After a major Crosby, Stills , Nash and Young tour in 1974, the quartet returned to separate projects. While Stills and Young resumed their solo careers, David Crosby and Graham Nash elected to record a couple more albums after having recorded one for Atlantic in 1972. Crosby and Nash decided to sign with ABC to put out their duo records, hoping they'd get more exposure. Thirty years ago today - September 15, 1975 - the duo released Wind On the Water.

http://www.4waysite.com/images/releases/C_NnWind.bmp

Wind on the Water surprised fans and critics who thought of Crosby and Nash as being rather mellow and as the George and Ringo of CSNY. Many of the songs were full-blown rockers, and the lighter songs crackled with similar energy. After four duo albums from Crosby and Nash, many fans and critics still consider Wind On the Water to be their best effort. :)

This thread will looks at each of the eleven tracks on this LP, one by one.

Crosby and Nash recorded Wind On the Water in Los Angeles with a crackerjack touring band that included keyboardist Craig Doerge, drummer Russ Kunkel, guitarist Joel Bernstein, and bassist Tim Drummond. They would tour with Crosby and Nash as the Mighty Jitters all throughout 1975 and 1976.

Oh yes, Wind On the Water included some famous guests - Levon Helm of the Band, James Taylor, Carole King, an Jackson Browne. :)

Wind On the Water was loosely a concept album. Many of the songs Crosby and Nash wrote for the record (no pun intended) dealt with social commentarian themes and how they related to aging and death. They took a mostly subtle approach to the subject, allowing the album to be far less morose than one might expect. There was even a little levity in a song or two to lighten the mood a bit. Crosby and Nash deliberately tried for a different sound overall, with fewer harmonies in some places and heavier arrangements in others, so as to avoid comparisons to the sound they'd been getting with Stephen Stills and/or Neil Young.

Wind on the Water reached number six on the Billboard album charts. :)

So here we go, with the kickoff track:

"Carry Me" : A Crosby song, this number starts with a clear, unencumbered acoustic guitar line supported nimbly by drums, keyboards and a subtle electric guitar Crosby waxes poetic about his past, singing about having "found an old dream," using airplane metaphors to describe how he revived it ("I made it some new wings / And I painted the nose / And I wished so hard / Up in the air I rose"). Subsequent verses refer to a former girlfriend and Crosby's mother, who died after a long ilness and had wanted her son to euthanize her (which Crosby couldn't do, else he's be charged for murder). "Carry Me" reaches an emotional high point here, as the vocals get louder and the drums off an clicmatic flourish. Nash sings harmonies on the refrain "Carry me, carry me, carry me above the world." Corsby mostly sings this song solo, delivering an strong vocal that reminds the listener how accomplished a singer he is. A powerful, personal song, "Carry Me" sets the pace for what's to come.

"Mama Lion" : This Nash song is the first rocker on the album. It starts subtly with a creepring guitar line that builds in intensity against the desperate harmonies singing lyrics about a mysterious woman who is "feeding the weeding the souls she could save" and is "living in the future, and it lies in her hand." Clearly a mistress of her own domain. "Mama Lion" recalls the bewitching (no pun intended) "Lady Samantha," Elton John's first big radio hit from 1969; it's just as esoteric, but with the California rock style of Graham Nash's adopted home rather than that of merrie olde England. A stinging guitar solo livens up the bridge, and the song ends with an intense instrumental coda that culminates in a hollow percussive sound. Storng stuff, indeed. :eek:

"Bittersweet" : A melancholy piano riff provides the backdrop for an emotional David Crosby song about truth towering proudly on one side and love precariously holding on, on the other side. The bass, drums, and electric guitar in are so intensely engrained in this low-key arrangement, the music almost sounds like the aural equivalent of a nagging drizzle. Crosby sings with convction about the need for satisfaction from both sides, however bittersweet it may be. "Bittersweet" was written in the morning and arranged and recorded that same evening while the Cros's inspiration was fresh. "It's a song about duality," Crosby has said, "if you want to be intellectual about it." :lol:

"Take The Money and Run": Not the Steve Miller Band song. Believed to be a confession by Nash that the 1974 CSNY reunion tour was all about the money, it was in fact an angry indictment of the promoters and road managers who made money off the tour. (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young hardly made that much after everyone else on the tour had been paid.) A pointed tumble of drums kicks off the song with gritty guitars and Nash's angry vocal, culminating in an astonishing violin solo in the middle eight by David Lindley before eventually ending on the same angry note it begins on. The lyrics revolve around a lyric that sums up the song's message, with Crosby joining in with Nash on said lyric: "You cannot give me any more time / You've already taken to much of mine / Take the money and run." ;)

"Naked In the Rain" : This song is the only track here to feature a Crosby-Nash credit (unless the closing track "To the Last Whale. . ." counts - but we'll get to that later); paradoxiaclly, it's the weakest song on the LP. It's about psycohological paralysis, opening with a lyric about a clown looking in his mirror unable to remember how to paint his face, wondering if he could go on. Crosby and Nash then sing about "a storm in you / You don't know what to do / Just when you think you're going insane / You lie naked in the rain." The tempo is slow and the music is rather mellow. "Naked In the Rain" ends abruptly at the lyric "The choice is your soul's moment for its light to strike." It's an intersting idea but an underdeveloped song.

