The experiment began almost by accident and, befitting the way it would toggle between love and something far from it, on Valentine’s Day. February 14, 1968, had been an overcast midwinter day in Los Angeles, but the weather didn’t deter the city’s pop music royalty from making its way to the Sunset Strip that evening. Commandeering the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Clark Street in West Hollywood, the hulking Whisky a Go Go had been a Bank of America branch until the building was transformed into a dance-crazy pop nightclub in 1964. Since then, the five-hundred-seat nightspot, with its incongruously old-fashioned awning over the front door, had hosted rock-and-roll mavericks as well as more soul and R&B acts than any other club in town; it was the place to catch everyone from the Doors and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention to Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and the Miracles, often with woozy lights and bubbles projected on the wall.
Crammed next to each other at one table tonight were David Crosby, best known for his affiliation with the Byrds, and Cass Elliot, the beloved and gregarious member of the Mamas and the Papas, whose enveloping harmonies had done their best to calm the country down over the past three years. Nearby were Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s pop-singer daughter, former Lovin’ Spoonful frontman John Sebastian, and at least three of the Monkees, the fabricated but socially connected TV pop band. Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, one of the most beloved if combustible of Los Angeles pop bands, was also in the crowd; one account also placed his bandmate Neil Young there. All were primed for a rare Hollywood performance by peers from across the ocean named the Hollies.
In light of the grim drumbeat of the nightly news, it made sense to want to escape for an evening. The war in Vietnam was thousands of miles away but hitting closer to home by the day. Weeks before, North Vietnam had stunned the world with the Tet Offensive, a barrage of surprise attacks on over a hundred cities in South Vietnam. That February day, just after it was announced that peace talks between North Vietnam, the United States and other nations had collapsed, the beleaguered US President, Lyndon Johnson, signed off on sending another 10,500 troops into war. Asked if nuclear bombs would be used to defend Marine outposts in South Vietnam, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “refused to speculate.” (Decades later, it would be revealed that Johnson had vetoed a plan that week to install nukes in South Vietnam as a last resort against the North.) Even the local news was unsparing: an eighteen-year-old living near the University of Southern California had been arrested for allegedly shooting his father in the face with a 16-gauge shotgun after a family argument.
Little intruded on the festivities at the Whisky a Go Go. In their native England, the Hollies had played the Cavern Club in Liverpool right after the Beatles; starting in the now far-off 1963, they had become a hit-making machine all their own. In the States, the Hollies were a regular pop radio presence—with kicky, full-voiced charmers like “Bus Stop” and “Carrie Anne”—but had yet to fully graduate to the counterculture world of FM radio. At the Whisky, one reason why they hadn’t was clear: they looked sharp in now-unfashionable matching dark jackets, and only one of them, goateed rhythm guitarist and harmony singer Graham Nash, sported facial hair. But the band’s even sharper-cut vocalizing, courtesy of Nash, lead singer Allan Clarke and lead guitarist Tony Hicks, was dazzlingly precise; onstage, the Hollies sounded exactly as they did on record, no easy feat in the sound-system-challenged days of the ’60s. Slicing through the arrangements, Nash’s keening, high-pitched voice, which Paul McCartney had once mistaken for a trumpet, was particularly impressive.
When the show ended, Stills and Crosby, who had been circling each other over the past year, two ambitious musicians in search of a magic combination to vault them to the top, loitered on the sidewalk outside the Whisky, near its yellow awning. Each was at a crossroads. Crosby exuded a sun-baked, up-for-anything gusto—“What’s the most fun we can have in 20 minutes?” would be his most devilish and successful pickup line—and his droopy mustache, occasional cape and hair flipping down to his shoulders made him one of the most recognizable figures on the city’s music scene, a naughty boy prince of pop. But at twenty-six, the now former Byrd faced an uncertain future after having been fired four months before from one of rock’s leading and most innovative bands. With Buffalo Springfield faltering and at least two of its members regularly missing in action, the blonder Stills—whose flashes of good-old-boy grins and phlegmy laughs could easily give way to an intimidating, penetrating stare that signaled his displeasure—could never tell if his band would exist much longer. When a newspaper reporter asked him a few months later about the state of the Springfield, Stills, all of twenty-three, mentioned a planned fall European tour but added: “I don’t know, though. You never can tell. You know, we might break up tomorrow.” Although Young had joined him at the Whisky, he was generally off somewhere else, which didn’t surprise Stills in the least; even then, no one could keep tabs on Young.
For all the uncertainty gripping their careers, Crosby and Stills were now caught up in what they’d just witnessed inside the Whisky. Joined by Elliot, who seemed to know everyone in town and delighted in moving around musical chess pieces, Stills and Crosby talked elatedly about Nash’s performance that night. “Maybe we can steal him,” Crosby said out loud, according to one of many varying accounts. Crosby had already met Nash; they’d bonded in Los Angeles and London and had gotten stoned together. The only thing they hadn’t done together was sing, but in front of the Whisky, Stills and Elliot weren’t sure that was an option. In the rules-oriented world of pop in 1968, swiping a member of another group was fairly unthinkable, an affront to the bonds of a rock-and-roll band; legally and morally, there were still rules.
Whether they realized it or not that evening, Crosby, Stills and Nash were each dogged with insecurities; in one form or another, they were in search of acceptance, validation and victory. In due time, those needs, and how they intersected with financial concerns, would also pull in Young. But at the moment, they were men of radically different voices, temperaments and features (Stills and Nash chiseled, Crosby more baby-faced, even at his age) who were hungry for someone to complete them. They wanted what they wanted, and they decided that the established rules would not apply to them.
FOR NASH AND his school friend Harold Clarke, their first taste of a different, less suffocating world beyond working-class Salford, a suburb northwest of Manchester, arrived inside a pub. The two had met in elementary school (Nash had raised his hand when the newly arrived Clarke had shown up in class and needed a seat next to someone), and the two had first noticed the comfortable way their voices blended while singing “The Lord Is My Shepherd” at a school concert. It wasn’t long before they had hustled up guitars and together started singing skiffle—scruffy folk that had originated in the States but had undergone a revival in the United Kingdom—in the Clarke or Nash homes. When Clarke’s older brother overheard them, he thought the two kids, now in their teens, should try singing in public—specifically, at a nearby workingmen’s bar, the Devonshire Sporting Club. Clarke’s brother introduced them to the owner, who asked them to play him a few songs. Satisfied with what he’d heard, he told them they could play at the bar that same day, immediately after a juggling act. “We came offstage and the guy came up to us and said, ‘We like that and here’s 10 bob,’ a half pound in those days, quite a lot of money,” Clarke recalls. “Graham and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is okay.’”
For Nash, the moment would be formative, his first taste of rising above his surroundings and feeling less like an outsider. He’d been born amid the rubble of World War II; the Christmas 1940 bombings of Manchester and Salford had forced expectant mothers to relocate to hospitals in nearby Blackpool, where Nash arrived on the second day of February 1942. (Adolf Hitler had spared Blackpool, thinking it would make for an ideal seaside vacation spot once he had conquered Great Britain.) Nash would long be haunted by memories of the thick “blackout curtains” his family used at night so enemy bombers wouldn’t be able to determine where the towns and villages lay below.
In his teen years, Nash’s face grew lean, and his hair became an overgrown version of a Presley pompadour. But he could never escape the feeling that he was a societal black sheep. His father, William, cast metal in a local foundry. At the Nash family home in Ordsall, the gritty, blue-collar section of Salford, the bathroom was outside and hot water was in short supply. Unlike the more cultured types in London, two hundred miles to the south, Nash didn’t have fashionable clothes; his Manchester-area accent, combined with his frequent salty-sailor expletives, made his working-class roots even more pronounced. One of the few things that made him less than blue collar was music. “I definitely wasn’t cool,” he says. “If the leather wore out on the bottom of my shoes, I wore a pair of my mother’s manly-looking shoes. But when I started to play guitar and sing Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly songs, people started to treat me a little differently, strangely enough. And I realized that. I recognized the power in being popular. And so because I wasn’t ‘cool’ in my normal life, this one little area of playing and singing made me feel a little cooler than I was. And I liked that.”
Once their schooldays had ended, Nash and Clarke both followed their supposed accepted paths in life, working day jobs that, for Nash, included the post office. But their desire to play music and escape their lives was unquenchable. By their later teens, they were giving themselves a string of different names—the Two Teens, the Guyatones (named after the mass-produced Japanese guitar manufacturer), or the Everly Brothers–inspired Ricky and Dane Young—and playing regularly in whatever club or pub would have them. Clarke, who would soon rename himself Allan, had a strong, nasal tone that demanded he be the lead singer, and Nash had startlingly high harmonies that softened Clarke’s delivery. Additional musicians were added until, in 1962, the full group, first named the Deltas, transformed into the Hollies. The name was partly a nod to their hero Buddy Holly; it was also a reference to the Christmas decorations in a club they were playing. Asked to come up with a name before they took the stage, Clarke looked around and told the announcer, “We’re the Hollies,” and it stuck.
