Like many who were orbiting the group’s world, Henry Diltz had already grown accustomed to never knowing what to expect. The previous summer, in 1969, he’d taken a call at home from two New Jersey kids who loved his photographs on Crosby, Stills & Nash. They were calling themselves the “Henry Diltz Fan Club.” In the middle of March 1970, an even more mysterious call came to Diltz’s home. Amid crackling static, he could decipher, barely, the voice of art director Gary Burden cutting in and out, saying something about being on Crosby’s boat off the coast of Mexico. He knew that Crosby, Stills and Nash had blown off the Grammys—the ceremony was considered square and old-fashioned, and none of the three were in Los Angeles that March night anyway. In another week or two, Diltz was scheduled to photograph Young—but with his other band, Crazy Horse. Diltz had no idea what was happening, but then, he was hardly alone in wondering about the state of rock’s most exalted non-group.
To Ahmet Ertegun’s disappointment, the first album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would not be delivered to record stores in time for Christmas 1969. Thanks to the various obstacles, sessions and final touches, the completion of the album dragged on past New Year’s 1970. The graphics themselves wouldn’t have been ready in time for the holidays. On an early November 1969 afternoon, the entire band, including Taylor and Reeves, convened at Crosby’s Novato home for a photo shoot for the cover. Given that it was the home where Crosby had lived with Christine Hinton, who had died less than two months before, the setting couldn’t have been more somber. But after a late coffee-and-eggs breakfast and a few lines of cocaine—and with cheerleading from their friend Grace Slick, who was visiting—the group changed into cowboy costumes they rented at the Western Costume Company in North Hollywood and gathered in the backyard. The photographer, Tom O’Neal, then using his birth name, Gundelfinger, had been tasked by Stills and Burden to make the band appear as if they were in a Mathew Brady–style photo from the Civil War. “Ahmet would whine, ‘That’s gonna cost a lot!’” Stills has said. “But it was this whole concept I had. If you went to the wrong part of town with long hair, guys would attack your car. We felt like we were in the Civil War because of the times.”
As the group congregated in front of a gnarled tree in the backyard, Nash refused to hold a gun. But Crosby had grown up around weapons—he “joined the Junior NRA and went through their whole riflery program” as a youth, he would later recall—and he had no such issues carrying a musket. Nodding to his southern heritage, Stills picked out a Confederate outfit—which wouldn’t be the only nod to those times. To fully capture the North-versus-South mood they wanted, O’Neal had rented a well-preserved wooden-box camera that dated back over one hundred years. The exposure time was two and a half minutes, so he also brought along a modern camera as insurance. Sure enough, the photo that would ultimately make the cover would be taken with that new model and then chemically treated to make it appear as if it were a century old. But that was only stage one of the process. The band demanded that the photo be hand-glued onto simulated-leather cardboard covers—part of Stills’ demand that the packaging resemble an antique hymnal. Workers at multiple pressing plants around the country were enlisted for the task, postponing the record’s release until nearly spring.
Yet no amount of delays could dampen the expectations for the album they’d decided to call Déjà vu. Everything in the zeitgeist appeared to be lining up in their favor. Boosted by their first album, sales of fretted instruments, including acoustic guitars, had leapt from $106 million to $160 million between 1969 and 1970. Crosby, Stills & Nash had been nominated for Album of the Year and the trio for Best New Artist. In an instance of brilliant timing that made record companies and managers drool, the Grammy ceremony would be held the week of the new album’s release. “I hear a group like CSN and understand how free and expressive they are,” an unnamed Eastern teenager commented in a Gilbert Youth Poll conducted early in 1970. “This is how we should all be.”
Two weeks after Déjà vu was scheduled to be displayed in record stores, the movie of the Woodstock festival was set to open. Thanks to David Geffen, who wanted to make sure the group’s presence was played up as much as possible, the group would not only be seen in a performance segment, but “Long Time Gone” would accompany the opening footage of crews setting up the Woodstock stage, and the film would end with their version of “Woodstock.” “It was perfect for the film,” says festival co-organizer Michael Lang. “There wasn’t much push-back.” To further promote the album, Geffen and Elliot Roberts were in the midst of organizing a national tour, including two nights in Chicago and six in New York City.
Déjà vu was a guaranteed moneymaker. Atlantic had already scored $2 million in preorders, and the label was certain it would be one of its most lucrative releases in years. In the weeks leading up to the release, record stores across the country laced ads in their local newspapers exclusively for Déjà vu. Two Guys, a mostly Eastern-based department store chain, made it the only LP featured in its full-page ads alongside everyday products like a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner ($49.97) and Presto hair curlers ($16.99). Even though one band member was British and another Canadian, the phrase “American Beatles” began appearing in the media about them. “That was tragic,” Stills has said. “What an absurd, stupid, Hollywood-manager thing to say.” But with the Beatles seemingly evaporating before the public’s eye, the public was eager to embrace another quartet of distinct personalities crammed together in one band—with the added expectation that they would represent liberty and social justice for all.
AS MUCH AS they were looking for a reprieve from the crush of the previous year, now would not be the time. Early in 1970, they shipped their amplifiers and gear across the ocean for a few concerts in Europe. Their performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London was especially nerve-wracking, since Nash felt he would be judged for having left his beloved previous band. “I’d committed the sin of leaving the Hollies, and the English people didn’t like that particularly,” he says. “So I really wanted to be good. I really wanted to shine and let England know that there was a good reason I left.” Stills worried that the time they often spent onstage tuning would also be frowned upon.
At that point, they needn’t have worried. The sold-out venue, which included Paul McCartney and Donovan, seemed to adore them as much as American audiences had the year before. As in the States, they opened with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” joked repeatedly among themselves (Stills slapped an “L” handbill—the British learner’s permit for driving lessons—on Crosby’s back on the way to the stage), and ended with a “Down by the River” jam. But after two additional shows in Scandinavia, they more than ever realized they needed time apart from each other. More a drinker than a toker, Stills was growing irritated by his bandmates’ devotion to weed, and they were tiring of his bossy tendencies. Greg Reeves was beginning to act abnormal, carrying around what seemed like witch-doctor paraphernalia that inevitably led to drawn-out airport security searches. Even worse, in their book, he began asking if they could perform some of the songs he’d written. Like Taylor, he assumed that the rhythm section was an integral part of the band—they were featured on the cover of Déjà vu, too—but both men would soon learn that was not the case.
Once their European obligations were met, they scattered. In a pattern that would repeat itself over decades, Stills and Young each immersed themselves in work while Crosby sought to escape with the help of his close friend Nash. Entranced by England, Stills decided to stay there a bit longer. He rented a room at the Dorchester Hotel and began dropping into nightclubs and pubs, quickly ingratiating himself with the likes of Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. When Starr was looking for someone to lease Brookfield House, his home in Elstead outside of London, Stills was given a tour of the property by Starr’s wife at the time, Maureen, who had taken Ringo’s real last name, Starkey. Stills was captivated by what he saw: a 350-year-old estate with chandeliers, a wine cellar, a pond that was home to ducks and geese, and a living room with beams made from the wood of Spanish Armada ships. Thanks to one of its previous owners, actor Peter Sellers, it also had a movie theater for private screenings. From the sight and sound of his bandmates to the upheaval in America, Stills was tired of the States. Brookfield House was the sort of property one would associate with pop royalty, and Stills, who was newly wealthy and valued his privacy, quickly rented it and moved in.
Always driven to prove himself and ward off the feelings of self-dislike that derived from his upbringing, Stills had barely settled in when he got back to work. Even though Déjà vu wasn’t yet in stores, he decided to initiate an album of his own, becoming the first to take advantage of their anti-band concept following the success of Crosby, Stills & Nash. With over a dozen newly written songs in hand, he began spending dusk-to-dawn nights at Island Studios in London, zipping back and forth from Elstead at pushing-the-limit speeds in one of his Ferraris or Mercedes.
