Flashback, September 1970: CSNY’s Mitchell-Inspired ‘Our House’ Released as Single

Fifty years ago this month, Atlantic Records released as a single “Our House,” the third and last song from the Deja Vu album to reach the top 100 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following one month after Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s rushed release of “Ohio” as a stand-alone song and six months after “Woodstock,” this tender love song did not burn with combustible fervor as warm the heart—at least superficially.

As CSNY bandmate Stephen Stills had done the prior year with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Graham Nash was inspired to compose his song by a relationship with a folk music queen. But, while Stills wrote out of frustration over his seesawing romance with Judy Collins, Nash poured out his feelings at the zenith of his love affair with Joni Mitchell.

After eating breakfast on Ventura Boulevard, Nash and Mitchell stopped at a small antique store, where Mitchell purchased a vase, Nash later remembered: 

“It was a kind of a cold gray morning as it sometimes can be in Los Angeles, and I said, ‘Why don’t I light the fire and you put some flowers in the vase that you just bought.’ So she’s cutting stems and leaves and arranging flowers in this vase, and I’d lit the fire. Now, my and Joan’s life at the time were far from ordinary … and I thought, ‘What an ordinary moment.’ Here I am lighting the fire for my old lady and she’s putting flowers in this vase that she just bought.”

Nash promptly sat down at the piano in their home in Laurel Canyon and, within an hour to an hour and a half, wrote “Our House.”

The details evoked in the song—as well as the event that inspired it—represent an ideal of domesticity, at least in the home shared by Nash and Mitchell in Laurel Canyon—a community of friends who listened to each other’s music, dreamed of a better world—and tried to negotiate personal relationships enough to be close and intimate but not possessive.

Domesticity, as practiced by Nash and Mitchell, meant living together outside of marriage. Young people today might find this surprising, given that 7.5 million unmarried American couples now cohabit, but the concept was nearly nonexistent in 1960, according to a 2012 study by the National Institute of Health.  

Such relationships, however, had come into vogue in the counterculture. It especially suited a bohemian like Mitchell, much of whose subsequent work reflected her oscillation between emotional closeness and the personal freedom she required as an artist. “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city,” she sang in “My Old Man.”

The relationship between her and Nash came into existence not only because of personal attraction, but through their Laurel Canyon community’s ideals of friendship and freedom.

“I can only liken it to Vienna at the turn of the century or Paris in the Thirties,” Nash remembered in the documentary Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind. “There was this freedom in the air, this sense that we could do anything. We were scruffy kids that were, in some small way, were changing the world and changing the way we think about things.”

Mitchell had originally been involved with CSNY bandmate David Crosby, who yielded when he sensed the growing attraction between her and Nash.

“Our House” was not the only indication of Mitchell’s influence on CSNY: they also recast her quietly meditative “Woodstock” into an electrified anthem of the counterculture.

Mitchell's influence on Nash's work lasted longer than their relationship, however.

“I had sworn my heart to Graham in a way that I didn’t think was possible, and he wanted me to marry him," she noted years later. "I had agreed to it, and then I just started thinking that my grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician and she kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm…As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I just thought I’d end up like my grandmother.”

Nash got a telegram from Greece from Joni that ended, “If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers.” “It was Joan’s way of saying goodbye to me,” Nash recalled. The two would go on to other partners but would remain close friends.

The recording sessions for the Déjà Vu LP were among the most difficult in rock history, with the band members often nitpicking particular tracks. One wonders if even a seemingly simple tune like “Our House” elicited this same rough treatment.

Not everyone was enthused with “Our House.” Four years after its release, Rolling Stone’s Langdon Winner called it “a flyweight ditty with nothing to say and makes this clear through its simpering melody.”

But the song has become a staple of classic rock stations, and will probably endure long after Nash and the rest of CSNY are no more.

Flashback, May 1969: Crosby, Stills and Nash Score With 1st LP

Arguably the first, most successful, influential—and combustible—American rock supergroup, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, surpassed even the expectations raised by their experiences in their prior bands, with their self-titled LP released at the end of May 1969.

David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash—refugees from, respectively, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies—brought complementary strengths that meshed beautifully in these 10 songs that immediately became staples of AM and FM radio: social commentary and moody introspective pieces (Crosby), broad-ranging musical skills and a feel for country-music textures (Stills) and melodic pop (Nash). 

The Atlantic Records release included two Top 40 singles, “Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”—“a definite game changer,” Nash would remember 40 years later. 

