Almost Cut My Hair

Hey Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just spun up “Almost Cut My Hair” off Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu, and this one still feels like a raw nerve from the end of the sixties. David Crosby wrote it and handled the lead vocal by himself—no stacked three-part harmony here, just him out front while Stephen Stills and Neil Young traded electric guitar lines, Graham Nash sat on organ, Greg Reeves held down the bass, and Dallas Taylor drove the drums. It went down at Wally Heider’s Studio C in San Francisco on January 9, 1970, right at the tail end of the session time they had left. Crosby later said it was the only take they cut. You can even hear him on the longer version that showed up on the 1991 CSN box set, coaching the band at the top: not quite that slow, ease up on the gain, then they roll into it.

The timing made it heavier than it already was. Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton had been killed in a car wreck just days earlier, and you can hear the cracked, angry edge in his voice that isn’t his usual smooth delivery. He kept working through the grief in the studio, and this track caught some of that weight. Neil Young called it Crosby at what he thought was his best. Crosby himself looked back and said the lyrics were the most juvenile set he’d ever written, yet they carried a certain emotional punch that still lands. The song turns on the everyday question a lot of long-haired folks faced back then: do you trim it to blend in, or leave it long and let the freak flag fly. Crosby popularized that phrase as a clear signal of standing outside the straight world. He later noted that in those days long hair was a political statement; now it’s mostly a style choice. On the unedited take you catch the full instrumental stretch where the three guitars talk to each other before he comes back in with the verse about getting down to that sunny southern weather and finding a place inside to laugh.

Live, the song stretched out into guitar duels between Stills and Young that could get loud enough to push the monitors. Crosby recalled that on the 1974 stadium run Stephen and Neil were cranking well over a hundred decibels off their half-stacks, so he and Nash sometimes couldn’t hear themselves to sing the harmonies. Bass player Tim Drummond said he just wandered between the amps so he could still hear what he was doing. The full, unedited studio version and those live stretches show how the band locked in even when the personal chemistry was fraying. Crosby kept the track on Déjà Vu even though Stills pushed back on the vocal; years later they all recognized it had its place.

The four of them came together from separate corners of the rock map. Crosby had been a founding Byrd until friction over direction and songwriting got him fired in late 1967. Stills came out of Buffalo Springfield after that band fell apart in early 1968. Nash was still with the Hollies in England, writing hits and looking for more room to stretch. Crosby and Stills started hanging out and jamming in Laurel Canyon. Nash, already acquainted with Crosby from earlier tours, got pulled in by mutual friends including Mama Cass Elliot. The key moment came at a house party—accounts differ on whether it was Cass’s place or Joni Mitchell’s—when Crosby and Stills played Stills’s new song “You Don’t Have to Cry.” Nash asked them to run it again, then joined in on the high harmony. The blend clicked so hard that Nash quit the Hollies and moved to California. They auditioned for Apple Records and got turned down, then Ahmet Ertegun signed them to Atlantic. For the first tour they needed more electric weight, so Ertegun suggested Neil Young, Stills’s old Buffalo Springfield partner. Nash met Young over breakfast and asked why they should bring him in. Young answered by pointing to the way he and Stills played guitar together. That settled it. They debuted as a quartet, played Woodstock, and rolled into Déjà Vu with songs like this one that still define the era.

You can follow the whole story and the catalog at the official site crosbystillsnash.com, or catch updates on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Crosby’s own site davidcrosby.com keeps the catalog and stories going as well. The song remains one of those tracks that reminds you why the long hair and the electric edge mattered when the times demanded a clear line in the sand. Catch it again whenever the Zoo Crew drops the needle over at THE ZOO.