His new musical connections helped: Clapton overdubbed a guitar solo on “Go Back Home,” a blues piece that allowed Stills to show off his Hendrix-inspired skills on wah-wah guitar. Starr arrived one day, set up before everyone else had arrived, and played on several songs, including “As I Come of Age,” in which Stills, all of twenty-five, was already assessing his mistakes. (Starr later invited Stills to join him and George Harrison on one of Starr’s first solo singles, “It Don’t Come Easy,” recorded that spring; Stills played piano.) At a party, Billy Preston, the African American singer and keyboardist who had pitched in on the Beatles’ Let It Be, was talking with Stills about women and casually said, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with,” inspiring Stills to write—and soon record—a driving, pulsating song with that title in London in March.
Stills and Jimi Hendrix had been endless-jam buddies for several years. “Stephen came to me full of praise for Jimi, saying this guy made him swing the hardest and jam the hardest he’d ever jammed,” said Peter Tork. Hendrix and Stills would convene in the music room at the house on Shady Oak in Los Angeles and play for hours. In London, where Hendrix was now based, the two reconnected—hitting the clubs, indulging together, and recording, in one feverish take, “Old Times Good Times,” Stills’ swampy look back at his youth. His organ and Hendrix’s guitar sidled up along each other with a natural ease. Afterward, Hendrix implied to Stills that they’d make an album together.
For his part, Young, having done about six months’ time in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young world, was eager to regroup with Crazy Horse. As if cleansing his palette, he and the band were on the road just weeks after the last CSNY show in Copenhagen. While playing acoustic sets before being joined by the Horse, Young made it explicitly clear he wasn’t bound by his deal with Crosby, Stills and Nash. In Cincinnati in February, he introduced a performance of “Helpless” with a wry chuckle, calling it a song from “a new album on Atlantic Records” and not mentioning the names of the others. (At that and other shows, his between-song comments were generally droll and self-deprecating, another contrast with his partners.) Eager to complete After the Gold Rush, the album he’d started the previous summer, Young went in search of what Nils Lofgren called “a clear, direct sound” and recruited Lofgren, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina and Greg Reeves. During the same weeks that Stills was frantically recording and pulling musical all-nighters in London, logging up to 160 hours in the studio, Young was on fire too. Over the course of one week at his home studio in Topanga—a down-home space beneath a porch—he and his musicians recorded more than half an album: a contemplative beauty called “After the Gold Rush”; “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” his song to Nash about his growing troubles with Mitchell; a rare political-zinger diatribe, “Southern Man”; and a few lightweight throwaways, including “Till the Morning Comes.” “CSNY was this storm gathering on the horizon, this super-band Neil was part of,” Lofgren says. “We were happy for him. But we didn’t go with him to those sessions. In our world, he was focused on Gold Rush.”
Still grappling with the aftermath of Hinton’s death, Crosby opted to fulfill a dream he’d long had—sailing his boat an inordinately long distance—and, along the way, he would put Hinton’s ashes to rest. Retrieving his sailboat, the Mayan, in Florida in late January 1970, he enlisted an initially wary Nash, who’d never been on a boat but wanted to support his friend, to go along. Also joining them was a rotating cast of band crew members (including road manager Leo Makota), bona fide sailors and a few musicians, including singer-songwriter Ronee Blakey (later known for her role in Robert Altman’s Nashville).
Setting sail from Fort Lauderdale, Crosby and Nash effectively dropped off the music business radar for over a month. They sailed from Florida and the Bahamas to the West Coast by way of Cuba, Jamaica, the Panama Canal and Mexico. On the trip from Jamaica to the Panama Canal, they were joined by Joni Mitchell, who’d been invited by Crosby and didn’t know Nash would be aboard. By the time the Mayan arrived at the Panama Canal, Nash and Mitchell were barely on speaking terms. (“It was just unpleasant,” Nash says. “I wasn’t grown up enough. It was tense.”) They stopped at a yacht club, went to Mexican banks for cash, witnessed an eclipse, saw whales springing up through the waves, and got endlessly high along the way on pot and a canister of cocaine.
Few knew where they were, including Geffen and Roberts. “Elliot was freaked,” Crosby says. “We were wasting time sailing around on that damn boat. We were supposed to be working. It made no sense to him at all.” But the trip would prove cathartic to Crosby, “good medicine,” as he put it, that would also solidify his bond with Nash. After they made their way up the West Coast, Crosby completed the trip as he had hoped, spreading Hinton’s ashes from aboard the Mayan not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.
BY THE TIME the completed tapes of Déjà vu were submitted to Atlantic in February, the music betrayed little of the second-guessing and the turbulence that had plagued its creation. The album’s mix was crisper and more upfront than on Crosby, Stills & Nash. Since the band no longer had to take sonic orders from Ertegun, the guitars and percussion were more pronounced, and the individual instruments were clearly delineated. “Woodstock” was a perfect example: after opening with Young’s guitar, the other instruments—Stills’ organ, Reeves’ bass, Crosby’s scraping-rake rhythm guitar and Taylor’s drums—slid in one by one. The moment when Nash’s and Stills’ voices each swelled up behind Crosby’s in “Déjà vu” had a similar lucidity. As well made as it was, the first album almost sounded muddy next to the sonic clarity of Déjà vu. For sheer record-making skill, it was hard to top “Carry On,” from its exclamatory verses to the array of guitars and keyboards Stills layered throughout.
What Déjà vu lacked, not surprisingly, was the cohesion of the first album. None of the songs on Crosby, Stills & Nash featured a single voice with no accompanying harmony, yet several on Déjà vu did. Alone with just his guitar, Stills had sat down in an LA studio and played “4 + 20,” about an imaginary old man looking back on his tattered life. He sang it in the same solemn timbre from start to finish, lending the song a repressed undercurrent. The take felt so right, so perfect, down to a telling pause between “I” and “embrace,” that Crosby and Nash decided to keep it that way and not add their voices to it. “Crosby and I were watching when he was recording, and Stephen really felt it,” says Nash. “When he came to that line and took that gulp, he wanted to cut it again—which he did, without the gulp. But Crosby and I loved it. It was so human, and on such a human song. We convinced Stephen to use the first take.”
Through the magic of overdubbing, Déjà vu could sound like a band effort. After taking the basic tapes of the medley back with him to Los Angeles, Young and collaborator David Briggs worked their magic on “Country Girl (Whiskey Boot Hill, Down Down Down, Country Girl [I Think You’re Pretty]),” adding a pipe organ and other instruments. With Crosby and Nash harmonizing with Young on one verse, and Stills and Young blending together on another, the song was transformed into a hippie-choir ensemble piece, a Laurel Canyon symphony with an accompanying, otherworldly vocal crescendo. By and large, though, Déjà vu felt more like a revue and less like a working band. As it should: in the end, Young played on only five of its ten songs and sang on just two, his own. His guitar, however, noticeably upped the energy levels on “Woodstock” and “Almost Cut My Hair.”
Yet from the moment it started, with a bustle of Stills acoustic guitars and burst of massed harmonies on “Carry On,” the glummer Déjà vu tapped into the mood of the moment as much as its predecessor had. Five days before the album’s release, a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village suddenly exploded; in the weeks that followed, it was learned that in its basement, members of the Weather Underground had been building bombs to possibly attack a military base. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon’s approval rating, after just a year in office, was approaching 60 percent, despite his announcement that he was sending troops into Cambodia. A sense of powerlessness began taking over the counterculture, and few knew what a new decade augured.