An EMI Records executive saw them at the Cavern Club in December 1962. A month later they had followed the Beatles to EMI and were recording their first single, a peppy, breathless cover of the Coasters’ “(Ain’t That) Just Like Me” that hit no. 25 and set the tone for their original sound. “Our lives changed completely,” Clarke marvels. Suddenly, the two childhood friends who’d grown up feeling less than hip were seeing their songs—covers of R&B hits like “Searchin’,” “Stay” and “Just One Look”—on the British charts, and singing before throngs of squealing young women.
In early 1966, the Hollies broke through in America with “Look Through Any Window,” which played to their most charming qualities—swelling vocal harmonies, picturesque lyrics, and drummer Bobby Elliott’s kinetic rhythms. Whether written in-house or by outsiders, the singles that followed—the weather-driven love story “Bus Stop,” the belly-dancer-inspired “Stop! Stop! Stop!,” the Marianne Faithfull nod “Carrie Anne”—were impossibly magnetic radio candy and, deservedly, hits on both sides of the ocean. Nash had a hand in writing many of them, and momentarily, life felt grand: in 1963, he left the Manchester area behind and moved to London, marrying his girlfriend, Rose Eccles, the following year. By then, he and Clarke had even spent an inebriated evening in the studio with the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector, singing warbly backup on throwaways like “Andrew’s Blues.”
For all those accomplishments, the Hollies could never score an aura of hipness. In 1965, they released “Too Many People,” a politely political commentary describing how a million people died in an unnamed war. In fact, the song had its roots in news reports about the Mau Mau, a terrorist organization of the late ’50s and ’60s that was killing white farmers in Kenya to protest their settlements. It didn’t make the Hollies rebels, but it was a start. When the multi-hued late ’60s came into view, the band snazzed up its wardrobe with floral-patterned shirts and beads. “We went along with the flower-power stuff because that’s what was happening,” says Clarke. “We would have gone along with anything if we wanted a hit record.” But the band’s unhipness, the way it now made him feel as out of sorts as he had in grade school, gnawed at Nash, who longed for the credibility of the London scene. “Graham was going down to London and to the clubs and seeing things there that hadn’t come into his life before, like drugs,” says Clarke. “If there was anything happening, Graham wanted to be there. I was enjoying the ’60s, but Graham wanted to take it further.”
In the middle of 1966, the Hollies flew to Los Angeles for the first time to promote one of their records. If the palm trees and beaches he saw from the plane weren’t enticing enough for Nash, the immediate bear hug of the Hollywood music scene was. At a party, he met Elliot, known as Mama Cass, the queen bee of the scene, and Nash took her up on an invitation to attend a recording session for the Mamas and the Papas. To complete Nash’s trip to LA—and to fulfill her desire to make everyone feel connected—Elliot invited him to visit a friend of hers who lived in a wooden house on Lisbon Lane in Beverly Glen Canyon. There, Nash encountered a mustached man sifting through a box of weed—David Crosby of the Byrds—and Crosby promptly got his new acquaintance higher than he’d ever been. “I had better pot than anybody else,” Crosby says. “I got him whacked.” Although Nash didn’t know it at the time, Crosby stashed some of his drugs behind secret cupboards, along with guns and knives.
The trip was a grand awakening for Nash: people like Crosby and Elliot knew who he was and loved his singing. In a heartbeat, he felt hipper, more like an insider, than ever before (the Hollies dabbled in drugs but mostly stuck to drinking). Simultaneously, Nash began to take greater charge of steering the Hollies’ ship. At the same time—and in the same Abbey Road studio where the Beatles were concocting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in early 1967—the Hollies began recording Evolution, the first of two self-consciously psychedelic albums they would make. Nash played an even larger role in the same year’s Butterfly, which was stuffed with Indian sitars, a song about a flying horse, and another song titled, with trippy pretensions, “Elevated Observations.” They made a valiant effort to sound high, but they still came across as too chipper and perky, and Butterfly would be one of their least successful albums.
That summer Nash brought in his most ambitious undertaking, “King Midas in Reverse,” a self-lacerating account of his own infidelities and growing personal confusion. With its trilling strings and intentionally swervy, hallucinatory harmonies on the chorus, the record was the most ambitious the Hollies had ever made, although not everyone in the band approved. “The producer told us it wasn’t going to be a hit, but Graham was quite adamant,” says Clarke. “He was trying to be the Beatles. Everything but the kitchen sink was on that record. But it wasn’t the Hollies’ approach.” Although a sonic accomplishment, the single peaked at no. 18 on the British charts—about a dozen spots lower than “Carrie Anne” or the equally contagious “On a Carousel.” Although Clarke denies it, Nash feels the song’s lack of impact made the Hollies begin questioning his judgment and decisions.
By then, Nash was already keenly aware of an alternative universe he longed for. Sometime before the “King Midas in Reverse” recording, the Byrds, with Nash’s new acquaintance Crosby in tow, flew into London for promotion. Nash invited his new American friend to stay with him and his wife, then to accompany him to a Hollies interview. To Nash’s astonishment, Crosby was curt and rude to the British reporter. “A lot of it was my own natural feistiness,” Crosby recalls. “I didn’t like show business. It was very appealing to me to be completely different about that.” The Hollies would have never been so improper—they played by the rules—but Nash was stunned and intrigued by Crosby’s insolence. He saw for himself that Crosby was truly one of pop’s savviest players and realized he wanted some of that integrity for himself.
FROM AN EARLY AGE, Crosby was enthralled by the sound, the idea, of people working together to create musical beauty, even as another part of him rebelled against collaboration. As a child, his nurturing mother, Aliph, had taken him to a symphony orchestra concert—in the late ’40s, rock and roll did not yet exist—and the sight of a large ensemble working in tandem to create an overwhelming sound would stay with him for decades. “I had never heard an orchestra,” he says. “I had never been to a rock concert. Nobody had. But this was huge, and the strength of it was all of them together, making this big thing.”
But finding partners in musical or even personal harmony would rarely come easily for him. Compared to Nash, Crosby was a child of privilege. His father, Floyd, came from the social circles of New York; he was born in 1899, graduated from the Naval Academy in Maryland, and briefly worked in the cotton business in the South and at a brokerage firm in New York. His life changed when he accompanied an expedition to Haiti to take photographs, a trip so inspiring that it led to a career as a cameraman on documentaries. That phase extended well into the ’30s, and in 1931 he won an Oscar for the cinematography on Tabu, a silent film shot in Tahiti. He met and married Aliph in New York and moved with their two sons—Floyd Jr., later known as Ethan, born in 1937, and David, born four years later, August 14, 1941—to Los Angeles.
The youngest member of the Crosby family would remember his mother as “a really good parent” who encouraged her son’s love of music, but Floyd, who played mandolin on the side, would be a fleeting, sometimes disapproving presence in David’s life. Thanks to Floyd’s job making films for the Air Transport Command during World War II, he wasn’t around for his youngest son’s first three years. Even when the war ended, Floyd was gone again, this time to shoot a film on ice patrols in the northern part of the Atlantic. Though Floyd preferred working on exotic-locale documentaries and didn’t care much for Hollywood backpatting, he was awarded a Golden Globe for cinematography for his work on High Noon, the 1952 Gary Cooper western. Several years later, after being blacklisted for associating with left-wing filmmakers, he began the first of many collaborations with future B-movie king Roger Corman.
By then, the Crosby clan was living in Santa Barbara, an enclave one hundred miles north of Los Angeles that attracted Hollywood types in search of less clogged surroundings. Yet despite the trappings and Floyd’s steady work, the distance between father and son rarely improved. “I knew my father as a very straight crusty old guy, not much of a father,” Crosby says. “Being around and being warm and concerned weren’t his thing.” Insecure, often chubby, and increasingly an expert at “fighting authority,” as his older brother once said, Crosby began making a name for himself in school in the most inharmonious ways. At Crane Country Day School, he realized the power of an audience’s love when he took a role in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore. But at his next school, the Cate School, he was kicked out for disconnecting a bell as a prank. The Laguna Blanca School deemed him of “dubious moral character” after it was discovered he was having sex with several girls in his class; he was soon ousted from that institution as well. He eventually managed to graduate from high school and enroll at Santa Barbara City College, though he was suspended after being arrested as part of an ad hoc burglary posse—and only able to re-enroll after ongoing therapy.
They didn’t realize it at the time, but he and Nash had a ruptured family in common. When his son was a teenager in the ’50s, William Nash was arrested on the grounds of possessing a stolen camera—which he insisted he’d bought second-hand from a friend. Unwilling to divulge that person’s identity to the authorities, the elder Nash was sentenced to a year in jail: first at Strangeways, the daunting brick-wall prison in Manchester with a permanent—but now unused—gallows, then a minimum-security jail in Bela River. Overnight, Graham had to become the premature man of the household, presiding over his mother and two younger sisters, Elaine and Sharon. William Nash was released in 1960, but by then he was, as his son recalled, a broken man. He died six years later—shortly before his son came upon the startling sight of his mother kissing another man.
Crosby’s family difficulties erupted when his parents divorced in 1960. Dropping out of college and relocating to LA (into an apartment that his father, now based in Ojai, kept for trips into Los Angeles), Crosby at first seemed intent on an acting career. But he ran afoul of his teacher, Jeff Corey, who, despite being a friend of Floyd’s, still kicked Crosby out of the class for acting up. During his high school years in Santa Barbara, Crosby had begun singing folk music in local coffeehouses, discovering immediately the power that a supple voice and a strummed guitar had over young women. In Los Angeles, he frequented the folk clubs, although hardly singing the type of hale-and-hearty ballads common to that post–Kingston Trio era in pop music. As she later recounted, one early girlfriend characterized her boyfriend’s downbeat performance style, prophetically, as: “I’m really horrible, everybody hates me, I’m different, isn’t it sad, I can get attention this way and self-destruct in the end.”
