Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

I wrote several years ago about the eponymous 'Crosby, Stills and Nash' record, commenting "The production on this is strange to my way of thinking: whilst the guitars (especially in "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes") have careful spacial placing, the vocals (with one notable exception) are mixed together, dead in the middle, thus making it difficult to separate each singer's contribution."

Now I know why the production was as it was (well, that's not strictly true - I know how come the vocals are mixed together, but I don't know the real reason for doing so).

The answer can be found here:

“After Stephen had recorded his acoustic guitar part, he, David and Graham were ready to sing, and for that I was ready. We had done all kinds of jingles in the little room at Heider’s, from the Anita Kerr singers to Jan and Dean, and so I just took the Neuman U67, opened it all the way around [ie. put it into omni mode], gave them three sets of headphones and went, ‘Sing!’ Singing into the one mic, they moved around a bit. They didn’t need any music; they were rehearsed, they knew the lyrics, and while harmonising with each other they were also in the process of amazing each other.

 

What I’d also learned to do by then was save what I thought was the good stuff, and with 16 tracks that was easy to do. So, through the course of that whole album I never played them what they had done; I only played them what they were doing. They were out there for a couple of hours, and when they finally came in to listen, I had three tracks of ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ just about completely recorded. I thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll play it all for them,’ so I turned up the guitar, spread out the three tracks and pushed ‘Play’, and they had no idea what was coming. They had three passes of the three of them and it was brilliant. They were so tight and so rehearsed "  (engineer Bill Halverson).

The most amazing thing about the track is that Stephen Stills "blew through seven-and-a-half minutes with all the time changes, all the pauses, all the everything in just one take, no edits, no nothing."