Album Challenge - 1970 pt. 1 - Deja Vu

I'm back to that Album Challenge and on to 1970. Deja Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is the album I'm starting off with and that was after some thought because there are so many albums from 1970 that have influenced my taste in music but this one was important to me because of that time and place. This album was my taste in music and I played it constantly in the barracks after getting the cassette from the Navy Exchange store on the Great Lakes Naval Base and then got to see them perform in Chicago that summer.

I had seen all of these guys several times over the years in various bands... Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds in 1968 and Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1969. So I knew these musicians and this new album was amazing. I loved these songs that covered the full range of music and songwriting of all four band members. They were all playing such great music during that time period. I had the 1969 album Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Neil Young album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere which I previously wrote about for this Album Challenge. I could just as easily write about Neil Young's 1970 album After The Gold Rush which was also one of my favorite albums of that year.

1970 was an important year in music for me but I was not buying albums at the furious pace I had been over the previous couple of years. I was preparing to go to sea. I would not buy very many albums until towards the end of 1973. At that point I would start to catch up with getting albums in my collection that were released between 1970 and 1973. It would take a few years to get all that I wanted from that period. However, this is one of the albums I got in 1970 and loved.
In 1971 they would release their live album 4 Way Street. The show I saw that summer was one of the ones that were used for the recording. I would see them again in early 1974 at the Academy of Music in Philly. It was a strange show and felt like a bunch of solo acts taking turns to do their songs.

Yesterday I listened to this album on the turntable and today I played the CD. They both sounded great and I don't think I've listened to this album start to finish in a long time. I have used all of these songs on mixes over the years.

This was also one of the few albums that I had in cassette, vinyl and CD. I never did have an 8-track player. Later on I did get the CSNY box set.