In July 1960, a clean-cut guitarist and banjo player named Jim (later Roger) McGuinn found himself at the Ash Grove, LA’s fairly new and already prominent folk club, playing a nearly weeklong stint with the folk-pop group the Limeliters. Originally from Chicago and born in 1942, McGuinn was the son of two writers (his parents, Jim and Dorothy McGuinn, had coauthored the 1947 advice book Parents Can’t Win); a private-school kid, he’d been pulled into rock and roll as a teen before switching to folk during rock’s fallow years in the early ’60s. The young McGuinn had landed a job backing the Limeliters as soon as he’d graduated from high school, and Crosby had approached him at their Ash Grove show. Crosby struck McGuinn as an aspiring actor who dabbled in music, so he showed Crosby a few chords and played him a couple songs by Chicago folk legend Bob Gibson. Crosby invited McGuinn up to his family home in Santa Barbara, and the two zipped up the highway in Crosby’s convertible, complete with woven fabric seat belts that reminded McGuinn of airplane seat buckles. McGuinn stayed at the Crosby home for a few days, relishing Aliph Crosby’s lamb-and-avocado sandwiches, but he already sensed his new friend was trouble. “He was a little bit unruly,” McGuinn says. “Substance abuse problems even then. Not illicit drugs, no pot, but mostly beer. I remember him having too much alcohol.” A Crosby friend warned McGuinn to stay away from him.
Trouble not only followed Crosby to Los Angeles but made him leave. In 1961, he learned that his girlfriend, Celia Ferguson, was pregnant. Unable to handle the news and not wanting the responsibility, he immediately left for Arizona and then Colorado; from there he ventured to New York, passing the hat at folk clubs, before continuing his travels to New England, Canada and eventually Miami. By late 1962, he was back in California—this time San Francisco, where he befriended fellow stoned folkies Paul Kantner, David Freiberg and Dino Valenti, and all four made their way down to Los Angeles. In 1962, Travis Edmonson of the duo Bud and Travis—who introduced Crosby to weed—recorded Crosby’s first song, a languid ballad called “Cross the Plains” that would contain the first hints of his irregular-cadence approach to songwriting. Crosby, along with his older brother, Ethan, was then hired as part of a shanty-voiced folk group, Les Baxter’s Balladeers, but like his father, Crosby bristled at conformity; he soon left to resume his scuffling around Los Angeles. Jim Dickson, an army veteran and aspiring producer, heard Crosby on the folk circuit and recorded four songs with him—folk-blues tracks like “Come Back Baby” and “Willie Gene” that showcased Crosby’s high, pliable voice yet didn’t lead to a record contract.
At the Troubadour, one of the city’s leading folk clubs, Crosby met up again with McGuinn, who was now performing with Gene Clark, a transplanted Missouri singer-songwriter. Clark, like Crosby, had tried his hand at mainstream folk (in his case, the New Christy Minstrels). At the front part of the club, Crosby joined them and, uninvited, began singing along. “He wanted to be in the band,” McGuinn says. “And I was like, ‘I’m not sure I want to do this.’” McGuinn remembers Crosby’s reputation for being a “problem child” but was willing to table his concerns for the time being when Crosby told them he knew someone—Dickson—who had a studio they could use. “He bribed me and said, ‘We’ve got a recording studio we can use for free!’” says McGuinn. “And I said, ‘You’re in!’” Paul Potash, a folksinger and fledgling actor, was also present and advocated for Crosby coming aboard, and the Jet Set—McGuinn, Crosby and Clark—was hatched.
Like many others, including Stills, McGuinn and Crosby saw the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night that year and realized the future was not in vernacular ballads but in rock and roll; McGuinn, who had already begun playing Beatles songs in folk clubs, to the consternation of some in the audience, would always recall the sight of Crosby excitedly twirling around a lamppost after they saw the movie together. With the addition of Chris Hillman, a bluegrass mandolinist handed a bass, and Michael Dick (later renamed Clarke) on drums, the Jet Set was now a rock-and-roll band. With his orchestral memories in mind, Crosby tried to be as much of a team player as possible. McGuinn recalls his sometime-roommate bringing donuts and chocolate milk to rehearsals for breakfast. The two would idle away the time at the Los Angeles airport on a runway, and eventually, inspired by watching the planes zoom over them, they eventually wrote “The Airport Song.”
Throughout 1964, led by McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar, Gene Clark’s often doleful pop songs, and their harmonies, the band bore down on becoming a Beatles-influenced rock band. Initially called the Beefeaters once the Jet Set was discarded, they recorded one failed single for Elektra but were given a second chance by Columbia, which signed the band in late 1964. Their manager, Eddie Tickner, suggested “the Birds” as a name, but McGuinn opted for the snazzier alternate spelling. Two months later, in January 1965, the newly renamed Byrds, abetted by studio musicians, recorded a celestial cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (Hillman had beat them to the Dylan punch when his bluegrass band, the Hillmen, did a version of Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In,” but that version wasn’t electrified.) Dickson had received a demo of “Mr. Tambourine Man” from Dylan’s publisher, a recording with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott singing out of tune on the harmony. They added what McGuinn calls a “Beatle beat”—4/4 time—and deleted several verses; Crosby worked out the high harmonies, and pop radio devoured it. The single sold nearly a million copies in the summer of 1965 and the Byrds were overnight pop stars. Soon they were flying in a chartered DC-3 and, like the Hollies thousands of miles away, straining to hear themselves over the screams of female fans.
Unlike the early years of the relatively harmonious Hollies, the Byrds’ flight was tumultuous almost from launch. By early 1966, months after the success of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Clark was out of the band, a victim of his own neuroses (Crosby had whittled away at Clark’s self-confidence by taking the rhythm-guitar role, leaving Clark as the lead singer). Starting with their third album, Fifth Dimension, Crosby began to find his voice as a writer. On that album and the following year’s Younger Than Yesterday, he began contributing songs that stood apart in their beautiful bareness (“Everybody’s Been Burned”), confused state-of-mind reflections (“What’s Happening?!?!”), and ancient-world splendor (“Renaissance Fair”). If McGuinn was the reserved, analytical, brainy heart of the band, Crosby was its searching, breaking-bad soul, and the unconventional quality of his melodies, rooted more in jazz than rock, embodied pop’s new, open-ended future. Crosby was the most musically adventurous of the Byrds, as Mark Naftalin, keyboard player for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, saw for himself when he visited Crosby at his apartment in 1965: showing him a photo of George Harrison holding a sitar, Crosby told him, “Change is where it’s at.”
On Byrds albums, Crosby’s harmony parts encased each song in a warm glow, but his personality could be discordant. Smuggling pot onto the Byrds’ tour buses, often sporting one of his trademark green or brown suede capes, Crosby, perennially outspoken, began living up to Billy James’ description of him, in the liner notes of the band’s first album, as a “troublemaker.” At a press conference in Los Angeles to debut the band’s single “Eight Miles High”—a rumbling supersonic jet of a song co-written by Clark, McGuinn and Crosby—Crosby barked out, “Rev it up loud.” In March 1966, a review of a Byrds show at Lawrence University in Wisconsin noted the elevated decibel level of Crosby’s guitar, which “literally made the chapel doors vibrate and in the process removed all chances of hearing either leader Jim McGuinn or Crosby sing.” Those same pushy traits began alienating him from McGuinn and Hillman, and one by one, quality Crosby numbers, like the half-spoken “Psychodrama City” and two sensual, erotic songs—the dreamy, floaty “It Happens Each Day” and the love-triangle revel “Triad”—were recorded but, to Crosby’s frustration, omitted from Byrds albums. “I was into Eastern religion and being goody-two-shoes about that song,” McGuinn admits of “Triad.” “I should have let it go.”
For Crosby, the Byrds were no longer offering him the support and ego-stroking he needed on a regular basis. To him, they were square, the worst possible designation, and he began searching for other options. He didn’t have to look terribly far. One afternoon in 1967, McGuinn and Crosby visited the home of Stills; Buffalo Springfield had opened for the Byrds on several occasions, so the two bands knew of each other. Stills and McGuinn cradled their guitars and Stills played a blues lick.
“Can you do that?” he said to McGuinn.
“It’s not my style, man,” McGuinn, an inveterate folkie, said.
Stills turned to Crosby: “See?”
THAT SPRING, WITH the Monterey International Pop Festival approaching, Stills had his own pressing need—another guitarist. Buffalo Springfield was once again on shaky ground: their eccentric bass player, Bruce Palmer, had been busted for pot, and their co-lead guitarist, Young, had bolted the band in the spring, right before they were scheduled to hobnob with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Months earlier, the Springfield had scored its first—and eventually only—Top 40 hit with Stills’ “For What It’s Worth,” inspired by demonstrations on the Sunset Strip. A slot at Monterey Pop, which would be filmed for a concert documentary, would vault them even further toward the stardom Stills craved. With Young out of the picture, Stills was in search of an additional player who could fill out the sound of the band and lend the support and encouragement he always seemed to require.
