Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young...& Jones

This is just surreal. It’s a video clip from the ABC variety show This Is Tom Jones, and the emphais in the bookings for their 1969 line up was very clearly “variety.” Each week, the singer would fill his broadcast with a wide range of actors, comedians, celebrities, and of course, musical guests. And while the groups and singers that made an appearance were typically straight from the pop charts (such as The 5th Dimension, The Bee Gees, Davy Jones of the Monkees, Sonny & Cher), there were one or two surprises.

In the fall of ‘69, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were hot. The debut album from the original trio was a success. The band had made an impact at Woodstock. And they were newly energized by the addition of Neil Young to the line up to make it possible to perform their music live.

So it’s not surprising that a television variety would have wanted them to make an appearance. But as Rolling Stone pointed out in a 2012 article, “Just a couple of years earlier, Neil Young quit Buffalo Springfield the night before they were booked to play on the Johnny Carson show. ‘I thought it was belittling what the Buffalo Springfield was doing,’ Young later explained. ‘The audience wouldn’t have understood us. We’d have been just a f—-ing curiosity to them.’”

But wrap your head around this: not only did CSNY make an appearance on a Tom Jones TV show, they served as Jones’ backing band as he sang the living daylights out of one of their songs!

Surreal!

It was the group’s manager, Elliot Roberts, who lined up the appearance. But he apparently got grief from Neil Young for years. In Neil’s biography Shakey, Elliot recalls, “It was very highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call. Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones Show! What possessed you?’ Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.”

Still, it’s interesting to take a peek at Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in action as their careers were skyrocketing.