Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's upbeat hard rock arrangement was released as the lead single from their 1970 Déjà Vu album. This version opens with a distinctly staccato lead guitar lick played by Neil Young, who also plays the solo. Stephen Stills sings the lead vocal with backing harmonies from David Crosby and Graham Nash. The Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young version of "Woodstock" is also notable for the stop-start instrument-patterns, just prior to the "We are stardust, we are golden..." chorus.
Although Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young learned the song from Joni Mitchell herself (who wrote and this song) the band's version slightly rearranged the lyrics from her original. They put the line, "we are billion year old carbon"—which only appeared in her final chorus—into each of the first three choruses. Then they replaced that line with "we are caught in the devil's bargain" in the last chorus which was also in Mitchell's final chorus.
"Woodstock" was one of the few Déjà Vu tracks where Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young all performed their parts in the same session. Later the original lead vocal by was partly replaced with a vocal recorded by Stills who recalled: "I replaced one and a half verses that were excruciatingly out of tune." Neil Young disagreed, saying "the track was magic. Then later on [Crosby, Stills & Nash] were in the studio nitpicking [with the result that] Stephen erased the vocal and put another one on that wasn't nearly as good."
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