Commotion and irregularity were deeply rooted in Stills’ life. Although he had been born in Dallas, on January 3, 1945, that city had only been a blip in his roundabout upbringing. As Crosby, Stills and Nash biographer Dave Zimmer would unearth, William Stills, his father, had been raised in the South but had wound up in Illinois, booking concerts by big bands. The elder Stills’ skills as an engineer soon led to construction work and overseeing early tract-housing projects in that state. According to his son, speaking with writer David Fricke, William Stills was “an entrepreneurial kind of guy—he’d start something up and be real successful, then get bored and start something else.” (For decades afterward, rumors swirled that William Stills was either a “career diplomat” or worked for the CIA, where, as Nash told one interviewer, he “had to change countries every ten minutes.” Informed of this comment, Stills was stunned and insisted his father was an engineer.)
After Illinois, the family was on the move again, down to Louisiana and finally to Florida, where William Stills went into the retirement-home business. There, during the 1956–1957 school year, his son Stephen, a sixth-grader, was sent to the Admiral Farragut Academy, which would instill a military-style precision and bossiness into his brain (along with an occasional fantasy). “I loved the drill,” he told Fricke. “It was really a relief to have some organization because my house was always in such chaos.” The constant relocation also gave the teenage Stills an inordinately wide musical palette: he played drums in school bands, heard local bluesmen playing in informal backyard settings, and joined a band early in high school in Gainesville, Florida. (His fellow guitarist was Don Felder, later of the Eagles.) During his Florida high school years, he discovered blues records by way of his friend Michael Garcia, along with open tunings and country and bluegrass songs like the railroad-disaster chronicle “Wreck of the Old 97.” Like Crosby and many other musicians before and after, he also saw the way music easily attracted women: he and his friends would sit in their cars, play guitars and watch local girls gather around and applaud. The sound of the crowd and the support made up for whatever he felt missing in him growing up in a home with a hard-living mother, Talitha, who wished her son was more refined. (He also had two sisters, Hannah and Talitha.)
As Zimmer also documented, Stills was soon on the move again, this time to join his family in Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose, after he was falsely accused of stealing two textbooks at a high school in Florida (Stills, just sixteen at the time, contended he had picked them up by accident with a pile of other books). The rest of his family had already moved there because William Stills, who his son would later say had a bad temper and a fondness for alcohol, had become involved in the construction of storage tanks in El Salvador. Amid the mountains, cattle ranches and banana plantations of Costa Rica, where the Stills family would live for nearly a decade, Stills was exposed to jazz, folk and, naturally, Latin music. He would always remember the musician at a hotel in Panama who played a mighty Wurlitzer organ with a salsa beat. After an aborted attempt at college in Florida and a falling-out with his father, he wound up in New Orleans in early 1964. Stills had begun singing in a folk band in Costa Rica, exposing a prematurely grainy voice, but in New Orleans his musical talents expanded. With a local singer, Chris Sarns, he landed a gig in a bar, the Bayou Room, just around the corner from the New Orleans Playboy Club; it wasn’t unusual to see off-duty Bunnies stopping in for a drink.
After six months, Stills was on the move again, this time following Sarns up to New York City to become part of the burgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village. He found an apartment in the area and hit up all the usual open-mic clubs, sometimes with Peter Thorkelson, a similarly sandy-haired musician and singer from Connecticut who had relocated after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota. Dylan was gone by then, but the Village still had its share of characters, including the gentle, beatific Manhattan-born singer, guitarist and harmonica player John Sebastian and the blues-rooted singer, songwriter and guitarist Fred Neil, who advised Stills to grow out his thumbnail to improve his guitar playing.
At one or another coffeehouse, Stills met Richie Furay, a wide-eyed, newly transplanted Ohio kid. By the summer of 1964, both had been swept up into a short-lived folk music revue called America Sings at a theater on MacDougal Street. After the show closed, the troupe was booked into the Village club called Café Au Go-Go. The band rechristened itself as the Au Go-Go Singers and recorded an album titled They Call Us Au Go-Go Singers. On the one song that spotlighted his singing, “High Flyin’ Bird,” Stills, all of nineteen, revealed a husky voice that could soar into a wail (and fly above the hokey folk-chorus choir behind him); a guitar solo on another track also hinted at his potential. “Stephen was head and shoulders above most of the guitarists playing the Village at that time,” recalls Sebastian. “He had soul, and that was one of the things you really had to look for, especially in the folk movement. There were soulful people like Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers. But being a fluid lead guitarist wasn’t really a folk job.” In an homage to Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson, Stills was later known as the “take-off man,” the type who takes a song to a new level by turning up a guitar “and taking your head off,” as Sebastian put it.
The Au Go-Go Singers disbanded in 1965, and Stills, eager to get his career going, was at loose ends. He briefly toured Canada with the Company, an offshoot of the Au Go-Go Singers. There, in a club in Ontario in April, the group shared a bill with the Squires, led by a lanky singer and guitarist, Neil Young. Young introduced himself, and the two promptly went out, got drunk and plotted putting a band together. Like Stills and Crosby, Young had also been inspired by A Hard Day’s Night; folk was out, and amped-out rock and roll was in. But Young flaked out on Stills, opting for a solo act, and Stills was back in the Village hunting for work. Through it all, Stills retained a sense of drive, a hunger for success, that many others lacked or hid. Meeting him on the club circuit in the Village, before the Butterfield band, Naftalin jammed one day in Stills’ apartment and heard him tell a friend that Naftalin was the bass player in his band, even though no such band existed.
Stills soon became part of the great westward migration, which would bring at least two hundred thousand Americans to California each year between 1960 and 1965, though the numbers sharply declined for the rest of the decade. With his parents’ marriage over, he then made his way back to New Orleans, where he picked up his mother and one sister and drove with them to San Francisco. Relocating to Los Angeles, Stills was approached about a job on an upcoming TV pilot about a fictional rock band, but he passed when he heard he would have to sell the rights to his songs; Stills’ recessed, non-camera-ready front left tooth probably didn’t help. (He would later recommend his friend Thorkelson, who, after some initial hesitation, took the job; Thorkelson moved to Los Angeles and became Peter Tork on The Monkees.) Calling Furay, who was still in New York, Stills told him to fly out to California to join the band he was forming, but when Furay arrived, he realized, as Naftalin had, that there was no actual group.
But there soon would be. In what would become one of rock and roll’s most divine accidents, Stills and Furay were driving on Sunset Boulevard in early April 1966 when they saw a hearse with Canadian plates, and Stills instantly remembered Young drove that type of vehicle. Pulling up behind the hearse, Stills and Furay shouted for the car to stop, and Young and Palmer, who had been kicking around in Los Angeles after a long drive from Canada and were on their way to San Francisco, pulled over. In what felt like no time, they decided to pool their talents, hiring a seasoned drummer, Dewey Martin, along the way. Young soon wrote to his mother in Canada: “We have formed a group in which we’ll do all our own material.… The group is called Buffalo Springfield, for no particular reason.” (A reason actually did exist: they’d seen it on the side of a steamroller on Fountain Avenue.) A mere month after that meeting on the streets of Los Angeles, they were playing at the Whisky a Go Go and had two managers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, as well as a contract with Atco Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic.
On paper, the Springfield would seem a jumble of a band: Stills wrote and sang pleading or cautious love songs; Young contributed spooky tunes that Furay, who had a more commercial voice, sang; and Palmer would play with his back to the audience. But those same clashing personalities and styles immediately made them stand apart in the Los Angeles club scene, and they had terrific material to boot. Released late in 1966, Buffalo Springfield, their debut, had songs that ranged from Stills’ bubbly “Sit Down I Think I Love You” to Young’s addled “Out of My Mind.” With its muffled sound, the album didn’t entirely do them justice, but its green effervescence was impossible to deny.
The Strip would come to their rescue. In the fall of 1966, clubgoers began descending on it, irritating area residents and upscale boutiques, and the Los Angeles Police Department instigated a 10:00 P.M. curfew for anyone under eighteen. On the night of November 12, a local radio station announced a protest at a club called Pandora’s Box, complete with a fake funeral procession. A fight broke out for reasons unrelated to the curfew: a car carrying a group of Marines was bumped by another vehicle. Egged on by that brawl, the protesters (some of them carrying placards that read “We’re Your Children! Don’t Destroy Us”) trashed a city bus and threw bottles and rocks at storefronts. Inspired by that night—with the Vietnam War in the back of his mind and a few songs by the band Moby Grape in mind as well—Stills drove home and quickly wrote what came to be known as “For What It’s Worth.” In a sign of how fast things were happening, the band recorded it a few weeks later. With its emphasis on Stills’ rattled voice, Martin’s ominous snare drum, and Young’s warning-bell two-note guitar part in the verse, the recording was gaunt and unsettling, capturing the uneasy mood of the moment that extended beyond Los Angeles to the whole country. At the suggestion of Ahmet Ertegun, the erudite head of Atlantic Records, the single was rush-released with an amended title. “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)” peaked at no. 7.
