WONDERING what that pic ture in Mick Jagger’s attic looks like? We have an answer: David Crosby.
“CSNY: Déjà Vu” is a concert-film documentary about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s highly speechified 2006 anti-war tour, in which they tried to sell (at $350 a ticket) the idea that since a war was going on again, their new songs were worth hearing and their classics worth revisiting.
The band’s harmonies have crumbled and their new songs sound like paint being chipped off an aluminum shed with a garden rake. Their hits would sound better on the next eight-track you see at a yard sale. Still, the band sounds better than it looks.
The doc, directed by Neil Young under a pseudonym, doesn’t seriously press the point that the new songs stand up; we hear mere snippets of them as the film turns instead to testimony from anti-war vets, news clips and, on the other side, snippets from snarky reviews of the tour and interviews with angry fans who stampeded out of a concert when Young droned the lyric, “Let’s impeach the president for lyin’ . . . ”
Given the way the situation in Iraq has improved, though, another CSNY album could have provided a far more appropriate title: “Daylight Again.”
This band is Crusty, Shrill, Nasty and Old. Among the few amusing moments are a Spinal Tap-ish scene in which Stills topples over onstage and continues to play the guitar while turtled on his back. Another comes when Neil “Let’s Roll” Young sings fatuously of our enemies, “We don’t talk to them/And we don’t learn from them.”
If Young ever converses with the gentlemen from al Qaeda, I expect his comments to be along the lines of “Please don’t cut my head off.”
CSNY: DÉJÀ VU
For naught it’s worth.
Running time: 95 minutes. Rated R (profanity, war violence). At the Angelika, Houston and Mercer Streets.