The cover artwork for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s 1969 debut ranks among the most recognizable of its era. So why did the band initially want the image reshot?
During a recent conversation with The Rockonteurs podcast, Graham Nash explained what happened.
“One day, (photographer) Henry Diltz came into the studio. He’s a dear friend of ours.And we realized that, you know, we were halfway through this CSN record and we realized that we didn’t have a cover,” the singer recalled. “So we told Bill Halvorsen, our engineer, I said, ‘Look, do me a favor, figure something out to do for an hour. We’re going to take a walk.’”
The trio, accompanied by Diltz, strolled over to Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
“We saw this old house and we said, ‘You know what, let’s just sit on this couch, take a picture,’” Nash remembered. A day later, they saw the prints, but there was a problem. “We saw the ones that we loved, but we’re sitting in the wrong order. We’re sitting as Nash, Stills, Crosby. And we decided to call ourselves Crosby, Stills and Nash because that’s how it comes off the tongue.”
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Initially, it seemed like an easy issue to fix. Diltz agreed to go back to the same house with the band the next day to take a new round of pictures.
“So we go back. There’s no house. It’s gone. It’s just a pile of lumber in the back,” Nash recalled. “It had been bulldozed the same day.”
CSN had no choice but to go with the original photo, even though the musicians were not seated in the correct order. While it created a little confusion among the band’s fans – Nash noted some “people think I wrote ‘Guinnevere’” – the artwork nevertheless became one of the era’s timeless images.
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Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
