Even though they knew what they were doing, they still began in the dark. Early in 1969, Bill Halverson was again at work, managing Wally Heider’s Studio 3, when he took a call from an underling at Atlantic Records. The label wanted to book time for one of its new acts. Halverson wasn’t given the name of the band—apparently, they didn’t have one yet—but was told it was a self-contained unit that would need three to four weeks at the studio. Halverson, who offered to work on the sessions himself, told the label fine, he’d be prepared.
As mysterious as the project was, Halverson was even more puzzled when a green Volkswagen bus, outfitted with a revved-up Porsche engine, rolled up in front of the studio on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood in early February. Out stepped Stills and Crosby, both of whom he knew, and Nash, whom he didn’t. The three were hauling various guitars and basses, but no one else accompanied them. Was this a full band or not? After small talk, they instructed Halverson, seated in the control booth, to set up a microphone but no music stand in the recording room.
Walking into the space with one of his acoustic guitars, Stills told Halverson to kill the lights. Halverson couldn’t see Stills at all but could hear him warming up, and Crosby, standing beside Halverson, swung his arm over his head, what Halverson calls the universal signal for “we’re recording.” As Stills started playing a slippery opening in an open D modal tuning, every string tuned to an A or D, Halverson thought it sounded off, with no bottom end. But Stills kept going, and when he finished, still enshrouded in darkness, Halverson heard Stills putting his guitar down followed by the sound of high-fiving. “That’s the sound I’ve been looking for forever,” Stills told Halverson, who soon learned that the multipart, seven-and-a-half-minute guitar performance he’d just put on tape was the foundation for a song called “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
Besides being unaware of what they would call themselves, Halverson also hadn’t realized how much the trio had prepared in the short, insanely concentrated time since they’d first harmonized together. Two months before, they’d been in another studio, the Record Plant in New York, where they’d congregated with producer Paul Rothchild, best known at that moment for his work with the Doors. What transpired over the course of one day set the tone for their future dealings with other potential overseers. Although untested in many ways—they still hadn’t performed in front of people who weren’t their friends—the trio was inordinately confident in its abilities and had little interest in outside input. With Stills handling percussion, they put two songs on tape, “You Don’t Have to Cry” and another Stills ballad, “Helplessly Hoping,” instigated by an alliteration exam he’d taken in high school. Both mid-tempo, both acoustic, both quieter than anything their previous bands had done, the recordings were striking—a new harmonic blend in a new context.
The recordings were satisfactory, but to Nash, Rothchild came across as too controlling and prescriptive. Rothchild’s interest in taking a cut of any profits if he were to be their full-time producer was also off-putting, and David Geffen convinced Crosby, Stills and Nash that they could handle the production chores themselves—and keep the extra cash as well. “We worked with Rothchild to see if he was okay,” says Crosby. “It was okay, but not good enough. We didn’t need him. We’d all three made records. We didn’t need a producer. We saw that very quickly. We cut him out.” Although those tapes soon helped secure their future, Rothchild would long be resentful about what he felt was a raw deal—his first indication that money was beginning to matter as much as music in his business. “He was very bitter about that,” says Dave Rao, who would later work for Stills and met Rothchild. “He said, ‘They’re baaaad people,’ which I didn’t agree with.”
After the Rothchild episode, the trio stayed on the East Coast. Already sensing they were attracting unwelcome hangers-on and could easily fall prey to distractions, John Sebastian had suggested they relocate there from Los Angeles to refine their approach. Sebastian made the case for Sag Harbor, a former whaling port on the far eastern end of Long Island, where he lived with his wife, Loretta (Lori for short), and their four dogs, five cats and organic garden. Crosby, Stills and Nash agreed and rented an A-frame home with a fireplace where they could rehearse and get as stoned as possible without any interruptions.
At the airport on the way to Long Island, they coincidentally met Sebastian’s new drummer, a twenty-year-old from San Antonio who’d played in a quasi-psychedelic band, Clear Light, that Sebastian had heard and liked. Already married with two young children, Dallas Taylor arrived with his own baggage—to combat stomach issues when he was a child, his mother had given him medicine laced with paregoric, a form of opium—but he also came with a limber, jazz-influenced style. His dark hair, cut in a bowl shape, gave him a distinctive look. Taylor and Stills had gotten off on the wrong foot earlier when, Taylor said, he worked with Stills and hadn’t been paid, forcing him to report Stills to the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). But Taylor heard the trio was looking for a drummer, and he and Stills reconnected as buddies in frenetic, relentless jamming. Nash quickly realized that his initial hope for Crosby, Stills and Nash—an acoustic folk album—wasn’t to be. “Stephen was pushing them to do a rock-and-roll record instead of a folk album because he was the electric guy,” Taylor recalled later. “He was a rocker. He wanted to play.”
Between snorts of cocaine, the trio rounded up a few other musicians, including bass player Harvey Brooks and keyboardist Paul Harris. (Stills and Brooks had worked together earlier in the year on Super Session, a jam album with singer and multi-instrumentalist Al Kooper and white-blues guitar hero Michael Bloomfield that was a surprise hit; Stills’ wah-wah guitar on his and Kooper’s version of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” became a major presence on FM radio that summer of 1968.) Songs were beginning to tumble out. Crosby wrote a hippie statement of purpose, “Almost Cut My Hair,” at the Sag Harbor house. “At the time we were very rebellious,” Crosby recalls. “We were the counterculture, so the idea was, ‘Don’t give in, stay with it, don’t cop out from the attitude that we’re different and want it another way.’ Hair was only a symbol. It was a statement of independence. We’re not going to shave it and put on a button-down shirt and become like you.” Nash would pen “Right Between the Eyes,” about sleeping with a friend’s partner, that referred circuitously to his feelings for Sebastian’s wife. (According to Nash, those feelings weren’t consummated until later, and Sebastian was accepting, given the shaky status of his marriage at that time: “Once you realize you’re not well paired,” Sebastian says, “it’s a lot less painful when you find out there’s someone else involved.”)
During this period, Sebastian’s name was floated as a possible addition to the band. During a practice session in Sag Harbor, he slipped behind a drum kit to tap out a gentle rhythm. “I got a little brushes thing going and they said, ‘Hey, he could sing below and we’ll have another songwriter in the fold,’” Sebastian recalls. “It sounded good that afternoon, but it was just that afternoon. It was a really brief idea that faded quickly. I dodged a bullet.” Meanwhile, Stills, an accomplished bass player himself, wasn’t hearing the sound or tone he wanted, and Brooks learned of his dismissal when he arrived at an airport to pick up a plane ticket to join them for recording in Los Angeles—and discovered there was no ticket.
Now ensconced at Heider’s studio on a bustling Hollywood street, Crosby, Stills and Nash had the songs they wanted to record or remake, like “Long Time Gone” from the Frozen Noses moment. (Halverson remembers someone bringing up that name, so it hadn’t yet been completely dismissed.) They also knew exactly how they wanted to sound. In a matter of months, they’d worked out most of their vocal arrangements and sounded like they’d been harmonizing together for years. But knowing they had to prove their worth on record, they also realized they had to concentrate, so certain rules were laid down. No friends or groupies were allowed; nor were any representatives from the American Federation of Musicians, which routinely kept tabs on recording dates for financial reasons. “That was normally what happened in the ’60s,” says Nash. “The union was a big presence in the studio making sure the drummer was being paid right, and so on. We said, ‘We don’t want anybody here. Leave us the fuck alone.’” (As a result, no official AFM paperwork has turned up for those sessions.) Not for the first or last time, they were accommodated, allowed to get away with something few had before.
As they worked from early afternoon into the early hours of the morning, day after day, the album began taking shape. One early idea—a double album, half acoustic and half electric—was abandoned, but “Guin-nevere,” which Crosby had first attempted on his own, was reborn as a Crosby and Nash duet. Crosby recorded two guitar parts, Stills played a mellowed bass line, and Crosby and Nash added intertwined harmonies with breathy, brotherly precision. (They also recorded it with drums but, realizing the song felt too conventional that way, erased them; Halverson would still hear a bit of the percussion in the background of the recording.) Such creative interactions fueled the sessions. Crosby and Nash faced each other at a microphone and sang Nash’s “Lady of the Island” (which Sebastian also sensed may have been about his wife, the “island” being Long Island). When Crosby struggled with a few of the introductory lines in “Wooden Ships,” Stills stepped in, making the first part of the song a duet that enhanced the postapocalyptic dialogue of the lyric. The trio sang a version of Stills’ rousing “Change Partners” with round-robin vocals that recalled the Hollies’ “On a Carousel,” and cut a version of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” but opted to leave them both off the record. Nash made fried-chicken runs; as a way to cement their new bond, Crosby bought Stills a Fender Precision bass. “It was a lot better than I thought it would be,” says Crosby of the songs emerging. “It was kind of startling. I didn’t know how good we would be at creating tracks. A lot of it was Stills. He was terrific.”
Now decisively in charge of his music and destiny, Stills worked with a manic drive, playing most of the guitars as well as every note of bass guitar and keyboard, since Paul Harris had ultimately not been enlisted, either. (Even the percussion toward the end of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was Stills thwacking away on the back of his Martin guitar.) He toyed with varied guitar tones on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” including lazy-day country licks he eventually discarded. Thanks to Stills, Nash was finally able to hear “Marrakesh Express” the way he wanted it, with Stills’ fizzy organ and slithering guitar pushing the song down the tracks. “It was amazing to watch,” says Sebastian, who dropped in one evening. “Stephen was, ‘Here’s a guitar. Now I’ll play bass on it. Now it needs a little more guitar in this other part. Now I’ll put on some B3 organ.’ Stephen really made that whole album.”
Unable to make the “Marrakesh Express” session, Taylor was temporarily replaced by session drummer Jim Gordon, a handsome surfer type who was as talented as he was peculiar. Years later, after he had played with Eric Clapton and co-written “Layla” as part of Derek and the Dominos, Gordon half-jokingly told Taylor he had wanted to “cut his [Taylor’s] hands off” and do the rest of the Crosby, Stills and Nash album himself—a chilling admission given that, over a decade later, Gordon would be imprisoned for stabbing his mother and bashing in her head with a hammer.
