Starting with the day he was thrust into the group after Dallas Taylor’s firing in 1970, Johny Barbata thought he’d seen it all when it came to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. That same year, Stills had recruited Barbata for his first solo album, and after a typically long night in the studio, Barbata arrived back home in the early-morning hours, exhausted, only to take a call from Stills asking him to turn around and come back—he had a few more musical ideas to get on tape. To what seemed like Stills’ displeasure, Barbata passed on the request to return to work that same morning. “That’s just the way he is,” Nash consoled the drummer. “You did the right thing.”
Now, in 1973, came another call from the Stills camp, again concerning Taylor, who by then had begun his deep, quickly debilitating dive into hard drugs, including experimentation with heroin. A roadie had introduced the drummer to the drug, and before long Taylor was shooting up alongside Keith Richards during work on an album by Bill Wyman of the Stones. Eager to help his bandmate—Taylor and Hillman were his wingmen in Manassas—Stills had paid for Taylor’s rehab, but Taylor had relapsed. Without any explanation, Barbata found himself on a Lear jet heading for a Manassas show in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the summer of 1973. There, Stills told Barbata to set up his own drum kit by the side of the stage and be prepared to fill in for Taylor if he couldn’t make it through the show. That scenario came to pass when, midway through, Stills ordered Taylor off the stage; Barbata then did his best to play on a song he’d never heard before.
Manassas’ troubles were a microcosm of the problems Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young struggled with on their separate paths in the year that followed. If 1972 had demonstrated how each of them could survive and prosper outside the mothership band, 1973 would be a rude awakening about how much their fans were willing to endure while awaiting another group album or tour. Young’s problem-plagued shows, culminating with his outreach to Crosby and Nash, made for an early barometer. Another was the sudden re-formation of the original Byrds.
In the years since Crosby had been fired from the band, the Byrds had gone through a string of personnel and musical changes, veering from barroom country to Americana rock; their prominent instrument became the twangy, lyrical lead guitar of Clarence White, who joined in 1968. The Byrds now sounded almost nothing like the ensemble that had once featured Crosby, although later songs, such as “Chestnut Mare,” “Just a Season” and “Ballad of Easy Rider” (which did make that movie), demonstrated that Roger McGuinn, the sole surviving member by the end of the ’60s, could successfully remake the band. By 1972, the Byrds had declined, with their albums limping along both creatively and commercially. Crosby and co-manager Elliot Roberts visited McGuinn at his home in Malibu and, according to McGuinn, Crosby said, “Some of this stuff you guys are doing with Clarence is pretty good, but some of it isn’t.” McGuinn agreed with him. With Geffen now in charge of Asylum, a plan was hatched to reconvene the original Byrds; in the post–Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young era, they could be marketed as something akin to a supergroup. Although Hillman was still a member of Manassas, the others were largely available and unrestricted by record contracts. Since the Byrds were still technically contracted to Columbia, Geffen only had to convince Clive Davis to let them go—which Davis did in exchange for a McGuinn solo album that Crosby would oversee.
In a sign of his industry clout, thanks to his success with Nash, Stills and Young, Crosby would serve as the producer of the Byrds reunion album. McGuinn, the nominal leader, would take a back seat to his former rival. “David was the boss, the big guy,” says McGuinn. “I wasn’t used to that. He did what he wanted. He was the bigger star and he was pretty much in charge. He had a lot of confidence.” Thanks to Crosby’s potent weed, the making of the album was, McGuinn says, “a great party.” Unable or unwilling to return to their soaring “Eight Miles High” period, the Byrds instead opted for a folksier coffee-house approach. Gene Clark, in particular, shone on songs like “Full Circle” and “Changing Heart,” which poignantly hinted at the personal and career problems he’d had since leaving the Byrds. McGuinn and lyricist Jacques Levy’s “Sweet Mary” and a Crosby-fronted version of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free” made the most of the group’s harmonies, which felt almost gothic.
But because of the rushed nature of the project (Hillman still had commitments to Manassas), and the fact that some of the members withheld their strongest material for albums of their own, the final product was spotty. A remake of Crosby’s “Laughing,” from If I Could Only Remember My Name, was flabby and unnecessary. When the album, Byrds, was unveiled in March 1973, the group put on a stoic public face. “I had a wonderful time doing it, working with all of them,” Crosby told Rolling Stone. “Stress that.”
But expectations were inordinately high, and the reviews were middling to brutal. In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau called it “the most disappointing and one of the dullest albums of the year.” (And it was only March.) Since he was credited as producer—even pictured front and center on the cover photo—Crosby absorbed the brunt of the criticism. Elaborate plans for a combined reunion tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young along with the Byrds and the Hollies—a monumental organizational task to begin with—crumbled with the album’s disappointing sales. In coincidental but biting timing, National Lampoon Lemmings—a play derived from the beyond-irreverent humor magazine National Lampoon—began performances off-Broadway. The show parodied a fictitious rock festival, openly mocking Crosby’s political songs in “Lemmings Lament.” Lemmings was up and running when the Byrds album arrived in stores.
For all its early promise and across-the-musical-universe shows, Manassas was simultaneously starting to spin out of control. Onstage and on record, the band effortlessly leapt from one genre to another; offstage, they adhered to their pure rock-and-roll lifestyle. Taylor was far from the only one dabbling. “People liked their snow and drink,” says guitarist Al Perkins. On a 747 flight to Australia, the group smuggled aboard hash mixed in with cigarettes and openly smoked and drank.
When the band reconvened in Florida in late 1972 to make its second album, its members were more scattered and less inspired than the year before. Adhering to his vision of Manassas as a band as much as a vehicle for himself, Stills planned to make the record more of a group effort, with other members taking a greater role in writing and singing. The eclecticism of their debut resumed in the sparkly bluegrass of the hitchhiker’s lament “Do You Remember the Americans,” the low-rider funk paranoia of “Rollin’ My Stone,” and the tough-guy boogie rock of Hillman’s “Lies.” Without Stills, the rest of the band concocted “Mama Told You So,” which sounded more like the then popular R&B band War than anything out of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young universe.