Thanks to the creative overdrive of both Stills and Young at that point, the Springfield broke as much artistic ground in as short a period of time as any rock band in history. From their first demo sessions in the summer of 1966 through the following summer, they wrote and recorded a dizzying array of songs that touched on country, rock and nearly everything in between. Onstage, Stills and Young—decked out as a dressy cowboy and a fringe-laden Native American, respectively—egged each other on, and offstage it was even more intense. Furay was the earnest-voiced front man of the band, but Stills and Young almost seemed in a race to be the first to elongate the group’s sonic range. Young was its dark psyche, casting a prematurely jaundiced eye on fame in “Burned” and “Mr. Soul”; without the rest of the band around, he took his music into opulent orchestrated places with “Expecting to Fly.” With his musical schooling in South America and Latin America, Stills was leading the band into Latin rhythms and horns (“Uno Mundo”), stomping rock (“Special Care”) and hungover cocktail-lounge jazz (“Everydays”); in terms of sheer musical diversity, few of his generation had his range at such a young age. By their second album, 1967’s shape-shifting Buffalo Springfield Again, the members of the Springfield were already recording songs without the others. Furay sang and played “Sad Memory” alone when no one else showed up in the studio that day, and Stills recruited outside players for his experiments.
Taking a similar route as the Byrds, the Springfield began flying apart shockingly fast. Palmer, who was increasingly indulging in psychedelics, was busted for pot early in 1967; Young, dealing with both epileptic fits and the stress of success at the age of twenty-one, began flaking out. Amid the chaos, Stills tried to herd the band in the direction he wanted for it. “Stephen and Neil both respected each other’s work, but they were ambitious and there was always this rivalry,” says Nurit Wilde, a friend of the band members at the time. “Stephen was much more open about it. Neil was more passive-aggressive about his ambitions. Their guitar styles were quite different. Their managers thought they could get more out of them creatively, more songs, and would say, ‘Well, maybe such-and-such a song would be side A,’ and you could see the hackles going up. It wasn’t who wrote the better songs but whose song was going to get out there.” In a 1969 interview with the Detroit Free Press, Young placed the blame on Martin: “We just couldn’t hack him anymore. He was on an ego thing and thought he could sing and always wanted to. It just bugged the hell out of us.”
One May 1967 evening, Buffalo Springfield was scheduled to fly to New York to tape The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which hadn’t yet relocated to Burbank, California. Instead, that evening, Young left the band. Buffalo Springfield was still slotted to play the Monterey Pop festival, with guitarist Doug Hastings filling in for Young. Stills nevertheless felt the need for someone else to have his back.
MONTEREY POP WASN’T the first rock festival of the Summer of Love: the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival in Marin County, a week earlier, had staked out that turf, complete with an appearance by the Byrds. But Monterey’s organization and lineup easily vaulted past the Fantasy Fair. It began when manager and Dunhill Records head Lou Adler found himself talking about jazz and folk festivals—like the respected ones at Newport—with Paul McCartney, Cass Elliot and Mamas and Papas singer, songwriter, guitarist and libertine guru John Phillips. “It was all about the fact that rock and roll wasn’t considered an art form in the way jazz was,” Adler remembered. Everyone realized that pop music should have a comparable festival of its own, and Adler and Phillips (who took over from the original planners) concocted an ambitious plan: three days of pop, rock, soul and world music at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, with a capacity for seven thousand concertgoers. Over the course of three harmonious days, the weekend of June 16 to 18, 1967, musicians hung out backstage, eating lobster and steak and sharing dope, while the seated crowd took in Otis Redding, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with their frontperson Janis Joplin), Ravi Shankar, and both the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.
Monterey Pop was intended as a statement of solidarity and harmony in the new pop landscape, but the Byrds and the Springfield came to the festival in various stages of disarray. McGuinn, Hillman and Michael Clarke were growing increasingly irritated with Crosby, and they arrived already testy, having just fired Jim Dickson, their co-manager and mentor. “They were at a point where there was so much separation there and angst between everyone,” Adler recalls. In full rock-Cossack look—fur hat, mustache, mischievous “STP” sticker on his guitar—Crosby was center stage and dominant during the Byrds’ set that Saturday night; he was also high, and, in McGuinn’s memory, “so grumpy at us.” At one point, Crosby quoted a line from Paul McCartney that “all statesman and politicians in the world” should be dosed with LSD to prevent future wars. Before the Byrds started up “He Was a Friend of Mine,” a traditional folk song updated with John Kennedy–related lyrics, Crosby again addressed the crowd: “I’m sure they’ll edit this out. I want to say it anyway even though they will edit it out.” As McGuinn and Hillman stood silently on either side of him, Crosby told the audience that Kennedy was “not killed by one man,” that there was a conspiracy to keep it hidden. “He was going beyond the scope of what we were about,” McGuinn recalls. “We weren’t running for office. ‘Everyone should take LSD.’ I took LSD but I wasn’t sure everybody should—it could be dangerous to some people.”
Crosby also didn’t fill McGuinn in on his plans for the following day. Debate still rages over Crosby’s initial impressions of Buffalo Springfield when he and Hillman saw them at the Whisky a Go Go in the spring or summer of 1966. Hillman and Stills would maintain that Crosby was dismissive of the band (“Ah, they suck—I don’t like them,” Crosby supposedly said to Hillman), although Crosby disputes those reports: “I liked the Springfield right away. The quality was obvious—the songwriting and the singing. Way ahead of everybody else.” Whatever his initial impression, Crosby was spending more time with Stills by the time thousands began streaming into Monterey Pop. With Crosby providing an introductory part, Stills had already written and was in the midst of arranging a new song, “Rock & Roll Woman,” partly about Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick. “My lick,” Crosby says with a laugh. “I showed it to him because I had thought of it and he swiped it.”
Few, if any, Monterey concertgoers took note when the Springfield walked onstage without Young but with Crosby, now wearing a black cowboy hat. Unlike during his time onstage with the Byrds, Crosby stayed comparatively subdued with the Springfield, remaining mum between their six songs and strumming and harmonizing as best he could under the circumstances. “Stephen asked me,” Crosby says. “And I was there. The Byrds were coming apart at the seams, and I was very taken with Stills. He was cocky. As a young guitar player, he probably thought he was better than he was, but he was good. But I didn’t have a plan. I knew their songs and they were fun to sing. I didn’t care how Roger and Chris would react. It was fun filling in.”
Other members of both bands were less than happy, though. Hillman was rattled by the thought of his bandmate allying himself with another, competitive band (“One just didn’t do that then,” he told Zimmer), and Palmer told a Canadian journalist, John Einarson, that Crosby “stunk to high heaven” and “embarrassed us to the max.” Asked about Crosby’s cameo months later by a New Jersey reporter, Stills was nonchalant: “He sat in with us a couple of times and he played with us at the Monterey thing, and everyone started thinking all these horrendous and heavy things. It was just that he could jam with us, whereas some of the other Byrds couldn’t.”
No matter what discord they were sowing, Stills and Crosby were increasingly being pulled into each other’s orbits. On June 22, just a week after Monterey Pop, the Springfield began cutting the shimmery, sweet-to-tough “Rock & Roll Woman,” which they’d played at the festival. (Crosby has been credited with singing backup harmonies, although he can’t confirm he actually did sing on the record.) Late June 1967 was a time of rising convulsions in Los Angeles. On June 23, President Johnson arrived in town for a fundraiser only to find protesters outside the hotel where the event was taking place. Organizers were so concerned for his safety that plans were made to airlift him out by helicopter if a riot ensued; fortunately, the protesters simply marched.
On the Strip, a different type of protest, this one cultural, was taking place the following weekend. Stills and Crosby again found themselves on the same stage, this time at a hopping club called the Hullabaloo. The three nights of performances, technically billed as Springfield shows, amounted to free-for-all sessions that included most of the Springfield (even, on the first night, a cameo by Young, who met Crosby for the first time), Byrds drummer Michael Clarke, and African American power-house drummer Buddy Miles. On the second night, Crosby again stepped onstage with Stills, this time singing the garage rocker “Hey Joe” (a song he’d recorded with the Byrds) and pitching in with Furay on harmonies on Stills’ “Bluebird.”
“We may be breaking some rules tonight,” Crosby told the crowd on the second night. “But it’s about time someone started experimenting.”
ASKED ABOUT HIS future at a 1966 Byrds press conference, Crosby had casually retorted, “I want to retire in five years and sail off in a big schooner.” His wish would be granted sooner than he planned. As his interactions with Stills became increasingly creative, McGuinn began to feel that Stills was trying to pull Crosby away from the Byrds. At the same time, Crosby became more and more vocal about his unhappiness with the band. Over the summer and into the fall, the band was at work on a new and ambitious album, a swirling song-sound collage called The Notorious Byrd Brothers. When “Triad” was recorded, but deemed unworthy of inclusion, Crosby pouted, sitting on a studio couch and refusing to sing on its likely replacement, a cover of Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s wistful “Goin’ Back.” The last straw for McGuinn came when Crosby, who’d spent time in London with George Harrison and an orchestra, remarked that the Byrds weren’t good enough musicians for him. “We thought, ‘Oh, really?’” McGuinn remembers. “Chris got mad.”