In that context, Déjà vu struck many chords at once. “Almost Cut My Hair” now seemed like a defiant statement of purpose. “Helpless” may have been about Canada, but that word rarely implied more in a pop song than it did at that moment. “Woodstock” was one of the band’s meatiest moments, living up to Mitchell’s celebratory lyrics, but with Altamont now in the rear-view mirror, the fantasy of half a million hippies living in harmony was back to being a dream. Nash’s “Our House” and “Teach Your Children” were cheery, but the concluding “Everybody I Love You,” masterfully cobbled together by Halverson from two different recordings, was so rushed that it sounded desperate, as if they were trying to convince each other and the country that everything was on track.
Finally released on March 11, 1970—if Ertegun didn’t have Christmas, at least he had Easter—Déjà vu wasn’t immune to criticism. Rolling Stone published a sarcastic piece about fans awaiting its release, then took sharp jabs at the album, calling its worked-over harmonies and arrangements “too perfect to be true.” (Given the tumult that went into its making, the magazine wasn’t far off in that regard.) But the so-called straight press, from the Los Angeles Times to the Tampa Tribune, called it the best rock album of the year to date, and a New York college radio station played the LP in its entirety most of the day.
As much as they were reveling in their time apart, band duties beckoned. Crosby and Nash were reminded of the work that lay ahead when Roberts and Burden flew to Mexico, on an especially rickety plane, to ensure they signed contracts for concerts that would earn them $25,000 and 65 percent of the gross—an especially sweet deal for the pop-concert business of 1970. At a typical arena that charged an average of $5 a seat, that percentage could amount to as much as an extra $50,000 a night. And as Diltz would soon learn, here was the reason for the mysterious ship-to-shore call to his home. Someone had finally tracked down Crosby and Nash, and the group, such as it was in March 1970, now had to fulfill its obligations to their management and their record company, if not to each other.
“PUBLIC NOTICE” BLARED an advertisement with imposing black letters in the May 18 edition of the Minneapolis Tribune. Beneath that warning was the startling news: “The entire national concert tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young has been cancelled due to illness.” Over the next few days, similar reports sprouted up in newspapers in Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis for performances in those cities. Each ad similarly mentioned an unnamed illness along with an address for mailing tickets back for a refund. It was a rare—and catastrophic—announcement for a major act whose album was no. 1 in the country that week (and the second biggest-selling record in the eight-track tape and cassette formats).
As soon as everyone had reassembled in Los Angeles in April to rehearse, everything about the group suddenly had felt jinxed. While Mitchell had been on vacation in Greece, she had telegrammed Nash, who was still at her house, to formally end their relationship. Returning from London and driving home from the Los Angeles airport on April 14, Stills saw a police car in his rear-view mirror, was temporarily distracted, and rammed his car into a parked vehicle, fracturing his left hand. In what would amount to the first of many delays of rehearsals, Stills’ broken wrist was now in a cast, and he fled to Hawaii to recuperate. (Although he could only move two fingers on his left hand, he still managed to write several songs.) After two weeks, he returned, but now the group had to deal with Reeves. His mysterious ways and his request to have them sing his own material irked Crosby, Stills and Nash, if not Young or some of their friends. “He was a bit eccentric, but from where I could see it didn’t affect his relationship with the band,” says Bobby Hammer. “He had some bizarre cultish religious beliefs, but he was a really quiet guy and could play all their songs. He was really good.”
Still, the decision was made to fire Reeves. “He did something that drove David crazy,” Stills has said. “It was, ‘This has to change.’” Opposed to the idea yet still supportive of Reeves’ musicianship, Young accepted their decision but vowed to keep working with him. (At Young’s behest, Reeves and Taylor had also been awarded 1 percentage point of Déjà vu’s royalties.) Reeves was indignant but accepted the situation. “Being a medicine man or not (which is when I was more a practitioner of the Native American way of life) has nothing to do with the fact that they needed me to make the ‘track’ portion of their records complete,” he said later. Either way, he was out, and with their first concert less than a week away, a new bass player was needed, and immediately. Stills flashed on Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuel (then Samuels), a black Jamaican bassist he’d met in London. At twenty-two, Samuel, nicknamed for the way he played his bass through a fuzz pedal for a distorted tone, had logged time in R&B and ska bands. A frequent presence at London’s Olympic Studio, he had asked Stills’ roadie Bruce Berry to set up a bass in the studio where Stills was working, and soon the two were jamming together—and, to Samuel’s surprise, the notoriously demanding Stills seemed to like his playing. With his friend, drummer Conrad Isidore, Samuel ended up participating on Stills’ own in-progress album.
Told to track down a “bass player named Fuzzy” in London, Ron Stone of Geffen-Roberts somehow managed to find the possible new bass player. Homeless at the time, Samuel often wound up crashing at Olympic, so it may not have been too difficult. Though Samuel didn’t have the money for a plane ticket (Stone recalls he did get him a visa), he went to Heathrow Airport anyway. In a scenario that could have only happened at that moment in history, Samuel took advantage of a distraction and sneaked aboard a flight to Los Angeles, then fled the plane when it landed. He was driven to meet the band at a rehearsal space, and the next day, flew with them to their first show, at the Denver Coliseum on May 12. “We didn’t rehearse,” Samuel says. “We got on the plane and flew straight to Colorado to play. All in one night.”
The stage was set for a less than almighty return, which the band more than delivered. “We haven’t seen each other for six weeks!” Crosby announced early in the show, words that rang true in light of the group’s shambolic performance. Stills hobbled around on crutches (he’d hurt his leg skiing, adding to the delays), and the sound system crackled and fed back; Crosby warned the audience that the crew was “struggling with it.” Samuel, who was not intimately familiar with the group’s repertoire, had to learn to play their material as thousands of faces bore down on him. At one point, Crosby rolled out his usual adulatory introduction of Stills—who was nowhere to be found and didn’t emerge from the wings for five minutes.
But the group was nevertheless greeted with adoration—screams of “Right on!” punctuated the air, references to Woodstock were cheered, and the crowd seemed to happily forgive mistakes, including a fumbled “Teach Your Children.” During a particularly time-consuming moment in the electric set, Crosby warned the crowd that they’d have to watch the band get in tune. “And you get to get stoned!” came the approving response of one fan. Their bond with their fans was reinforced by elliptical comments about protests, the war, and the debut of a newly written Nash song, “Chicago,” inspired by the group receiving an invitation to play a benefit for the Chicago Eight, the protesters who had been arrested in the aftermath of the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention the previous year. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Lee Weiner, John Froines, Bobby Seale, Renee Davis and David Dellinger had all been charged with conspiracy to “incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in and carry on a riot.” (Seale had been bound and gagged in the courtroom and chained to a chair to keep him from interrupting the proceedings. The first line of the song is a reference to him.) The Chicago Eight had gone to trial in September 1969, and in February 1970 they were found guilty of contempt of court and, except for two of them, intent to riot; most were fined $5,000. Not for the first time, Nash talked to his partners in song; the song was actually addressed to Stills and Young, who opted against appearing at the benefit, particularly in the line pleading with them to come to Chicago to sing.
