Crosby, Stills & Nash: The Authorized Biography (The Definitive Inside Story of the Supergroup by Dave Zimmer Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Crosby, Stills & Nash: The Authorized Biography (The Definitive Inside Story of the Supergroup
Book Review: Excellent!
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw and previewed this book while in Barnes and Noble in Downtown Pittsburgh and I thought WOW! Some of the stuff I never knew about them! I had to go back and buy it for my mother for mothers day who is a HUGE CSNY fan! great job!Also recommended: Classic Rock Stories - Tim Morse .. Stories behind the greatest songs of all time .. did you know the first 2 lines to Wooden Ships were taken from a church sign that Graham saw in Florida?
Book Review: Excellent!
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw and previewed this book while in Downtown Pittsburgh and I thought WOW! Some of the stuff I never knew about them! I had to go back and buy it for my mother for mothers day who is a HUGE CSNY fan! great job!Also recommended: Classic Rock Stories - Tim Morse .. Stories behind the greatest songs of all time .. did you know the first 2 lines to Wooden Ships were taken from a church sign that Graham saw in Florida?
Book Review: Glad to have this book back in print
Summary: 5 Stars
The new chapter makes this book worth while to those that own the 1984 edition. The only thing I miss is the color pictures that appeared in the original version.Book Review: Too biographical...
Summary: 4 Stars
It is a biography, and so one should expect to be sauntered through the births, childhoods, teen years, and adulthoods of these three rock mega-stars. With that simple framework in hand an author should then consider, I believe, what the readers connection is to your subject. With David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, the obvious link is the music. There is also the rather chaotic, evolutionary decades of the sixties and seventies to be considered, which the music reflected and effected, as well as the more transient experiences most people had with the band, such as their concert appearances. But what I would guess most people really tune into when they read a book like this is the product the trio produced, which served as our "middle-man" to their individual and collective psyche, and creative spirits over those decades.
Even Graham Nash intones late in the book, "People have always tended to place far too much importance on the nature of the personal relationships between us, instead of what is created out of these relationships". Amen, Graham. You would think a light bulb should have ignited over author Dave Zimmer's head as he considered this statement, and allowed it to act like the beam from a lighthouse to guide his work. Instead that's exactly what the book focuses on. The first several chapters, of course, offer a succinct and necessary descriptive overview of each of the performers childhood roots. Once you're into the CSN and CSNY segments, however, the book devolves into tale after tale of how the boys couldn't play nice together. To be honest, I really don't care about their squabbling. I care about the music, and for the most part, the music took place independent of the squabbling. There is a place for the 'squabble-tales', such as when the music was a product of them, such as Nash's 'Wasted On the Way'. But most of the squabbles tended to damn rather than redeem the music. I really wish Zimmer would have taken liberties with, rather than literally pursuing the definition of 'biography'. Further editing could have been done with the tales of rock and roll excess. Did I really need to be told what great weed David Crosby was able to score? I probably would have ventured to guess that it was primo.
And what do you replace these ditties on the cutting floor with? More of the stories behind the music, which the book is not devoid of. There is a nice discourse on 'Wooden Ships' for instance. But by and large, vast segments of the CSN and Y catalog are ignored. Of the thirty-one songs recorded by Stills with Manassas, for instance, only a handful (yeah, I count five) are given any mention at all, and most of that information could have been gleaned from the album jackets. There have to be stories behind these songs, and since I don't spend much time with David, Stephen, and Graham, but do spend time with their music, it would be nice to know more about it. Gosh, what IS IT Stephen is wailing in Spanish while Graham and David do the "Do-do-do-do-do..." coda on 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes'? You won't find out here, though it's probably the most-asked question about their music.
I was going to give this work three stars, and probably should have, but it IS a biography and perhaps I'm being unfair in wanting it to be something it isn't. When the book 'Crosby, Stills and Nash: The Story Behind the Music' arrives, perhaps then I'll be happy. For now, if you want to hear about the naked ladies walking around Crosby's pad, or how Still's was cajoled into performing in an afro wig, this book is your baby! On the other hand, if you want to know what inspired Stills to dig back into the Buffalo Springfield catalog to graft 'Questions' onto 'Carry On', you'll have to be a bit more patient... and you may never know.
Book Review: disappointing
Summary: 3 Stars
The book was particularly interesting in describing the early history of the members of my favorite band, including each man's separate childhood and previous musical ventures, the story of their coming together and falling apart in the early '60s and '70s. But I found it frustratingly superficial in following CSN after about the mid-'70s; too much quoting the band and not enough talking to other people in their orbit, surprisingly circumspect on some of the problems of those times, notably those of David Crosby, both medical and legal. And different parts of the book are inconsistent - early on, the boys' enthusiastic embrace of the drug culture is presented as they expressed it at the time, w/o any recognition of later changes in viewpoint. While Zimmer and Diltz have had access to the band for a long time, a little more sense of historical overview would seem to be in order after more than 30 years - not simply undigested and un-reflected upon statements dating from the times of the original events.