In late September 1967, Crosby was at his home in Beverly Glen Canyon when McGuinn and Hillman pulled up in matching Porsches. (Crosby says they called first; McGuinn says it was a surprise.) There, the two Byrds bluntly informed Crosby that they were tired of him and he was out of the band. “It wasn’t my plan,” Crosby says. “I said, ‘It’s short-sighted, but okay.’” In Crosby’s memory, McGuinn told him, “We can do better without you”; McGuinn insists he said, “We can continue to make music without you.” Either way, Crosby was now unemployed, rejected by yet another institution. One announcement declared that he was “complying with a request to resign.”
Later that day, Crosby tooled around in his Porsche with the Monkees’ Peter Tork, reiterating the party line: “They asked me to resign today,” he told Tork. But in Tork’s mind, Crosby seemed more bemused than distraught. “He was still in some kind of shock,” Tork told Rolling Stones’s Brian Hiatt, “but he always wondered what was going to happen next, and of course, he was set up well enough that he didn’t have to worry about eating in the immediate future.” Later, McGuinn would express regret about the decision. “It was a bad marriage, and it was painful to hang out with him,” he says. “But in retrospect, it wasn’t the best career move for the Byrds. It would’ve been better to keep him in the band and make it work.”
But as Tork sensed, Crosby accepted the decision, telling Columbia president Clive Davis he was quitting the business to go sailing. (Davis called McGuinn to confirm the statement.) Crosby was proud of the fact that the label bought his rationale. In fact, few at Columbia minded the change; Crosby was viewed as an agitator who was hindering the band. When The Notorious Byrd Brothers was released in January 1968, Crosby was surprised—and more than a little appalled—to see the three surviving members of the band pictured alongside a horse, which he interpreted as representing him.
Crosby would have mixed feelings about his forced exit from the Byrds. “There was regret because I loved that band and enjoyed it,” he says. “But there was also a certain freedom, a door opening. Now I’d got a clean slate and could go in any direction I wanted.” With a chunk of cash—McGuinn recalls a $50,000 settlement, although Crosby feels he borrowed $25,000 from Peter Tork—Crosby returned to Florida, bought a seventy-four-foot sailboat made of Honduran mahogany, the Mayan, and lived the life of an adrift pop star mulling over his options. Flying down to visit, Paul Kantner, Crosby’s folkie pal and now cofounder and guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, helped his friend write a new song that caught the anxiety of life in the nuclear age. “Wooden Ships” opened with a line about the common language of smiling—inspired by a saying Crosby had seen on a church sign in Florida—and turned into the dialogue of two survivors recounting the screams they heard and the silver-suited radiation suits they witnessed. Crosby and Kantner were both science-fiction buffs, and Stills, who also saw Crosby in Florida during this period, pitched in with writing it as well. Although Crosby would soon be in need of cash and a new direction, life after the Byrds was already revealing what it could offer artistically—collaborations with anyone he wanted, the no-rules ethic at work.
When Crosby stopped by the Gaslight Cafe in Coconut Grove one night in late September, a different potential partner revealed herself. Billing itself as home to “the finest folk,” all for $1.75 admission on many nights, the club was hosting a relative newcomer, Joni Mitchell. Born Roberta Joan Anderson, the twenty-three-year-old had lived several lives by the time she stepped onto the Gaslight stage: a childhood in several towns in Canada, a case of polio when she wasn’t yet ten, a club performer and fledgling songwriter by her teens, an unexpected mother at age twenty-one, a wife after she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell (not the father of her child), followed by stints in Detroit and, after leaving Mitchell, in New York. Soon came a career-making performance at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival.
Crosby, who’d never heard Mitchell’s name before, had stepped into the Gaslight to see another act on the bill, teenage folksinger and guitarist Estrella Berosini. As Berosini told author Sheila Weller, Crosby caught sight of Mitchell onstage and initially dismissed her as “just another blonde chick singer.” But that perception changed when he listened more closely. “You walk into a club in Florida and she’s singing ‘Michael from Mountains’ or ‘Both Sides Now’ or one of those early songs,” Crosby recalls. “I instantly fell in love with her. Some of it was lust, but I certainly had a crush on her and thought she was the best thing I’d heard.”
The feelings were initially mutual, and by Christmas, both Crosby and Mitchell had moved to Los Angeles, where Crosby helped arrange Mitchell’s first record deal, with Reprise. The two had a brief romance, and Crosby would act as producer for the album; he would also revel in presenting her to his friends, treating her like a prized, talented possession. “I discovered sensimilla early on and I had it before anybody else did,” he recalls. “So I would get people wrecked and then say, ‘Hey, Joni, sing ’em a song.’ It was fun.” (Mitchell would later claim she felt uncomfortable in those situations. “It was kind of embarrassing… as if I were his discovery,” she told biographer David Yaffe.) Mitchell would later complain about the sonics of her first album, Joni Mitchell, also known as Song to a Seagull, but Crosby adequately captured the spiraling purity of her soprano and a few of her strongest early songs, including “Night in the City” (which featured Crosby’s new pal Stills on bass guitar).
Life as a producer, though, wasn’t enough to satisfy Crosby or pay his bills. Never one to churn out songs, by early 1968 he nonetheless had enough to record a demo for a possible record contract of his own. The songs he put on tape one night that March, with no accompaniment but his own guitar, continued the meditative, rhythmless, puzzled-by-life journey he had begun in the Byrds. “Games” questioned relationships and his own motivations; the skeptical “Laughing” was triggered by George Harrison’s devotion to the Maharishi. “Wooden Ships” didn’t yet have all its lyrics, but Crosby nonetheless put down its surging, cresting melody on tape. Like “Wooden Ships” itself, the tape was intriguing but unfinished, waiting for something or someone to complete it.
That same spring, Buffalo Springfield was wobbling on its last legs. Finally the band held a meeting with Ertegun to tell him it was over. In his mid-forties, two decades older than the Springfield members, Ertegun had been the band’s biggest cheerleader. With his heavy-lidded, jazz-cat aura, the Turkish-born record head and social aristocrat had launched Atlantic in the late 1940s and had signed pioneers such as Ray Charles and, more recently, the British power trio Cream. He saw a future for the band, especially Stills, whom he regarded with something akin to reverence.
At the meeting, Ertegun was visibly shaken, almost in tears. But Stills, like Crosby, was already thinking ahead. Bill Halverson, a husky, blond, twenty-five-year-old native Californian, had long been enamored of vocal groups; after working his way into audio recording, he had helped record portions of the Monterey Pop Festival. At the time, he was managing Wally Heider’s studio in Los Angeles when he heard Stills wanted to book time. Halverson had already met Stills, during the Springfield era, and it hadn’t gone well: when Stills had asked him to turn up the volume in his headphones during an overdub session, the headphones had squealed horrific feedback and Stills had chewed out Halverson. The studio reunion in mid-1968 was more productive—and further revealed Stills’ talents to Halverson. Playing every instrument himself, Stills meticulously constructed a song called “49 Reasons,” then instructed Halverson to turn the tape over so he could record another guitar part backward. “This is nuts,” Halverson thought to himself, but it worked, adding a slithering, psychedelic-trip aspect to the punchy song about lost love.
Work like that should have augured the start of Stills’ own career, in much the way his now former bandmate Young was bearing down on his own first album without the Springfield. But Stills was unsure of his voice, imagining himself a better guitarist than singer. Fortunately for him, another collaborative partner was willing to join him and bolster his confidence. Crosby had similar doubts about his own viability as a solo act and was still drawn to the idea of a band—“like a brotherhood or a marriage,” he says. In Stills, he saw a simpatico character. “I liked that he was cocky,” Crosby says. “He believed in himself. He believed he was good, so he would step forward and bite a chunk out of life, and I felt the same way.” As spring led into summer, the Crosby and Stills friendship began firming up. The two musicians had little to do but spend time in one another’s homes, playing guitars, getting high and plotting a way to make themselves stars.
In Crosby, Stills found a collaborator who was everything he could want at the time: supportive in a stoned-cheerleader way but not nearly as threatening or dominating as Young could be. With Crosby, there would be no arguments over guitar solos or, at least at that moment, leadership. Crosby, meanwhile, was open to a partner with a similar lifestyle and an even more open-minded musical sensibility. “The Byrds could swing, sort of,” Crosby says. “But we were a bit awkward at it. I wanted to swing like a Motown record, and Stills could. I liked that. I wanted me some of that.” Crosby had his first taste of that input as soon as the two began working together that summer. “Long Time Gone” had tumbled out of Crosby immediately after Robert Kennedy’s horrific assassination in Los Angeles on June 5. “It wasn’t just about Bobby,” he says. “He was the penultimate trigger. We lost John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and then we lost Bobby. It was discouraging, to say the least. The song was very organic. I didn’t plan it. It just came out that way.” A mere eight days after Kennedy’s death, he and Stills put the first version of the song on tape, Stills again handling the majority of the instruments. It was instantly apparent what Stills could bring to Crosby’s music. From Stills’ assertive bass to his crisp drumming, the song didn’t meander or glisten the way Crosby’s songs with the Byrds did; instead, “Long Time Gone” sounded like a switchblade, sharp and dangerous, and even Crosby’s voice exhibited an added grit.
