Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - American Dream (1988)

It wasn't Déjà Vu all over again.

David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young had tried a couple of times in the seventies to record a second studio album together as a quartet, but their attempts ended in arguments.  Then in the mid-1980s, Young made a deal with Crosby, promising him a CSNY studio project if the Cros kicked drugs and got sober.  Young might have single-handedly saved Crosby's life.  But nothing and no one could save American Dream.

What made Crosby, Stills and Nash - and sometimes Young - so special was their ability to integrate their personal perspectives with their topical observations so seamlessly, creating memorable songs of romantic love, political protest, friendship, and, of course, Moroccan train rides, and setting them to compelling music with a lot of heart.  American Dream has none of those things; it is a typical eighties album from a pre-MTV group trying to to be hip for the times.  In other words, it's a mess.

The problem with American Dream is that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, all in their mid-forties at the time, had lost the spark and the inspiration that had sustained them in their earlier days.  Now older and more cynical in a politically conservative era defined by insubstantial, synthesized pop, they tried to adhere to their old-school hippie values while conforming to the realities of modern record production, and the result was rather boring, lightweight radio fodder.

The fourteen (yes, fourteen!) songs are proof that all four singer-songwriters were simultaneously at their lowest ebbs as composers, and the music is full of the sort of cheesy synthesizers and indulgent snare drums you listened to CSNY in the eighties to get away from.  Stephen Stills is at his weakest here, having co-written all of his contributions with Neil Young and others.  "Got It Made," a light-rock ballad addressed to yuppie baby boomers in their McMansions urging the one-time hippies not to forget their liberal ideals, sounds tired and listless; Stills himself doesn't seem to believe what he's singing.  But at least "Got It Made" tries to make some sort of relevant point; Stills tunes such as "Drivin' Thunder" and "That Girl" are clunky, overwrought rockers celebrating the joys of, respectively, reckless driving and the girl of one's dreams, which sound rather juvenile, especially from a middle-aged father of four as Stills was at the time.  David Crosby, just beginning to write songs again after a long hiatus, offers "Compass," about coming off drugs, that has some interesting guitar tuning but trite lyrics that tell us nothing about what he went through.  Graham Nash confuses public awareness with lyrical quality, and protest songs like "Clear Blue Skies" (about the environment) and "Soldiers of Peace" (about warriors who want to stop fighting with guns and start fighting with platitudes)  demand a sharp rebuke from Queen Gertrude.  But Young's title song is probably the most annoying track on the LP; "American Dream" is a smug response to the political and evangelical scandals of the late 1980s that fails to offer any context (was Gary Hart's sex scandal really as bad as Oliver North's role in the Iran-contra affair?) and fails to at least illuminate news stories that would be forgotten by the time this LP got released.

Oh yeah, and there's that goddamned flute riff.     

Okay, there are a couple of good songs here.  Nash's "Don't Say Goodbye" is one of his most honest piano ballads, and Young's "This Old House," sounding like an unhappy sequel to Nash's "Our House," is a poignant tale of the heartbreak of foreclosure.  And the harmonies on American Dream were still as solid as ever.  But the joy of making music that defined this group - something Crosby, Stills and Nash got back only a year later at the Berlin Wall celebrating its opening and something Neil Young regained when he challenged himself after realizing that he hadn't made anything as great as Rust Never Sleeps since that album's release - was missing, as was their ability to call their multigenerational fans to their highest ideals.  Nothing underscores the lack of the latter quality on American Dream more than the fact that George Herbert Walker Bush was elected President a week after this LP came out.

And when Michael Dukakis outdoes you in inspiring a liberal dream of a better America, you know the sixties are over.