Were CSNY really considered the "American Beatles" in the early to mid 1970s?

Exactly.

Compared to The Beatles of the 60s, nobody was bigger, ever, not when combining sales with impact....but in the 70s, as the two groups might also be evaluated as 4 individual artsts, the story shifted quite a bit. I broke down the numbers in my review of the CSNY 74 set for my day job. Here's the section I wrote on the sales angle, from 1969-1974 -- which obviously isn't the whole story, but I don't think most people know many of the specifics of the story at all. Apologies for the lengthy quote, but it's very much on topic.

The nature of Déjà Vu as largely an album of solo tracks highlighted one reason they couldn't stay together long: they all had far more songs in them than the couple they'd be limited to on a group album. The world may have wanted more CSNY, but the world also clearly wanted them individually. After the band went their separate ways in the summer of 1970, their solo careers exploded.

Still's first solo album went gold in 1970, as did his second in 1971. Young's multi-Platinum After The Gold Rush became the 20th best-selling album of 1971, just ahead of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.

With Nash and Crosby also releasing Gold solo albums in 1971, all four of the bandmates had albums in Billboard Magazine's top 15 that year.

1972 saw Young's Harvest become the year's most popular album. The duo album Graham Nash David Crosby peaked at #4. And while not as widely known today, Stills' double album Manassas peaked at #3.

In fact, for a six-week period in May and June of 1972, After The Gold Rush, Graham Nash David Crosby, and Manassas were in the top 10 of the Billboard album chart at the same time. For two of those weeks, May 27 and June 3, the albums were in spots 3, 4 and 5, respectively. No members of a group had done that before, and nobody has done it since.



(For that matter, the solo Beatles never had four albums in the top 15 in the same year, as CSNY did in 1971.)

The solo projects actually had a way of burnishing the group's gleam. The members popped up on each other's albums, and they sometimes appeared unannounced on stage at each other's concerts. All of them were touring relentlessly, and new albums kept coming.

To borrow a phrase, "How many more?"

Here's how many: a total of 16 albums from some combination of them in just five years, 14 of which went Gold or Platinum, and only two of which contained any previously released material.

Put the pieces together, and it's hard to overstate just how big Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had become by 1974.

Hard, but possible. The Beatles were still The Beatles, after all. The same 1969-1974 span from Crosby, Stills & Nash to Young's On The Beach also stretches from Abbey Road to McCartney's Band On The Run. The Beatles scored 16 Gold or Platinum albums during that time. That's two more than CSNY – but The Beatles took six more albums to do it.

The sales totals for the two groups are also remarkably close. Comparing the two group LPs from 1970 for example, Déjà Vu well outsold Let It Be, now certified with totals of 7 million and 4 million copies respectively. The lowest-charting album from a CSNY member in 1969-74 (Nash's Wild Tales) still peaked at #34, while a couple of Beatles solo albums in that period failed to hit the top 40, and three more failed to even reach the top 100.

That's the scale we're talking about. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young weren't bigger than The Beatles, but they were bumping right up against them, with nobody else much in the vicinity.
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So, there you have my goofy amount of research on the numbers -- again noting that I don't think that the numbers tell the whole story...but no kidding, CSNY, both individually and in various combinations, were huge. In 1974 for this tour, they broke attendance and revenue records that Zeppelin had set in 1973....which of course led Zeppelin (hahahaha) to go even bigger in 1975...but still. These guys don't get the due they deserve for the way that they were embraced by the American public.

Which is why I think they're unambiguously an American band. Where they were born is irrelevant. They were an American band. They met in the US, and lived and recorded in the US. Their politics were based on American perspectives. This is where their touring and sales successes were. I don't know if Young ever lived in Canada again, but I know that Graham didn't live in England again, and became an American citizen in 1978. Immigrants who become rooted here is as an American story as it gets.

And CSN&Y, collectively and invididually, were as big as anyone got by 1974.

Other than The Beatles. Who, by the numbers, weren't all that much bigger.

 

Canada is in America, North America.