The group formed and signed with Atlantic for creative, personal and legal reasons. Crosby had been kicked out of The Byrds because of his increasing wish to write songs (which, he had come to see, was where the real money from music came from) and his difficulty in getting along with the other bandmates. Columbia Records head Clive Davis gladly gave him his freedom, figuring his days as a commercial force, outside the Byrds, were over. Crosby urged his new friend, Nash, to leave his British group, The Hollies, which had rejected his songs.

Following the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, Stills was still on the Atlantic label. With Crosby, in effect, a free agent and able to join him, that left only Nash at large. That problem was solved when Atlantic, in effect, traded Stills’ former bandmate, Richie Furay (who had moved on to the country-rock group Poco) to Columbia to effect Nash’s release at that label from the Hollies.

In order to make sure that future incarnations of the band could tour if a member departed, the new trio decided to use their surnames to christen the new entity. But what would be the order of the names? In an early hint at the later ego problems that would roil their relationships, Stills wanted his name first. He seemed to have a fair claim to it, as their label was his original one and, as the group member most musically versatile (he would play every instrument on their debut LP except drums), he was the dominant studio presence. But he was outvoted 2-1 when Crosby cheerfully went along with Nash’s insistence that “Crosby, Stills, and Nash” rolled off the tongue easiest.

That hurdle was surmounted, as everything else soon appeared to be in these early halcyon days of the group. Much of it happened through consumption of mind-altering substances. During business meetings, Crosby would urge his new friends to smoke highly potent weed “so we’re all on the same page.” (Additionally, their growing penchant for cocaine would earn them an industry nickname: the Frozen Noses.)

Toward the end of the recording sessions, Phil Spector came in with his dark, wordless, deeply weird presence. But really, who needed the creator of the Wall of Sound when Crosby and Nash could so easily find another studio obsessive who could drive bandmates as crazy as himself?

Stills would occupy within the group the same slot later held by Lindsay Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac: a guitar master and production wizard with a mile-wide perfectionist streak—and whose own tortured love affair would find similar memorable expression on vinyl. In Buckingham’s case, it was with the 3½-minute “Go Your Own Way”; for Stills, it was with the seven-minute “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”

The latter tune, the most jagged of love songs, inspired by Judy Collins, ranged widely in tone and lyrical content, yet was held magically together by songwriter Stills’ deft guitar textures in the instrumental bridges, as well as by the seamless vocal harmonies that would become one of the group’s hallmarks. The average listener wouldn’t notice the mood shifts from self-accusation (“It's getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore”) to expressions of love (“I am yours, you are mine”) to bewailing the needless frustrations created by a love (“Please be gone I'm tired of you”). The voice could be blunt and in your face (“You make it hard”) to poetic (“Lacy lilting lady/Losing love lamenting”). (Indeed, in the case of those last lines, an elementary school English teacher of mine cited it as an example of alliteration.)

It took close to forever for just that one song to come together. After 10 hours, when the tapes were played back, Stills wasn’t sure they’d gotten it. The trio went back in for another 10 hours, despite Nash’s insistence that they’d already killed it. At the end of the 20 hours, Stills agreed: the original was best.

It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him.

At other times, he rescued what seemed hopelessly mixed-up. Case in point: “Long Time Gone,” Crosby’s outraged reaction to the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  The group had been floundering when Stills told Crosby and Nash to “get a burger and go home” and let him at it. The next day, upon their return, Stills had come up with an arrangement that worked beautifully. 

Crosby had an unusual--potentially deadly--method of measuring their studio progress, according to Nash's 2013 memoir Wild Tales: cutting notches in the desk next to the studio board. At one point, a teenager burst into the room and, when Crosby pointed the knife at him, grabbed it out of his hand, saying it was his knife. When Nash wondered aloud about it, Crosby smiled: "Aw, that's just my friend Jackson Browne."

Throughout, the group achieved what they had aimed for at the beginning: magical harmonies that recalled the Everly Brothers. Essential in this process was Crosby. Art Garfunkel (who knows a bit about such things) recalled it in an interview for “Croz’s” autobiography, Long Time Gone: “The middle man does the stuff that makes the chord work, but you never notice it. David can be right in front of your eyes in a sort of velvety way and you’ll never notice him.”

Unfortunately, what did get noticed about Crosby—exacerbated, no doubt, by his rampant drug use—was his brash, arrogant manner. “David was obnoxious, loud, demanding, thoughtless, full of himself,” recalled the group’s former manager (and future entertainment industry mogul), David Geffen. (That impression undoubtedly became lasting because Geffen was busted at an airport for carrying pot cross-country at the insistence of Crosby—who then had the nerve to scream at him when he showed up for their meeting without it.)