In Denver, before playing “Helpless,” Young told the crowd, “It’s good to be back on the boards.” Inside he was seething, initially about the PA. “The monitor system really sucks, you know,” he grumbled out loud, for all to hear. “It’s driving me crazy.” He was also displeased with Stills, who had returned to his preferred role of leading—or, as the others interpreted it, dominating—the band. Young, still unhappy over the firing of Reeves, now had to cope with a rhythm section made up entirely of Stills’ players and a set list dominated by Stills songs, since Samuel was more familiar with those than with Crosby, Nash or Young material. (Five years later, Stills pooh-poohed those tales of friction to writer Barbara Charone, saying, “Remember all those stories about who was the lead guitarist in CSN&Y? Well, that discussion lasted through the first guitar break in the first day of rehearsal the first time we did ‘Carry On.’ Neil walked over and said, ‘You’re the lead guitar player.’”) Stills also played more solo songs (three) than the others. Before the penultimate song of the night, “Long Time Gone,” Young unplugged his guitar and stalked off—to the shock of the others, who remained onstage, made it through the song without a lead guitar part, bid their goodbyes and left without playing another song.
Before they all went to bed, Taylor was called to a meeting in Young’s Denver hotel room, where he also found Nash and Crosby. In an extraordinary—and reckless—move that exposed the fragility of their union, they told the drummer that they no longer wanted to work with Stills and were canceling the tour and flying back to Los Angeles. “If the music’s not there, why the fuck would we want to do it in front of people?” Nash says. “And it wasn’t there. We had a partner who was going off the deep end. It was too much. And it was definitely too much for Neil.” Taylor pledged his allegiance to Stills, who, uninformed of what had taken place, flew to their next gig in Chicago by himself and arrived at the auditorium only to find the crew packing up.
Four hours before show time, the two Chicago concerts were officially called off, with “illness” initially cited as the cause. Atlantic then announced that the cancellations were due to “the sore throats of David Crosby and Graham Nash.” Stills and Taylor flew back together to Los Angeles; Taylor tried to console his shaken bandmate by arguing that they should form their own group and forget about the others. As dance students at Sonoma College in Santa Rosa, California, performed a routine to “Déjà vu,” and a survey of Indiana high school students revealed that their favorite song was the group’s recording of “Woodstock,” what promised to be one of the most profitable rock concert tours of its time was effectively over after one inadequate performance.
STARTING WITH AN onstage meltdown and the immediate breakup, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would sprint through a stunning gamut of experiences in the nine days that followed the Denver show.
For the June 6 issue of Billboard, Atlantic rushed out a statement denying the group was disbanding, blaming the cancellations on Stills’ “wrist and knee injuries” and Nash’s recurring throat issues. The label also began preparing ads like the one that would run in the Minneapolis Tribune announcing the cancellation of the entire tour. In reality, nobody, least of all the business types who worked for them, wanted to scratch the shows; breakup rumors could deter fans from buying tickets to future concerts. Three days after Denver, on May 15, the four musicians were summoned to the Geffen-Roberts offices with their dual managers and a flummoxed Ertegun. “We told Elliot that was it and he had to undo the tour and figure out how long it would be before we talked to one another again,” Nash recalls. Instead, the four were read the rock-and-roll version of a riot act and told that they risked lawsuits and other financial crises if they didn’t resume. This time, the money truly talked. “We had to face the consequences,” says Nash. “It was a lot of money. We had to make sure the promoters who were so kind to us on the first tour weren’t hurt.”
But at least one compromise had to be reached between the band members, and Young made it clear that Taylor had to go. In the worst possible timing, Taylor arrived at the office as the meeting was wrapping up and watched as the somber-faced bandmates emerged. Stills apologized and said they had no choice; Taylor was out, to be replaced by a drummer to be named. “The deal had already happened, and Neil got his way,” Taylor claimed. “It was the worst day of my life. I was dumbfounded. It had nothing to do with my playing. Neil was pissed at me for not saying I would tour without Stephen.” (Counters Crosby: “Dallas was canned because Neil could get and should have had a better drummer”; Taylor also claimed that Young’s wife, Susan, was “flirty” with him, which, Taylor added, annoyed Young.)
The group scattered briefly to lick its collective wounds, with Crosby and Young heading north to San Francisco and then driving south to road manager Makota’s house in redwoods-encased Pescadero. On the morning of May 19, four days after the band meeting, someone at the house went for groceries. At the time, the country’s most popular photo-driven newsweekly was Life, which had a weekly circulation of over eight million copies—one of which was dropped into the bags of food. “Tragedy at Kent” read the cover line, next to a photo of students leaning over the body of a fallen man. As everyone already knew by then, four students at Kent State had been shot and killed on May 4 by National Guardsmen. At that moment, the circumstances and timelines remained murky, but the fatalities were horrifically undeniable, and the photos that took up eleven pages of the magazine offered a visceral chronicle of the event. As Crosby watched, Young picked up a guitar and, in short order, wrote and sang a song he called “Ohio,” about soldiers, Nixon, and students being gunned down.
When the group reassembled in Los Angeles two days later, May 21, to begin rehearsals, they had a revived sense of purpose, along with a replacement percussionist. Also staying at Makota’s home had been Johny (then Johnny) Barbata, a lanky, Jersey-born drummer who must have heard his beats on the radio a million times when he was a member of the Turtles (and played on their biggest hit, “Happy Together”). The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour was already being rescheduled, and Barbata was witness to discussions over who would replace Taylor. “They were a bit in disarray,” Barbata recalls. “We talked about Dewey Martin, but he wasn’t good enough. Then at that point, Leo said, ‘Why don’t you do it, John?’” With little time to spare and rehearsals days away, the choice seemed obvious, and Barbata was offered a sizable amount, $1,500 a week, for the month-long tour.
That first day, the four of them, along with Barbata and Samuel, reconvened at the Warner Brothers studio lot for five or six days of rehearsals. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a movie about a Prohibition-era contest where couples danced until they dropped, had finished filming on the same soundstage, and a sign from the set—“How Long Will They Last?”—hung ominously over the stage. Adding to the discomfort was the presence of Taylor, who had been asked to drop by and help Barbata learn the drum parts. “Like a dummy, I did it,” Taylor said. “‘Awkward’ is the word. It was horrible. I was in my own nightmare, awake.” The tension was broken at least once, when comedian Bill Cosby, who was also working on the lot, appeared with a prop whip and, snapping it, ordered them to get to work; finally, everyone laughed.
At the end of rehearsals, Halverson, working at the Record Plant studio on Stills’ album, received a call asking him to prepare for a group recording session instead. Later that night, the six musicians arrived and took their places with their instruments. They were in a smallish space in the studio that was normally home to a string section, and practically on top of each other. In just a few takes, they taped Young’s “Ohio,” which they’d been practicing all day at the Warners lot.
Over the months they’d spent on Déjà vu, they’d labored to create a unified group sound, but starting with Young’s funeral-march introduction, soon joined by Crosby’s rhythm guitar and Stills’ steely lead lines, they achieved cohesion in just a few takes of “Ohio.” (Stills would always feel the song needed another verse, though.) Even the vocal parts were recorded live, without their customary layers of overdubs. During the extended chant at its conclusion, Crosby improvised a part—“How many, how many more?” “I went to the end of it and was so into it and I was just screaming that stuff at the end,” he recalls. “I’m very proud of that. If that’s what CSNY gets remembered for, fine. That’s good.”
The previous decade had been rife with protest songs, but from its timeliness to the way the intertwined guitars crackled with brittle, amplified menace, few felt as immediate as “Ohio.” Ertegun pushed to release it as a single. For the flip side, they gathered around and recorded “Find the Cost of Freedom,” a one-verse, hymn-like meditation Stills had written for the previous year’s Easy Rider that had been rejected. Again they gathered close—“It was like the four of them at a card table, that close,” recalls Halverson—and sang in effortless four-part harmony. (As was often the case, Young took the highest part.) The tapes were quickly shipped to New York in order to press and release the songs as soon as was mechanically possible.
With “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom” quickly in the can, they had not only both sides of a timely single but a renewed sense of commitment. In the course of little over a week, they had played, fought, broken up, disbursed, fired a drummer, hired a new one, reunited and forged a new bond. It had been a whirlwind 216 hours since the Denver concert.
