Woodstock

Joni Mitchell wrote it in a New York hotel room while watching television reports of the Woodstock festival of August 1969, which she did not attend because she was due on The Dick Cavett Show. She said she wrote it from the point of view of a kid going, having been the deprived one who could not. She released her own version on Ladies of the Canyon in April 1970.

The CSNY version opens with a guitar riff by Neil Young, who also plays the solo, and Stills sings lead with harmonies from Crosby, Nash and Young. It uses stop-time patterns just before the chorus. Jimi Hendrix played bass and overdubbed guitar on a version taped on 30 September 1969 that came out in 2018 on Both Sides of the Sky. It was one of the few tracks on Déjà Vu where all four played in the same session. Stills later said he replaced one and a half verses of the vocal because they were out of tune, but Young said the original track was magic. It was the first single from Déjà Vu and reached number 11 on the Hot 100 and number three in Canada.

Matthews Southern Comfort took a different version to number one on the UK Singles Chart on 31 October 1970. Led Zeppelin worked its lyrics and structure into live performances of Dazed and Confused between 1973 and 1975, and James Taylor sang it at the 1997 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in tribute to CSNY.