This just 'kills me' [LOL] that people in the UnitED States think [well/that's actually questionable] their the only "Americans".
me fave was when the "World Cup" was held in "The Good Old USA" in '94 & people were disappointed that an "American" team didn't win it.
Yet Brazil, from South America, did win it!

 

I thought CSNY were better than the Beatles whom I never rated much.

 

I was around then too, turned 21 in the fall of 73, and I have never heard that before.

 

Canada's in North America, period.

 

Interesting question so I thought I should check some sources from the 1970s:

The NME Book of Rock vol 2: p.131 (Star Books 1977)
No mentioning that CSN&Y are similar to Beatles. There are references to Jefferson Airplane, Byrds and Buffalo Springfield obviously.

Encyclopedia in Rock vol3, p.72f (Panther 1976)
[...] What separated CSN&Y from the rank and file was their conquest of both Los Angeles and the San Fransisco approaches to rock. In the studio, they were perfectionist as the Byrds had been; on stage they were every bit as real, as separate personalities singing for each other as for the audience, in the manner of Jefferson Airplane. They sparked an infectious joy in the making of music [...]

No mentioning of Beatles....

 

Whether you like The Beatles music or not....take a moment...sit down....close your eyes & let's just think about this. Think about their career...about their music from the Beatlemania period thru the Abbey Road album...how they evolved...the constant speculation about whether they would ever get back together....to the success of Anthology....to the phenomenal success of "1"....to the fact that people are still talking about them & still buying and intricately analyzing their music almost 45 years since they broke up. Then think about the cultural changes that happened along the way...some (many?) of which could be said to be a direct result of their popularity.

Sure other artists have outsold them. But there is just one - and only one - Beatles.

Let's see....who were the English Beach Boys? How about the American Abba? Do we ask who the American Beethoven was ... or the English Mozart?

 

I think CSNY were exceptional but could not be compared to The Beatles. Probably lean towards The Beach Boys if there was any American band to compare. Even though I was so "Beatled out" by time the 70's came, I still thought of them as band primo.

 

Hah, for sure you do not frequent, Beach boy, abba and Motzart forums.

(( on other forums, some are just as obsessed about hundreds of OTHER groups.......))

 

Agreed

 

Thanks for all of the research; they really were truly great successes in the early to mid-70's.

Where I don't agree with your logic is your decision to compare CSNY (and solo) sales to the sales and chart successes of the solo Beatles in the early to mid-70's. In order to properly compare and contrast the two bands, we must compare the Beatles sales from 1963/64 onwards, to the CSN(Y) sales from 1969 onwards. The solo Beatles are not the same thing as the actual Beatles.

We must also compare the Beatles singles and album chart positions from 1963/64 onwards, with those that CSN(Y) had from 1969.

This is where the true differences lie; EMI confirmed in the mid-80's that the Beatles had sold over 1 Billion records worldwide and this figure is predicted to have reached 2 Billion by the late 2000's. When they first performed on the Ed Sullivan show, 40% of the US population watched them.
They had 20 US number 1 singles, and famously had the entire top 5 singles on the chart in April 1964. In the UK they had 17 number one singles. They have had 15 UK number 1 albums and 19 US number 1 albums. They had the best selling album of the 1960's in the UK (Sgt. Pepper) and the best selling album of the 2000's (1). In the UK, they had 10 of the top 20 best selling albums of the 1960's. They also had the best selling album to be released during the 60's in the US (The Beatles White Album). They also had 71 Hot 100 singles, 34 of which made the top ten.

The collective CSNY just cannot compare with these figures.

As you pointed out, the solo Beatles still managed to be bigger than the assorted CSNY releases from 1969 through to 1974, but to truly show how huge the difference between the groups is, it is only fair to compare the actual Beatles sales and chart records to the CSNY sales and chart records.

This is why I don't think that CSNY can be considered to be the 'American Beatles'. The fact that one member was English and one is Canadian also undermines that title IMO.

 

There was a 10 part documentary about the history of rock music a few years ago. David Crosby himself admitted that someone had suggested this very thing about CS&N(Y) He then said, in his opinion, CS&N(Y) wasn't even the American answer to sliced bread.