But overall, the material was weaker than on Manassas, and Stills seemed distracted. “We said, ‘This isn’t happening—it’s not good,’” says Howard Albert, who engineered the album along with his brother Ron. “Stephen went, ‘Okay, fuck those guys,’ and finished it up with other people. He was at times drinking a lot. It wasn’t good.” Disciplined and not one to suffer fools or self-indulgence lightly, Hillman confronted Stills about the up-all-night recording schedule. Adds crew member Guillermo Giachetti, who was experiencing his first Manassas studio work, “Helping Stephen in the studio was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was tough to keep up with him. He’d be in the studio for three days in a row and I’d go to sleep and go back the next day and he’d still be there.” Part of Giachetti’s job became convincing Stills to eat.
Having sold the Brookfield estate in England for a profit, Stills was now calling Colorado his home—he had bought a house in Rollinsville, outside of Boulder—and Manassas reassembled there for additional work. With his neighbor and new friend Joe Walsh playing greasy-spoon slide guitar, Stills wrote and sang “Down the Road,” a startlingly candid white-blues catalog of his misadventures that rattled off cocaine and bourbon. Twice the album was submitted to Ahmet Ertegun; twice, Ertegun rejected it for containing too many tracks that didn’t feature the star of the band. (In the shuffle, a few worthy songs—“Witching Hour” and “Thoroughfare Gap,” the latter one of Stills’ most thoughtful musings, set to banjo and mandolin accompaniment—fell by the wayside.) Relocating again, this time to California, Manassas kept recording, now with longtime Stills collaborator Bill Halverson on hand. “We were trying to get something the label would put out,” Halverson recalls. “We recorded and recorded and got in other players to make Ahmet happy. But the stream was running dry. It wasn’t CSN. They weren’t bringing that kind of talent to the table.”
Called Down the Road, the album meandered out in the spring of 1973, a month after Byrds, and suffered a similar critical and commercial fate. Like Byrds, Down the Road wasn’t the complete debacle it would later be labeled. The mix was punchier than on Manassas; Stills’ two Spanish love songs, “Pensamiento” and “Guaguancó De Veró” (the former a type of tango, the latter a version of a rumba), were fetching; and the anti–Vietnam War “Isn’t It About Time” returned Stills to his politically aware roots. But the often sloppier Down the Road didn’t do much to bolster Stills’ reputation, which had already begun to take body blows. Two nights after his concert at Madison Square Garden in 1971, the venue was scheduled to host the all-star “Concert for Bangladesh,” featuring co-organizers George Harrison and Ravi Shankar along with Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and other upper-crust rock luminaries. Given how quickly the concert had to be set up, Stills offered Harrison his sound system—and then heard he hadn’t been invited to play. (“But then,” Stills has said, “I’d gone to visit Ringo and was really hammered, so he probably warned them off.”) Reviewing Manassas, and in particular songs like “Colorado,” the New York Times called his music “the self-pitying cry of a wounded male chauvinist.… Obviously, it never occurs to Stills, whose field of vision too frequently encompasses only his own tortured adolescent soul, that women these days are becoming independent human beings.” A Rolling Stone profile in 1973 started in the worst way imaginable, at least as far as publicity was concerned: “It’s difficult to name a rock & roll star who’s been put down, chopped up, dismissed and generally hated as much as Stephen Stills.”
While Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young weren’t paying attention, younger bands influenced by them—Eagles, America—were sprouting up and delivering more seamless versions of the kind of music the quartet had pioneered. America’s first hit, “A Horse with No Name,” was an unintentional but uncanny imitation of Young, who didn’t know what to make of it when he heard it. America was also managed by Geffen-Roberts, who appreciated their attitude right away. “CSNY was pretty much a constant fight—‘I think we should do this,’ ‘Well, I don’t!’” recalls Leslie Morris. “America did pretty much what you wanted them to do. They were good clients.”
Unbeknownst to any of them, a manager and trained violinist in New York, Hilly (short for Hillel) Kristal, was preparing to open a new club in downtown Manhattan in the fall of 1973. Like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, he loved folk music—he was even planning to call the club CBGB & OMFUG, an abbreviation for “country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers.” But that musical menu would soon change to a more bare-boned and influential form of rock and roll, and in their thickening fog, few in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young world would see it coming.
“CROSBY, STILLS AND NASH is a myth,” Stills practically spat out at a reporter in 1973. If so, it was a myth that refused to die. In late 1972, music journalist Ritchie Yorke, who had solid access to the band, reported that Crosby, Stills and Nash had met with Elliot Roberts to discuss a new album and tour, possibly with Young’s involvement. Another published report early in 1973 claimed the trio were already at work on a record to be released in April. But all of it was wishful thinking; Crosby and Nash were on the road with Young during that time.
Still, the start of an actual reconvening did occur in April in Hawaii. Crosby and Young had remained particularly close of the four, with Crosby counseling Young on his increasingly difficult relationship with Snodgress. During this period, Young referred to Crosby as “my guiding light.” In return, during Young’s tour, Young let Crosby use his tour plane to fly to Santa Barbara and visit his mother, who was dying of cancer (she would pass away that year, at the age of sixty-seven). It was a magnanimous gesture that Crosby would never forget.
After a lengthy sailing trip from the mainland to Hawaii once Young’s tour ended, Crosby had arrived in the hippie-centric, former plantation town of Lahaina in western Maui, docking the Mayan off the Mala Wharf. Young arrived soon after and began spending time with Crosby. Even there, people in their business would put themselves out for the band. Tom Moffatt, a local DJ and promoter who was among the first to play rock and roll on Hawaiian radio, was asked to help bring contracts to Young and Crosby on the boat. Moffatt retrieved the packet at the airport, flew from Oahu to Maui, took a taxi to Lahaina and then was forced to hire a fishing vessel to take him the two miles out to sea to Crosby’s boat—where Crosby and Young scrawled their signatures on the paperwork and sent Moffatt back on his way to land.