Crosby was confronted with Stills’ pushed-to-the-max work ethic when they hit an impasse. After five weeks, “Long Time Gone,” so important to Crosby, was proving difficult to nail; the whip-crack feel of the Frozen Noses version was discarded, but nothing was emerging to take its place, and the song was almost left for dead. Finally, on the night of March 11, Stills told Crosby and Nash to go home; he wanted to work on the arrangement. “Graham and David would come and go, but Stephen was obsessed,” says Halverson. “The sound would be in his head, and he had so many ideas it was just a matter of ‘How quick can I get these down?’ As quick as I could rewind to another track, he was onto something else. You just had to keep up.”
When Crosby and Nash arrived back at Heider’s the next morning, Stills was still there—he’d been up all night, no doubt aided by one stimulant or another—and played them the track. Again, he’d handled everything except the drums, and out of the speakers emerged an organ that throbbed menacingly and jabs of guitar that sounded like snarling dogs. Overjoyed, Crosby grabbed a bottle of wine, tossed down a few gulps and sang the song with a new, deeper tone, almost as if he were underwater and struggling for air. As writer Ellen Sander, who was on the scene and was the only writer invited to watch them at work, observed of that moment, “Stills… had his eyes down, and when he raised them, the expression on his face said plainly and silently: I arranged your song better than you could have in a thousand years. And don’t you forget it.”
As Nash recalls: “Yes, that’s absolutely true.”
DESPITE THE NO-OUTSIDERS decree, plenty of friends still managed to drop into Heider’s over the course of those weeks and heard bits of what Crosby, Stills and Nash were secretively creating. Ertegun arrived in a limo, dragging along an eerily quiet Phil Spector. Joni Mitchell and Cass Elliot stopped in; when Nash couldn’t make it, Elliot would substitute for him on early versions of songs, and her voice eventually made its way into a bit of “Pre-Road Downs,” a polite rocker that was Nash’s attempt at preparing Mitchell for when the band would leave Los Angeles behind and go on tour. Revisiting the backwards-guitar idea he had used with Halverson the year before, Stills threaded his serpentine solo through the song like a needle.
Then there was the woman who inspired, to various degrees, most of the Stills songs on the album. By the summer of 1968, when she left New York for Los Angeles to make her first rock-influenced album, Judy Collins had already been a performer for a decade, first in her native Colorado. On 1966’s In My Life, she was progressing beyond the folk ballads and shanties of her early work into art song and pop. Rightly lauded by many media outlets as a folk “goddess,” Collins exerted a siren-like pull with her pure soprano, enchanting blue eyes and long brown hair. Now, with the help of producer David Anderle, who wanted to loosen her up, she was hoping to inject country and rock and roll into her pristine folk.
When he heard she was recording, Stills “bugged Anderle [to enlist him] until David said okay,” Collins recalls. The two would long disagree on where in Los Angeles they first met, but the immediate attraction, musically and physically, was undeniable; Collins thought he was one of the most handsome men she’d ever seen. Stills’ impact on her music was equally immediate: for the album that came to be called Who Knows Where the Time Goes, he added gentle strums on Collins’ version of British singer-songwriter Sandy Denny’s title song, chicken-scratch guitar swipes behind her slow, churning version of the traditional murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” vibrato twang to “First Boy I Loved,” and a loping bass on her take on Ian Tyson’s “Someday Soon,” which Stills had suggested. Flying back to New York, Collins, who at twenty-eight was five years older than Stills, told her boyfriend they were over and a new man was in her life.
Stills and Collins gave off the air of a music-textbook folk-rock couple. She would visit California, where they would talk of getting a home together; he would join her band onstage for shows, including at Carnegie Hall, to promote her album. Although women visitors were frowned upon during Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Sag Harbor practices, Collins recalls bringing along a copy of Music of Bulgaria, a collection of vocally astounding harmony singing from the ’50s that her record company boss, Elektra’s Jac Holzman, had just released on his sister Nonesuch label. (Crosby thinks he turned Nash onto the album; Nash recalls receiving a copy from Paul Simon.) “A huge influence on me,” says Crosby of the sound of the massed Eastern European female voices heard on the record. “I don’t think Stills or Neil ever listened to it, but the harmonies are brilliant. It was stuff people hadn’t even tried, let alone pulled off. It was as important to me as the Beach Boys.”
But the Stills and Collins affair would burn itself out quickly. Collins, who lived in New York, was five years into psychotherapy and had no desire to move west; Stills wanted to stay in California. Both were headstrong careerists, and Collins—rightly, it turned out—felt that Who Knows Where the Time Goes would take her music to a larger audience, and she didn’t want to miss the opportunity to promote it. “Stephen didn’t like therapy and New York, and I was in both,” she says. “That was kind of a parting flag that went up. And I was determined to make sure that this career that was beginning to actually happen had to be paid attention to.” In an effort to change her mind, Stills began crafting songs to her, first and foremost, probably in the summer of 1968, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”—three different tunes he merged into one, based on a series of notebook musings about his feelings for Collins. In it, he pleaded for reconciliation, felt sorry for himself, begged her to remember the good times, melodramatically admitted he was suffering, and in general tried to convince her that the two had a connection. “You Don’t Have to Cry,” which told of how wrecked she’d left him in favor of her work phone calls and music business matters, began as a love letter to Collins.
By the time of the Crosby, Stills and Nash sessions, their relationship was teetering, but Collins stopped by the studio nonetheless around March 12, when she was in Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards. (She walked away with a “Best Folk Performance” award for her chamber-pop version of Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”) Collins and Mitchell visited Heider’s together, and Collins, who’d received word that her on-again, off-again beau had started a new band, was suitably floored by what she heard. “It was just thrilling to be there and hear them sing,” Collins says. “All these songs were pouring out. That harmony was astonishing; you couldn’t help but be drawn into it. It was a way for Stephen to realize a lot of his dreams of songwriting and arranging. You could hear this was Stephen’s thing; he’d found a way to realize it with these guys. In the beginning, it was magical.”
But Collins didn’t stay long. Ten years into an alcohol problem, she didn’t want to be pulled into what she sensed was a potentially dangerous situation. “It was a struggle for me making sure I didn’t get sucked into the scene out there,” she says. “I knew it would do me in—the music scene and everything with Stephen, my producer, the drugs. I knew that if I stayed out there, I would not make it.”
Collins returned to California in early May, shortly before the scheduled release of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s completed album, to play at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Visiting her Holiday Inn hotel room, Stills, still lovestruck, gifted her with a Martin guitar and sang and played “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for her in its entirety. Collins, who hadn’t yet heard the song, was stunned and touched, recognizing the subtle reference to the days of her therapy appointments (Thursdays and Saturdays) in the lyrics. “He must have been reading my diaries,” she says wryly. She told him it was a wonderful song but that it wouldn’t win her back.
BY LATE MARCH, the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album was finished, and the time had come to finalize what name or names would appear on the cover. Given the unpleasant experiences each had had with previous bands, the idea of a formal group name felt distasteful and restrictive, not to mention perilous. “If you have a band name, you can be replaced,” says Crosby. “We’d each had some experience with that. It needed to be an equivalent situation, not a bullshit situation.”
They decided to use their names, like a law firm, as a way to ensure everyone knew who they were individually and to signify that they could splinter and work with others at any time. Calling themselves Crosby, Stills and Nash would also announce their experiment to the world, what an Allentown, Pennsylvania, newspaper writer pegged as “the latest trend in groups—that is, non-groups… an ever-changing membership to suit its needs, along with the rights for the members to do whatever they please.” The non-group would be the ultimate symbol of ’60s values, a world in which one could do anything, with anybody, without facing consequences as long as it suited one’s needs.
The order of their names proved a stickier matter. On February 22, 1969, as the making of the record was under way, a Billboard article on Atlantic’s new signings referred to the trio as “Stills-Crosby-Nash”—not surprisingly, Stills’ choice for their name. But while he was adamant, Stills couldn’t deny that the handle sounded better as Crosby, Stills and Nash. “Try saying it any other way,” says Crosby. “It was blatantly obvious to anyone who understood that kind of thing that that’s how it would be.” Adds Nash, “Stephen was pissed because me and Crosby said no. But Stills-Crosby-Nash just doesn’t work.” Crosby had another rationale: “At the time I was the one with the biggest name—the Byrds, hits. The Hollies might have had more but not of the same caliber. So at the beginning, to people who were concerned, I was the most important one.”
The debate had an unintentionally comical postscript when the three gathered for a cover photo. To amplify the organic, earthy quality they saw in themselves and their music, they wanted a jacket that felt homey, and Nash and Gary Burden, a thirty-six-year-old former Marine and architectural design student who had been encouraged by (naturally) Cass Elliot to fashion album covers instead, found the ideal location: a derelict home at 815 Palm Avenue in West Hollywood. Although the property was just off the hectic Santa Monica Boulevard, the house, complete with a run-down sofa out front, felt worlds removed from Hollywood. To photograph it, the trio recruited photographer and fellow musician Henry Diltz. The son of an Army Air Corps recruit, Diltz, thirty, had lived all over the world, from Tokyo to Bangkok to Hawaii, and had attended West Point for a year. At school in Hawaii, Diltz had begun singing in a coffeehouse, and he had become a founding member (on banjo) of the Modern Folk Quartet (MFQ). He had moved with the group to Los Angeles in the early ’60s, where they made the rounds of folk clubs. Diltz met Stills in Greenwich Village around 1964, when the MFQ briefly relocated there. Genial, bespectacled and rarely given to drama, Diltz was able to easily ingratiate himself into the already stormy Crosby, Stills and Nash world. Shooting them at Heider’s during the making of the album, he made sure to time the clicking on his camera with the drums so that his picture taking wouldn’t interrupt anything.
Diltz photographed the trio on the ratty couch on Palm Avenue, making for a homespun image of approachable rock stars who could have been mistaken for members of their audience. But when everyone looked at the prints in the days that followed, one major error announced itself: they were sitting in the wrong order from left to right—Nash, then Stills, then Crosby. “We were panicked about it: ‘How could you have Crosby’s name over Graham Nash?’” says Ron Stone of the Geffen-Roberts Company. When Diltz and the trio returned to the same spot the next day to retake the photo, they discovered the house had been torn down, leaving them no choice but to use the original. The group and Burden also convinced Atlantic to bend to their wishes on the texture of the cover itself; they wanted it to feel rough, not smooth. “It was the first album with that feeling,” Diltz says. “The record company freaked out and went nuts. It wasn’t any more expensive. They just hated anything new and different.” On the back cover, they stripped in a photo of Dallas Taylor as if he were staring out the window. For decades, many would mistake Taylor for Neil Young.