FOR THE COUNTRY, 1968 and 1969 had been soul-shattering years, piled high with race riots, deeper involvement in Vietnam, Manson’s death-cult murders, and assassinations of beloved political leaders. What remained of the legacy of the ’60s seemed to erode even further as 1970 wearily dragged on. Kent State was a chilling example of the potentially violent consequences of protesting the war, and the Weather Underground’s townhouse explosion disgusted many on both the right and the left. After NASA had landed a man on the moon in 1969, the Apollo 13 mission in the spring of 1970 nearly stranded astronauts in space. The Manson trial that summer put the grisly details of the murders on display, even dragging the Beatles into the fray (prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi learned that Manson had read apocalyptic signs into their so-called White Album, which had even been played for the jury while they were deliberating). Already teetering on a breakup, the Beatles themselves appeared to publicly collapse in the spring, when McCartney released a solo album complete with a self-written question-and-answer session in which he seemed to dismiss the thought of working with John Lennon again in the near future.
Just as 1970 tried to hold itself together, so did Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as they resumed their tour in Boston on May 29, about a week after recording “Ohio.” During rehearsals, the set list for the upcoming tour was carved into particularly tough stone, ensuring that each man (and his songs) received equal stage time and exposure. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” would still open each show, followed by Young joining them for “On the Way Home” from his Springfield days. Some of the onstage gags were repeated. During their six-night stand at the Fillmore East in New York, workers at the theater were initially charmed to see Stills grab a standup bass and act as if it were a regular guitar; the others, acting surprised, yucked it up. The band then did the same shtick the following nights.
The second, electric set would have nearly the same lineup of songs each night, centered around extended, dozen-minute-plus versions of “Carry On” and Young’s new, vitriolic tongue-lashing “Southern Man,” which allowed Stills and Young to turn it up and lob guitar solos back and forth. “It was entertaining,” Stills has said. “We’d try to imitate what the other guy was playing and that worked out really good. We’d go off and come back to the original theme. The word ‘dueling’ never came from me. Musicians don’t duel. It ain’t a competition. It ain’t NASCAR. I said, ‘Neil, are we doing that or not?’ And he said, ‘No, we’re just trading off.’” Sticking a lit cigarette in the tip of his guitar or mugging during solos, Stills had the tendency to overdo his stage moves, but he also felt the businessmen around them were egging him and Young on: “It was destructive and it probably contributed to our demise: ‘He’s a better guitar player!’ Thanks, guys.”
Drama continued to ensnare them. Although he had sung “Our House” on stage at many shows the year before, Nash, still shaken from his breakup with Mitchell, didn’t play the song on the entire tour, fearing he wouldn’t be able to get through it. At the Fillmore East, when Dylan came in a back door and sat in the sound booth, Stills played more solo songs than the group permitted, leading to a backstage confrontation in which Nash accused him of hogging the spotlight. The others watched silently, Stills crushing a beer can in his hand and glowering. (To coerce them into an encore and out of their locked dressing room, Graham started slipping $100 bills under the door.) Three days after the last of the Fillmore East shows, they played the Spectrum in Philadelphia, where critic Jack Lloyd of the Inquirer noted that “needlessly bitter barbs came zinging out between songs periodically.” But in the wee hours of the morning after the performance, Stills and Nash reversed course yet again; in search of a pool table, they hired a limousine to drive them to the suburban home of a teenager, Joel Bernstein, and his family.
Bernstein, who had just graduated from high school before the group’s Fillmore shows, had met and photographed Mitchell the previous fall, when she had played in Philadelphia; taken with his work, Mitchell had invited him to be her official portrait taker. In no time, the affable, chatty teen was drawn into their world. His photos of Young would grace the front, back and inside of Young’s next album, After the Gold Rush. Arriving at his family’s house after the Spectrum, Stills and Nash first congregated in his bedroom; when Nash sat on Bernstein’s bed, a photo of Mitchell on the wall seemed to hover behind him. They relocated to the basement, where Bernstein watched as the two rock stars snorted and played pool for hours. Bernstein’s father, Stanley, buzzed down to the basement to ask his son what exactly was going on before finally popping in, in his robe, and introducing himself. At times like those, the group could almost live up to the just-folks image on their first album cover.
As the tour resumed, their talking-to after Denver clearly had its desired, scared-straight effect. Especially during the electric set, where they were grounded by Barbata’s sturdy, rigid beats, the band sounded sharper and more focused than they had in Denver. (Unfortunately, some of the highlights of that show, including Crosby’s solo version of “Everybody’s Been Burned,” from his Byrds days, and an attempt at “Everybody I Love You,” from Déjà vu, were not to be repeated.) Nash’s “Chicago” and Stills’ medley of “49 Bye-Byes” and “For What It’s Worth” (renamed “America’s Children” for the over-the-top poem/exhortation he included in it) felt newly plugged into the times in light of the Kent State massacre. Most of Déjà vu was left unplayed, but the sets featured a slew of songs the public hadn’t yet heard: Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” and “Tell Me Why”; Stills’ “Love the One You’re With” and “As I Come of Age”; Nash’s “Right Between the Eyes”; and Crosby’s “The Lee Shore,” a sailing soundscape that served as another showcase for the way his and Nash’s harmonies circled each other. A nightly highlight was the newly released “Ohio”; for kinetic crackling energy, the concert version easily surpassed the studio rendition.
As enthusiastic as the crowds were—“Youth Await Their Heroes” proclaimed one headline—early signs of a backlash were beginning to surface. In their lifestyle, wardrobe and political views, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young staked their claim to being interchangeable from their audience, but those fans had the first of several rude awakenings when tour dates and prices were announced in April. The best seats at the Metropolitan Sports Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, were an inordinately high ten dollars (the equivalent of sixty or seventy dollars several decades later), leading Barry Knight, a twenty-one-year-old student at St. Paul’s Macalester College, to launch a boycott of the concert. “No one can afford to hear music anymore,” Knight told the Minneapolis Tribune. In response, five record stores in the city opted out of selling tickets to the show. “Crosby writes about how he almost cut his hair but finally let his ‘freak flag fly,’” commented a local writer. “Well, let him cut his prices instead.” He added that the situation augured “a feeling of disappointment, as though a trusted friend had betrayed you.… Their heads are close to ours. It’s our music.”
The tactic worked—before the concert was ultimately canceled in May, the venue’s promoter reduced the price of some of the cheapest Met Center seats from five dollars to two. But a newfound suspicion toward the group remained.
IN LATE JUNE, the group returned to their Los Angeles home base for two nights at the Forum. As ever, they walked their own particular tightrope. Heading from their dressing rooms to the stage on opening night, Crosby, Stills and Nash decided to warm up then and there, in the hallway. Breaking into the line from “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” that compared Collins to a sparrow, they hit all the notes, looked at each other and giggled. “Well, that takes care of the sound check,” they cracked. A poet and friend, Charles John Quarto, who was strolling around with them, was stunned by how much that small portion sounded precisely like the recorded version of the song.
Before and after the Forum shows, they were afforded a sliver of downtime prior to heading back to the Midwest to play the rescheduled shows. Ever the workaholic, Stills used the days off to complete the solo album he’d started in London, running up costs of over $500,000 due to its across-the-pond sessions. A few of the songs, including “Love the One You’re With” and a majestic plea for brotherhood, “We Are Not Helpless,” cried out for a choir. (The latter had been triggered by the 1962 novel Fail-Safe, about a clash between the United States and the Soviet Union that threatens to go nuclear: “Man has been made into a helpless spectator,” warns one character.) Stills invited a slew of his friends—including Crosby, Nash, Cass Elliot and John Sebastian—to join in, along with a relative newcomer to the scene. At twenty-five, Rita Coolidge had a sweet but sultry voice, alluring Native American looks, and plenty of professional experience under her belt, including background vocals for Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour earlier that year. She and Stills had met when he had been invited to play on the first album she released under her own name. (He played all the guitars on the unplugged “Second Story Window.”) In turn, Stills invited her to be part of the choir on his album.