Later the following month, during a break in Manassas’ unremitting tour schedule, a newly bearded Stills, along with Nash, also arrived in Maui. They took up residence in a house Young had rented, along with those who’d accompanied them on the trip. The musical-family aspect of their dynamic played out in multiple ways. Young was joined by Snodgress, and Crosby brought Debbie Donovan, his most regular female companion of the time. Stills arrived with his new wife, a vivacious French singer, songwriter and keyboardist named Véronique Sanson. The daughter of French Resistance fighters, Sanson, twenty-four, had first recorded as a teenager but was now in the first flush of her own career; her 1972 album Amoureuse had established her in her native country as a formidable proponent of flowing piano chords and emotive singing. She had met Stills soon after attending a Manassas show in Paris the previous fall, and the attraction was immediate. Stills asked her father for permission to marry, and on March 14, 1973, they wed at a ceremony, held not far from Brookfield House, that was attended by Nash and other rock luminaries, including T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. A few days later, Ertegun threw the couple a wedding bash in New York. “Why did they get married? They were both singers,” says Giachetti. “It was a beautiful thing.” Many hoped it would be the stabilizing force that Stills appeared to need at that point in his life.
With their families in attendance and the West Maui mountains in the background, it was hard to imagine a less stressful scenario for setting up their first album since Déjà vu. Young brought “Human Highway,” a folksy but disheartened ballad ripe for group harmonies. Among others, Nash had “Prison Song,” which touched on both his father’s imprisonment and modern drug busts. With an ambling melody that stretched out like yawning arms, Crosby’s “Time After Time” captured the sense of contentment he was experiencing. The songs were worked up in a casual fashion, and the group—relaxed, hirsute, tanned—even posed on the beach for a photo (snapped by one of Nash’s friends, Harry Harris) that would make an ideal album cover: the superstars in repose. But the idyll was shockingly brief. According to Young biographer Jimmy McDonough, one of the roadies, Bruce Berry—formerly with Young, now working for Manassas—showed up with drugs intended for one particular band member who’d already had his fill, and the serenity exploded.
Nonetheless, the plan to start and complete an album proceeded, and the group reconvened at Young’s studio on his ranch in the summer, joined by bass player Tim Drummond and drummers Barbata and Russ Kunkel. Aligning everyone’s schedules proved to be the first major task. Stills, perennially an all-nighter, would sleep during the day, precisely when the others were awake and watching the most riveting television of the summer: the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, which was investigating that suspicious break-in from the year before at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. (Just as the recording sessions began, on June 28, US senator Howard Baker, a Republican, famously asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”) A few songs were put on tape, including Stills’ “See the Changes,” a modestly percussive ballad about the impact Sanson had had on his life. Meanwhile, Nash wrote down a list of possible tracks for the album and presented it to his friend Joel Bernstein.
But the time apart had taken its toll. Listening to each other’s suggestions after being the bosses of their own bands was no longer palatable, and the work petered out. “It was Neil,” says Crosby. “It was his choice. He didn’t want to do it. He took another look to see if he would be happy doing it and it didn’t look happy to him. He was happy with me and the sailboat. I don’t think Nash helped. He wants Neil’s power. Nash wants to be Neil and Neil wants to be Bob [Dylan]. Funny shit.” To writer Bill DeYoung, Stills would credit the crash to “drug-induced confusion on everyone’s part at the time.” With its hopes for a long-overdue group album in the fall suddenly evaporating, Atlantic hastily announced it would instead push out a compilation, and record-store ads for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Greatest Hits, complete with makeshift cover art featuring a photo of the group onstage at the Fillmore East in 1970, began appearing in newspapers. Demonstrating the ongoing chaos, that album was canceled at the last minute.
TWO WEEKS AFTER the group work crashed, Young embarked on another, very different journey. Reconvening what was left of Crazy Horse (Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot), along with Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren and Young’s gruff, opinionated producer, David Briggs, Young and his crew settled into Los Angeles’s SIR studio in late August. In between shooting pool, drinking and coking it up, they recorded a series of hauntingly dissipated songs about, among other things, the overdoses of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. Berry had died on the mainland shortly after delivering drugs to the group.
From his mainstream AM radio breakthrough to the deaths of Whitten and Berry, everything around Young felt out of sorts, and the new material reflected that mood. Young and his musicians, dubbed the Santa Monica Flyers, made music the polar opposite of what Crosby, Stills and Nash had done, and even far removed from Harvest: vocals were occasionally out of tune, and the musicianship had a spontaneous, off-the-cuff feel. “Neil didn’t want us learning the songs and working on parts too much,” Lofgren recalls. “It was the antithesis of production. We’d play a song for half an hour and develop a part. Briggs kept saying, ‘We’re not gonna over-rehearse.’ Me and Ralphie used to argue with Briggs—‘Let me sing the harmony part.’ We didn’t even know the words. It was the roughest record ever made.” The music, an album called Tonight’s the Night, was so steeped in ennui and decay that the public wouldn’t hear it for almost two years.
Simultaneously, Nash was entering a surprisingly cheerless era of his own. By the middle of 1973, he had a new live-in girlfriend, Calli Cerami, a transplanted college student who, coincidentally, had lived on the same Florida street where Stills had rented a house with Manassas. After meeting some of the members of that world in Florida and then moving to San Francisco to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Cerami had been invited by Elliot Roberts to a party at Nash’s home. She found Nash “very flirtatious from the word ‘go,’” she recalls. She also sensed he was “kind and warm to everyone—very true to his lyrics.” It wasn’t long before Cerami moved in with him. Her father objected, telling her, “You’re giving up the best years of your life—to this guy? He’s not married and you should be married.” But for Cerami, the new lifestyle into which she was suddenly thrust—lobster fishing on Crosby’s boat, traveling to Crosby and Nash shows in Lear jets—was a magical, enticing place, the upscale counterculture of the early ’70s on full display.