By still mysterious means, B. Mitchel (sometimes spelled Mitchell) Reed, the influential forty-two-year-old DJ at KMET, Los Angeles’s leading rock radio station, got ahold of a copy of the song and began playing it on air, introducing it as the work of “The Frozen Noses.” No matter who came up with the ad hoc band name, its meaning was obvious: Stills and Crosby had both begun sampling cocaine, which has a numbing effect on the nose (“freeze your nose” was an in-vogue phrase for doing the drug). “We could’ve done without that [name],” Crosby says, but by then, the duo was already associated with the drug. “[Cocaine] started happening right when we started to make the [first] album, before we even started,” Crosby later told Rolling Stone writer Andy Greene. In 1968, Americans spent only an estimated $5 million on cocaine, a pittance next to the estimated $100 million on marijuana, but the drug was on the rise, especially in the music business.
The recordings Stills and Crosby made, which also included Crosby’s “Guinnevere,” partly inspired by Mitchell, had potential, but it was left to Cass Elliot, who prided herself on uniting like-minded talents, to determine what was missing. By now, her Hollywood pop social circles also included Stills’ old Village folk pal John Sebastian. In the years since he and Stills had encountered each other on the coffeehouse circuit, Sebastian had become more successful than any of his peers; thanks to Sebastian songs like the bubbly “Do You Believe in Magic” and the atypically granular “Summer in the City,” his band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, had scored bigger hits than anyone outside the Mamas and the Papas. But by 1968, Sebastian had left and relocated from New York to California. At one or another hang-out session at someone’s home that summer, Sebastian overheard a conversation between Elliot, Stills and Crosby over the way an even higher voice than Crosby’s, someone like a Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers, could enhance Crosby and Stills. “I probably wasn’t the only one who said it, but I said, ‘You probably can’t have him, but you might be able to get Graham Nash, who’s even more fluid as a singer,’” says Sebastian. “It was all part of that running conversation.”
No one knew it at the time, but when the Hollies rolled onstage at the Whisky that mid-February night in 1968, Nash had one leg out the door. To compensate for the poor chart performance of “King Midas in Reverse,” he and Allan Clarke had concocted “Jennifer Eccles,” a too-perky, more mechanical pop love song that Nash detested. He went along with recording and promoting it, but for him, it represented a step backward, another sign that the Hollies were behind the times. (The record trade magazine Cashbox dubbed it “a cutie with terrific appeal for younger pop listeners,” which must have also made Nash’s teeth gnash.) He’d already presented the Hollies with a few new songs—including the hippies-gone-Middle-East travelogue “Marrakesh Express,” written during a trip he and his wife, Rose, had made to Morocco the previous summer—and the band seemed indifferent, although they recorded a half-hearted instrumental version of it. Instead, plans were in the works for an album of Dylan interpretations. Nash participated in the first recording, a horn-driven, Vegas-friendly remake of “Blowin’ in the Wind” that disgusted him even further. “I was pretty down on myself,” Nash says. “I was feeling pretty useless. I thought ‘Marrakesh Express’ was a decent song, but my bandmates didn’t like it, so it must not be very good.”
At some point during their conversations with Elliot, Crosby or Stills must have flashed back to the Hollies’ Whisky a Go Go show the previous Valentine’s Day evening. As soon as the show ended, Nash had joined Stills and Crosby outside the club. The three had walked down Sunset Strip, eventually winding up in Stills’ Bentley (nicknamed the “Dentley” for all its scratches and nicks). As Stills drove, Nash and Crosby in the back seat, and all sharing a joint, Stills (according to Zimmer) turned to Crosby and asked, mischievously, “Which one of us is gonna steal him?” (Clearly he was referring to Crosby’s earlier comment outside the club when Nash wasn’t around.) Allan Clarke recalls the three men showing up at the Hollies’ hotel room, where they sat around and possibly sang together. Not considering himself a good enough musician to grab a guitar and join in, Clarke went to bed. “I thought everyone was having a good time and getting on and the Hollies will go back and everything will be all right,” Clarke says. “I just thought Graham was interested in other musicians. He always was. But all the signs were there. I just didn’t see what was coming.”
IN THE END, it was Joni Mitchell as much as Cass Elliot who clinched the deal. A month after the Hollies’ Los Angeles show, on March 15, 1968, the group found itself in Ottawa, Canada, for a show at a local theater. By coincidence, Mitchell had just begun a twelve-night run at a local folk club, Le Hibou. Crosby had told her about Nash, and vice versa, and after the Hollies’ performance, Mitchell wound up at a party for the band at a local Holiday Inn, where Nash was smitten by her looks and the combination music box and photo album she was carrying. Always up for a chat with an attractive woman, he instantly introduced himself. Clarke remembers hearing a knock at the band’s hotel room door, opening it, and seeing Mitchell, who asked for Nash and added, “David sent me.” Nash was an engaged and attentive conversationalist: “He is aware and alert, and if he asks a question, he always listens to the answer,” observed the Ottawa Journal after interviewing him during this time. Not surprisingly, he and Mitchell wound up spending the night together. All evening, Clarke could hear Mitchell singing her songs to Nash in the room next door.
By summer, Mitchell and Nash had committed to each other. Mitchell’s relationship with Crosby had run its course, and by then, Crosby was in love with Christine Gail Hinton. A blonde with a winning smile and a father who was in the army, Hinton had been the founder of the Byrds’ fan club, which soon became, in the words of a friend, “a David Crosby fan club.” Determined to meet Crosby, she even took an apartment across the street from the Whisky a Go Go when the Byrds played there. She and Crosby had hooked up before he’d met Mitchell, but after Mitchell and Crosby were less of an item, Hinton and Crosby were together again. “Joni found out about that and came to a party at Tork’s house and was very angry and said, ‘I’ve got a new song,’” Crosby says. “‘Ooh, Joni’s got a new song.’ She sat down and sang ‘That Song About the Midway.’” With its references to a man’s sky-high harmonies and the way she had caught him cheating on her more than once, there was no question about the subject of the song. “It was a very ‘goodbye David’ song,” he says. “She sang it while looking right at me, like ‘Did you get it? I’m really mad at you.’ And then she sang it again. Just to make sure.”
With money she had earned from her first, Crosby-produced album, which was rolled out in early 1968, Mitchell was now a homeowner. Given that houses on Lookout Mountain Avenue were generally priced in the affordable range of $25,000 to $40,000, she was able to buy a cozy place with a fireplace, paneled walls, stained-glass windows, and antique lamps and clocks. Guitarist Robert “Waddy” Wachtel, a New York–born musician newly arrived in town with his own band from Rhode Island, was driving down Sunset Boulevard and spotted two recognizable figures, Nash and Mitchell, and pulled over. Nash, who was carting a large bag of weed, asked for a ride to their home.
As Crosby and Nash remember it, Mitchell’s home was the setting for the historic moment that came next. Crosby and Stills visited one evening, and as the two began singing one of Stills’ new songs, “You Don’t Have to Cry,” Nash listened, asked them to sing it one more time (it only had one verse), and, on the third go-round, joined in harmony. Both Crosby and Stills were taken aback by how naturally Nash’s high register blended with their lower tones. “I didn’t think much of the Hollies because it was a purely pop band,” says Crosby. “No substance at all. The harmonies were good. But when he sang with us, it was startling. The third time he put on the harmony [on ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’], you couldn’t forget it. Stills and I looked at each other and we knew we wanted him to sing with us right then. Immediately.”
Stills has recalled it differently, with the vocal hookup taking place at Elliot’s cozy, white-fenced home on Woodrow Wilson off Mulholland. She had encountered Stills at a club one night and told him Crosby would soon be inviting him to her house, and Stills should go along. (“Do it—that’s all I’m going to tell you,” she said.) In Stills’ memory, the “You Don’t Have to Cry” moment occurred there, where Stills felt less inhibited about performing one of his own songs than in front of a young master like Mitchell. (In another version of events, Stills said in a 1982 radio interview that the “Who will steal him?” comment came after they’d first sung together.)
Others claim to have had their own sightings of the trio’s initial moment of harmony—almost as if it were a sort of musical Yeti. Sebastian thinks it was at a home with a swimming pool, either his or Elliot’s. “They called out ‘You Don’t Have to Cry,’” Sebastian says, suggesting it was not the first time, “and it was instantly, ‘Crap, that sounds like the Four Lads or Four Freshman—it sounds like a unit.’” Wherever it happened—and it’s likely there were many impromptu performances that summer and into the early fall—the sound of the three intertwining, very different voices (Stills’ on the bottom, Nash’s high register on top, and Crosby’s meaty middle) made for unison singing unlike anything anyone had experienced. “We took it ‘on the road,’” Nash says. “We went to Peter Tork and [producer] Paul Rothchild and Sebastian and Cass. We knew immediately. We knew. It was just ridiculous. That sound didn’t exist before that sound.”
Emotionally and physically, Nash was ready to bolt the Hollies for a new, more welcoming world, and those ad hoc performances were his ticket out. Crosby had already sent Nash a copy of the solo tape he’d recorded, and Nash was struck by the unusual quality of the songs, how freeform and unstructured they were compared to the airtight pop of the Hollies’ work. Now, singing alongside two of Los Angeles’s most respected singers, songwriters and musicians, he was being welcomed into a hipper, more exclusive universe, complete with the supportive brothers he never had growing up. Within two weeks, they’d decided where their future lay. Wachtel ran into Crosby, whom he’d already met on the scene. “I’m going to ask you something,” Wachtel recalls Crosby saying. “What would you think if I put together a band with Nash and Stills?”
