When Crosby, Stills, and Nash performed their song "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" at Woodstock in August of 1969, it was only the second time they had performed together in front of an audience. Their slot was in the middle of the night, but that audience was a half million people. No wonder they were scared.
The song was written by Stephen Stills about his girlfriend at the time, Judy Collins. He had been writing down his thoughts about her in snippets of poetry for months, as the relationship deteriorated and he contemplated losing her (spoiler: he did). The various snippets of poetry inspired different tunes, but none of them had enough to make a complete song, so Stills mashed them all together. That's why "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" indeed sounds like a collision of four songs. Yet they were four really good tunes, and the completed love song became a staple of FM radio. Read how and why the song came about, and how Collins responded to it at Dangerous Minds.
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That was one of the first record albums I ever bought. I didn't play the guitar yet, but I could tell something was wrong with that song right at the beginning. I found out later there's a weird guitar tuning with strings tuned way lower than can stay in tune when you bang on it like that. Their wonderful voices drown out the instruments and that fixes everything.
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