In the hills of Laurel Canyon, anticipation for the album was building as music industry insiders (and Crosby and Nash themselves) played advanced pressings for friends and fellow musicians. Other musicians may not have wanted to witness the reactions, but Crosby and Nash reveled in sitting back and watching the euphoric responses to their work. Word was also spreading east. When the Who played a few nights at the year-old Fillmore East theater in May, two weeks before the album’s scheduled release, promoter and owner Bill Graham emerged from the wings and told the crowd he had something no one else in the world had heard: the first music from Crosby, Stills and Nash, directly from the band itself. “I think you’re gonna like it,” he told them, and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” blasted out over the PA. “Needless to say, all in attendance, myself included, were thoroughly mind-blown,” says Binky Philips, a Who devotee at the show that night. When it was over, the song received a standing ovation.
For all the careful deliberation and construction that went into the making of the album, no one could have planned how well timed it would be. The previous year had been relentlessly brutalizing: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; the chaotic, violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago in which protesters were clubbed; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; and, most deflatingly, the election of Richard Nixon in November, the first Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower roughly a decade before. Even rock and roll was mystifying: on their White Album, the Beatles seemed to be growing up and splintering before everyone’s eyes, and Dylan, in the last month of 1967, had reemerged as a more obliquely political folkie on John Wesley Harding.
Triumphs trickled out: for the first time, Mississippi allowed women to be jurors, and Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman in Congress, winning the race for the 12th Congressional District in her native Brooklyn. But into 1969, such victories seemed few and very far between. In the days and weeks leading up to the release of Crosby, Stills & Nash, four hundred American soldiers died overtaking Dong Ap Bia Mountain, or Hill 937, in Vietnam; the battle was so bloody that the mission was nicknamed “Hamburger Hill.” At the all-black Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, a junior who advocated for black power wasn’t allowed to be placed on the ballot for student council. Other students protested, leading to tear-gas-wielding police arriving at the school. The clashes soon spread to the nearby North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and gunfire battles erupted between the National Guard and unidentified protesters. Although it was never determined who fired the fatal shot, Willie Grimes, a twenty-year-old sophomore, died from a bullet to the back of his head.
Into this increasingly dire scenario arrived Crosby, Stills & Nash on May 29, 1969. At Ertegun’s insistence, the album had been remixed at the last minute by engineer and producer Tom Dowd to boost the voices; Ertegun wanted to replicate what he’d heard when he’d visited Crosby, Stills and Nash at work, and he had mostly remembered their singing. The band protested, but, according to Halverson, they had no choice: “Ahmet signs our paycheck,” Stills told him. The impact of that demand was easily heard on the finished record: the voices, not Stills’ guitars, keyboards, or bass, or Taylor’s drums, stood out the most. The decision may not have enhanced the band’s rock-and-roll credibility, but it would be a wise move. Whether he realized it or not, Ertegun knew what would make the trio stand apart: their carefully entwined voices.
Anyone reading the fold-out lyric sheet inserted with the album—another uncommon perk—wouldn’t have sensed much joy. Even without explicitly mentioning any member of the Kennedy family or King, “Long Time Gone” conveyed the frustration of attempting to speak truth to power in the late ’60s. “Wooden Ships,” which Jefferson Airplane would also record that year, spoke to that part of the generation that wanted to escape the planet; in their alternating parts in the introduction, Stills and Crosby played battle-weary warriors from opposite sides now sharing food and hopes of survival. “You Don’t Have to Cry” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” read like chronicles of adults working out their relationship issues; “49 Bye-Byes” was a farewell to an affair. Even in its hazy depiction of three women in Crosby’s life—Christine Hinton, Joni Mitchell and another he would never reveal—“Guinnevere” had an undertone of longing more than sexual connection; all three women seemed apart, in their own worlds, unreachable.
But starting with the skittering riff of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” followed by the sound of the multitracked voices in unison, Crosby, Stills & Nash immediately radiated something desperately needed in pop at the time: a luminous hint of hope. Harmony singing was nothing new in pop, and in many ways Crosby, Stills & Nash picked up where classic vocal harmony pop bands like the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys and even the Hollies had left off, albeit with their own supergroup twist. Instead of the watertight unison harmonies of those bands, however, Crosby, Stills and Nash sang together and, in a way, separately; in a typical mix, it was still easy to pick out each of their individual voices. Thanks to that singing, Crosby, Stills & Nash was akin to a floor-to-ceiling, sun-drenched window. For all the personal anguish and hard labor that went into it, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was seamless—what critic Robert Christgau, reviewing the album for the New York Times, called a “structural triumph.” As it moved through its three sections—upbeat and feisty to slow and anguished and back to fast again, with Stills’ acoustic and electric guitar parts flying in and out—the song was in keeping with rock’s newfound ambition: songs that stretched past the accepted two- or three-minute mark. In its closing “doo doo doo” section, it also captured rock’s ebullience.
Reflecting the camaraderie with which it was made, Crosby, Stills & Nash was also startlingly of a piece. Each man may have had a distinct personality (and look, judging from the cover photo), but the album had a cohesive flow, and that pacing allowed the songs to breathe. The cheery bounciness of “Marrakesh Express” contrasted with the bestilled exquisiteness of the subsequent “Guinnevere,” which paved the way for Stills’ folk guitar trot on the following “You Don’t Have to Cry.” Lyrically, “Wooden Ships” was bleak, but the moment when Crosby and Nash’s harmonies joined Stills in the chorus was anything but despairing. The same went for “Long Time Gone.” The original version that Stills and Crosby had recorded as a duo had a certain crackle, but the merged, fussed-over voices on the chorus of the trio version chased away the blues of the times.
Thanks in part to Halverson’s careful attention to microphone techniques, the album also came off as strikingly direct; on “Lady of the Island,” his love-by-the-fireplace serenade, Nash’s voice sounded inordinately up close and personal, and the pirouette of his and Crosby’s voice throughout the song was more common to jazz vocalese than anything heard in rock. “It was that intimacy we wanted,” says Nash. “Taking it down to the essence. We drew our audience closer to us with the lyrics and the gentleness of how we presented it.” The concluding “49 Bye-Byes” found Stills merging two different songs: the first half, “49 Bye-Byes,” was sulky, almost pouty, with Stills’ organ prodding the arrangement only so much, but the second portion, originally called “Bye Bye Baby,” used Crosby and Nash’s multitracked harmonies as the ultimate, I’m-okay-now sendoff to a relationship. The song embodied everything the album offered: splendor and optimism during a time that needed both.
The reviews were largely enthusiastic. “Success is insured for this new group,” announced Billboard, while Christgau called it “as perfect as has been expected” (while also noting that overall, “the wildness that should liberate great rock” was noticeably absent). In The Saturday Review, Ellen Sander called it “nothing short of a treasure,” adding, “It is packed with songs of the changes that have made searchers of all of us.” Immediately, the group was crowned as the multiheaded voice of its generation, and Crosby, Stills & Nash earned a gold record with sales of five hundred thousand copies. Now, all they had to do was live up to those expectations.
ALTHOUGH NASH HAD first crashed in Crosby’s house when he moved to Los Angeles, they were now living separately. Stills hunkered down in a hovel on Beachwood Drive in the Hollywood Hills, so far from the main road that friends weren’t always inclined to visit. Nash and Joni Mitchell were living together at her home in a blend of domesticity and oncoming pop fame. When a New York Times reporter visited them in April, Diltz had just dropped by with the photo of the trio’s album cover and Elliot Roberts was making plans for Mitchell. Later, they went to a studio, where Nash watched as Mitchell recorded “That Song About the Midway,” her kiss-off to Crosby. “Do you want to pack it in, luv?” Nash asked her after she was having trouble landing the right take on another new song, “Chelsea Morning.” With a smile, she replied, “Just sit there and look groovy.”
Their domestic life would be immortalized in song that same spring, when, at his insistence, Mitchell bought a vase for herself. Back home, Nash tossed some wood in their fireplace and, with an idea for a song, sat down at her piano; in an hour’s time, he’d written “Our House,” an homage to their togetherness that blended details of their home with a chord pattern and descending bass line that evoked Baroque pieces like Pachelbel’s Canon in D. When he began playing the song in concert later that year, he would often introduce it as “about my woman” without naming her; the phrase, later seen as chauvinistic, was barely greeted as such at the time.
In Mitchell’s compact driveway, barely wide enough for two cars, Crosby was killing time waiting for Nash and Mitchell to return home one day when Neil Young, who lived not far away, drove by, stopped and asked Crosby what he was doing. Crosby told him not much. As Crosby recalls it, Young asked if he could sing Crosby a few songs. Pulling out a guitar he played “Helpless,” a turtle-paced reminiscence of growing up in his native Canada, all moons and birds, and “Country Girl,” a suite made up partly of fragments of songs from the Buffalo Springfield days. Crosby knew who Young was and had spent a bit of time with him, but the ad hoc performance was a revelation—and helped the new group resolve a lingering issue.
The rules of the music business dictated that the trio would have to promote the album with live shows despite having only sung together in friends’ living rooms. By then, ads for summer Crosby, Stills and Nash concerts, like the one at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, had begun appearing in newspapers. (Amusingly, the Los Angeles Times, of all places, announced the concert would present “a newly formed combination of singers from England.”) But they would need help. Crosby and Nash were adequate guitarists and Taylor would be their drummer, but they required a bass player and, in Stills’ mind, another musician to fill out their sound, preferably on keyboards.
The search began. Visiting England, Stills and Taylor ran into George Harrison at Basing Street (also known as Island) Studio and brashly brought up the idea of the Beatle as one of their accompanists; Harrison had no reaction. The two men clomped through rain and mud to visit the country home of Steve Winwood, who was then in the midst of a disorienting experience with Eric Clapton in their supergroup, Blind Faith. As respected as Stills and the Crosby, Stills & Nash album were among their peers, Stills’ intensity could be intimidating—to the point where, Taylor recalled, “Winwood was scared to death and locked himself in his bedroom.” Stills later claimed he asked Mark Naftalin, who had just left his keyboard slot in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, but Naftalin later had no memory of such a request, though he says he might well have taken the job had it been offered. (Two years earlier, Stills had asked him to join the Springfield to replace the newly busted Bruce Palmer, who had been deported to Canada; Naftalin had started as a bass player. But Naftalin politely turned him down and remained with Butterfield.) Nash says John Sebastian was also on their mind, but he still resisted; by then, Sebastian was about to set sail on his post-Spoonful career.