It was at the Stills session where Coolidge first met Nash, who was clearly smitten and immediately asked her to be his date at the band’s Forum show the following night. (As Mitchell would later say, it didn’t take Nash long to move on to a new partner: “Well, my heart was much more broken than his,” she told biographer David Yaffe. “He just jumped right back into dating.”) By then, Nash was crashing at Stills’ Shady Oak home, so he gave Coolidge the phone number. When she called the next day to finalize the arrangements, she says, Stills answered and told her Nash wasn’t at home but that he’d left a message: Nash wouldn’t be able to take her to the show, but he, Stills, would be happy to do so. (She didn’t know it at the time, but Stills had been so taken with Coolidge the night he met her that he’d written and recorded a song about her, “Cherokee,” that very evening; she and Judy Collins also shared the same birthday, May 1.) “I said okay,” Coolidge says. “I wasn’t in love with anybody. I just wanted to see CSNY.” Backstage at the show, Nash, unaware of the machinations, and thinking Coolidge had bailed on him, pointedly ignored her the whole evening.
Before matters grew more tangled on that front, the band was back on the road to play their rescheduled concerts. Minor irritations ensued: The first show, in St. Louis, started an hour late, after the equipment trucks suffered several flat tires on the drive from California to Missouri. The review of the first of their two Chicago shows noted that Stills was “brooding” by the side of the stage and that Crosby seemed distracted. But in a standard example of the make-up-sex aspect of their rapport, both men were excitedly bouncing in sync during the concluding “Carry On” jam.
When they arrived in Minnesota for their final performance, on July 9, the sour aftertaste of the initial boycott of that show lingered. A writer for Hundred Flowers, the city’s leading underground newspaper, encountered Crosby on the afternoon of the show in Dinkytown, on the edge of the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus. After first denying he was who he was, Crosby admitted he was eyeing the female co-eds passing by: “The love of my life for the night may be wandering around these hallowed halls.” Students recognized Crosby and began asking him about the high prices of the concert. “My first reaction was fuck ’em,” he told them. “My second was ‘we won’t play,’ and my third was ‘we’ll get sued.’” Crosby’s tattooed bodyguard paid for the Hundred Flowers writer’s dinner and offered him a free ticket.
Although the band sounded more cohesive than they had at the chaotic Denver show, Stills remained dissatisfied with the tour that summer. “We got through it okay,” he has said. “We weren’t very good, though. We were real sloppy. It was drifting toward Grateful Dead bedlam. I don’t care for that. I remember feeling, ‘This is almost right but nobody’s finishing anything.’ It never had that craftsmanship quality.” Halverson, who recorded shows in Chicago and New York, agrees about the lack of fine-tuning on some of the stage arrangements: “They didn’t do a lot of rehearsing or ‘let’s go play it again because we want to.’ It was ‘you have enough.’”
After the Minneapolis show, they gathered in a hotel room for a celebratory, end-of-tour dinner, with Young’s mother, Rassy, in tow. Joining and photographing them, Diltz caught “various energies between people, feelings good and bad.” They had just hit the two-year mark as an anti-band, and the time felt right to continue the part of the experiment where each could now go off on his own.
JAMES MAZZEO, A freewheeling artist also known as Sandy Castle, was hanging out at his commune south of San Francisco one fall day in 1970 when Neil Young, of all people, drove up. Young had bought a nearby ranch and, while tooling up State Route 35, had come upon a group of local hippies. “Hi, my name’s Neil—I moved into the neighborhood,” he told them. The women told him he just had to meet Mazzeo.
Raised in northern California, a former member of the Coast Guard who’d then drifted into the bohemian world, constructing psychedelic light shows, Mazzeo was Young’s type of nonconformist. By chance, he’d worked the sound system for a 1967 Buffalo Springfield show at the Ark, a ferry boat that had been converted into a performance space in Sausalito. Mazzeo remembered Young as the enigmatic, black-garbed member of the Springfield who stood in the darkened portion of the stage but still managed to command as much attention as Stills or Furay. Standing in the back of the room at the sound board, Mazzeo heard audience members asking each other, “Who’s the guy in back?”
Mazzeo’s commune, the Star Hill Academy for Anything, was home to several dozen wayward adults and kids. As Young and Mazzeo became reacquainted, Mazzeo got a sense of what had drawn Young to the northern part of the state, four hundred miles away from Los Angeles. “He told me he really didn’t like doing CSNY because it was too big,” Mazzeo says. “At those concert places, they weren’t getting good sound, and he felt like he was ripping off 30,000 people. With Crazy Horse, Neil felt he could jump into the shadows. With CSNY he felt under the microscope.”
Despite Young’s concerns about the overwhelming popularity of the band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young remained very much an ongoing business and cultural presence as 1970 began winding down. Woodstock, an instant box-office draw when it was released in the spring, continued to play in movie houses across the country, eventually becoming the fifth highest-grossing film of the year and cementing the band’s connection to the festival and all it represented. A few of their songs were included on the soundtrack of The Strawberry Statement, a heavy-handed riots-on-campus drama that was released that summer. “Ohio” had initially struggled to get radio play—stations in Detroit and Chicago declined to air it—but it hit enough of a nerve to reach no. 14 on the charts. As if they were a normal band that operated on a traditional schedule, Atlantic announced that a two-record set recorded in concert would be in stores by the end of 1970. Ertegun insisted to the press that the group had not disbanded, and that they were working on a new album and planning to hit the road again in the spring of 1971.
Yet by the fall, they were more scattered than they’d ever been, aided by the financial windfall of the previous year. Between tour revenue and record sales—Crosby, Stills & Nash and Déjà vu had sold a combined 3,050,000 copies that year alone—each man had made as much as $7 million after taxes. In the spring of 1967, as a member of Buffalo Springfield, Young had received a six-month royalty statement of exactly zero cents. Thanks to Crosby, Stills and Nash, he could now afford to fork over $340,000 in cash for a 140-acre spread near the Santa Cruz Mountains. At least for the time being, he would be living there without his wife; he and Susan, who struggled to deal with her husband’s fame and popularity, broke up as he was moving north, and their divorce was finalized that fall. When Nash visited the Youngs at their Topanga home before the breakup, he noticed a photo he’d taken of Neil pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen with push pins through the eyes. “When I saw that, I went, ‘This marriage is over,’” Nash says.
Starting with Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch, their respective new homes became mirror images of their divergent personalities. Preparing to make his move up north, Young enlisted roadie Bruce Berry and one of Berry’s high school friends, Guillermo (later Felix) Giachetti, to help him. Arriving at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles to start the trip, Giachetti met Young for the first time. “He looked like a wreck and a drug addict, but he wasn’t,” he says. Driving north in two cars, the men arrived in the early morning hours at Young’s new home, a low-rent place with a fireplace and not much else. Young and Giachetti began the process of renovating the house by hand, starting with ripping out the carpeting by hand, as well as the ceiling, which looked like old cottage cheese, taking the house down to its studs. “Crazy thing to do when you’re a guitar player,” recalls Giachetti, who sensed a reclusive side to his new boss.