Yet in spite of his tastefully designed home and new relationship, Nash was in the early stages of a depression; according to one friend, his breakup with Mitchell was belatedly hitting him, three years later, and his cocaine use had increased. He was also eager to prove he could be on the same creative playing field as the likes of Young. Wild Tales, the record he began making within weeks of the collapse of the reunited CSNY project, would be that vehicle. Nash began recording songs that were several Laurel Canyons away from the cheeriness of “Our House.” In addition to “Prison Song,” he sang of his internal confusion (the haunted-dream melancholy of “Another Sleep Song,” with an exquisitely woozy arrangement to match), his feelings about Mitchell (the snippy but upbeat country song “You’ll Never Be the Same”), and his distaste for fame (“On the Line”). Stark, bereft and powerful, “I Miss You” brought out his lingering feelings for Amelia “Amy” Gossage, the daughter of advertising executive Howard Gossage (designer of a best-selling sweatshirt featuring the image of Beethoven), who had been Nash’s companion for about a year and a half before their breakup in 1973. Using members of the most recent edition of the Stray Gators—Drummond, Keith and Barbata—Nash set those melodies to arrangements that were less adorned than those on Songs for Beginners; like Young, he even played more harmonica. Fueled by session man David Lindley’s slide guitar, the title song was scrappy rock and roll, rougher than anything Nash had made before. (Opening with Drummond’s Motown-tough bass, the title song would be one of the rawest tracks Nash would commit to vinyl.) Though not as visceral as Young’s recent musical voyage, Wild Tales was its own journey into darkened territory.
The same month Nash and Young started work on their individual records, David Geffen sold Asylum to Warner Communications for $2 million in cash and $5 million in stock. His Asylum label and Elektra were merged under Warner’s umbrella, with Geffen appointed chairman of the new Elektra/Asylum Records. Since the deal included rights to the artists’ publishing, the shift rattled many Geffen-Roberts clients, including Crosby, Nash and Young. “We pretty much put Geffen in business,” says Crosby. “It wasn’t a good feeling.” According to Cerami, “Graham and David were really pissed at Geffen. Nobody was happy.”
The lure of the mothership still lingered in the waning months of 1973, when Stills and Manassas settled into San Francisco’s Winterland theater for two nights in October. Ken Weiss, a Hillman associate now running Stills’ Gold Hill publishing company, was backstage at the first show and glimpsed an unusual sight: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young huddling together in a dressing room. Weiss couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it became apparent soon enough. During the acoustic part of Manassas’ show, a roadie emerged to place several stools onstage, and the crowd was stunned when Crosby and Nash suddenly appeared alongside Stills. (They were also likely baffled when Stills ordered Bill Graham to eject an inebriated Grace Slick, who was doing karate moves by the side of the stage during the first Manassas set.) “We’re here for a while, just for a little while,” Nash told them. They’d barely practiced, and at times it showed. Stills forgot the lyrics to one of his own songs, “As I Come of Age.”
Yet the natural rapport between them was ageless as they slipped into versions of “Helplessly Hoping,” “Wooden Ships” and John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Nash’s voice roamed to his traditional highs, particularly on “Wooden Ships.” Returning to his usual organizational role, Nash also adjusted Stills’ mic, announced songs, and bobbed and weaved while singing. (Other tendencies resurfaced as well: one of the members of Manassas nicknamed them “Crosby Smells of Hash” that night.) The crowd lustily cheered every moment and was further roused when Young materialized. “It’s been a long time since this happened!” Nash noted, at which Young stood back up and gave an exaggerated “I quit!” What followed was startling: acoustic and fairly tight versions of new songs they had worked up over the past year together, including Young’s “New Mama” (he and Snodgress had had a son, Zeke, the previous year), his doper anthem “Roll Another Number (for the Road),” and “Human Highway” (with Stills and Young trading lead vocals). Nash’s “Prison Song” and “And So It Goes,” a Wild Tales rocker that was melodically reminiscent of “Cowgirl in the Sand,” both took on added gravitas. The performance, which lasted just under an hour, amounted to a public rehearsal—a frustrating hint of an album the public would essentially never hear.
Three nights later, back at Winterland, Stills seemed to acknowledge as much. In the midst of a solid performance with Manassas, complete with another Crosby cameo, he thanked the band for its work and told the crowd, “We ain’t superstars, but we make good music,” before adding, “To me, this band is home.” Several nights later, in Long Beach, the group would give its final show. But others, from Hillman to Weiss, saw a hint of what was about to come. “You had Atlantic wanting it and the company willing to pay you whatever,” Weiss says. “And here they were being friends. It felt like the natural order.”
THE KID WITH the backpack, whoever he was, was drawn to the clatter emanating from deep in the woods. He surely recognized those familiar harmonies and songs, and he, like some others, may have simply thought a massive stereo was blasting old albums. But before he was able to see the source of the music for himself, one of Young’s ranch hands found him and escorted him off the property. Other fans parked their cars on adjoining properties within a few miles and sat up in the hills. “Don’t hurt ’em,” the ranch hands told the property owners, who complied. They just wanted to hear the music.
Had any of them made their way through the forest during the late May and early June of 1974, they would have witnessed a remarkable sight: Stills, Nash, Crosby and Young, usually in that order, standing on a makeshift wooden stage about six feet above the ground. In the heat of the midday sun, sometimes shirtless and wearing shorts, they were practicing songs they hadn’t played together in years as a run-up to their first full tour since 1970. Managers, road crew members and friends hovered around, taking in the rare sight. “The year before hadn’t been so good, but this time they seemed to be getting along,” says Cerami. “They all seemed to be pretty positive about it. I don’t remember a lot of fighting. We were all pretty stoked.”
In the months leading up to the rehearsals, numerous forces had finally welded them back together. Although plans for an album and a tour in 1973 had disintegrated, those preliminary proposals made everyone realize the likely financial windfall that could come of such a venture. “Elliot and Geffen were basically thinking, ‘We’re not going to not make this money,’” recalls a source close to the band. Thanks to friendly reunions like the get-together at Winterland, the timing now felt right, and another round of discussions began. Bill Graham had by then shut down his Fillmore theaters in New York and San Francisco; disillusioned by the increasing greediness of the music business, he had decided to take a break. But now he was back in the game, acting as the promoter for Bob Dylan’s immensely successful comeback tour in early 1974. Knowing well the public appetite for a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reemergence, Graham pitched Geffen and Roberts—and the musicians themselves—an audacious plan: a tour that would mostly play outdoor stadiums. They had never before attempted something on that scale. Everyone agreed that, should it be undertaken, Graham would be the man for the job.