With a planned summer tour in the works, they were fast running out of options. Someone had to make a decision, and that person would be Ertegun. Although he remained very much in Stills’ corner, a part of Ertegun missed Buffalo Springfield, and the thought of Stills and Young reunited had stayed with him. During a dinner with Stills and Geffen at his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (or, as Crosby would recall in his first memoir, he and Roberts), Ertegun slyly played a few Springfield songs on his stereo.
Finally, Ertegun posed the question outright: What about asking Young to join? “There’s something about Neil Young that goes with this,” he said to Stills, according to an interview Ertegun later gave to author Dave Zimmer. After all, he argued, Stills and Young had “something special” in the Springfield. Ertegun even offered to call Young himself. (Another possible reason to inject some revamped-lineup news into the situation: while Crosby, Stills & Nash was a hit album, neither “Marrakesh Express” nor an edited-down version of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” had broken into the Top 10.) For any number of reasons, it was the one idea no one had considered before.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE Crosby, Stills and Nash began putting their artistic union on tape at the Heider studio, Young was in the same facility beginning the next chapter of his career. He had a new group of players behind him—three members of the Rockets, a band that had kicked around in several previous incarnations, including an LA doo-wop group, before morphing into their bustling pop-garage sound. Much to the dismay of lead guitarist George Whitsell, Young had begun rehearsing with the other Rockets—singer and guitarist Danny Whitten, drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot. They had rechristened themselves as Crazy Horse and, with him, had recorded two monolithic epics in January 1969. “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” were both relatively simple in structure and musicianship; both were long and spacious enough to allow Young to roam free on his guitar; and both augured a new, stripped-down, primal sound for Young. They also cut “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” which would wind up the title song of the record they were making.
After a break—and once Crosby, Stills and Nash had vacated the premises after finishing their record—Young and Crazy Horse returned in March to tape another song, the fever-dream-fueled “Cinnamon Girl,” which was more concise than their previous tracks but had a densely packed power. Few remember Young crossing paths with Crosby, Stills and Nash at the time, although Young and Roberts did visit the trio’s sessions as they wrapped up to hear “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”; in a photo that exists of that moment, Young looks noticeably wide-eyed and impressed at what he’s hearing. Standing near him, Stills has the expression of someone who knows what he’s achieved.
In some ways, though, it was inevitable that Young would end up connecting with the three of them. Born in Toronto on November 12, 1945, ten months after Stills, he shared traits with each of his future partners. Like Stills, he had a mother—Edna, known to all as Rassy—who was a tough, life-of-the-party type, and a father—Canadian journalist, sportswriter and novelist Scott Young—who was in and out of his life (much like Floyd Crosby, William Nash and William Stills with their sons). As with the Stills clan, the Young family had moved around for several years, living in the small town of Omemee, Ontario, which Young—who was also coping with a diagnosis of polio at the age of five—would later revisit in “Helpless.” After Scott Young began straying from his wife, Young was told his parents were divorcing; it was 1960, the same year Crosby’s parents broke up. Like Floyd Crosby, Scott Young wasn’t known to be especially supportive of his son’s musical ambitions.
Moving to Winnipeg with his mother and his brother, Bob, Young garnered a reputation as quick witted but sensitive. Like Crosby, he had his mischievous side; like all three of them, he realized soon enough that playing guitar and singing made him stand out, especially with girls. The young Neil Young was elusive even in his youth. As one of his high school classmates later told writer John Einarson, Young once bolted from school as soon as the bell rang, right out a window instead of the classroom door: “That was kind of his philosophy,” she said. Young’s first instrument was the ukulele, but by Winnipeg he had moved to an acoustic guitar and then an electrified one. He tried joining local bands, but soon after starting high school in 1961, he formed his earliest group, the Squires, which played concerts as early as 1963, when Young was all of seventeen. Like Nash at the same age, Young was indoctrinated into the world of bars and clubs early on. The songs the Squires played and recorded—quasi-surf instrumentals, smitten-teen ballads (“I’ll Love You Forever”) and twangy throbbers (“I Wonder,” which would later morph into “Don’t Cry No Tears”)—displayed Young’s range and devotion to craft. With the encouragement of his mother but his father’s hesitation, he dropped out of high school before graduating to pursue the dream of becoming a professional musician.
The Squires slogged on, moving to Fort William in Ontario (where Young turned nineteen and wrote one of his most important early songs, “Sugar Mountain”), then back to Winnipeg. Young and Stills met during this period. By the fall of 1965, the Squires had collapsed and Young had shifted to solo, Dylan-influenced songs, such as “The Rent Is Always Due.” Traveling to New York City with Stills’ Greenwich Village address in hand, Young learned that his new friend had left for California, but Stills’ roommate and music buddy Richie Furay happened to be in the apartment. He filled Young in on Stills’ whereabouts, and several false starts followed. Young recorded some of his new songs for Elektra, which passed, and thanks to a Canadian friend, Bruce Palmer, Young found himself at the Motown building in Detroit. Palmer enlisted Young in the Mynah Birds, a woolly rock band fronted by an African American lead singer—Ricky James Matthews, later known as Rick James. Preliminary recordings were made, but Matthews was AWOL from the US Navy Reserve and eventually turned himself in and spent time behind bars. With the Mynah Birds shut down and his Canadian music prospects looking dimmer by the day, Young, with Palmer and some other friends, piled into his new car—his second used hearse—and headed for California. It was the beginning of spring in 1966. The hearse wasn’t the ideal car for a cross-country road trip, but if he hadn’t bought it, and if Stills hadn’t noticed it and its Canadian plates on Sunset Boulevard, Young’s career may well have gone in another, less rewarding direction.
Young’s tenure with the Springfield made for an even rougher ride than the hearse. To Stills’ consternation, Young seemed to be in and out of the band on a regular basis. Even once he rejoined the group after dropping out before the Monterey Pop Festival, he remained his own, solitary man. During a group interview in Connecticut in the fall of 1967, the band members reveled in a party that was thrown for them, bouncing around and chatting up everyone—all except Young, who was dressed in black and quietly sipped a glass of milk in a different part of the room. After the Springfield’s farewell concert in Long Beach, California, in May 1968, Young began assembling his own team, including a crazed but inspired producer, arranger and musician named Jack Nitzsche and an ornery producer named David Briggs. Young also married for the first time, to a Topanga waitress named Susan Acevedo, in late 1968.
During the same period when Crosby, Stills and Nash were first harmonizing in the homes of Laurel Canyon, Young was huddled with Briggs and Nitzsche to make his first album, Neil Young, released in early 1969. Unlike anything he’d made before or would make after, Neil Young took the layered musical textures of the Springfield to another level. The songs were often melancholic, stacked with pipe organs, multiple guitar parts, gospel backup singers, even rodeo hoedown strings. In “I’ve Loved Her So Long” and “Here We Are in the Years,” the album established the vibe—that of the high-voiced, lonely-guy balladeer—that would follow Young around, often to his dismay, for years.
Neil Young made the smallest of splashes, not even making Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, but true to his restless spirit, Young was already looking ahead. The same month it was released, he was already at work with Crazy Horse. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was more basic, far more cohesive and far more down home than Neil Young; billing Crazy Horse on the cover, Young could be both boss and one of the guys in the band. But at least initially, it, too, fell short of expectations. Released the same month as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere peaked at no. 127 on the Billboard chart. Although he never wavered in his support of Crazy Horse during those early days, Young also had to consider other options.
When Ertegun broached the idea of his former bandmate augmenting Crosby, Stills and Nash, a huge red flag immediately unfurled in Stills’ mind. “I went, ‘Why would we do that?’” he has said. “‘You know him—he has control issues.’ As a trio, we worked pretty well.” Yet other factors were in play. For all his cockiness, Stills harbored doubts about his abilities as a lead guitarist (which he later told Zimmer were “kind of silly”). Stills also couldn’t deny the financial ramifications of a so-called supergroup: “I knew this was going to be a monster and it would make scads of money,” he told David Fricke three decades later. “And that maybe the thought of being multi-millionaires would soothe, would balm, some of these old wounds.” It’s possible that the power-play dynamic also appealed to him: Stills would be asking Young to join his very successful band and would thereby have the upper hand.
Not everyone was sold on the idea. Geffen and Roberts worried about tinkering with the trio, a formula that was clearly working. In his memoir Waging Heavy Peace, Young enthused that Crosby, Stills and Nash “sounded like a new car coming off the assembly line!” Young also worried that Stills would “overplay” and “step on me,” much like in the Springfield. Meanwhile, their friends scratched their heads at the thought of Young joining up. “I thought, ‘That’s an odd pairing,’” says Sebastian. “Here was this perfect vocal unit. Nothing against Neil, but I didn’t see the need to add to it. I just felt that’s such a complete unit and now they’re going to get it more complicated again.”
Far more problematically, Crosby and Nash were at first ambivalent, and rightly so. Nash, who’d been smitten with Young’s Springfield mini-epic “Expecting to Fly” and had played the recording endlessly on a portable stereo during a Hollies tour, asked for a meeting with Young. “Neil wasn’t a superstar then—he was the guitar player in the Buffalo Springfield,” he says. “I said, ‘You want someone to join the band I’ve never fuckin’ met? I don’t know if I’ll like the way he smells or whatever.’” The two sat down for breakfast in Greenwich Village, near where the trio were beginning to rehearse at the Village Vanguard jazz club when it was empty during the day, and Young charmed Nash with his sense of humor. Crosby was also on the fence. But after hearing Young perform in Nash and Mitchell’s driveway, he was won over. “I said, ‘Oh, shit! We need him in the band,’” Crosby says. “Not just because he was a guitar and keyboard player but because of the songs. They were completely different from ours and I knew what they would do. So I flipped and said, ‘I want him in.’”
