Crosby, Stills & Nash
Live It Up

Often, great artists have alternated, over the course of their careers, flashes of absolute genius with alarmingly dark moments, and almost all of them have numerous skeletons hidden in their closets represented by poor or uninspired albums or recordings.

One only needs to think of tragic albums like "Undercover" by the Rolling Stones, "It's Hard" by the Who, "Landing On Water" by Neil Young, or "Press To Play" by Macca. "Live It Up" by Crosby, Stills & Nash also belongs to this museum of horrors category. The career of the most important supergroup in rock history has managed to offer, for more than thirty years, superb music to unforgivable lapses in style, evidenced by pathetic reunions, bland concerts, and absurd discographic publications like this album from 1990.

A sense of sadness pervades it all from the terrible cover where four sausages are suspended over a cartoonish land. "Live It Up" is a mediocre work, spoiled by excessive use of synthesizers and drum machines. The unnecessary presence of numerous prestigious guests like Roger Mcguinn, David Gilmour, Bruce Hornsby, and Peter Frampton does not add quality to the album, which becomes annoying from the title track, a pop-dance piece accompanied by a frighteningly danceable video. The same goes for "If Anybody Had A Hart", where Mcguinn's Rickenbacker fails to conceal the polished sounds of an exaggerated production or for the commercial "Tomboy". There are a few sufficiently acceptable tracks like the acoustic "Haven't We Lost Enough?", a nostalgic recovery of Stills from the seventies, "Arrows" by Crosby, or Nash's dramatic story in "After The Dolphin". Nothing compared to past compositions, always driven by a positive and poetic spirit. In "Live It Up", there is no trace of Crosby, completely invisible, almost absent, and rightly more interested in fully recovering his health, of Nash, totally devoid of inspiration, and of Stills, just a pale ghost of the great musician of the past who, in the filler "Straight Line", hands the solo over to Frampton because he was unable to perform it satisfactorily.

Despite the failure and justified criticism, the album provides the pretext for the three to embark on a new tour in the States followed, the following year, by a brilliant acoustic tour documented by the DVD "Acoustic Concert". Furthermore, in October of the same year, Crosby, Stills & Nash regained the limelight with the release of a splendid retrospective box set that collects the best of their production alongside a long series of unreleased tracks. Listening to authentic gems like the Beatles-inspired "Blackbird", the studio version with Young of "The Lee Shore", or the live version of "Man On The Mirror", a precious out-take from "Four Way Street", and extracted from the box in question, offers moments of pure emotion that, for a moment, "Live It Up", with its numerous embarrassing moments, had denied us.