The tour, which promised millions in revenue, appealed to the band on multiple levels, starting with their finances. For Stills, the newly disbanded Manassas had been artistically rewarding but a money pit; a generous boss, he paid his band and crew well, but they lost thousands of dollars a night on the road. Rolling Stone reported that he had spent $36,000 on a Mercedes snowplow for his Colorado home. Barbata heard that Stills once had a private jet fly to Colorado to pick up two cases of his favorite Coors beer and transport them to a show. During his first meeting with Weiss, after a Manassas concert in Georgia in the spring of 1973, Stills confessed he was feeling the pressure of shouldering the band by himself. The poor sales of Down the Road—around 250,000, about half of what the first Manassas had sold—only reinforced his delicate financial state.
Young hadn’t fared much better with his latest record, Time Fades Away. A clankety document of his trouble-plagued tour, it was a live album that, unlike almost every other concert collection of the time, contained not a single retread of an old hit. Instead, from the anxious title track to the monolithic finale, “Last Dance,” pausing only for a few voice-and-piano songs, the album featured all new—and all wonderfully ragged—material. For some record buyers, that alone was challenging enough. But the songs were delivered in a voice that sounded sometimes hoarse and agitated, and the Stray Gators provided meaty but jumpy accompaniment. To the consternation of old and new fans, nothing on the album sounded remotely like “Heart of Gold,” although “Don’t Be Denied” was one of his most personal songs, and “L.A.,” his love-hate ode to his former adopted home, had a draggy grandeur. One of Young’s most remarkable records, Time Fades Away was like one long exposed nerve set to music. And not counting the hodgepodge Journey Through the Past soundtrack, it also became his worst-selling album since 1969’s Neil Young.
Young didn’t seem to care—the art and the anti-commercial message were far more important to him than money—but Broken Arrow Ranch was not an easy property to maintain. About $30,000 was needed for asphalt roads and driveways, the studio in the barn needed to be upgraded, and he had to feed and maintain the animals living on the property. “One time in the ’80s, Neil goes, ‘Do you know what the cows need to live? $170,000 a month,’” says James Mazzeo. “Nineteen seventy-four was the beginning of all that.” Nash still lived an upscale lifestyle at his home in San Francisco, but Wild Tales, to his dismay, peaked at no. 34 on the Billboard chart and sold only 150,000 copies, a fraction of what the band albums had moved. As for Crosby, he’d finally found property he wanted to call home—a nondescript, fairly isolated home on the outskirts of Mill Valley with a pool and a huge lot—but it was also ready for an upgrade. As his friend Kevin Ryan recounted, part of the budget for the makeover included checks made out to “a mythical Jose Gonzalez,” which bought cocaine for construction workers.
When Crosby and Nash returned to playing duo shows in late 1973, they were met by largely supportive audiences—but at a show in Wisconsin there were hecklers. In Rochester, New York, Nash asked the crowd, “Do you want to hear an old song or a new song?” and someone tellingly yelled out, “Old!” Reviewing their show for the Chicago Tribune, critic Lynn Van Matre dubbed them “the most deadly-dull big-name duo of the year,” adding that the performance was “like something out of the past, and not in the best way.” The top-selling albums of 1973 belonged to the likes of Elton John, Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin, who caught the arena showmanship zeitgeist of the moment far more than any of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young offshoots. With Bill Graham offering to run the day-to-day operation with his team, relieving a frazzled Roberts of that part of a huge undertaking, the tour would boost the quartet’s bank accounts and return them to their upper-echelon status in the business. All they had to do was tolerate each other for a few months.
Although rumors began leaking in the press, Stills would ultimately break the news of the tour to the world. In the early months of 1974, he found himself back on the road, this time with a leaner post-Manassas band featuring a young, Texas-based guitarist named Donnie Dacus. Although Stills was still able to draw crowds, his standing was evident when, in Chicago, the marquee on his hotel spelled out, “Welcome American Dairymen” in huge letters, and “Welcome Stephen Stills Group” in noticeably smaller letters below. On the last day of the tour, he told writer Barbara Charone that he, Crosby, Nash and Young would be reuniting for shows starting July 4 in Tampa, Florida. He articulated an artistic reason as well: their musical collaborations. “I think that some of my records have suffered for lack of their influences, and some of theirs have suffered for lack of mine,” he told Charone. “And we all kind of agree on that.” He admitted that “the hardest part is going to be for everyone to remember how to sit and take orders—and me too,” but added that he respected Crosby’s vocal arrangements and Nash’s ability to tell Stills not to overplay. (“And Neil and I,” he paused, “well, that’s another deal.”) In May, Stills couldn’t resist some of his usual impolitic bluntness when talking to a United Press International reporter about the tour (which, at the time, he said would only consist of ten shows). “Graham Nash doesn’t like the style of my solo stuff—he thinks it’s too loud and too lush,” he said. “But then I think his album [Wild Tales] drags.”
Crosby and Nash were less enamored of the idea of playing stadiums but went along with the plan. Nash later said he took a quaalude before an important meeting, and therefore wasn’t able to voice his concerns about the size of the venues. “I heard Graham say, ‘Well, Crosby and I, we do whatever Neil and Stephen want to do,’” Tim Drummond later told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene. “And I thought, ‘God-damn, how disappointing they have a life like that.’”
The expected musical negotiations followed. Stills wanted to hire Russ Kunkel as drummer, Kenny Passarrelli as bassist, and the former Manassas conga player Joe Lala, all members of his current band. But in a repeat of the way Stills and Young had divvied up the rhythm section in 1970, Young (and Nash) argued for Tim Drummond as their preferred bass player, and Drummond landed the job. As Stills later recounted to Greene, it was his suggestion to rehearse at Young’s ranch, which meant Young abdicating some of his crucial privacy. “I kind of forced that down: ‘Neil, we’re coming to your ranch and we’re going to build a stage across the road from your studio because we’ve got to learn how to play outdoors,’” Stills said. “He didn’t want all those people in his house, but it actually worked.”