True to his own image as a free-living hippie bard, Crosby had moved out of the Novato home where he had lived with Hinton and Debbie Donovan and onto his sailboat, the Mayan, now docked in a Sausalito harbor. Women, including two look-alike teenagers, came and went on the boat, which contained bunks for half a dozen; Crosby always kept a stash of cash, about $2,000, for drugs or to lend to anyone who might need it. Among those who crashed on the Mayan was Jackson Browne, a rising singer-songwriter whom Crosby had championed in the pages of Rolling Stone. “I was stoned and happy and getting laid a lot,” Crosby recalls. “I didn’t have a plan.”
As if taking up where the domestic coziness of “Our House” had left off, Nash had bought a four-story Victorian townhouse in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district. When his relationship with Mitchell soured, he decided to move into the house by himself. Hiring road-crew members like Makota as carpenters, Nash had the home remade from the inside; by the time he was finished, it had velvet curtains, a studio in the basement and, on the fourth floor, a bathtub made of black walnut. The upstairs bathroom featured a stream, complete with live goldfish, between the tub and the sink. “The floor was all water and you had to step on stones so you wouldn’t get your feet wet,” says producer Ron Albert, who visited. “It wasn’t the type of bathroom you’d want to get to in the middle of the night.” As disillusionment with so-called revolution was setting in after Kent State and other traumas, Nash had plugged into another reemerging part of the zeitgeist: as historian Bruce J. Schulman put it, “sixties radicals found it easier to build new homes for themselves than to rebuild American political culture.”
Nash, Crosby and Young were all “in the same general area, but living so completely apart,” says Ron Stone. “Three completely different worlds.” The most famous Los Angeles–based pop band of the moment was now far from that city, and Stills’ world was even farther removed. After a brief stay at a rented home in the Colorado Rockies—where, to his shock, he received a call saying his friend Jimi Hendrix had been found dead in a hotel room in London, after which he stayed up all night playing piano—Stills returned to his house outside London, which he’d bought from Ringo Starr for a quarter of a million dollars (about $1.6 million in 2018 value). (At the last minute, the business manager of the Beatles, Allen Klein, had tried unsuccessfully to up the price.) Stills continued to be attracted to the British countryside and lifestyle, but he had an additional motivation for retreating across the pond in September 1970: the incestuous California rock world had made a direct hit on him.
Soon after the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour wound down, Stills and Rita Coolidge continued seeing each other, although Coolidge was less than enchanted by Stills’ seemingly out-of-control lifestyle, which involved everything from recreational drugs to manic horse racing. From Nash, she finally learned the truth of what had happened the night of the “Love the One You’re With” recording—and, at the same time, realized that she and Nash were drawn to each other. Wanting to be upfront with Stills, Nash suggested he and Coolidge tell Stills to his face that they were in love. “Stephen was adorable, but he had all these different things going on,” she says. “Being with Graham was as easy as breathing.” Driving to the Shady Oak place and finding Stills poolside, they told him what had transpired, and Stills, angered and shocked, spit at Nash. No longer welcome at that house, Nash immediately moved out, taking a room at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood.
Nash, dubbed “Mr. Sex of the Hollies” in a story on Crosby, Stills and Nash the year before, had a reputation for easily wooing women, which Stills now understood all too well. “It’s a terrible thing when a best friend snakes your lady,” Stills told Diltz. Already shaky, the group now ceased to exist over the Coolidge incident. “It didn’t help,” says Crosby. “Girls fell quite naturally in love or in lust with Graham. He had that lovely British accent and he was a good lover and a gentleman. Stephen had tried everything he knew to get Rita’s attention. So he wasn’t happy with Graham walking off with the prize without any effort at all, which is probably how he saw it.” (Or, as Stills put it later, “She didn’t break us up. He broke us up.”) With a flair for drama, Stills went off the deep end. On August 14, the front desk clerk at a La Jolla motel saw a man “crawling along the floor” in a hallway and called an ambulance. When police arrived, Stills was found babbling incoherently on the bed; two grams of cocaine and some barbiturates were found in the room, along with a twenty-two-year-old woman friend. (According to Coolidge, Stills had also written “I love you Rita” on the bathroom mirror, which she interpreted as his way of getting her attention.) Stills and the woman he was with were both arrested, and Stills spent the night in jail. Eventually he was freed on $2,500 bond, and the following spring, the charges were reduced to a $1,000 fine and a year’s probation.
No sooner had Stills finalized and submitted his first album to Atlantic than he was at work on its follow-up, a planned double album that would integrate all his musical passions and then some. He would do so in England, moving there for good (or at least for the foreseeable future), wishing to be as far from Crosby, Nash and Young—and Coolidge—as possible. “When Stephen was in the studio back then, it was guitars, not girls,” says Halverson. “With Crosby, sometimes it was with girls. But with Stephen, he got to the studio and said, ‘What am I going to sing or play next?’” Staying up for days at a time, welcoming guests—including Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones—Stills and his loyal engineer, Halverson, recorded acoustic blues, flew the esteemed Memphis Horns to London for his stab at the big-band rock newly being popularized by acts like Chicago, and finally succeeded at reworking Buffalo Springfield’s “Bluebird” into an overwrought but passionate breakup song, “Bluebird Revisited.” “He was more and more obsessed with doing everything,” says Halverson. “There were days when I would get there on a Tuesday and leave on a Thursday and do some more amphetamines. I was starting to lose perspective.” When the sessions moved to Criteria studios in Florida a few months later, Nils Lofgren, who had been invited to play keyboards, saw the differences between working with Stills and with Young: for one thing, the Stills jam sessions extended from midnight to dawn. Moreover, “Neil was very focused,” he says, whereas “Stephen was just feeling songs out.” But with Stills, there was “hellacious jamming” and plenty of rock-life perks: “People came in and cooked and cleaned,” Lofgren added. “It was heaven.”
One frenetic day in November, Stills drove his Mercedes onto a ferry to go to Paris; there, fellow drag-race aficionado Steve McQueen was filming the racecar movie Le Mans, for which Stills was hoping to score the soundtrack. Realizing he’d just missed McQueen, Stills instead partied with Ertegun at his Paris home. (The following summer, he and Ertegun would be among the guests at Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in St. Tropez, France.) Soon after visiting Ertegun, Stills drove for five hours to get to an airport and hopped on a KLM flight to Amsterdam, where he literally walked right onto the stage to sit in with the Stones before carousing until dawn with Jagger and Keith Richards. Arriving back in London, Stills then spent thirty-three straight hours recording. Piles of empty wine bottles accumulated in the yard of the Brookfield House. “It was so much fun,” Stills has said. “It was wicked dangerous because there were nasty things crawling about. And I managed to walk that razor’s edge. Probably not without making an utter fool of myself.”
Crosby and Nash saw the hazardous side of Stills’ lifestyle for themselves when they flew to England in October. Forgiving Nash at least for the moment, Stills recruited him to sing harmonies on a few of his new recordings. To his shock, Nash witnessed Stills almost overdosing. But little was slowing Stills down at that moment. Visiting a horse farm, he bought a steeplechase horse he called Major Chance, but a little Appaloosa pony also kept following him around. “You’ve got to buy that little horse too,” said Diltz, who accompanied him on the trip. Eventually, Stills did, naming the animal, of all things, Crazy Horse. “It was wild times,” Stills has said. “That’s when it started to be a four-way street, four horses pulling in different directions. Which is the method they used to use for executions.”
BY CHRISTMAS 1970, all four were back in the States. Stills had returned to the States temporarily earlier in the month, but that didn’t necessarily mean a reunion was imminent. Young had begun experiencing back pain, and a few days before Christmas, he was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital for a slipped disc. Among his visitors were Crosby and Carrie Snodgress, an Illinois-born actress whose deft performance in Diary of a Mad Housewife, from the summer of 1970, was about to lead to an Oscar nomination. Giachetti had seen the film and told Young about it, and the two had gone to see it together. “We were like a couple of groupies,” Giachetti says. He and roadie Bruce Berry sent her a note about Young, and she and Young (whose marriage was about over by then) soon hooked up.
