The 25 Best Live Rock Recordings - No. 13: 4 Way Street

No. 13 - Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Yound - 4 Way Street (Atlantic, 1974)

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Sometimes it begins with a live recording that is one hot mess: terrible programming, poor sonics, and questionable performances. But there is just something about the recording that resonates. Not just the nostalgia of aging Baby Boomers, but something that reaches down to tweak one’s gonads. Maybe the poor quality is a metaphor for the times when the music was conceived and expressed. Maybe the members of the band took themselves too seriously, had egos too long, and tempers too short. Maybe it was the pressure of being the “American Beatles.” In truth, it was a confluence of all these things that contributed to the schizophrenic nature of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s 1971 recording, 4 Way Street.

Four Way Street is the result of a tour initiated in support of the release of the band’s second album, Déjà Vu (Atlantic, 1970) after the addition of Neil Young to the masthead. The material making up the release was culled from performances recorded at Fillmore East, New York City (June 2–7, 1970); The Forum, Los Angeles (June 26–28, 1970); and the Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (July 5, 1970), all rock pilgrimage sites. From near the beginning of this tenuous union before Woodstock, this band was doomed because of the internal stresses. The Beatles were never better than when they were falling apart and the same can be said for CSN&Y.

If we push through our sonic and production reservations, we can see the release for what it was, an angry fist shaken at the corrupt geopolitical establishment Eisenhower had warned us about 20 years before. Four Way Street is a teeth-clinched, raging suite appropriate for 1970, performed by the closest thing to supergroup royalty America has ever produced (despite the colonial inclusion of Anglo Graham Nash). Not only had the turbulent '60s come to a close but America found herself standing at the foot of a decline and fall unequaled since, the band was being torn apart by the centripetal force of fame, drugs, and egos. On Four Way Street, CSN&Y stood at this cultural and personal cusp looking both ways with a mercurial defiance.

The Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young of the 1970s were an ambitious and angry quilt stitched together from three significant bands of the 1960s. David Crosby brought his wistful tenor and floating compositions from Roger McGuinn's Byrds. His addition to the new group is more "Eight Miles High" than "Turn, Turn, Turn," providing the band with his spacious open-chord vision and, often, noodling lyric ramblings. Stephen Stills and Neil Young made their way from Buffalo Springfield, bringing with them the electric soul of the band, both members being formidable lead guitarists. Graham Nash came over from the Hollies, establishing the calm center of the group. That band alone had a resultant sound unlike any of its precursors. This trio, sans Neil Young, released their eponymous first recording in 1969 and supported it with a tour that included Woodstock (after adding Young). They came along to play at the right place at the right time and they had a lot to say.

The original 2-LP set was divided equally between acoustic and electric performances. The sum of all its parts is protest. This is music recorded two years following the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention and two years before Watergate, smack-dab in the middle of the beginning of the end of Vietnam. On the acoustic side, Graham Nash chimes in with his "Chicago" played only on piano, dedicating it to Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley and his police state in '68 at the Democratic National Convention. David Crosby offers his profligate “Triad” from The Notorious Byrd Brothers (Columbia, 1968), and Neil Young submits a plaintive “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” from After The Gold Rush (Reprise, 1970)

But, acoustic criticality is fully achieved and realized when an anxious and manic Stephen Stills seats himself at the piano, proceeding to have a six-minute grand mal convulsion, detonating a frenzied and biting medley of "49 Bye-Byes / America's Children (For What It’s Worth)." Stills transforms his beautiful country ballad of love lost into a corrosive metaphor for the Vietnam War, My Lai, and the Tet Offensive by juxtaposing it with the spitting rage of his "For What It's Worth, delivered as Agent Orange spread to reveal the enemy, and only revealing every Democratic politician who supported the war. Save for this beautifully poetic psychotic break, the acoustic sides are quiet introspection More Ghandi than Malcolm X; more Mother Teresa than Elijah Mohammed. More wary than certain.

On the electric side, the centerpiece could be no other song. "Ohio" is today a song of protest and despair. Its chunky over-driven guitar introduction beats like an angry fist on a table, upsetting everything in sight. Neil Young is a flamethrower of rage and despair with every word, a premonition of his later work on the subject of death and war. "Southern Man" contains the same bitter sentiments pointed at a recalcitrant and unforgiving (and unforgivable) South. "A Long Time Gone," David Crosby's elegy to RFK, is perhaps the best of the electric sides, peppered with Stephen Stills's staccato lead guitar and Crosby's almost Muscle Shoals soul singing. The band plays electrically with a gale-force wind. "Carry On" has the best vocals and "Preroad Downs" is the best, if not loosest, boogie. This Electric music can only be equaled by Neil Young's later work, identifying him as the molten core of the band's electric soul.

The original 2-LP set was re-released on CD with new material dreadfully but necessarily omitted because of vinyl time constraints. Of note were the additions of Stephen Still's "Black Queen," a staggering, gambling blues played in an open guitar tuning, Graham Nash's reprise of the Hollies' "King Midas in Reverse" and Neil Young's acoustically grave "Down By The River." But these additions are gravy. Memorable are the hope of "Teach Your Children," the whimsy of "Lee Shore," and the anathema of "Love The One You’re With."

Music writer Dave Marsh, in his Book of Rock Lists (Sidg. & J, 1981) considered the album, “one of the worst live albums of all time.” Depending upon where one beamed in from, this could be true. The release is sloppy, poorly recorded, and more than a bit self-indulgent (but, to be perfectly fair, what live albums of the period were not). The release could not even provide a full performance of one of the band’s greatest songs, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” No, we get 30 seconds of the coda and then right into Neil Young’s “On The Way Home” from Buffalo Springfield’s The Last Time Around (Atco, 1968).

The "Right Between the Eyes" introduction is muffed (though some will argue this adds to the quaintness of the recording). The sonics are lacking in a major way, and most of the electric sides sound muddy and bogged down. We can empathize with Dave Marsh’s opinion, but examples of really bad live albums would be Tom Petty's Pack Up The Plantation: Live! MCA, 1985) or Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive (A&M, 1976)—regardless of how popular it was. Listen as Frampton plays lead guitar on Humble Pie: Performance Rocking the Fillmore (A&M, 1971) and then praise the pantywaist blather of Comes Alive. But not Four Way Street, no. For all of its faults, Street remains a grainy color 8mm, a rock Zapruder clip, capturing all of the drama and rage of the period. Regardless of all, Four Way Street was the ragged soundtrack to a militant generation, capturing perfectly the time and place that was the birth of the 1970s.