Happy 45th: Graham Nash and David Crosby, GRAHAM NASH AND DAVID CROSBY

45 years ago today, Graham Nash and David Crosby released the first of their four studio albums as a duo.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are a textbook example of a group that all but requires you to keep a scorecard handy of who’s working with whom. After CSN&Y disbanded in 1970, all four members of the group soon released solo albums, but in the fall of ’71, Nash and Crosby decided to hit the road together. In doing so, they ended up road-testing several new tracks, and when the tour came to its conclusion, they opted to record the new material on a joint album.

Produced by the duo and Bill Halverson, GRAHAM NASH AND DAVID CROSBY featured a host of guest musicians, including Dave Mason, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Danny Kortchmar, Russell Kunkel, and more. The 10 tracks contained on the album were uniformly strong, with two of them being released as singles, and while “Southbound Train” failed to chart, “Immigration Man” provided Nash and Crosby with their first top-40 hit, hitting #36 on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter track was based on an actual event which had happened to Nash: he was going through U.S. Customs, trying to to come into the United States, but the customs official wouldn’t let him pass at first, and it was only after people started coming up to him and asking for his autograph that the official let him go by. It stung, as you might imagine, and he took out his anger in song.

To date, Nash and Crosby – or Crosby and Nash, if you prefer – have released three additional studio albums: WIND ON THE WATER (1975), WHISTLING DOWN THE WIRE (1976), and CROSBY & NASH (2004). As it stands right now, it seems relatively unlikely that we’re likely to see a fifth album emerge from the duo, but we’ll always have this quartet of quality LPs to revisit and remember.