Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young May Release ‘Deja Vu’ Box Set
Graham Nash spent the last few years working tirelessly on the upcoming CSNY 1974 box set, and now that it’s finally done, he’s starting to think about his next archival project. “I’m toying with the idea of redoing the Deja Vu album,” he says. “When we made the album we were restricted by the technicalities of how many minutes you can get onto a side of vinyl without having to compress everything. It meant we had to fade everything out.”
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The digital age, obviously, means that such considerations are now moot. “We recently did a mix of one of David’s songs that went all the way through from beginning to end,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to hear ‘Carry On’ without it fading.’ I want it to go all the way to the end when Dallas [Taylor] put his drumsticks down. I want to hear the jam we did at the end of ‘Everybody I Love You.’ I might talk to the boys about doing the entire Deja Vu without fading any of the songs.”
A few months after the release of Deja Vu in March of 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young did a series of shows at New York’s Fillmore East that were professionally filmed, yet only bits and pieces of that footage has surfaced over the years. “That’s an entire other project,” says Nash. “Those shows we did at the Fillmore East were absolutely the best shows we ever did in our lives and that’s all been filmed. It’s just a question of whether we have the time and desire to put them out.”
As the co-producer of CSNY 1974 as well as recent career-spanning box sets focusing on David Crosby and Stephen Stills, it’s clear that Nash has taken on the role of group curator. “I’ve always been interested in the music,” he says. “I was the one who kept all those tapes alive. I was the one who paid for storage in temperature-controlled vaults. I bore those expenses and I didn’t give a shit if I didn’t get paid back. About a year ago, everybody realized that I’d spent a fortune protecting our tapes and they gave me their share. Yes, you could definitely say I’m the curator of the band.”