Young couldn’t deny the musical blend that Crosby, Stills and Nash had created, especially when he heard them rehearsing; nor could he discount how much he enjoyed exchanging guitar parts with Stills, whose talent he still respected. Taylor recalled a night he and Stills jammed with Young in a club somewhere on the East Coast. “We said, ‘Wow, that was great,’ and Neil said, ‘Really cool,’” Taylor recalled. “Neil wanted to find out if he and Stephen could share a stage without hitting each other and if I was any good.” Driving to Young’s boxy redwood home on Skyline Trail in Topanga, where he lived with his wife, Susan, Stills made the offer to Young. For several weeks, the deal hung in the balance when Young insisted he receive equal billing in the name, as opposed to none at all (the group still wanted to be known as Crosby, Stills and Nash). In what would not be the last time, they consented to his demand, and in mid-July, the word was out, thanks to Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle and other writers: Crosby, Stills and Nash were now Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. “Nothing Neil does is an accident,” says Crosby. “We were the hottest thing at that point. He knew, and he knew exactly how to work it. He’s a very bright guy.”
Ertegun had his wish for a partial Springfield reunion and Young had a project that could elevate him in the public eye in new ways. How it would benefit the other three members of what was now a quartet was open to question. “They had the tiger by the tail on the first album, and it all looked great,” says Stone. “I don’t think anyone could have comprehended where it was headed by bringing in Neil. I don’t think they understood the potential in what was about to happen to them. It was risky to throw that element in. High risk, high reward.”
When reviewing Crosby, Stills & Nash, a writer from the Detroit Free Press said, “If the heavens ever descend upon us with musical gifts, they include Crosby, Stills and Nash.” Then he noted the unexpected addition of Young: “One could fear the extra man may upset the beautiful balance already existing.”
NO SOONER HAD Young merged with Crosby, Stills and Nash than they began rehearsing and even recording new material, and many of those rehearsals took place at a white, gated compound at 3615 Shady Oak Road on the north side of Laurel Canyon. Formerly owned by dweebish actor Wally Cox, and then by Peter Tork of the Monkees, the house became the expanded band’s home base. At the top of a curvy driveway for maximum seclusion, it came with all the Hollywood-star amenities of the time: a pool, a sauna, a pool house with an apartment above it, marble floors and staircase, and a multicar driveway. In between the kitchen and living room was a large room that had been converted into a music practice space, its walls covered in rugs to muffle the sound.
Although it was technically Tork’s house (he was in and out), the bedrooms were always filled and the vibe remained hippie casual. During breaks while recording their debut album, Crosby, Stills or Nash would stop by the pool for a quick dip; the house was so high in the hills that no other homes overlooked it, so nude swims were a daily, private occurrence. Stills—and sometimes his musical running buddy Dallas Taylor, who would often crash at the house—would seclude themselves in the music room and jam for hours upon hours, with friends slipping candy bars under the door for Stills to help him keep up his energy. One evening, ornate tapestries were spread across the living room floor for a casual banquet for the band and two dozen friends, including Joni Mitchell, who came bearing paint brushes and an easel, part of her other life as a painter.
One of the Shady Oak bedrooms was occupied by Salli Sachse, a comely twenty-three-year-old actress who had entranced teenagers the world over in beach-party movies like How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and Bikini Beach. Sachse had lost her first husband in a flying accident in 1966, after which she had dated Dean Martin’s agent. The freewheeling, anything-goes Shady Oak scene was a radically different and even more liberal-minded version of the Hollywood she thought she knew. “There was nude swimming and a lot of people running around without any clothes on,” she says. “It was a different set of norms, totally against all the values I grew up with in San Diego. Someone would always be pushing the limits of public decency in the kitchen.”
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young still needed a bass player, and former Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer was the first who came to mind for Stills and Young. But the plan quickly hit a speedbump. Crosby and Nash weren’t convinced Palmer was up for the task; they may have also been concerned about what was essentially a Springfield reunion in their midst. Palmer had a history of drug busts and deportations, most recently in early 1968. Luckily, a replacement was practically in their backyard. The legends of how a teenaged but already seasoned Motown bass player named Greg Reeves came into the fold vary. Reeves, who was sharing a house with Rick James, remembered Crosby and Nash visiting one day and literally pulling him into their world; James himself would recall running into Stills at a local club, which led to Reeves being invited to a band audition at Shady Oak. No one could agree on his age, either: everyone thought Reeves was nineteen, thanks to what turned out to be a phony ID card, but in fact he was about three years younger. “We always wondered why he was a little immature,” said Taylor. “But he was tall. You couldn’t tell how old he was.” What wasn’t debatable was the way Reeves’ bass lines added an extra, funky thrust to the rhythm section. After Reeves was invited to sit in with them at Shady Oak, James knew his protégé had landed the job when James was tossed a vial of pure cocaine as a thank-you gesture from the band.
With a full-band lineup now in place, the group began prepping for what promised to be a feverishly hectic summer and fall: concerts, a smattering of TV appearances, photo shoots behind the house on Shady Oak, even a follow-up record to make with Young in tow, which Atlantic was already hoping to release in time for Christmas. In the early summer of 1969, the full band set up in the driveway to play outside with their stacks of amplifiers. Crosby discouraged it, fearing it would bring the police, and he was right: at sundown, squad cars arrived to tell them the band could be heard several canyons over and they needed to stop, immediately.
But between the gold-record award, the fame, the pressure and an audience that was suddenly hanging onto their every utterance about life, music and politics, the scenario was heating up like the pots of rice people always kept on the boil in the kitchen. Bobby Hammer—a former Army Security Agency employee who had moved to California to pursue a completely different career, in photography and film—was one of many at Shady Oak who grappled with the group’s curious dynamic. (Hammer, who had arrived first, lived in the apartment above the poolhouse with Sachse, who was then his girlfriend.) In the kitchen one day, Stills and Crosby flew into a heated debate about something Stills had read about turtles and how long they could survive underwater. “It was some silly thing and they got into a really big argument about it,” Hammer says. “I wondered, ‘What are they really trying to say to each other here? What’s the real undercurrent?’” Another time, Hammer was filming Crosby as he reclined in the white rope hammock in the driveway; Crosby was pontificating about one topic or another when in stormed Stills, shouting at Crosby. All Hammer could decipher was that Crosby and Stills were already angry with each other: Crosby wasn’t happy that Stills was late, and Stills wasn’t happy that Crosby had missed a day or two of rehearsal when he was sick. Crosby criticized Stills for not thinking enough about the group as a whole. Stills, continuing his shouting, said, “You walked out two fuckin’ days in a row, you fuckin’ hypocrite—you piss me off!” Then he stalked off.
Years later, Stills felt the argument had stemmed from Crosby’s uneasiness at being booked on TV shows like This Is Tom Jones, where the Welsh pop singer had joined them for a riotous “Long Time Gone” that fall. (Geffen pushed for as much mainstream exposure as possible.) But it almost didn’t matter what had instigated the clash. “It wasn’t shocking,” says Sachse, who also witnessed the argument. But she felt uneasy about the “bad vibes.” Hammer also observed the other part of their relationship. Whether it was a rehearsal or a concert, the group would always play expertly after one of their blow-outs, as if they were kissing and making up in song.
AS MICHAEL LANG learned, few in the group’s camp doubted their potential, even before Crosby, Stills & Nash arrived in record stores. Only twenty-four, Lang, whose halo of dark curls surrounded an impish mug, was in the early stages of co-producing a summer festival in Woodstock, New York. Having already organized a successful outdoor rock gathering at a racetrack in Miami the previous year, Lang was learning what it took to mount such happenings, from arranging artists’ fees to providing bathroom facilities. Working out of the Manhattan office of an agent and friend at the William Morris Agency, Lang was introduced one spring day to Geffen, who eagerly played him a test pressing of the trio’s album.
As a fan of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, Lang was already primed, but the majesty of the music won him over, and he knew he wanted the band at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair—but he also sensed Geffen was going to play hardball. “Geffen knew what he had, put it that way,” Lang recalls. “He was like the cat who had swallowed the canary. You knew this was going to be huge.” When Geffen demanded the group receive $10,000, the second-largest fee Lang was offering, Lang agreed on the spot. Although the biggest acts, like Jimi Hendrix, were being paid $15,000, it was a good deal for Crosby, Stills and Nash (Young was added after the initial agreement was made). Their payday put them on the same level as Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival, bands with many hit singles and gold albums under their belts by 1969. Stills would later tell writer Alan di Perna that they’d had to talk Geffen into including them in the festival; Geffen was worried they wouldn’t get paid, but Stills and Crosby were convinced it would be the place to be that summer. Woodstock was to open its gates in the middle of August.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s stage debut had been scheduled for New York’s Fillmore East. The downtown theater was only a year old, but it bestowed immediate counterculture credibility on anyone who played there. Yet that show, and a planned set at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, had to be postponed when Nash developed throat polyps. Instead, their public debut would be in Chicago’s 3,800-seat Auditorium Theatre on August 16. There, they received three standing ovations, one after the very first song, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Even the group, which hadn’t yet performed together in public, appeared to be taken aback by the response. “Golly, we needed that,” Nash told them.
At those shows and others for the remainder of the year, audiences basked in a band that, on multiple levels, was unlike anything they’d seen before. Starting with their clothing, each embodied an archetype of the moment. With his fringed jackets, his head nodding up and down with the music, and his decidedly opinionated between-song patter, Crosby was the counterculture agitator, the free-love spokesman, the benevolent hippie-philosopher. More straitlaced in his garb (sweaters, white-collared shirts) and the most severe in his onstage demeanor, Stills was the down-to-business professional. Nash, the genial stage host with the voice, air and occasional embroidered vest of British gentry, despite his working-class origins, appeared to be the sensitive, worldly soul many audience members probably wanted to be themselves; he was also the band member female fans tended to crush on the hardest. Taking in his surroundings with hooded eyes, Young, the last-minute addition, was both part of the show and apart from it—the one who, like many other members of their generation, didn’t quite want to commit to anything at the moment.