In August, Nash returned to London and, as if nothing had happened, continued to work on new Hollies songs. They recorded two by outside writers, singer-songwriter-guitarist Terry Reid’s “Man with No Expression” (also known as “Horses Through a Rainstorm”) and songwriter Tony Hazzard’s “Listen to Me” (which would sound like an early version of the ’90s Brit pop band Oasis). The band, Clarke in particular, knew Nash was unhappy, but felt they were resuming as always; the Hollies were nothing if not productive. The group was planning more concerts as well as a benefit at year’s end for the Invalid Children’s Aid Association. Clarke was therefore stunned when, crossing the road near home, he encountered a friend who informed him that Nash had left the Hollies and had formed a new group with his friends in California. Clarke had known Nash for a dozen years; when the Hollies toured, Nash’s wife would move into the Clarke home for company. But this news (which Nash admits he avoided telling the band in favor of letting their producer know first) was the first Clarke was hearing of his friend’s sudden new life.
BACK IN LONDON, Nash, closing in on twenty-seven, began dismantling his life. He left his wife, Rose, although the divorce would not be finalized until January 1971 (“on the grounds of her misconduct with a married man,” according to reports at the time). Nash moved into an apartment with Larry Kurzon, a William Morris agent who was also, at one point, interested in managing the potential trio of Crosby, Stills and Nash. The Hollies had confronted Nash about the rumors, and he admitted he was exiting: “He said, ‘I want to leave, and I’m going whether you like it or not,’” as Clarke recalls. (Nash says he gave notice.) Stills and Crosby soon joined Nash in London, decamping to an apartment on Moscow Road and woodshedding individual songs that could be adapted to a trio format.
In that geographical context, Crosby and Stills’ American brashness could be jolting. Chris O’Dell, an Apple Records employee who spent time with them at their shared apartment, was stunned when a bag of cocaine accidentally spilled onto the floor and Crosby and Stills dropped to the carpet to snort it. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this for real?’” she says. A neighbor complained about Stills playing too loud. At the Hollies’ last show, the charity performance at the London Palladium on December 8, Crosby appeared backstage, much to Nash’s amusement and the Hollies’ displeasure. (“He wasn’t in my dressing room,” says Clarke.) In Crosby’s mind, he’d stolen Nash away from the Hollies in much the way he’d snatched that bell from his old high school.
Based on the Frozen Noses demo, Ahmet Ertegun had forked over seed money to the trio, which gave them funds for traveling to the United Kingdom, but he didn’t necessarily have the rights to the band. Then again, no one was 100 percent certain there would be a band. Part of the reason for Stills and Crosby’s London getaway was to make sure Nash would leave the Hollies, but they also planned to audition for Apple, the Beatles’ recently launched label. George Harrison and Peter Asher, the former Peter and Gordon member in charge of signing acts to Apple, dropped by the apartment and listened as the trio played acoustically for them. The two said little and left, and the trio later heard Apple was passing. “Crosby, Stills and Nash were already established, in a way, and Apple was looking for nonestablished new talent,” says O’Dell. “And each of them had already been in a band that had made it.” (“They didn’t get it,” Crosby counters. “Everyone makes mistakes. They made a mistake. We were good.”) O’Dell also wonders if Paul McCartney, who was seen visiting the flat at least once, may have been rattled by the amount of cocaine, a drug that was not yet prevalent in England.
Still, the trio knew what they had, in terms of the combination of talent, and they knew they needed a rapacious team to ensure that the industry met their demands for such a musical merger. Acerbic and enamored of a good joint himself, Elliot Rabinowitz had grown up in the Bronx, but by the time he was working as a young agent at the William Morris Agency he’d renamed himself Elliot Roberts, and one of his first clients was Mitchell. While at William Morris he had met another agent, David Geffen, an even sharper rising mover and shaker who had worked his way up from the agency’s mailroom. Geffen, a Brooklyn native, had moved on to the Ashley Famous Agency, where he had worked solely on their music acts. Roberts planned to manage the trio himself by way of his new company, Lookout Management, which had a total of three employees, including himself, but he realized there was a complication: Crosby was a free agent after the Byrds, but the Hollies were signed to Epic (in America), and Stills had signed with Atlantic as part of Buffalo Springfield.
Realizing he didn’t have the record company contacts Geffen had, Roberts reached out to him. Legend has it that Crosby, who tended to be initially wary of outsiders and kept them at arm’s length until he felt comfortable with them, almost killed the deal when they met with Geffen at an apartment he was subletting on Central Park South in New York. Scanning the LP collection in the home, Crosby, according to Geffen biographer Thomas L. King, saw rows of mainstream pop albums and freaked out. “Is this what you listen to?” Fearing he had blown his chance to manage the trio, Geffen called his friend and client, singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, and begged her to come over and play her songs on the piano in the apartment as a way of bolstering Geffen’s credibility. (Crosby doesn’t recall the incident and says it may be apocryphal.) According to King, Crosby wasn’t initially convinced of Geffen but was talked into it by Stills. But when Geffen and Roberts decided to join forces, at Geffen’s insistence, everything began to click. “Elliot we knew and liked a lot, but we thought to ourselves, ‘We’re in a shark pool and need our own shark,’” says Crosby. “We met Geffen and said, ‘There’s one. Okay, those two guys. Elliot will be the mensch and David will be the wolf and that’ll be fine.’ They were both the wolf, it turned out, but that was okay.”
For Geffen, securing the new group a record contract presented both a challenge and a showcase for his canny negotiation skills. Their Laurel Canyon friends were stoked at the idea of this musical conglomerate, but Geffen and Roberts were still dealing with fairly unknown quantities when it came to the trio’s name recognition. The Byrds and the Hollies had had hit singles, but few outside the business knew Crosby’s and Nash’s names; Buffalo Springfield had largely been an underground act with only one hit to its credit. Geffen’s first choice for a deal was Columbia, and Clive Davis, the avuncular head of the label who always craved the respect of the rock crowd, expressed his interest. Visiting the rambunctious Atlantic A&R man Jerry Wexler to ask that Stills be let out of his deal, Geffen was physically thrown out of Wexler’s office, then told Stills that that company was run by “animals.” Capitol Records was attracted to the idea of the trio, but, according to Leslie Morris, who worked for the label at the time, “Capitol wouldn’t touch it. It was sticky because it was multiple record companies. So they were hands off.”
In the end, they wouldn’t need Capitol or any of the others. When Atlantic’s Ertegun heard about Geffen’s meeting with Wexler, he swooped back in and charmed Geffen. Stills was already thinking ahead: he knew his former Springfield bandmate, Richie Furay, had formed a spunky, country-leaning band, first called Pogo and then changed to Poco for legal reasons. Stills sensed that a band rooted in that genre would be more at home on Columbia than on the R&B-leaning Atlantic and called Furay with the idea of switching labels. Furay was amenable, and Geffen made an offer: Nash would leave Epic, the Hollies’ label, for Atlantic, and Furay would leave Atlantic for Epic. “Sort of like a baseball deal,” Stills said later. According to King, Ertegun suggested that Atlantic and Columbia partner: the former label would release the unnamed trio’s first album, Columbia would release the second, and so forth, but Davis was understandably not interested in such a peculiar deal.
Ertegun hedged a bit. “Ah, man, the trouble you cause me,” he told Stills when the idea of swapping labels for Nash was brought up. “Why do you make me go through all this trouble with Sir Joseph [Lockwood, chairman of EMI, Capitol’s parent company] and Clive Davis just because you want harmony?” He also wondered aloud to Geffen whether Stills’ new band would be as big as another harmony-driven group, the Association. Ertegun later admitted that, had negotiations dragged on, he would have let the trio go to another company. But he valued Stills and, in the end, offered them a six-album deal. “Geffen manipulated the outcome,” says Ron Stone, who was then working for the newly renamed Geffen-Roberts Company. “It was not so much a legal process as a kind of ballsy move, and David was quite brilliant. He was playing chess, many years ahead of us.”
In the last month of 1968, Jerry Pompili, the house manager of the Fillmore East, New York’s preeminent rock theater, heard from a box-office clerk that a strange-looking guy was standing beneath the marquee, not moving or talking. It wasn’t a completely uncommon sight, but Pompili went to check on the situation and, to his surprise, recognized the loiterer—David Crosby of the Byrds. Introducing himself, Pompili invited Crosby in to hear whatever band was playing that night, but Crosby said no, he just wanted to stand outside. Pompili was confused, but Crosby told him he had just landed an amazing deal and couldn’t tell anyone yet. His way of celebrating, he told Pompili, was to travel downtown to the Fillmore and stand in front of it.
Finally, two days before New Year’s Eve, 1969, the respected and music-savvy San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason broke the news: “David Crosby of the Byrds, Graham Nash of the Hollies, and Steve Stills of the Buffalo Springfield will form a special trio to record together.” Refugees from three disjointed families had come together to form a new one, with its own unique rules. It was now a matter of making the new family and brotherhood work in ways the old ones hadn’t.