Deja Vu by Crosby Stills Nash & Young 1970

 In 1970 I was doing a chemist round where I dropped off medicines and other things at people's houses. Sometimes I even had to carry big packs of nappies on the back of my bike. My other job was burning stuff in the incinerator out the back of the shop. This was good because I could listen to my transistor radio as I burned stuff. This is where I first started hearing songs from Crosby Stills and Nash who were all over the radio the previous year with Marakesh Express. But the track everyone talked about was Suite Baby Blue Eyes. A small epic. This is what pointed to the future of rock. They said. And then they added Neil Young to the mix.

So it was with great excitement we waited for the new album CSN & Y album. And when it was released it went straight to the top of the charts. And straight onto the turntables of just about everyone I knew. Even our English teacher at school brought the record in to play us Teach Your Children so we could discuss the lyrics. I had to have it but had that laborious wait after ordering it from the Australian Record Club. I think I bought it with the equally popular Sweet Baby James album by James Taylor. When it finally arrived I would sit listening to it in the spare bedroom while incense filled the air (Another new thing for me) Great album although I always lifted the needle when Almost Cut My Hair came on skipping to the next track,  In the end, I was drawn to the Neil Young tracks more and more especially Helpless. Gradually talk at school was about Neil Young and an album he put out called After The Goldrush. But then someone brought Everybody Knows This is Nowhere to school and blew our teenage minds. All these albums mixed in together to create that American vibe which kind of summed up 1970 for me.

I must admit though that I hadn't listened to the album since then. Though some of the tracks overstayed their welcome on the radio listening to the album once more it sounds quite amazing. They said it took 800 hours to make and with the attention to detail one could almost believe it.