Saturday Music Hall: Variations Over Time

Guinnevere, Crosby and Nash, 1970

Guinnevere, Crosby and Nash, Concord CA, 2006

A friend mentioned he'd started listening to CSN(Y) again after not hearing them for many years, and how wonderful it was to be in that space again. As for me, I've had the pleasure of hearing and seeing them over the course of their long career (and my life), in various combinations, acoustic and electric, in venues large and small. At times, I've traveled to other states to do it. I've witnessed concerts by CSN, CSNY, Neil Young, Crosby and Nash, Graham Nash alone, David Crosby solo and David Crosby in CPR, a band he created in 1997 with exquisite guitar player Jeff Pevar, an incredibly talented rhythm section and the son he didn't meet for decades, James Raymond, on piano and keyboards.

At a time when noise, static, soundbites, arguments, name-calling and IED explosions dominate the airwaves and our senses, I thought a dose of harmony and acoustic guitars was in order, so I focused on several incarnations of David Crosby. Time is strange and powerful. Cycles complete, disappear, return in a slightly different form. Variations on a theme. We change. We age. We evolve. Yet the song remains essentially the same. Deja vu.

Lee Shore, CSN, Japan, 1991

CPR doing Deja Vu, 1998, Dutch television

From Crosby's website:

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." --Albert Einstein