In late May, musicians, managers and crew began assembling at Broken Arrow, with the crew crashing in a barn full of Young’s vintage cars. “It was like going on a camping trip, but a high-end one,” says Glenn Goodwin, a former serviceman in the Vietnam War who had started working for Nash and was now part of the crew. A full-size concert stage was erected across a dirt road from Young’s studio, and the band would play for several hours a day, relearning old songs and figuring out how to rearrange their solo material for the group. While setting up every day, Goodwin saw their wildly opposing gear: Stills’ super-potent Marshall amps contrasted with Young’s Fenders and Nash’s and Crosby’s custom-built units. Clearly, this was no traditional band, but four men with distinctly separate sensibilities and crews. “It was a total mish-mash of stuff, all different brands,” says Goodwin, who was assigned to Crosby, Nash and Drummond. “We purposefully stayed away from Neil’s gear. We had our assignments.”
While the band rehearsed, the business of preparing for one of the most ambitious tours in pop history was underway in the San Francisco offices of Bill Graham’s FM Productions. Although not every one of the thirty-one planned shows (the number had quickly risen from the ten that Stills had mentioned) would be in outdoor stadiums, the amount of equipment and number of employees needed was still formidable. The tour would involve six trucks, a travel agency, carpenters, bus drivers and leap-frogging stages: while they were playing one city, another crew would arrive at the following city and spend the day erecting a stage there. Among the opening acts along the way would be Santana, the Band, the Beach Boys and Joni Mitchell—all headlining acts on their own who would now be subsumed by the collective Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young power grid.
Serving under Graham with the title “tour manager/artist services” was Chris O’Dell, a former employee of Apple Records who was now a seasoned industry pro; she had just worked with Graham on Dylan’s tour. Flying into San Francisco, O’Dell arrived at the FM offices to find one of her coworkers sitting before boxes of cigarette cartons. Diligently, he unrolled each cigarette, replaced the tobacco with pot, then rolled them back up and replaced the plastic on each cigarette pack. Ginseng bottles were emptied and refilled with cocaine. Those and other supplies—including aspirin and toiletries—would be placed in a large trunk set up in the hospitality suite of each hotel on the road, available to anyone who asked. “That was my first realization of, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to be an interesting tour,’” O’Dell says. “No one had ever catered to groups like that before. The idea was to make everything available.”
In a radio interview before the tour commenced, Young sounded hopeful even when the disc jockey brought up the dreaded “supergroup” term. “We have a lot of past together,” Young said. “We have a lot of memories of each other.… We have a relating point from the past. Now the thing, uh, is that relating point still going to be sparkling now like it was then?… That’s what we got together to find out and to get it going and see what’s happening.”
As Mazzeo watched the band play at Young’s ranch, dutifully and with focus, he also caught sight of something equally unusual, even in this rock-and-roll circus: Stills and his manager Michael John Bowen conducting soldierly exercises on the stage. “It was all this military shit: ‘Stand at attention!’ ‘Chest out!’ All kinds of boot-camp stuff,” Mazzeo recalls. Neither he nor anyone else involved doubted that the tour would be an unusual expedition.
AS STILLS, YOUNG, and a teenage journalist, Cameron Crowe—on assignment for the Rolling Stone competitor Crawdaddy magazine—watched from the upper-floor restaurant of a nearby hotel, thousands of concertgoers began streaming into the Seattle Coliseum in the early afternoon of July 9. Although he’d been joking at first with Stills, Young turned quiet at the sight. In a few hours, the opening show of the tour would power up—coincidentally, four years to the day since the last show on the Déjà vu tour. Over 15,500 tickets had been sold for the Seattle show alone.
In context, the thought of a rock band in stadiums (something that had not been attempted since the Beatles’ mid-’60s shows in venues of that size) made a twisted sense: by 1974, so much in popular culture felt oversized. The prog band Yes practically dared its fans to plow through the entirety of Tales from Topographic Oceans, a double LP with one extremely long and twisty song per side. Led Zeppelin launched its own record label, Swan Song, with elaborate parties in New York (complete with live geese) and Los Angeles. Two of the top-grossing movies of the year, The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, were overblown disaster epics—the latter was screened in some theaters in Sensurround, speakers that literally rattled viewers into believing they were in the midst of a quake. That fall, motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel would attempt—and fail—to launch his rocket-fueled Skycycle X-2 up a 108-foot ramp and over Idaho’s Snake River Canyon; one account of the festivities leading up to it called the event “a Woodstock on wheels.” In light of the spectacles of the year, hardly anyone thought Knievel’s stunt was remotely abnormal.
The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour would reflect that grandeur in more ways than just its venues. Goodwin checked into one of the hotels one day and, preparing to crash, saw specially made pillowcases printed with Joni Mitchell’s painting of the quartet. (The artwork would also grace the cover of So Far, a premature greatest-hits album that Atlantic released that summer to capitalize on the reunion.) “I go, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’” Goodwin says. “Our luggage tags were leather embossed with Joni’s art. I don’t know if ‘decadence’ is the right word, but it was so over the top.” Meals would be served on wooden plates that were also festooned with Mitchell’s illustration. Limousines would be on round-the-clock call; a personal chef was prepared to whip up whatever meals the band members wanted. Decades later, such amenities would be commonplace, but in 1974, they represented nouveau riche rock culture.
The initial plan had called for the tour to start in Los Angeles, but when LA’s county commissioners nixed the idea of booking an outdoor venue, Seattle received the kick-off honors. The four men who ambled onstage after an opening set by Jesse Colin Young, formerly of the Youngbloods, still comported themselves like ornery individuals. For that and most of the shows that followed, a now bulky-looking Stills, reflecting his love of football and a team spirit he wanted in the band, wore a succession of football jerseys. Young, with his sunglasses, summer-short haircut and occasional straw hat, resembled a carny barker. Both sported mutton-chop sideburns, as if they were competing for most imposing facial hair. Crosby’s pronounced receding hairline was offset by a halo of curls atop his head. Nash was the most physically transformed: with his unkempt mane and beard, scarily thin at 120 pounds, and wearing patched jeans and army shirts, he no longer resembled the vest-clad British countryman of several years before.
