Crosby, Stills & Nash - Songs for Beginners (1970)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released their second studio album, Deja Vu, on March 11, 1970, through Atlantic Records. Mostly recorded during the latter half of 1969, it came as the successor to the highly successful Crosby, Stills & Nash album, which they had toured with the addition of leader Stills' former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young on guitar and keyboards. It became an even bigger success than its predecessor, with Nash's "Teach Your Children" becoming a hit that summer and the supergroup performing a very successful tour through July 1970. During that tour, they debuted and performed many songs that would later appear on their solo albums, in order to fill out the early acoustic sets and showcase the individual members' talents. It was also probably due to the internal issues the band was facing at the time, with their group spirit giving way to infighting, drug use, and egotism. It was really no surprise when, following the end of the Deja Vu tour, the individual members decided to simply carry on with their solo careers instead of regrouping later in the year to start work on a third LP. It would be three years before the next time CSNY would perform together as a group again.

We will collect the best then-unreleased songs CSN played during their 1970 tour and turn them into a new album, the follow-up to Deja Vu. That way, we have an objective way of selecting the songs, and a way to avoid this turning into a "my favorites" playlist, which has always annoyed me. The reason I chose to exclude Neil Young from this was because I figured the only way CSN could carry on in the 70s would be to leave Neil alone. It seems clear that they could resolve their issues as a three-piece, but not as a foursome, it being no coincidence that when they finally managed to reunite in 1977, Young was nowhere to be seen. When it comes to their quotas, four Stills songs and three each for Nash and Crosby seems fair enough, as Stills was always the domineering one in the group, and he's the one who had the most material available. It would be ten songs long, just like the previous two, and as no high-quality live performances of this tour are available to us, we will have to make do with their solo studio versions. We operate under the assumption they wouldn't save their best songs for their solo albums, so that we can put together the best possible album here. With that out of the way, here's our album:

Love the One You're With (Stephen Stills)

Simple Man (Songs for Beginners)

The Lee Shore (Four Way Street)

Black Queen (Stephen Stills)

Laughing (If I Could Only Remember My Name)

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Chicago (Songs for Beginners)

So Begins the Task (Manassas)

Man in the Mirror (Songs for Beginners)

Song With No Words (If I Could Only Remember My Name)

As I Come of Age (Illegal Stills)

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Crosby, Stills & Nash - Songs for Beginners (1970)

Young, Crosby, Nash & Stills performing at the Fillmore East, 1970.

Of the ten songs selected for the album, nine were mainstays of the 1970 CSNY tour. The exception is "Song With No Words", which was only performed during the early 1969 tour. As we're short on Crosby songs for the album, we'll allow it, making it the only outlier in the reconstruction. In "The Lee Shore" we have our only de facto CSN recording, as the only studio version of it available is a Deja Vu outtake. However, given there are plenty of harmonies in the rest of the songs, it's easy to imagine the trademark Crosby, Stills & Nash vocals in most of these songs. The exception is "Black Queen", which would take "Almost Cut My Hair"'s spot as the harmony-less song on the record. "Chicago" incorporates the "We Can Change the World" coda, as it doesn't feel quite complete without it, bringing its runtime to four minutes. Outtakes include Nash's "Sleep Song" and Stills' "We Are Not Helpless". There's nothing wrong with those two, other than the fact that they were played live only once in 1970. Given that the others were played semi-frequently, I thought it was fair to give them preference. With three songwriters in the band, there are always a few outtakes to their albums, and this one would be no different.

In terms of sequencing, this album opens with its probable lead single, "Love the One You're With", with the second side starting with "Chicago", its probable follow-up. Side one ends with Crosby's magnificent "Laughing", and the album ends with one of the best songs on the album, Stills' "As I Come of Age". Other than that, I simply tried to not have two songs by the same member in a row, and put the songs where I thought they fit best. The result was a 41-minute album with roughly equal sides, which is what we were aiming for. Since they'd already released a self-titled album before, I decided to steal the Songs for Beginners title from Nash's album, as it's a nice name and fits this material well, them starting over after Neil's chaotic passage. I also made a nice album cover to go along with it, them rehearsing backstage at a CSNY gig with Young carefully cropped out. This album, which ideally would come out right before Christmas 1970, is a very good record, a better and more focused album than Deja Vu, but without reaching the heights of the debut, somewhat a compromise between the two. It would be nice to see what they would've done during the 70s, their sound and image evolving as they came of age.

