What were those, scalper prices or something? (We're talking about the 2 Sep concert in Seattle, right?)

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

Guess all those tickets were sold out by the time I looked a month before the show. I wanted to--I have a friend here who loves CSN but had never seen them live. I would have enjoyed being there for that.

Did you know a friend of mine used to be their road manager and lived in the same neighborhood as Stills when they were teenagers? He claims he taught SS the blues. :)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Did you know a friend of mine used to be their road manager and lived in the same neighborhood as Stills when they were teenagers?

No, I didn't. Anyone I've met?

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

Don't think so--he's in VA. Have you met a 60yo friend of mine with a strong Southern accent?

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Not that I recall...but you know a lot of people in VA (and elsewhere) that I've only met briefly, and I could easily have forgotten. *shrug* :)