The format of their shows wasn’t unique. Once Bob Dylan had fully invested in electrifying his sound a few years earlier, he’d begun splitting his shows between unaccompanied acoustic songs and high-voltage sets with the Hawks. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young used a similar format, albeit with their anti-group twist. They would open the shows with the founding trio, strumming out a song or two, and then be joined by Young, at which point they’d play pop musical chairs, performing separately or in pairs. “It’s up to each individual, you know, whatever songs they want to lay down to people, and sometimes it gets a bit difficult,” Nash told the audience in Houston. In fact, their set lists were largely established. They would always begin with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” often followed by the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” a showcase for the original trio’s harmonies. Crosby and Nash would wrap their voices around “Guinnevere”; Crosby would quiet the crowd with a solo version of “Triad,” often dissing the Byrds’ rejection of the song in the process. (In Detroit he told the crowd, “A certain member got red-faced, stormed out of the room and said, ‘That’s a freak-out orgy song and I won’t sing it!’”) Stills would use an acoustic blues number, “Black Queen,” to showcase pins-and-needles guitar runs. By fall, he had also devised a novel move, segueing from a solo-piano version of “49 Bye-Byes” into a crowd-pleasing, stomp-your-feet take on “For What It’s Worth” that hammered home the group’s socially aware image. (After one of those performances, someone in the crowd yelled, “Stills in ’72!” three years before the next presidential election.) Young would often accompany himself on “Country Girl.”
After an intermission, Reeves would emerge, Taylor’s drum kit would be rolled out, and all six would fire up the electric second half of the show. As intimate and hushed as the acoustic set could be, the second bristled with amplification and tension. The harmonies were nowhere near as precise and full as they were on record—even four voices couldn’t duplicate the sound they’d captured in the studio—but the plugged-in sets offered another side of the band. During “Long Time Gone,” Young’s lead guitar and Stills’ throat-shredding cameo in the chorus seemed to vie for attention. Stills reveled in notice-me gestures, like the way he would throw his right arm back after he hit a note on the guitar. The group rendition of “Down by the River” became a forum for tennis-match guitar parts between Stills and Young.
Threaded throughout the show, especially the first half, were gags and in-jokes, ranging from amusing to alarmingly self-satisfied for such a new act. When Young walked on, Stills would coyly introduce each to the other in a drawl (“Mr. Young, meet Mr. Nash,” and so forth). Minutes could pass between songs as they joked or tuned up. Any other act would have been booed or criticized for such indulgences, but for these four, each witticism or bit, spontaneous or not, was greeted with cheers and interjections of “Right on!” from the crowd.
The day after their Chicago debut, Nash and Taylor were being helicoptered toward the Woodstock festival when Taylor asked the pilot the name of the lake over which they were flying. The pilot informed him it was no waterway but an audience. By the time all six musicians had assembled at the grounds—Young arrived by car with Jimi Hendrix—several hundred thousand people had settled in with their tickets or crashed the gates, and the enormity of the event overcame them. In a backstage tent, they were met by John Sebastian, who sensed their anxiety. (As they well knew, it was only their second concert.) “They’re looking around going, ‘Holy shit,’” recalls Sebastian, who shared his weed to calm them down. “And I’m going, ‘Don’t panic, guys. This is a great situation. You just have to go with it.’”
Upon his arrival, Crosby witnessed a seemingly miraculous sight: a New York State trooper in pressed pants and black, shiny shoes walking nonplussed into a mudbank to rescue a girl who’d cut her bare foot on a shard of glass. When the police cruiser became stuck in the muck, Crosby watched as a dozen of his fellow hippies helped push the car out. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is working,’” Crosby says. “‘This is what I want. This is different and I like it.’”
But everyone arrived with his own baggage. Taylor and Nash’s helicopter nearly crash-landed after it scraped an electrical wire; when all seemed lost for a moment, Taylor considered kicking in what he called Nash’s “smug, English face” before it went down. Stills worried that the rainstorms that had soaked the festival grounds that afternoon would ruin their instruments or screw up their tunings. Young had his doubts about such a circus before he arrived, and they stayed with him. Rolling Stone magazine had launched two years before, almost immediately becoming the journalistic heart of the counterculture, and as part of its team coverage of the festival, writer Greil Marcus found himself by the side of the stage that evening, where he encountered Young taking in the crowd. “He was quiet and circumspect,” recalls Marcus. “It was dark and he kept saying, ‘I wish I could see all the way out.’” (Meanwhile, Mitchell, who had been their opening act in Chicago, missed the festival entirely. Early reports portrayed it as a traffic-clogged mudfest, and since Mitchell was scheduled to tape the all-important Dick Cavett Show the following day, Geffen argued that she should avoid Woodstock.)
Their sixteen-song set, which began at 3:00 A.M. on the last of Woodstock’s three days, wasn’t without its glitches. The harmonies and guitars were not always in tune, and an inspired idea—Young and Stills reprising “Mr. Soul” as an acoustic duet—lacked the fire of the Springfield version. Yet Lang and the band’s peers who gathered to watch them by the sides of the stage were startled by how serene the now tens of thousands remaining in the crowd were during the set and how intimate it felt despite the surroundings. “That was remarkable,” Lang says. “Nobody captured the moment like they did in terms of that connection. It was so quiet. You feel they were really connected.”
When the film version of the concert was released, an announcer would be heard introducing them as “Crosby, Stills, Nash…,” as if the “and Young” had been edited out. In fact, it had. Only after their set had begun had Young made it clear he didn’t want to be captured on camera. “Neil would threaten to deck anybody who did,” Nash says. “Or so I heard, after the fact.” Since the movie used the trio version of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” his absence wasn’t immediately noticeable, but his decision—“a huge mistake,” says Crosby—was the first sign that Young was already having second thoughts two months after hooking up with the others. Stills later said, only half joking, that Young’s light blue suit may have been the issue in terms of camera shyness, but Young told his biographer Jimmy McDonough that Woodstock was “a bullshit gig.… I think Stephen was way overboard into the huge crowd. Everybody was on this Hollywood trip with the fuckin’ cameras.” Keeping to his original plan to alternate between his own career and his band membership, Young had recorded a few tracks with Crazy Horse—including the almost desperate “I Believe in You,” a cover of country singer Don Gibson’s “Oh, Lonesome Me”—shortly before the festival.
Musical and personal matters improved during the group’s multi-night stand at their hometown venue, the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. With its emphasis on mainstream entertainers—they were bookended by pop crooner Johnny Mathis and Hawaiian crossover act Don Ho—the Greek wasn’t normally receptive to rock and roll, and the Geffen-Roberts crew slyly ensured that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would be the first rock act to play the six-thousand-seat venue by way of a half-truth. “The sales pitch was that, for the most part, the show was acoustic, but that was a lie,” says Stone. “They knew there was going to be an electric section, but they didn’t know it would be so loud and ferocious. By the time it was resolved, the show was over.”
Beyond financial reasons—the band was paid $70,000 for those shows—the risk was worth it: after playing the Greek (in a show that Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn called “a triumph of the first order” and “a staggering display of individual and collective talent”), the group was newly legitimized in the eyes of promoters eager to book them into similar non-rock venues. (Among those in the audience at the Greek, at the invitation of Geffen, was up-and-coming promoter Jerry Heller, who would later work on duo outings by Crosby and Nash; much later, he would become the notorious manager of the West Coast rap act N.W.A.) Other signs of mainstream acceptance were cropping up: when Bayou West, a “hip” clothing store in Chula Vista, opened its doors, the local newspaper coverage noted that the inside “features Crosby, Stills and Nash instead of the more conventional Lawrence Welk as background music.”
A few weeks later, the annual Big Sur Folk Festival should have been a placid and mellow gig, and in many ways, it was. Crosby took part in a hot-tub session with naked men and women; the quartet shared a stage with Sebastian, Joan Baez and former Traffic guitarist Dave Mason, among others; and the group played in front of a pool, with ocean views behind them. But it wasn’t without problems: on the first of their two days at the festival, they had barely finished their first song, “Helplessly Hoping,” when a stoned heckler began berating them for their fur coats and rock-star image. Crosby reminded him (and the audience) that the group was playing for free, having canceled a TV appearance to be there: “If you didn’t pay, shut up,” Crosby told the guy, to cheers from the crowd.
But as Crosby tried to reason with him, Stills’ temper flared. He stepped off his stool and approached the heckler, hoping at first to make him chill out. “Peace and love, peace and love—kick his ass,” Crosby joked, although in a tone that implied he wasn’t kidding. Nash implored Stills: “If you push him in the pool, Stephen, I’ll never forgive you!” and the crowd laughed. Young simply muttered, “Positive… positive… positive” into his microphone.
Before anyone could fully grasp what was happening, the two men were in a tussle. The crowd quieted. “Wasn’t that great?” Crosby recalls. “Stills was ready to punch that motherfucker out. It was hysterical. I was perfectly happy with him wanting to punch his lights out.” Stills was quickly pulled away, and their set resumed. (Five years later, talking about the documentary that was made about the festival, Stills admitted, “I did give him a knee in the old solar plexus, but they didn’t put that in the movie.”) Onstage, Stills rambled on about how “we think about that shit that that guy was saying,” and how the group could fall into that “same old trap.” As one reporter mistily noted, “Stills was ministered to in a loving fashion and scores of spectators cried at the senselessness of the confrontation and the beauty of the music.” Befitting the way they could lurch from madness to magic and back again, they then performed a flawless “You Don’t Have to Cry” with pitch-perfect harmonies.
IN HER CAR, Salli Sachse was navigating the canyons of Topanga, listening to the radio, when the station’s disc jockey, B. Mitchel Reed, broke the inconceivable news that Christine Hinton, Crosby’s main love, was dead. Sachse and Bobby Hammer—who together had just moved out of the Tork house, since the free-for-all environment had become too much for them—called Crosby at his new home in Marin County, and whoever answered confirmed the report. The two then drove north to stay in Crosby’s house and help him through the most traumatic episode of his life.
Crosby and Hinton had moved to a rented house in Novato a few months before, in the summer of 1969. Crosby had grown weary of Los Angeles for several reasons. On the night of August 8, about half a mile from his LA home, the members of Charles Manson’s cult had slaughtered five people: the pregnant actress Sharon Tate; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; Jay Sebring, a hairdresser; a writer, Wojciech Frykowski; and a teenager, Steven Parent, who knew the caretaker for the estate. Tate and her husband, film director Roman Polanski, who was in Europe making a movie, were renting the home where the murders took place; eerily, the house belonged to Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day and a record producer who had worked on the first two Byrds albums. The next night, Manson himself, along with several of his followers, had killed a supermarket executive, Leno LaBianca, and LaBianca’s wife, Rosemary, in their home south of Griffith Park. Manson was known by some in musical circles for his friendship with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, among others; Manson played guitar and had written and recorded several songs. When Young heard the songs, he thought they were “fascinating” and suggested that Mo Ostin, head of Reprise Records (where Young recorded on his own), meet Manson. Manson had already spent time in prison after being convicted on a variety of charges over a period of many years, but few expected him to transform into the darkest, grisliest incarnation of the counterculture. Crosby immediately bought a 12-gauge shotgun to protect himself, and he and Hinton decided it was time to leave Los Angeles.