Sources:
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Songs Performed in 1970

- Peter Doggett - CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

The Rolling Stones - Come On! (1963)

The Rolling Stones released their first single, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Come On", on June 7, 1963, through Decca Records. Backed by a version of Willie Dixon's "I Want to Be Loved", it reached number 21, a minor hit and an impressive result for their first-ever release. The Stones were signed to Decca through the recommendation of George Harrison, the label still reeling from their infamous rejection of the Beatles the year before. And so, after some demo sessions in March 1963 where they stepped into a recording studio for the first time, they recorded on and off for the rest of the year, releasing another single before the year's end, the Lennon/McCartney original "I Wanna Be Your Man". It became a big hit, and showed the label that the Stones had the potential to become a big act in the UK, and their first hit wasn't a fluke. However, Decca was still afraid to commit to a full LP by the band so early, even though they had already recorded enough material to fill one. So, they decided to release an EP instead, a compromise while they decided when and how to make the Stones' first album. The self-titled EP came out in the first week of 1964, featuring the highlights of their 1963 recording sessions, with songs such as "You Better Move On" and "Bye Bye Johnny". With its success, the first Stones album was finally greenlit, and they entered the studio to record it in February 1964.

But what if the Rolling Stones had released their first album in 1963? To answer that question, we will have to collect everything the Stones recorded before their first album, and turn it into a cohesive and feasible record, given the way the record industry worked in 1963. It will feature fourteen songs instead of twelve, just like your average Beatles album of the period. Singles weren't included in albums in the UK at the time, under the premise that the album needed to be worth the money, without songs you've already bought on singles, but we will have to make an exception at this time as we wouldn't be able to fill out a record otherwise, and even if we did, it wouldn't be of the quality we have come to expect of a Stones album. The Beatles' debut album also featured their singles, and so we will use it as a template, having the two songs off the single as either side closers or openers. Along with their early studio recordings, some live recordings of songs from their live set such as "Roll Over Beethoven" made for the BBC are also available, but won't be used here as their sound quality is much too poor. Studio outtakes that weren't officially released are fair game as well, as long as they are in decent enough sound quality. It will only feature a single original, the instrumental "Stoned", a fair cry from the six on Please Please Me, but it will have to do. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Bye Bye Johnny (Singles Collection)
Money (Singles Collection)
Baby, What's Wrong? (GRRR!)
Go Home Girl (Genuine Black Box)
Bright Lights, Big City (GRRR!)

I Want to Be Loved (Singles Collection)

Come On! (Singles Collection)

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I Wanna Be Your Man (Singles Collection)
Stoned (Singles Collection)
Road Runner (GRRR!)
Fortune Teller (More Hot Rocks)
Diddley Daddy (GRRR!)
Poison Ivy (Singles Collection)
You Better Move On (Singles Collection)

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The Rolling Stones - Come On! (1963)

Jones, Watts, Richards, Jagger & Wyman at ATV Studios, late 1963.

Our first inclusions are from the Stones' first proper studio session, in March 1963 at IBC Studios. With Glyn Johns on the producer's chair, they cut their versions of Rn'B staples "Baby What's Wrong", "Bright Lights, Big City", "Diddley Daddy" and "Road Runner". These recordings are very rough-sounding, for obvious reasons, but are more than good enough to help fill out the album, so we can include them without issue. Their next session, that May at Olympic, produced by Andrew Oldham, they cut their first single, "Come On" and "I Want to Be Loved". Oldham produced another session in August, this time at Decca, where "Fortune Teller" was recorded. Meant for a single, it was left unreleased until it made its way into a compilation a few years afterward by Decca. In October, they reconvened at De Lane Lea to record their next single, "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Stoned". With it, gifted by the Beatles' Lennon and McCartney, they had their first real hit and were well on their way to stardom. Shortly thereafter in November, they returned and recorded "Poison Ivy", "Money", and "Go Home Girl", with the first two being paired with the leftover recordings from August to form their first EP, and the latter surfacing only through bootlegs. By including all of those songs, we managed to reach our goal of having fourteen songs, and all that's left for us to do is sequence this into a real record.

To sequence these songs into an album, we will have all the songs released either on the EP or on singles open and close the sides, and the lower quality studio outtakes and IBC demos will fill out the middle of the sides, thus burying them deep onto the record and making their lackluster quality less apparent to first-time listeners. Clocking in at 32 minutes with two even sides, Come On! is your typical early '60s album, inessential but fun, giving us a glimpse of the Stones' early stage act. This album would've been released instead of the EP, which only came out because Decca wasn't sure the Stones could release an album and wanted to test the waters first. Coming out hot on the heels of the "I Wanna Be Your Man" single, and right in time for the Christmas season of 1963, I see no reason for this album to fail to sell well. Would it have topped the charts? Who knows, but I'm sure it wouldn't have been a failure, and the Decca executives had no reason to worry. With the EP songs coming out for the first time here, we would have ten out of the fourteen songs on the album being released for the first time here, not up to British standards, but still pretty solid. I've taken both the cover and the title from the great AndrewskyDE from the Steve Hoffman Forums, who put this together a few years back. While their real-life debut album is no doubt much better, it's interesting to see the Stones in this early stage of their long career, just six blues and Rn'B fanatics who wanted to be loved.

Sources:

- The Complete Works of the Rolling Stones Database: 1963

- Bill Wyman - Rolling With the Stones