As they took their places onstage, the show began as it always would: with Kunkel and Lala launching into a percussive rattle that led into Stills’ blaring guitar and rivet-gun solos, and finally into his “Love the One You’re With.” As if they’d been holding in their elation since that last 1970 show in Minneapolis, the crowd unleashed a collective bellow.
During rehearsals at Young’s ranch, it was decided to showcase not only the songs from Crosby, Stills & Nash and Déjà vu but also some of the work from their own albums and whatever new material they’d written. As a result, the first night in Seattle ran over three hours, encompassing more than forty songs. On that and subsequent nights, there was something for everyone. The oldies—a harmony-fueled “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” a monstrous “Déjà vu” and the inevitable sing-along, “Our House”—were faithfully resurrected. Fans could now hear how some of the solo songs—such as “Change Partners,” “Immigration Man” and “Cowgirl in the Sand”—would have sounded if they’d been group recordings, and how “4 + 20” and “Sugar Mountain” would come across with harmonies added. Lovers of Harvest heard Young play “A Man Needs a Maid.” Behind them during the opening and closing electric segments, Kunkel, Lala and Drummond offered up a sturdy, unflinching backbeat; Kunkel’s rubbery drumming, in particular, was a perfect match for that coliseum and the others to come.
In keeping with the excessive length of the show, they overdid it that first day: their voices were raw by show’s end. The next day, in Vancouver, Crosby totally blew out his voice during “Almost Cut My Hair.” For the rest of the set, he barely sang. The climactic “Carry On” jam session was stretched out to compensate for him, and Crosby, as Crowe witnessed, was nearly reduced to tears after the show. Later that night, they huddled with management to determine how to proceed. Someone brought up the story that John Lennon had supposedly wrecked his voice before the Beatles’ taping of The Ed Sullivan Show, forcing Paul to vocally assist his bandmate. “What it meant was, Stephen, Graham and Neil had to basically cover for David,” says Ron Stone of the Geffen-Roberts Company, who accompanied the band on the tour. “Four-part harmony would be three-part without anyone noticing.”
As Bill Graham fended off regular calls from David Geffen, who wanted to make sure the band wasn’t fighting yet, the tour posed any number of other challenges, starting with the outdoor stadium shows in Oakland, the third city on the tour. That summer, the Grateful Dead settled into a few stadiums with their enormous, towering Wall of Sound system, but they weren’t playing an entire tour in those venues. The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young team had to learn to do so on the fly. Sound systems remained primitive—in-ear monitors that allowed musicians to hear each other hadn’t yet been invented—and the combination of open-air acoustics and competing ramped-up guitars were a recipe for sonic overkill. (Stills had turned the once acoustic “Black Queen” into a bludgeoning stomp that was perfect for stadiums, although it completely obliterated the subtlety of the original.) At times, Crosby and Nash could barely hear themselves, resulting in harmonies that could sound ragged and off-key. “We were dealing with the elements and other things that could impact the sound,” says Goodwin. “So it could fall apart, and when it did, oh, my God—the harmonies [suffered]. How those guys could hear themselves sometimes was baffling to me. The volume was ridiculous. The sound system for the vocals had to be stronger than the band. It got to be a battle. It was scary and not fun.”
The risks of playing quieter songs in such massive venues also became clear one evening—the acoustic set was cut short when overly excited, borderline belligerent fans started throwing bottles onto the stage, almost hitting Crosby. (When a live album from the tour was finally cobbled together in 2014, forty years later, the vocal shortcomings were a major issue. Nash and co-producer Joel Bernstein, along with engineer Stanley Tajima Johnston, spent considerable time cobbling together songs Frankenstein-style, using harmonies from one performance and the backing from another to construct perfect tracks.)
Nonetheless, they were off and running until the tour wound down in early September. After the second night, O’Dell was already exhausted. “I was in my room in Vancouver thinking, ‘I’m going to die,’” she recalls. “All I could think about was how tired I was.” Just under thirty more shows remained.
FOR ALL ITS overblown pop culture, the country remained in a depressed sulk. It was bad enough that 1974 had started with a gas shortage, which led to rationing and long, infuriating (and often fraught) lines at the pumps. One of the shows would take place in New Jersey, where residents could only buy gas every other day. The recession dragged down auto sales and drove up the price of household staples (by fall, the cost of sugar would surge 300 percent from the year before). By year’s end, six million Americans would be out of work, the highest number in over a dozen years. The Watergate scandal, entering its second year of congressional hearings, made public the idea that the leader of the free world might be a criminal.
Not surprisingly, the culture began looking to the past for relief or escape. Sixties nostalgia had cast a melancholy over Don McLean’s omnipresent 1971 hit “American Pie,” a rousing but inherently forlorn look at the rise and fall of communal rock culture. More reflection followed, but without the angst. Grease, an originally rowdy but later cartoonish musical about teen life in the ’50s, arrived off-Broadway in New York in 1971, followed in movie theaters in 1973 by American Graffiti, director George Lucas’ alternately woolly and wistful glimpse of high school graduates in 1962. That movie’s success prompted the far more sanitized TV sitcom Happy Days, set in an idyllic suburb in the ’50s, starting in the first month of 1974.
In that context, a reunion of one of the most iconic acts of the previous decade took on a heightened import. For many in the arenas and stadiums, it would be their first chance to see one of pop’s most storied bands in person. Audiences never failed to be juiced when Stills began playing the opening of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” or when Young picked the knotty, immediately recognizable notes of “Ohio” during the electric set. The songs that received the loudest cheers were the ones associated with nation-shattering events—Kent State, the Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago Eight. When the skies opened up during one outdoor show, a segment of the crowd burst into the “No rain! No rain!” chant that had been immortalized in the Woodstock movie. In Houston, an overzealous security guard at Jeppesen Stadium saw early arrivals pressing against the gates and sprayed them with mace. Charging onto the scene, Bill Graham reamed the guard and apologized to the fans. “What is this, Kent State?” one of them yelled back, angrily conjuring a memory straight out of the country’s—and the band’s—past.