Crosby and Hinton seemed inseparable, especially when Crosby was off the road. “She rolled the best joints, and she was tolerant of his ways,” says Hammer. “She could make him laugh, and intellectually she could keep up with him. When others were around, she knew it was David’s show and she pretty much stayed in the background. She always made him feel stronger and better.” Given Crosby’s liberal attitude toward relationships, it was hardly surprising when Debbie Donovan, a friend of Hinton’s barely out of her teens, settled into the house as well.
On the morning of September 30, Crosby seemed to have it all: his career had taken off, and he had found the woman who appeared to be his soul mate. The Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart was preparing to deliver a horse to Hinton, but in the meantime, she and one of her close friends, Barbara Langer, were taking Hinton’s cats to the vet. On her way out the door, Hinton passed a few hand-rolled joints to Crosby and Nash, who was visiting that day. (Nash later claimed that, earlier, he had slept with Hinton with Crosby’s knowledge.) Hinton and Langer then climbed into Crosby’s green VW bus.
In a normally harmless moment that would come to derail the course of Crosby’s life and change his demeanor for over a decade, the two women were driving to the veterinarian’s office when one of the cats escaped Langer’s grip and jumped onto Hinton; distracted, Hinton crashed the vehicle directly into an oncoming school bus. She was killed instantly. Since Crosby lived near members of the Dead—and had been encouraging and coaching them on their harmony singing for what would be their next album, Workingman’s Dead—a member of the Dead’s crew, Ray Slade, drove Crosby to the hospital to identify the body. On the way, Crosby saw his mangled VW bus by the side of the road. In the hospital parking lot, an attendant was washing down a parked ambulance. When Hart heard about the accident, he rushed to the hospital too. (He and Langer had recently ended a relationship.) When he arrived, he found her wrapped in bandages, “like the Mummy,” he says. Hinton, whom he didn’t see, had already passed away. She was only twenty-one.
Crosby’s friends filled his home almost instantaneously, seeking to help and comfort him. “It brought everybody down to earth,” says Hart. “Everybody’s high and stoned, and we didn’t have many fatalities. This was a real wake-up call. We were moving a thousand miles a second. And all of a sudden this just stopped the clock. Certainly for David.” Members of the Dead dropped by with drugs; Sachse made chocolate chip cookies and mended jeans for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young when they returned from gigs. “Things like that kept David busy,” she says. “He was doing everything he could to avoid thinking about it. There was so much going on—the speed of all this and having to deal with his grief. Her parents would call and say, ‘Is there going to be a funeral?’ It was painful.” (Crosby would eventually spread Hinton’s ashes in San Francisco Bay, early in 1970.)
Although Crosby was shaken—“His entire world had been yanked from under him,” says Nash—neither Crosby nor anyone else in the band had time to completely process what had happened. A scheduled concert the night of Hinton’s death at Winterland in San Francisco was canceled, but in several weeks’ time, the group was due to continue recording its first record as a quartet. Preliminary work had been done in Los Angeles, but they had booked three weeks at the Wally Heider studio in San Francisco’s grimy Tenderloin neighborhood with a holiday release still in mind. Stills, Nash and Young took rooms in the nearby Caravan Lodge Motel; for added lunacy, Young brought along two pet bush babies, who scampered around his room. (According to Halverson, Ertegun decreed that the second group album must include Young now that he had appeared with them at Woodstock. The festival transformed from muddy joke to cultural talisman almost overnight when Rolling Stone rushed out an in-depth story cementing its importance.) As soon as they finished the album, they would have to begin jetting around the country for concerts, from Pittsburgh to Hawaii. There would be no time to mourn.
AS STEPHEN BARNCARD would see for himself, the next group album would not echo the fluid creation of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Hired as Bill Halverson’s assistant for the recording sessions in San Francisco, the twenty-two-year-old Barncard, who’d cut his teeth recording bands in Kansas City before relocating to the Bay Area, was more than eager to work on the first record by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but it wouldn’t always be what he expected. One day when Barncard looked through the glass into the recording room, he spied Crosby screaming into Nash’s ear from two inches away, although he couldn’t hear what he was saying. “It was frightening because the music was so good,” he says, “and it was frightening because of the tension between them.”
As Barncard also observed, there would be no dearth of material. Before the band arrived, their preliminary Los Angeles work tapes were shipped north. “Usually one or two reels come in on a project,” Barncard recalls, “but here, there was a cart stacked with tapes.” Nash brought “Our House,” his ode to life with Mitchell, and “Teach Your Children.” Written the previous year, the latter had been inspired by a Diane Arbus photograph, “Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962,” showing a young boy flashing a playful grimace while holding a plastic weapon. The advice-to-parents-and-kids song, which captured Nash’s straightforwardly melodic style, had poured out of him while he was under the influence of hash. He taught it to the band one day in the studio while walking around holding his guitar, as if he were a serenading waiter. Among his contributions, Stills had “Bluebird Revisited,” a slowed-down, nearly pleading update of the Springfield’s “Bluebird,” along with “So Begins the Task,” a despondent but stoically gentle farewell to Judy Collins that he had actually written before their breakup.
The album seemed to get off on the correct musical foot. On the first day of recording, with Mitchell watching, the full band tackled “Woodstock,” her look back at the festival she hadn’t been able to attend. Mitchell’s version, which would arrive in stores around the same time as the band’s, was misty and spectral, an idealized homage to a new-world moment she hadn’t experienced firsthand. Woodstock co-producer Michael Lang heard an altogether different arrangement when he was visiting LA; as he walked down Sunset Strip, Stills pulled up alongside him and asked him to accompany him back to the Shady Oak house. There, in the music room, Stills and Taylor, on organ and drums, respectively, blasted out a rocked-out version of the song. “Mind-boggling,” Lang recalls. “I had no clue it was even written.” (During a trip to New York in September, Stills worked up a version with Jimi Hendrix that captured the wild-cat intensity of Stills’ voice.)
The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young take, cut in October, picked up where that jacked-up version left off; in a promising sign, they recorded the instrumental and vocal tracks in one day. “There was steam coming off the floor,” says Barncard, who watched awestruck. Yet other songs were rarely that easy. Over the following two months, many tracks were recorded, including a rash of solid if unexciting Stills numbers, such as “30 Dollar Fine” and “Everyday We Live”; Nash’s “You’re Wrong, Baby,” a comment on his early relationship with Mitchell that recalled Paul McCartney’s twee music-hall moments; and Young’s organ-driven “Sea of Madness” and “Everybody’s Alone.” Crosby, crushed by Hinton’s death, couldn’t bring himself to write new music and brought three songs he’d written the year before: “Déjà vu” and “Almost Cut My Hair” ended up on the final album, but the band quickly abandoned “Laughing” when they couldn’t grapple with its chord changes. “Déjà vu” had its origins in a ride on a friend’s sailboat that felt eerily familiar. “It’s as if I had done it before,” Crosby recalls. “I knew way more about it than I should have. I knew how to sail a boat right away. Not an instinctive thing. It doesn’t make sense. I wasn’t thinking about that specifically when I wrote the song. It just came, but in hindsight, the song was informed by those experiences. I felt then and now that I have been here before. I don’t believe in God but I think the Buddhists got it right—we do recycle.”
Crosby’s situation was the most tragic, but the others were struggling with personal turmoil of their own. Nash was beginning to realize that his romance with Mitchell, now a year old, was suffering from his work demands; he would also claim she was reluctant to marry him. Mitchell herself would say her heart was more shattered than his when things began going south, and that she told him he had to come to terms with his mother’s affair: “Until you forgive your mother, your relationships with women are going to be difficult,” she told Nash, according to biographer David Yaffe. Then again, observant friends like Hammer felt that Nash was more besotted of Mitchell than she was of him. “He was madly in love with her and she liked him and thought he was an okay guy, and that was about it,” says Hammer. “She did not have the same commitment and devotion.”
Meanwhile, Dallas Taylor had left his wife and had briefly moved in with Neil and Susan Young. Stills remained wounded after his breakup with Collins. The same month he played “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for her in California, Collins had met the intensely rugged actor Stacy Keach, her costar in a Joseph Papp production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in New York. She and Keach had quickly begun an affair before the show opened that summer. Stills continued sending her “crazy, love-filled, disjointed letters,” Collins says. Returning to her Upper West Side apartment with Keach one night after dinner, she found Stills hovering outside her building. “We had a confrontation in the street,” she recalls. “Stephen was quite persistent and I was in the other direction.” Again, she brushed him off.
With so many headstrong, creative chefs in the kitchen, most of them in various fragile emotional states, the making of their second album exhibited little of the focus of Crosby, Stills & Nash. They drove each other to distraction, attempting songs without always giving them the same degree of rehearsal time that had gone into the first album. Stills’ meticulous approach to layering and overdubbing voices and instruments to create the ideal recording grated on Young, who thought Stills shouldn’t have changed part of his original, rougher vocal on “Woodstock.” Nash would think a song was complete, leave for the night, then return the next day to hear a noticeable difference. He would think he was losing his mind, when, in fact, Stills had tweaked the song after everyone left. Not averse to making demands of his own, Nash wanted a different low note on the piano to end “Our House,” forcing Halverson to fly down to Los Angeles to use a different keyboard in a different studio for one sustained ommmm.
Stills, who had run a tight musical ship on the first album, saw his control slipping away. When Halverson showed up to work in San Francisco, the sessions had already started without him. Halverson’s first instructions were to set things up so the band could play an electric version of Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair” live in the studio. The finished version, edited down from a nearly nine-minute jam, captured the snappish fire of the Stills and Young interplay. Stills thought Crosby’s voice was too raw, but Crosby wanted it that way. “David thought it was perfect,” says Barncard. “It was what it was.” (As laughable as many considered the lyrics, including, later, Crosby himself, the rasp in his voice also expressed his anguish after Hinton’s death.) “I didn’t want anyone to be in charge,” says Crosby. “I didn’t like that. Right from the start I knew I was not going to let Stephen be the leader of the group. Which he wanted to be. I didn’t want it myself, but I didn’t want anyone else to be either. Which was deeply frustrating for Stephen.”