The LP Crosby, Stills and Nash sold two million copies in 1969 alone, and has been named one of Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The addition of Neil Young later that year—and the resulting Déjà Vu album—pushed them to even greater commercial and artistic heights, paving the way for the Southern California rock of Joni Mitchell (lover, successively, of Crosby and Nash), Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, the Eagles, Dan Fogelberg and Warren Zevon. But, if three large, often drug-fueled egos were bad enough, four represented a recipe for an explosion. First went the innocence, then the camaraderie. They had it all, then were lucky to make it out with their lives. The music was incredible, but even with the occasional get-together over the years, the pity was that there wasn't more of it.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, on the Agony of “To Know and Feel Too Much Within”)

“People tell me it's a sin

To know and feel too much within.

I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.

She was born in spring, but I was born too late

Blame it on a simple twist of fate.”—Bob Dylan, “Simple Twist of Fate”, from the Blood on the Tracks LP (1975)

In Fred Goodman’s marvelous account of the rock-music business of the 1970s, The Mansion on the Hill, there’s a priceless scene from late 1974. Bob Dylan is playing to a small group of musicians several songs from what would become Blood on the Tracks.

The room is packed, so Graham Nash has to listen just outside the door and can’t see, but he doesn’t mind a bit—Dylan’s songs are amazing.

Nash’s reverie is interrupted by another listener, Stephen Stills. The man just can’t play guitar, Stills tells his CSNY bandmate. An outraged Nash feels this criticism is utterly beside the point.

Who am I to gainsay someone of Stills’ guitar skills when it comes to assessing Dylan on this instrument? And truth be told, despite the contention of New Yorker editor David Remnick that Dylan is one of the great singers, his voice wasn’t great shakes, either—more charitably described as “expressive” than “excellent.”

But Nash was absolutely correct in how he reacted to Blood on the Tracks. It’s one of those LPs that deserve to be placed in a time capsule as representing the best of the singer-songwriter era—or, indeed, the past half-century of rock ‘n’ roll. 

“His poetic distillation of love, memory, coincidence and fate was as close as rock music has come to great literature,” wrote Adam Sweeting in a Guardian profile 10 years ago.

Faithful reader, I fell down on the job two weeks ago, failing to observe that January 17 marked the 35th anniversary of the release date for Dylan’s song set on fractured love. Trouble was, much of the media—at least from what I can see—did, too. Shame on us all.

When it came out, the LP was hailed as proof that “Dylan was back”—not just physically recovered from his motorcycle accident of the Sixties (he’d been back from that for awhile), but back as a songwriter who mattered. That hope proved elusive. 

Sure, he subsequently had another protest hit (“Hurricane”); he could still surprise (his period as a born-again Christian positively flummoxed everybody); and he could come up with isolated songs that were excellent (the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed” from Wonder Boys), and whole albums that were good (Time Out of Mind).

But Blood on the Tracks is the last album, from first to final cut, that can be judged indisputably great.

Listeners could not help but notice the timing of the album’s release—when Dylan’s marriage to former model Sarah Lowndes was on the rocks. That perceived connection between real life and art annoyed the songwriter, who claimed that these recent songs had been inspired by his reading of Chekhov.

Wipe that smirk off your face. How much more do you want the man to say about a situation that hurt too much? Dylan was merely heeding the advice of fellow poet Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.”

After a decade and a half of paying tribute to old musical gods, of smashing them, of experimenting, of playing with lyrics and his own image, Dylan was singing from the heart, simply and powerfully, as if sensing the whole range of emotions involved in a longtime intimate relationship with another human being was enough.

Of the thousands of cover versions of Dylan songs over the years, two artists have, I think, done the best job with their takes on Blood on the Tracks. Shawn Colvin performed a dazzling rendition of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” from her Cover Girl CD, and Mary Lee’s Corvette did a tribute at Arlene’s Grocery in New York several years ago that won so much (justifiable) acclaim that it ended up being released as a CD.

“You’ll never know the pain I suffered nor the hurt I rise above,” Dylan sings in “Idiot Wind”—then, while we’re still absorbing this, he projects into the heart of his former lover: “And I'll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love.”

It’s an astonishing transition, one he pulled off at will, time and again, in this masterpiece that does not sound dated in the slightest, all these years later.