This film is absolutely engrossing. It is highly entertaining, very moving and sometimes extraordinary - and always captivating…
It was, at the time, one of the highest-grossing rock tours ever, grossing over 11 million dollars in an era when such figures were uncommon. Such success camouflaged the chaos behind the scenes – the bitter fights and feuds, the excess and indulgence that led to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young pocketing about a half million dollars each, when all was said and done. Big bucks were the reason the CSNY 1974 tour even existed. Efforts to record a new album in 1973, their first since 1970's breakthrough Déjà Vu, collapsed but manager Elliot Roberts and promoter Bill Graham convinced the group to stage the first outdoor stadium tour in the summer of 1974, with the idea that CSNY would test-drive new material in concert, then record a new studio album in the fall, or maybe release a live record from the historic tour. Neither happened.
CSNY 1974 is the nineteenth album by Crosby, Stills, & Nash, their seventh in the CSNY quartet configuration, and their fifth live album, the third as a foursome. Issued on Rhino Records in 2014, it consists of concert material recorded in 1974 on the band's tour during the summer of that year…
CPR released as their second record an equally excellent two-CD live concert recorded in November 1998 at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theatre. In his liner notes, Samson Records owner Norman Waitt, Jr. refers to the palpable joy that emanated from the stage that night, and most of that joy translates to this almost celebratory-like recording as well. David Crosby is in excellent voice here, perhaps the best he had sounded since his '60s and '70s heyday; still choirboy sweet, but not without the world-weariness that comes with the rocky life he had lived up to that point.
The Crosby-Nash subset of CSNY carried with it much of the charm and harmony of the larger group, and together and apart the two singers mined that appeal for several gold albums, especially in the first couple of years after the breakup of CSNY in 1970. They even inspired bootleggers, who released A Very Stoney Evening, drawn from one of their 1971 shows. Hence the title of this belated official release, drawn from a different show at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on October 10.