The gloom that hovered over the session led to one noticeable sacrifice. They recorded a cover of Terry Reid’s “Horses Through a Rainstorm” that Nash had once attempted with the Hollies. Fueled by Stills’ burbling church organ and trio harmonies that extended the ray-of-light high spirits of their first album, “Horses Through a Rainstorm” was almost a spiritual follow-up to “Marrakesh Express.” But it was deemed too sunny, too commercial, for the comparatively moodier new album, and the group relegated the recording to Atlantic’s vault. Another lost treasure would be many attempts to record “So Begins the Task,” one of Stills’ most fluid and moving songs. “It’s like, ‘What was wrong with us? What were we thinking?’” Stills has said. “We were brimming with songs. But we would go into the studio and write there, which turned out to be a dreadful mistake as studio costs and discipline go.” (Adds Crosby of the band abandoning that song, “Mistakes—lots of mistakes. That was Stills at his best.”)
Meanwhile, Young made his bandmates accommodate his particular creative wishes. “Neil was all business,” says Barncard. “He would only show up for the tracking and doing his vocals, and then disappear. I didn’t see him around a lot.” Young had first tried recording “Helpless” with them over the summer in Los Angeles (also with Crazy Horse, without satisfying results). Now, in the fall, they tried it again, and again, and again. Young felt that Taylor and Reeves—Taylor specifically—were overplaying, rushing the tempo. He knew the song required a slower, sludgier pace. With that in mind, Young kept them going in the studio for hours until, just before dawn, when they were all drained, he had the take he wanted. Later, Stills overdubbed a shimmery, sustained guitar that he made to sound like a sleepy fiddle. On the last day, according to Barncard, Young asked Barncard for his two songs—“Helpless” and “Country Girl”—to be removed from the master reel so he could take them to a studio in Burbank to remix or add other instruments, including a pipe organ on “Country Girl.” “It was bedlam, man,” Stills has said. “It was everybody doing whatever they wanted. It didn’t start that way, but it ended that way.”
Before Hinton’s death, Crosby had been on top of planning and preparation, the one the management team consulted first. After Hinton’s passing, he was suddenly unable to handle those responsibilities, which now fell upon Nash. “Graham was easygoing and sensible and gentlemanly—he had an air of English sophistication,” says Sachse. “He had manners and knew right from wrong, and he could say to them, ‘Oh, come on, now.’ He wasn’t a hothead like Stephen and David.” In the way it harked back to the days when Nash had to oversee his family after his father’s imprisonment, the role was a natural one for him. But it also taxed his patience. “Stephen and Neil were back at each other, and coke was making us all nuts,” said Taylor. “I remember Graham crying in the studio: ‘Guys, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? You’re destroying this.’ He couldn’t understand why things were self-destructing so quickly. I was kind of dumbfounded. I thought, ‘This is not good.’” One day, Nash was seen walking around the studio holding a spoon that cradled an inch-and-a-half-high pile of cocaine. “By the time we got to Déjà vu and we’d snorted eighty pounds of cocaine,” Nash said later, “things were a little different.”
Grudges began piling up. At Heider’s one night, they successfully turned “Teach Your Children” into a sparkling country-style song with the help of the Dead’s Jerry Garcia, who overdubbed a pedal steel guitar. Young didn’t sing on the track (many don’t recall him being there), nor did he participate in Nash’s “Our House,” much to Nash’s irritation. “From day one, I don’t think the other guys in the band gave Graham the credit he deserved,” says Stone. “All the hits were Graham’s songs. They were determined to be a rock-and-roll band, but Graham turned out to be the most successful pop songwriter.” For his part, Taylor, who was lapsing deeper into drug use, was growing increasingly resentful that Young received billing in the group name, while he did not.
In another indication that his commitment to the group wasn’t as solid as the others had hoped, Young didn’t appear at all on several other tracks. When Nash told Stills the album needed an ear-grabbing opener along the lines of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Stills overnight wrote “Carry On,” a cathartic sign that he was regrouping after his breakup with Collins. Playing all the instruments himself, other than Taylor on drums and Nash thumping on a conga, Stills was back in his preferred captain’s seat. (He also paired it with a revival of his Springfield-era “Questions.”) Crosby had written “Déjà vu” the year before, and the trio had tried to cut it for the first album, to no avail. Given that the meter changed dramatically, from 6/8 to 4/4, and Crosby used an unusual tuning (E, B, D, G, A, D, from low to high), it was a tricky song to wrestle with. But they kept at it until the wee hours of the morning, and Stills slowly overdubbed parts on top of it, sometimes when Crosby was asleep.
For all the fragmentary nature of the work, the potential for greatness together nevertheless poked out. Nils Lofgren, an impish, teenaged Maryland-based singer and guitarist who’d met Young at the Cellar Door, a club in Washington, DC, had tracked Young down again in Topanga Canyon. He was working with his own band, Grin, and Young’s producer, David Briggs, that fall. One day Young, along with Crosby, Stills and Nash, came bounding into the studio. “The door flies open and CSNY come blowing in, all with matching two-foot-thick polar-bear fur coats,” Lofgren recalls. “Obscene furs. They say, ‘Briggs, can we play you something?’” Briggs had little time or use for the group—he was in Young’s camp, not theirs—but agreed, and the band put on a tape of their completed version of “Woodstock.” Starting with Young’s wrenching guitar, the song embodied the way he could energize the band, and the harmonies never sounded fuller or more overpowering. “We put it on 10 and were pinned by the volume,” Lofgren says. “It was impressive, especially those high harmonies. They were very proud of it.” At such moments, maybe the chaos was worth it.
MEANWHILE, THE BUSINESS of the band churned around them, with both rewarding and fraught results. Elliot Roberts wisely set up separate publishing companies for each man, but they soon began squabbling over who would get how many songs on the album and make more money as a result. (Even the musician designated bandleader for each session, a union rule, earned more. In one of the few bits of paperwork that seem to exist, the group cut several songs at Heider’s in Los Angeles in July, including a version of “Helpless”; Stills, as the leader, earned $171 for the day, whereas the others were paid $86 each.) Halverson would watch in frustration as Geffen and Roberts arrived packing paperwork and discussing plans for the rollout of what was now one of rock’s most eagerly anticipated albums. “When the managers would come in with the contracts, it would only take fifteen minutes,” says Halverson. “But somebody wasn’t getting their way and the business would get in the way of the creativity. The vibe would change and it would take us two days to get it back.”
No sooner had they wrapped up most of the work on the album, before Christmas 1969, when they had to pack their bags for a series of concerts around the country. That task alone was no small enterprise: the group’s show in Arizona would be delayed when twelve thousand pounds of equipment needed to be set up. The Winterland shows that had been canceled after Hinton’s death were rescheduled for November. Robert Greenfield, a young music journalist covering the show for Fusion magazine, recalls that “Crosby’s face was so sad you could cry.” But they returned triumphantly to Chicago, where the Chicago Tribune noted the “homogenous” audience—“almost to a man bell-bottomed, peajacketed, fringed, and long haired”—and were again greeted by standing ovations and shouts of “Right on!” At an outdoor stadium outside San Diego, they had to overcome overhead airline noise, even tuning up as the audience watched.
Seeds of discord were already sprouting up. At the Hawaii International Center Arena, Young showed up late, joining them midway into the acoustic set (and apologizing to the crowd for it). The group was invited to participate in the Vietnam Moratorium in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that November; along with an earlier such protest, it would call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Southeast Asia. Further reinforcing the connection between themselves and their audience, who were enraged by the war in Vietnam, the group performed a short set. Stills told the crowd: “Politics is bullshit! Richard Nixon is bullshit! Spiro Agnew is bullshit! Our music isn’t bullshit!” Young, however, didn’t make the event.
In early December, they were enlisted to join the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Flying Burrito Brothers (the country-rock band that included Crosby’s former Byrdmate Chris Hillman) in a free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway. Originally planned for Golden Gate Park, the event had been moved twice to end up at its current locale, a dust bowl east of San Francisco. Promoters had dubbed the daylong event “Woodstock West,” but by the time the band arrived by helicopter on the grounds, the mood was anything but festive. The crowd, which shut down roadways and mushroomed to several hundred thousand, seemed to be everywhere. Leo Makota, a burly, red-headed, lumberjack-like member of the band’s road crew, was forced to hot-wire a truck and drive through the audience to the stage while Stills yelled out the band’s name to clear a path. (“Leo worked his ass off,” says Hammer of Makota’s crucial role in helping the band during this period. “They couldn’t find their way to a hot-dog stand without Leo.”)
The size of the crowd wasn’t the worst of it. Whoever’s idea it was—the Stones, the Dead, even, by one claim, Jefferson Airplane—the local chapter of the Hells Angels had been hired as security. Some of the Angels were “prospects,” not regular Angels, but no matter; the combination of gang members and sun-dazed, wasted fans was a bad one. As Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played in the afternoon, hours before the Stones, Hells Angels milled around menacingly. Stills was accidentally poked in the leg by a motorcycle spoke—“Streams of blood streaked his legs and soaked through his pants,” reported author Joel Selvin—and Crosby told the crowd, “Hey, crazy people, stop hurting each other,” to no avail.
They managed to make it through an abbreviated set that culminated in a lengthy “Down by the River” jam. Since they were scheduled to play a show that same night at the University of California at Los Angeles, they had to leave almost immediately, and Makota hot-wired the same truck to drive them to the airport. On the way out, they crossed paths with Hart, who remembers them as “just wide-eyed, scared shitless.” The band was out and gone before anyone seemed to know it (and before Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old African American man, charged the stage with a gun and was knifed and killed by an Angel). “It went really fast, and we were glad to get out of there,” says Sachse, who accompanied them to and from the show and photographed them onstage. In fact, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s set was so fleeting that most of the day-after newspaper coverage failed to mention their performance.
Altamont was unlike any other show or event they experienced that year, yet, in a way, the bedlam of that day was of a piece with the crazy rush of the year they’d just endured. As Young wrote later, “I could feel the music dying.” Less than six months after they’d finished their first album and become a quartet, they needed a serious break from each other before the sea of madness fully engulfed them.