I don't think this song would have made the cut had this been a Crosby, Stills and Nash album.

"Love Work Out": This is a very desparate rocker (a Nash song), driven by strident pianoi and stinging guitar riffs. Crosby and Nash lament wasting time and trying to simply avoid fading away rather than constructively make a love affair succeed. "It seems like a strange thing for me to say," they sing, "but I'm so tired of looking the other way."

So let love work out. Powerful stuff.

This song closes side one of the original vinyl record.

"Low Down Payment": This number is the fastest, hardest-rocking song on Wind On the Water from David Crosby, and it makes a fine opening to side two. The lyrics force the listneer to confront guilt and sin, referring to a pillar of salt with automotive metpahors ("And you can drive it out of here / All you do is find a gear / That will not blow it apart") and coming up with images of people witnessing the death of their dreams. Each verse slows toward the end, and the music starts up again with the next verse. The coda includes some fascinating guitar soloing.

"Cowboy of Dreams": This is a lovely country waltz based with a wonderful piano arrangement and some poingant fiddle from David Lindley. (Waltzes were par for the course in seventies California country-rock.) Nash wrote this song about Neil Young, and based it in part on how Young had taken his house and barn and made giant stereo speakers out of them. Young took Nash out in a little rowboat onto a small lake at his Northern California ranch when Nash suddenly heard music seemingly come out of nowhere and realized that house and the barn had been wired for stereo. When Eliot Mazer, Young's personal recording engineer, yelled at Young to ask how it sounded, Young answered back, "More barn!" :lol: One of the best songs on the Wind On the Water LP. :)

"Homeward Through the Haze": This is a great, blues-based David Crosby number, a much roguher version of which was recorded by CSNY the previous year and finally released on the 1991 CSN box set. THis 1975 C-N version is preety good too, with Crosby in top form on lead vocals and a stinging, bluesy guitar solo in the middle eight. The whole song smokes. :) As Crosby has said, it's a song about finding your way when it gets harder to find the way.

"Fieldworker" - This is an angry Nash number that picks at social injustice toward migrant farmworkers like a scab on a wound. The guitar line is prikcly and biting, and the lyrics mix concern for the migrant workers with images of death (the seeds of the vegetables are depicted as dying before they ca ntake root and grow, likely meant to call attention to farm workers who put their lives in jeopardy just for the right to work). Bruce Springsteen would pay tribute to these intrepid workers twenty years later on The Ghost of Tom Joad, but Nash's efort here is pretty incisive as well.

"To The Last Whale. . . . A) Critical Mass/ B)Wind On the Water": This closing track on Wind On the Water is a pair of two separate compostitions welded together. Together they address the hunting and slaying of marine mammals.

"Critical Mass," a Crosby composition, is 74 seconds of offset harmonic scat chanting. It's a very pure, unencumbered piece of music, which David Crosby credits to the classical music he listened to as a boy. It's a lovely melody, but. . . arrnaging it for scat chanting? If I had been an engineer on this album, I would have suggested that Corsby and Nash arrange it for piano instead, but hey, too late.

In than fades into "Wind On the Water," which is Graham Nash's diatribe against the hunting of whales to near extinction. His lyrics, beautifully harmonized with Crosby and, if you listen closely enough, special guest James Taylor, refer to the killing of whales on behalf of greedy corporations and the horrible sight of whales beached upon the shore. A stirring, chilling arrangement of piano and strings breiong this song into classical territory, with lighter accompaniment from James Taylor's guitar and Russ Kunkel's drums. The swooping strings convey the anger at the destruction of marine mammals. It goes out just as stirringly as it comes in, with whale calls thrown in for good measure that complement the music nicely. The song's end leaves you thinking about the future of the planet as the record itself ends.

Wind On the Water peaked at number six on the Billboard charts and was supported by Corsby, Nash and a fine studio band on a long concert tour, taking their music places where they dared not go with Stills and/or Young at the Time. Music critic Stephen Holden summed up the album best in his positive review in Rolling Stone: "If Wind On the Water shows Crosby and Nash at the height of their musical powers, it is also suffused with melancholy, resgiantion, and anger. . . Wind On the Water is not an album made by or about kids, but the work of men who face being beached like whales on a sandbar by the youth culture and who are determined to survive. They will."

And they have. :)