It’s hard not to appreciate the sheer rockstar dickishness
of opening this double-live album with a purported “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” that runs 30
seconds, most of it background noise. Plus, it gets the song out of the way
right quick to make way for Young’s “On the Way Home.” That Y towers over CSN
as always is barely necessary to mention, but the formless bloat of the C songs
are handled as gracefully as possible, by lumping a few together early on and
dispensing with them thus. Stills, as always on live recordings, absolutely
murders his songs—not in the hip-hop style of killing it, but as in, mangles
and abuses them until they are lifeless sonic corpses. Truly, the man’s stage
presence is nil, and that the album ends with nearly 20 minutes of him would be
unbearable if a decent chunk of that were not messy guitar clanging with Young.
Nash, always more pretty than smart, at least gets a dig in at Mayor Daley on
“Chicago,” and if it’s obvious, well at least it’s not as wrongheaded as some
of his songs about Vietnam vets and whatnot. Really this would be best served
by extracting the Young songs, appending them to Live at Massey Hall 1971, and leaving the other three to fend for
themselves (they’d actually sound better without Young there to put them to
shame so constantly)—but all that being said, they do harmonize nicely, and
it’s worth it for that.
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