In August of 1969, the nascent trio of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, accompanied by their sometimes fourth, Neil Young, played only the second gig of their existence at the now legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, N.Y.

Stephen Stills (left) and Graham Nash of folk-rock supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash, playing at Memphis Botanic Garden.

David Crosby performing at Saturday's Live at the Garden concert.

Comments

There are 3 responses to this article. Click here to join the conversation »

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

More Music Reviews

• Anthony Hamilton dazzles Orpheum crowd
• Review: Memphis Symphony shows disciplined strings, renegade brass
• Review: They're the Eagles -- what can you say?

Share and Enjoy [?]

Though the newcomers on the bill (their debut album had come out just two months before), CSN&Y’s folk-rock sound — socially conscious yet full of hope and filigreed by lovely three-part harmonies — virtually defined the hippies’ seminal event, and their subsequent cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” became, after the fact, its anthem.

Flash forward almost exactly 39 years to Saturday night and another outdoor stage, this one at the Memphis Botanic Garden, and things have changed remarkably for the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. In contrast to the free-for-all in Bethel, the gig was an entry in the considerably more regimented, tonier “Live at the Garden,” series. The tie-dye T-shirts have given way to tropical-print button-downs. The brown acid has been supplanted by Australian chardonnay.

The voices, however, remained the same, if a little ragged around the edges. Playing before a long-sold-out crowd of 6,400, CSN struggled to find their voices coming out of the gate with “Marrakesh Express,” their harmonies cracking at the seams. All three artists are in their 60s, now and voices age, too. But slowly, over the course of the evening, they locked in and by the time they closed the night with the consolatory encore “Teach Your Children,” they had managed to conjure completely the sound of their youth.

Along the way, the trio, backed by a four-piece band of organ, piano, bass and drums, thrilled the audience with some of their biggest hits. (Though, strangely, “Woodstock” was not one of them.) If numbers like the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth” seemed a step or two slower, the band made up for it with lengthy re-workings of others, such as “Guinevere” and spot-on re-creations of “Southern Cross” and “Wooden Ships.”

Oddly, the voice that has fared the best is Crosby’s, this despite the ex-Byrds vocalist’s formerly and famously hard-living ways. His vocals this night were warm and earthy on classics like “Long Time Gone.”

Equally impressive was the live musical prowess of Stills. The former Buffalo Springfield member, who played almost all the instruments of CSN’s debut album, handled the lead guitar chores all evening, turning “Déjà Vu,” for one, into an epic improvisational workout.

In the run-up to this concert, several people expressed to me their reservations about going, fearful that the trio, who of late have had no qualms about publicly ripping the President and the war in Iraq, would devolve into a celebrity rant.

In retrospect, those concerns seem silly. Though their music is rooted in the protest music of the ’60s, CSN’s activism has always been measured. With the eternally mild Nash emceeing the event (and sporting a Sun Records T-shirt in the second half of the two-hour show), there was no speechifying from the mic Saturday night. Politics only reared its head in the abstract, in songs with hardly objectionable subjects, like their recently unearthed Vietnam-era protest song “Military Madness.”