You might come to a Crosby Stills and Nash show expecting age-old favorites like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “Our House.” And, you’ll get them. But don’t be surprised if there are also, well, a few surprises along the way. The group has long favored a less polished, more visceral, iconoclastic type of show. Heck, earlier this summer, CSN added in a song that had been written just hours before showtime.
“Fuck polish,” Graham Nash tells the Charleston City Paper. “The thing that our audiences love is that we mean to be there. We want to be there. It’s not like we’re doing it because somebody needs the cash. We’re musicians; we’re communicators. We want to talk to people. We want to open their minds to new ideas. We want to make them fall in love, and we want to make them fucking pissed off, absolutely.”
That willingness to push the boundaries goes back, at least, to the late 1960s and moments like “Ohio” (performed with their on-again, off-again partner Neil Young) and continues through 2011’s “Almost Gone,” a Nash song focusing on the aftermath of the WikiLeaks scandal. Nash admits that a number of people walked out of an Atlanta show in 2006 as they performed a track called “Let’s Impeach the President.”
Still, don’t expect Crosby Stills and Nash — on-going 2014 dates continue through October — to change now. Or to slow down, for that matter. “We are constantly creating,” Nash adds. “As long as we can sing, this band will be in business.”
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