Four-way street

Fifty-four years ago, Four Way Street was released. It was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s first live album, and the first CSNY record I ever bought back in the early 1970s when double LPs were still in vogue. I remember flipping through the racks at Hinson's Records in Penang Road and picking it up almost on instinct. I’d heard the band in my friend's home and Déjà Vu, their second studio album, was already legendary. This one felt different. It looked like a statement. Live, raw and sprawlingly indulgent. No greatest hits on display, just four musicians doing what they did best on stage.

What I didn’t expect was how personal it would feel. The acoustic sides were stripped down and exposed. Each of them took turns with songs that reflected who they were. Stills showed off his bluesy chops, Nash delivered melodies with heart-on-sleeve clarity and Neil Young leant into stark and sometimes unsettling ballads. Crosby, who died last year, brought a drifting, dreamlike presence. The Lee Shore, in particular, still gave me pause. 

It surprised me, too, to find Suite: Judy Blue Eyes reduced to just its final 30 seconds. I’d expected the full performance. After all, it was one of their signature songs. But maybe the album was already running long, and the band chose instead to give space to newer material and varied solo showcases. In hindsight, it makes sense that Four Way Street wasn’t about replaying studio hits but was about letting each voice stretch out in ways that couldn’t always happen when they recorded as a unit.

The first half of the album was a series of solo and duo acoustic sets: intimate and conversational. There was no attempt to hide the spontaneity. Songs were introduced, interrupted and commented on, with banter that feels loose and unfiltered. The harmonies, when they appear, are like old friends suddenly arriving unexpectedly but at exactly the right moment. Made me feel that I was in a room with them.

Then comes the shift. Side Three onward, the electric sets kicked in and everything swelled. Volume, tempo, ambition. Stills and Young trade long guitar passages. The sound became more urgent, the music more defiant. The songs stretched out and took their time. There was fire in Southern Man and tension in Ohio, and even when the band didn’t sound unified, the intensity never wavered. This wasn’t a group offering a tidy concert experience; they were showing where they stood musically and politically in a country still rattled by Vietnam, Kent State and fractured ideals.

Four Way Street worked not because it was seamless, but because it so clearly was a product of its time. The flaws were part of its charm. It captured four distinct individuals who happened, briefly, to collide and harmonise in ways that still mattered. And maybe that is why the record holds up today. It didn’t try to be definitive. It just let the moment breathe.

Looking back, I’m still glad I picked it up in the record store when I did. I didn’t know much then, but I knew it sounded real.