KEY POINTS:
David Crosby came on stage looking like his grandfather. The hair he'd almost cut was iron grey, his stocky frame had shrunk, he wore his grandfather's gardening clothes.
Close behind him, Stephen Stills had grown bigger, much bigger around the middle, which a huge ethnic shirt couldn't disguise. And he wasn't walking well. Might have been hip trouble.
Graham Nash, the soft English harmoniser who used to look a little lost in the company of these American folk-rock originals, now took centre stage in every way.
"We've been wanting to come here," said Crosby, "ever since you went nuclear free."
That was only 20 years ago. The crowd that filled the Waitakere stadium on Thursday night were in a time warp of nearly 40 years. It didn't seem that long, of course, but there was no denying the wrinkles all around. Everyone, you sensed, was having the same thought: do I look this old too?
And another thought: we all know each other. We have never met but we know exactly what we did. We went to Woodstock, The Movie, circa 1971.
We bought the LPs, played them incessantly on stereos in student flats.
"Research has proven," said Crosby on Thursday night, "that between 1969 and 1973 30 per cent of all the women in the world lost their virginity to the following song."
Our House. You remember. So long ago now.
We graduated, got jobs, travelled, married, mortgaged.
They did Teach Your Children and had the crowd singing the choruses. Even children seem a long time gone.
So who were those people coming out of their seats, moving down in front of the stage to jive like they were 19? A custodian moved in to clear them. Stills leaned down as best he could on his bad knees and told the fellow to let them be.
I'd forgotten how political they were.
"You know this country looks even better," Crosby drawled, "while there is a chim-pan-zee in the White House."
And a little later: "I don't think you should be allowed to have your finger on the button to blow up the world unless you can pronounced the word nuclear. Nucular?"
Stills weighed in with the burning anthem he did with Buffalo Springfield after Chicago, 1968.
There's something happening here,
What it is ain't exactly clear ...
And Nash is still writing sweet songs of adolescent banality, these days about war and religion.
I wonder how many others in the audience were pondering how much their minds have changed.
The students who loved Crosby, Stills and Nash were probably always suspect to the new left. That harmony was too rich for social change.
The lefties were quite right. Once Kirk came to power, cancelled compulsory military training, recalled New Zealand's soldiers from Vietnam and called off a Springbok tour, that was enough for us.
Even when Kirk died and the dark ages returned with a vengeance under Muldoon, we didn't really buy the conspiracy theories. We thought the CIA were probably too busy. We left the country to Muldoon for awhile and saw the world.
OE usually meant Britain, which was a depressed society in the 1970s. Almost as bad as the eastern bloc. When we ventured behind the Berlin wall, or did the trans-Siberian, we discovered capitalism had a great deal going for it.
The crowd at Crosby, Stills and Nash looked quite a lot like the Labour Party today. I bet David Lange used to listen to them. I'm almost certain David Caygill did. Helen? Too light for her, probably.
Anyway, by the end of the 1970s Lange preferred Dire Straits. Muldoon's economy was deeply sick, inflation in double digits, unemployment likewise, and nuclear warships were flying the American flag on the Waitemata.
The old new left had lost the economic argument and a new right was in the ascendant, prescribing monetarism and free markets for the cure of inflation and sustainable full employment.
The left turned to non-economic projects, "post materialist" campaigns against racism, sexism, militarism and, in New Zealand particularly, nuclear pacifism.
The Cold War was virtually over when Helen Clark, Jim Anderton and Margaret Wilson frog-marched Lange into the nuclear policy that would take us out of the Anzus alliance. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power a few months later.
Clumsy American diplomacy turned the nuclear ban into a matter of New Zealand's pride and the policy has now outlasted the routine deployment of nuclear weapons on US ships by 15 years.
Old rockers are not as naive as they pretend. They don't come here for nuclear freedom, they come because the New Zealand dollar is worth earning these days. Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, remnants of the Beach Boys, Rod Stewart, are calling again because the economy is well again.
They bring echoes of some good times and the music of eternal youth. We'll be dancing on walking sticks next time around.
