Even Neil “Quitter” Young managed to stay long enough for the one-two-three punch of this album, the subsequent “Ohio”/”Find the Cost of Freedom” double-A-side, and the “4 Way Street” live album (and a quadruple punch, if you want to include the 1974 tour) to make us believe - heck, make them believe, too - that fleeting unity was worth every dirty look or dressing-room fight. And we largely believe it because, on enough of “Déjà Vu” to bolster anyone’s faltering faith, these guys did. We want to believe that lone rangers can lock in together. Yet there’s a reason supergroups endure as a fantasy, if not that much of a reality for the last 49 years or so, give or take a Wilburys, Highwaymen or Boygenius. (Last year, on the occasion of the album’s actual 50th birthday last year, writer Steve Hochman had a very good piece in Variety demythologizing the idea of “Déjà Vu” as a group-effort ideal.)

Probably anyone with the slightest CSNY consciousness now has a sense that there was a White Album aspect to the proceedings, with everyone in the foursome working up their songs individually outside the studio before bringing them in - or after after bringing them in, as Neil Young was known to take the tapes of the tracks he fronted with him after a session, to finish up on his own. IRL, it was in diminishing supply by the time “Déjà Vu” was being recorded in the latter stages of 1969, as Cameron Crowe’s generous liner-notes essay reminds us. Harmony was certainly the key word for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young all around… on the record. Maybe this modest, raw demo won’t mean that much even to most of their fans… but for a certain subset of us, it’s like an archeologist came up with recorded proof that gods not only walked the earth, but that they shared hippie-dippy moments of domestic tranquility before everyone got kicked out of the garden.

Deja vu album