Their famous predilection for wine, women and, indeed, bong - not to mention the furious ego clashes (during sessions in 1975 they split over a single harmony note) - made the release of every David Crosby, Stephen Stills & Graham Nash record a triumph in itself, yet it all started promisingly enough. The 1969 debut, with Nash just nicked from The Hollies in Manchester, is a piece of perfect hippy porcelain, three cherubic voices intertwining uncannily and some rock spine offered by the stirring Long Time Gone.

After that, it's a recorded story of Stills's degenerating voice (by 1988, and American Dream, it's truly buggered), Nash's grimmer and grimmer tunesmithery (Song For Susan on 1982's Los Angeles formica-pop disaster area, Daylight Again, is the marzipan nadir) and Crosby's increasing disinclination to put pen to stave.

Of the Stills offshootage, the eponymous 1970 debut is a lost gem of stoned gospel rock 'n' roll (with full-blooded hyperjamming courtesy Clapton and Hendrix), while Manassas (also the name of his band) is a sprawling rug of affecting country warp (cheers, then, ex- Byrd Chris Hillman) and keen folk rock weft.

By the mid-'70s, cocaine addiction was slaughtering hippy ideals and outfits such as, while Crosby & Nash - still peddling the proto-FM close harmony rock that was their stock in trade - were beginning to look old, hairy and outmoded. Nevertheless, the positive spirit of these recordings still seeps through nearly 25 years later, with and dropping in to play on some songs and a handful - including Mama Lion and the title track - cut live in a day. While lacking the spark that Stills or Young brought to the equation, the album yielded one near-hit in the shape of Crosby's Carry Me and flashes of cynicism in Nash's Take The Money & Run.

The face is lined, the locks grizzled, the jeans not exactly slim-fit, but David Crosby's voice-which with a little help from his friends Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, was the Woodstock generation's voice-can still trace the crystal-clear, occasionally drippy, harmonies of yore. That the former The Byrds no longer looks in the first flush of youth isn't surprising: after an unsuccessful attempt to rekindle past magic with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash in 1977, he abandoned himself to a lost decade of alcohol and drug abuse, ended only by a spell in jail. Now a sufficiently reformed character to have recorded an album with all three of his original partners, he's also completed this solo project. As his band, which at various times on these 11 tracks includes Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Neil Young, piledrives into the opener Drive My Car, David Crosby rocks out in uncharacteristically bluff manner. With the exception of the driving Drop Down Mama at the beginning of side two, the rest of Oh Yes I Can is a work of gentle reflection shot through with the will to survive. And if the mood sometimes seems mawkish on songs like In The Wide Ruin, there can be no denying his heartfelt emotion on ballads of the calibre of My Country 'Tis Of Thee.

Perhaps because of his Hollies background, Graham Nash was unusual among '70s singer/songwriters in appreciating the three-minute pop single. Typically, Military Madness-which links his English World War 2 childhood with the American conflict in Vietnam-is musically concise with a strong melody and inventive harmony. But the more ridiculous aspects of the '70s had a foot firmly in the studio door too. Subtlety of meaning is often sacrificed to clever sounding rhymes, some of the political stuff-We Can Change The World and the singalong chorus to Be Yourself-echo Lennon at his most naive and at times the lyrical artiness is ridiculous: (You'll wear the coat of questions 'til the answer hat is here). Nonetheless, some tracks-Military Madness, Sleep Song-equal the best Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That, plus appearances from Rita Coolidge, Jerry Garcia and David Lindley, make this solo debut, (a Top 20 hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1971), worth a listen for anyone into singer/songwriters.

And now, not that they need it of course, he extends the hand of patronage to Pearl Jam, youngish Turks of this decade. Recorded live in a Seattle studio, under the auspices of long-time Pearl Jam collaborator Brendan O'Brien, with Pearl Jam as backing band, Mirror Ball is a rough and ready collection of Neil Young songs, alive with studio ambience and, well, grunge.

Song X is a tremendous curtain raiser, a darkly oblique electric shanty, swaying on tides of minor chords and whose indeterminate, obscure lyrical musings: The priest was there with sandy hair/Religion by his side/He saw his law was broken/The punishment was applied, are a boon to the song's lonely, opaque mood. Eddie Vedder hey-ho's along with the chorus and the guitars crackle ominously. Act Of Love was premiered by Neil Young and Pearl Jam at this year's Hall Of Fame inauguration ceremony and probably worked better there than here, being a thumping 4/4 rocker with few distinguishing features.

Better fare are I'm The Ocean and Big Green Country but Truth Be Known is a dirge and Downtown, with its corny, strutting Deep Purple riff and lyrical reference to the Fillmore West is either ironic or simply dumb in the manner of weaker American Stars ëNí Bars tracks

As for what Neil Young undoubtedly thinks of as Side 2, it's bookended by two slight, haunting harmonium song-ettes in the manner of After The Goldrush's acoustic Till The Morning Comes and Cripple Creek Ferry: plangent and nicely fleeting. Peace & Love has a terrific slab of progressive rock malarkey at its core and the splendid Scenery works a hard rock variation on the On Broadway's two-chord trick.

