SINGERS WITH ENOUGH TALENT can overcome their politics, and Judy Collins has enough talent. So on Oscar night, the wife and I dragooned a younger couple, like the time my parents dragged us to hear Perry Como, and off we went to an auditorium on the campus of Claremont College to hear Judy and David Crosby in concert.

The largest quarter of CSNY played the opening set, an hour long display of guitar mastery and a surprising command of the higher vocal ranges. Crosby was a miser when it came to familiar tunes, though, and his time onstage left the audience a little restless. He veered towards politics just once, and the crowd tensed. But this was a night on which Americans had been taken prisoner and some of them perhaps executed. Only the oafish Michael Moore, with all of the gravity of Pat Paulsen but none of the humor or intelligence, could miss the significance of such events. Crosby explained that even dissenters from the war loved the country and he sang “My Country Tis of Thee.” Really. He left it at that.