School of Rock - Tuesday 6/30 - Crosby, Stills & Nash/Wooden Ships

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School of Rock is flashing back to a great year for music, 1969.  Members David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash had just departed from their previous bands, The Byrds, The Hollies and Buffalo Springfield.  Thankfully, personality conflicts with former bandmates brought this brilliant blend of voices together.

The trio's first album, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, was released in May 1969 and was an immediate hit, spawning two Top 40 hit singles and receiving key airplay on the new FM radio format.

In David Crosby's liner notes for the 1991 box set Crosby, Stills & Nash, he says this cryptic, apocalyptic, anti-war song was "Written in the main cabin of my boat, the Mayan. I had the music already [and Jefferson Airplane's] Paul Kanter wrote 2 verses, Stephen wrote one and I added the bits at both ends." He goes on to say that the songwriters "Imagined ourselves as the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization."

You’ll find several nautical references in CS&N, mostly influenced by David Crosby who learned to sail at age 11 and lived on a boat for many years.  The 1977 album cover of CSN shows the three on Crosby’s 80 foot sailboat “Mayan”.