The formation of Crosby, Stills and Nash is headily serendipitous stuff: proof that a supposed musician's nirvana existed in Laurel Canyon, California. Errant Byrd David Crosby and former Buffalo Springfield guitarist Stephen Stills were brought together in 1968 by Mama Cass Elliot. Hollies guitarist Graham Nash listened to the pair sing You Don't Have to Cry, asked to hear it again, then on the third performance joined in with his own perfect harmony. The high point of their collaboration came with Déjà Vu, their second album – the sound of California in a way the Beach Boys had been a few years earlier.
You could argue the trio never stopped symbolising the Laurel Canyon scene: their formation spoke of its optimism and talent, their transformation to coked-out, cocooned multimillionaires, unable to contain their own egos long enough to make an album, told you how things had changed. Occasionally participating (he was on Déjà Vu), but always from a distance – the funkier, scruffier neighbourhood of Topanga Canyon – the zealously independent Neil Young was the first to call bullshit when he saw things going wrong: the off-key, agonised howl of 1973's Time Fades Away as perfect a summation of what the hippy dream had become as the songs on Déjà Vu were an expression of what it might have been.