Up to that point, Young had been riding the headwinds of his association with Crosby, Stills and Nash. In the aftermath of Déjà vu, he would be the first of the four to embark on his own series of concerts. In the fall of 1970, he hit the road for a series of solo performances that included a headlining stand at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Although its versions of “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” were by then staples on FM radio, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere had barely registered in sales terms when it first came out. Now that Young’s name was more widely known, thanks to Déjà vu, the album reentered the pop charts in the summer of 1970, finally busting into the Top 40. Young’s investment in working with Crosby, Stills and Nash began paying off. “As good as Neil was—and make no bones, he was good—he’s never really been in the group in his mind,” Crosby says. “It wasn’t that thing you hoped for, that feeling of brotherhood, committed to this thing we’re building together. He was a comrade-in-arms. But it was part of his plan. The plan was to use us as stepping-stones to become an enormous star. And it worked. It’s not like he was sneaky about it. It was pretty easy to see how he wanted it to go. It’s ironic since he was solo and he wanted to come with us on tour, but it would have been unrealistic for me to look at it any other way.”
After the Gold Rush, the Young album that arrived in the fall of 1970, included songs he’d either played onstage with the trio or had tried recording with them. Stills had even sung backup on a few tracks, although some of those parts were either wiped out or lowered in the final mix. What the album made profusely clear was that Young didn’t need any of them. Although After the Gold Rush had been cobbled together from different months and sessions, the album was so seamless, so airtight, that only the most careful listener would have known. As self-indulgent as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young could be onstage, After the Gold Rush didn’t contain even one wasted note. As it made its way from the opening “Tell Me Why” through a crackling version of “Southern Man” and back to the delicate rumination of songs like “Birds,” framed by piano and harmonies, the record made it clear that Young could have it both ways—pensive, soul-searching singer-songwriter one minute, screaming-guitar rocker the next. With Jack Nitzsche seemingly striking random piano notes and chords, “When You Dance, I Can Really Love” captured the brawny thunder of Crazy Horse and an unabashedly sexual side of Young’s writing. On the other side, “After the Gold Rush” evoked the dazed-and-confused feel of a generation that had just hesitatingly left one vital era in American history and was entering a new, less defined, more unknowable one. Young could have it all. Nor was his sense of humor missing in action: “Cripple Creek Ferry” was a stoner’s sea shanty. But with the help of Bernstein’s photography—especially the shot of Young in his Philadelphia dressing room, which took up the entire inside spread of the LP, showcasing his patched jeans and deep-in-thought scowl—the album buttressed Young’s image as one of pop’s leading lonely guys, a bard of brooding. That fall, it became his first individual album to break into the Top 10.
With his back issues, the work slowed down, but only temporarily. Even while restricted to a hospital bed, Young was busy planning a fifteen-song live album from both his solo and Crazy Horse tours and mapping out plans for his first movie, which he planned to write and begin filming late in 1971. As for Crazy Horse, they were recording without him. (“Neil likes to play in groups, but basically he’s a solo artist,” Horse singer-guitarist Danny Whitten said at the time. “I don’t think he’ll ever stay with any group for very long. Deep down, he knows he has to do the gig by himself.”) When a visiting reporter started asking about the state of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, a nurse conveniently appeared to take Young away for more physical therapy. Early in 1971, Young was released from the hospital in time to start a one-man tour of the States and Canada. After arriving at an airport in Toronto in his lumberjack jacket and work boots, Young was searched by customs agents, who even rifled through his harmonica boxes looking for drugs. But the shows, which included homecoming concerts in Winnipeg and Toronto, featured exquisite versions of new and older material and backstage reunions with family members. When asked in interviews about the “bigger band” he was part of, Young offered little comment about its status or future.
Their managers weren’t sure about that situation, either. By those early months of 1971, the offices of the Geffen-Roberts Company, now on Sunset Boulevard, were the bustling, weed-friendly center of West Coast rock—which, at the time, seemed to be most of rock. With Geffen working the phones and Roberts chilling and schmoozing with their acts, new and established clients flitted in and out—Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, singer-songwriter Ned Doheny, members of a newly formed and inordinately success-hungry band called the Eagles. Geffen-Roberts continued to cater to their clients. Roberts’ newly hired assistant, Leslie Morris, would attend to coffee and flowers; now and then, she would cup headphones over her ears and listen intently to Mitchell’s latest album so she could transcribe every word for an album package.
But few of their acts loomed larger than Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. A year and over a million copies later, Déjà vu had been nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year (it would wind up losing to Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water). England’s Melody Maker had crowned CSNY the best rock group of 1970. But Morris only saw the group members occasionally and always separately. “They’d had their big moment and they were not getting along too well and were going their separate ways,” she recalls. “Neil certainly could easily do it on his own and wanted to. If it wasn’t fun, he wouldn’t do it. That’s the message I kept getting.”
At that moment, the situation was doubly challenging for Bill Halverson, who’d been tasked with compiling the live album of the group’s summer tour. Since each man was living in a different city, Halverson, in those pre-Internet and pre-MP3 days, had to fly from one home to another to get each of the four to sign off on the songs and versions to be included. To ensure that Stills’ and Young’s guitar solos were of equal length, Halverson, with Nash pitching in, worked diligently to edit the longer jams; Nash recalls “Southern Man” as particularly tricky to whittle down. Unhappy with the record, especially the occasionally off-key harmonies, Stills lobbied for overdubbing but was overruled, especially by Crosby. “We made the mistake of recording and I listened to it and said, ‘Some of this is horribly out of tune—we should just redo the vocals,’” Stills has said. “And Crosby says, ‘No, maaan, keep it real!’ I found that album really embarrassing.” Halverson was under the distinct impression that he was the only person in contact with all four of them.
The harmonic blends heard throughout 4 Way Street rarely approached the precisely layered harmonies on the studio versions. A vocally ragged version of “Carry On” was an occasionally wince-inducing case in point. But the album, which replicated the half-unplugged, half-electric format of their shows, captured both the living-room-hang ambience and the high-voltage authority of the group at its peak. The original trio and Young rarely blended onstage as naturally as they did on Young’s “On the Way Home,” complete with Stills’ call-and-response harmony and fluid acoustic solo. The exchanges between Stills and Young on “Carry On” and “Southern Man”—the way they would alternate solos like jazz musicians, with Crosby comping chords, before all three guitars and the rhythm section built to frenzied climaxes after roughly a dozen minutes—benefited from Halverson’s crisp recording.
4 Way Street preserved the band’s no-rules mandate, its collective civil-disobedience voice and its ever-impending sense of implosion. Many of the double LP’s highlights were solo or duo configurations that spotlighted the individuals over the collective: Crosby and Nash’s exquisite duet of “The Lee Shore,” which bobbed and weaved like a boat on the ocean; Crosby’s commanding take on “Triad”; Young’s solo “Cowgirl in the Sand,” shorn of Crazy Horse’s electrified backing but spookier than ever; and Stills’ merciless, pastor-voiced medley of “49 Bye-Byes” and “America’s Children,” which immortalized both his all-consuming intensity and his tendency to go way over the top. With Crosby harmonizing, Nash finally unveiled “Right Between the Eyes,” his somewhat guilt-ridden rumination on his feelings for John Sebastian’s wife.
As its title implied, 4 Way Street was the sound of men preparing to go their separate ways, as if they’d finished what they’d set out to do together and were ready to get on with the rest of their lives. It would also be the last album of newly recorded material that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would release for seventeen years.