Overall then, doughty enough, if not the place for Neil Young innocents to start. (Or perhaps it is, given Pearl Jam's flabbergasting popularity). General reservations? Brendan O'Brien should have been faster on the faders. Some of these tunes are carrying more excess poundage than David Crosby and Stephen Stills, and it was gracious but misguided to let Mike McCready's formulaic guitar solos edge out Neil Young's mad, sclerotic genius once, let alone two or three times.

That two versions of the same song book-end Freedom not only demands comparison to Rust Never Sleeps, but likewise invites us to look for a similar unity. Here, though there are songs in delightful exception, the theme is of urban decay, spiralling from bad housing and derelict education to social, moral and spiritual collapse. Rockin' In The Free World bitterly contrasts the American dream with the all-too-prevalent reality, first as a plaintive acoustic strum to ironic cheers and then, to close the album, as a gloves-off statement of intent. Crime In The City pressgangs a ghetto hood, a corrupt cop, a psycho and a record industry sleazeball into the cause of expanding this theme. Likewise, a version of The Drifters' On Broadway replaces its original romance with grinding, couldn't-give-a-shit urban squalor, Neil Young's overloaded electric guitar distilling the essence of snarl-up and brutal city roar. In his voice and guitar Neil Young packs a complex of emotions, from terror to bleak resignation to plangent compassion, forcing us to confront again what may seem like over-familiar territory.

Other songs are harder to decode for simple meaning. El Dorado (the title track to a rapidly deleted Far East-release-only EP which included two other songs here) finds Neil Young back in the New World of Cortez The Killer, the despoiled refuge first of Spanish and then American desperadoes. Down By The River is revisited in Don't Cry, where Neil Young sheds his reluctant lover; but instead of shooting her down, he unleashes the most savage guitar of his career, a divebombing firestorm of self-destructive rage. This is followed by the achingly tender Hangin' On A Limb. Ways Of Love, Wrecking Ball and the early '70s Too Far Gone are also first-rate Neil Young meditations on the heart.

The format could have been made for Neil Young. Few artists can get as much drama from so little apparent effort and nobody can cherry pick material from his own archive so cleverly or perform it so convincingly. Here you get three tunes from Harvest Moon, done, if anything, better than the studio versions, Old Laughing Lady from his first solo venture, Mr Soul from Buffalo Springfield, old crowd pleasers like Helpless, The Needle And The Damage Done and Long May You Run, two lesser known tunes, Stringman and World On A String, and, because he's a stubborn old cuss, Transformer Man from his risible electronic period.

Using a small group, including drummer and girl backing singers, he demonstrates his genius for rearranging songs while remaining true to their spirit, using harmonica, piano and dobro to great effect and even managing to remain faithful to Like A Hurricane with the aid of what sounds like a harmonium. Just when Unplugged ought to be running out of steam, Neil Young has taken the measure of its possibilities, picked exactly the right balance of material and put one over on everybody who's been there before, including Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen.

In fact, Tonight's The Night, the megalithic title track, mourning and warning about the fate of these men who lived and died for rock, casts a shadow over the rest of the album. It came from the first sessions on which Neil Young had used the live in the studio approach and there's a ramshackle air to it the charm of which time has worn thin.

After that, at least partial, exorcism-although a median line through his switchback manoeuvres might show a growing emphasis on raw electric noise-he always maintained extreme contrasts through tracks cutting back to acoustic guitar or piano and his most tremulously fragile vocal style. This was true even of Zuma, often touted as his first hard rock album. While the durable epic, Cortez The Killer, is carpeted with distortion, forgotten delights are the plain country lament Pardon My Heart and and the sombre subtleties of Dangerbird.

Long May You Run is not one to go down in rock history, being mainly Stephen Stills and Neil Young taking turns to lead affable variants on contemporary laid-back.

Comes A Time, from 1978, has a run of soft acoustic pieces prettified by Nicolette Larson's plaintive harmony, but broken by a convincing one-off soul song, Lotta Love, and the roughhouse Motorcycle Mama.

Finally, with Rust Never Sleeps he made a little more sense of his contradictory instincts when he split the album clearly into acoustic and electric sides, bracketed by, respectively, quiet and rackety versions of My My, Hey Hey. It flows, it's got a couple of his strongest issue songs in Pocahontas and Powderfinger, and it's even rather good-humoured (Neil Young exchanging surreal courtesies with a Martian in Ride My Llama and praising Welfare Mothers who make better lovers).

Play these studio album end to end and the late '70s Neil Young story is that, pouring it all out, he spread his intensity a thinly so that no one album is the great statement. The same applies to the 35-track compilation Decade. Reaching back to Buffalo Springfield days, it has many of his finest-Mr Soul, I Am A Child, Heart Of Gold, The Needle And The Damage Done-and nothing that wastes space. But it's more key text for the earnest student than a joy to all.