 

offED topic:

What's your point?
That Canada isn't in the Americas?!?!
Cause i literally postED: "... North America, period" vvv:

 

Please...with all due respect.

That's not what he was saying. American is part of our nation's name. It not said respectful. And, honestly, I think everyone understands.

I would LOVE to have a beer and discuss why the America has become short hand for the USA. But it would be against forum rules.

I thought the original post was very enlightening AND very respectful. I just purchased the CSN box set for $15.00 (American) yesterday for a great local record store. What an amazing group of songs.

It's not difficult to understand why some see them as the American Beatles. Not sure I've ever enjoyed a box set straight through like this one. Well...maybe the Kinks.

Good day.

 

I've already said why I don't agree with the latter, but I COMPLETELY agree with you on the first part. To go a little further in agreement, for most of The Beatles' biggest run of 63-69, CSNY didn't exist at all, and none of their previous groups even vaguely compared. I heard The Byrds referred to as an American answer to The Beatles, but I don't think that even that was considered any kind of equivalency.

The fact is that Déjà Vu outsold Let It Be by almost 2:1....but both of them combined did less than half of what Abbey Road did. Even if CSNY outsold The Beatles on a regular basis, it wouldn't have mattered though. The Monkees selling more records than The Beatles in 1967 was barely mentioned at the time. It just wasn't relevant.

My point was only that the aggregate footprints of the two groups in 69-74 only is a whooooole lot closer than most people imagined, even if those people were, like me, huge fans of CSNY. For a while, I was a bigger fan of CSNY, but I had no illusions about the two being equal. I also had no grasp of how similarly scaled their audiences were in the 70s until I did that research just a few months ago.....

 

Exactly! But I would bet that they don't discuss who the American Abba is ... of the English Beach Boys. The Beatles will always be #1 for me....and I think that some (not all) of their music will endure for centuries. Whether that is true for others, I don't know. (The Beach Boys best music had nothing to do with the beach - and I believe some of those songs will endure.)

But my point is, why do we have to anoint an "American Beatles" ... or a "Russian Mozart"? There were only one of them!

 

Near as bad as calling a folkie "the new Dylan".

 

offED topic:

Please, with all due respect; that's what they did say vvv:

"And, honestly, I think everyone understands."
i postED were a nation didn't understand, understand?
"I would LOVE to have a beer and discuss why the America has become short hand for the USA. But it would be against forum rules."
me too!! Esp the beer! i bet we could get away w/this in "Off Topic [General Discussions]".

Good day.

 

The Beatles were the heroes of CSNY. The right answer would probably be The Beach Boys in the 60s and Badfinger in the 70s.

 

Being there and aware ... no.
Nobody that I knew thought that or said that ... no body.

 

I was going to suggest this book also, which does a great job of weaving together various storylines of pop music and rock circa 1969 to 1971, including the unraveling of the Beatles alongside the promise and the thwarted fizzling out of CSNY as a going concern. The Beatles/CSNY thing is more associative and a matter of overlapping chronology, rather than a serious argument for equivalence or CSNY's contender status, which to the minimal extent it existed was rapidly and utterly squandered.

 

Does Long have any kind of citation for that epithet? Like others, I never heard any though even remotely like that expressed then (or now for that matter). Did he draw that from somewhere or just pull it out of thin air?

 

everybody knows the ramones were the american beatles.

 

I think you do understand.

But chose to be...well...enough said.

 

CSNY resonated on a cultural level with many young Americans in ways that CCR and TDN didn't. CCR was closer in kind to CSNY as you note; they mined Americana, transformed it into their own, looked the part, and in the process sold beaucoup records - but their constant AM chart topping success caused some folks to label them as sell outs or too commercial. TDN was simply a huge pop rock band from LA and was never any kind of cultural force per se. CSNY on the other hand had a certain coolness factor that emulated the Beatles popularity which straddled music, culture, and youth consciousness, but with a distinctly American twist. You knew they smoked grass, projected a laid back attitude, opposed the draft / war, sang of topical subjects that young Americans identified with, and looked like regular American dudes. Musically of course the Beach Boys influence was large, I believe Crosby even says so in his biography.