Of the four, only Young had a new album to promote by the summer of 1974. Its enigmatic cover showed him standing on the sand in Santa Monica, facing the ocean; in the foreground, a newspaper sported the headline “Senator Buckley Calls for Nixon to Resign.” And that was just the beginning. The record itself, called On the Beach, was a disconsolate, wintry collection of songs that were anti-nostalgic in just about every way. Another pivot from the strums and melodies of After the Gold Rush and Harvest, the album was like a bumpy drive on a bleak highway. “Walk On,” a shout-out to haters, had a gawky guitar part and clackity feel that guaranteed it wouldn’t find much of a home on AM radio.
The first half of the album painted a less-than-flattering portrait of the legacy of the country and the music business. The narrator of the spooked-out “Revolution Blues” was a leftover Weather Underground type itching to mow down celebrities; he wants to attack a factory that builds computer logs by unleashing doves instead. It was both scary and comical. “For the Turnstiles,” featuring just Young on banjo and his musical sidekick Ben Keith on dobro, was an oblique take on the concert business that sounded as if it had been written on an Appalachian mountain that had inexplicably popped up in Hollywood. Indeed, it sounded like the album had been recorded in a druggy, alcoholic haze. The second, ravaged half of On the Beach addressed Young’s discomfort with the media and the demands of his fans (the intentionally draggy slow burn of the title track) and his dissipating relationship with Snodgress (“Motion Pictures”). Set to a sulky melody lifted from British folk singer and guitarist Bert Jansch, “Ambulance Blues” was a comment on critics and the band he was about to tour with that very summer; a crack about peeing in the wind referred to what Elliot Roberts had supposedly barked at his ornery client after one of the aborted reunions with Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Hardly the type of sunny record one would promote on a stadium tour, On the Beach made it sound as if Young’s own life and the country itself were drowning, rather than standing safely on the shore. Yet Young did coax his bandmates into playing a few of its songs on the road, sometimes with dazzling results. Young and Stills shredded back and forth in “On the Beach.” Despite his objections to “Revolution Blues” (“too Mansonesque,” he says), Crosby had strummed along on “Revolution Blues” in the studio, and he played it onstage with Young as well.
If Young was coming to play mammoth venues where he could barely see most of the crowd, he would do it in his way, and not merely by playing On the Beach songs. When he sat down by himself with a guitar, anyone expecting to hear “Heart of Gold” was bound to be disappointed. Only three times during the thirty-one shows did he play his ubiquitous hit. Instead, the crowds were treated to Young tunes they’d never heard before: “Love Art Blues,” a honky-tonk ramble about his dog; the melancholic “Star of Bethlehem”; or a song about his long-lost hearse, “Long May You Run.”
Like the “Country Girl” assemblage from Déjà vu, another new song, “Pushed It Over the End,” showed how Young could pull the other three into novel—almost novelistic—territory. Young had debuted the tune during a surprise set at New York’s Bottom Line in May 1974, calling it “Citizen Kane Junior Blues,” and it seemed be launched right out of the news. The month before, the publishing heiress Patty Hearst, who’d been taken hostage by a radical group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, had been photographed taking part in a bank robbery—hence the Milly cradling a gun in the intro. The central character in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane had been based on Hearst’s grandfather, William Randolph Hearst. Performed with the full band that summer, “Pushed It Over the End” was a majestic, epic piece, lurching over eight minutes through rise-and-crest tempo changes, with Young’s lead guitar and Stills’ electric-keyboard yawps also egging on the arrangement. “Neil would just pull one out of his ass—his hat or his ass, either or—and kick it out,” recalled Drummond to Andy Greene. “The rest of them would grab on and hang on. That’s how it worked. That’s what made it so exciting.” Along with On the Beach, Young’s flurry of new and often topical songs was added proof that his creative rush, his ability to write fresh material, often at a furious pace, could overwhelm his partners. According to group historian Pete Long, one-third of the songs they performed on the tour were Young’s.
Crosby, Stills and Nash couldn’t hope to compete with that output. Crosby admitted as much at the first show, in Seattle, as he was about to play “Carry Me,” partly about the death of his mother the year before. Comparing their songwriting bursts, Young wrote “about three of ’em a day,” as Crosby told the crowd. But they did their best, all of them hauling along newly written or very recent songs. Crosby had “Carry Me” and “Time After Time.” Stills had the jazzy Latino shuffle “My Angel,” which he co-wrote with Dallas Taylor; another Latino rocker, “First Things First,” on which he would show off his timbales chops; and “My Favorite Changes,” an attempt at autobiography (citing his struggles with fame in his twenties, which were almost over). Unfortunately, “My Favorite Changes” was played only at one show. But in a move almost as perverse as some of Young’s, Stills also debuted his sullen piano ballad “Myth of Sisyphus”—in which he partly mocked himself—to stadiums packed with fans who surely wanted to boogie. For his part, Nash trotted out songs from Wild Tales. These included, with the others accompanying him, “Prison Song,” which was tailor-made for a group sing-along, as well as the agitated “Fieldworker,” about the Mexican laborers he had seen working, under wretched conditions, in Northern California, and “It’s All Right,” a piano serenade for Cerami that yearned to be the next “Our House.” (In a worlds-colliding moment, he dedicated the song to Cerami at their Long Island show as Mitchell watched in the wings.) Combined with the dusted-off oldies, each show on the tour presented a body of work that signaled they were rock’s most frustrating and yet most formidable band.
As the band tested the limits of its reinvention onstage, events in the outside world pressed in on them. On August 8, Richard Nixon, impeachment in the rear-view window, and Republicans bailing on him, resigned midway through their show in New Jersey. Nash announced the news to the crowd, and Bill Graham hastily arranged to have one firework set off to celebrate. A far more heartbreaking moment came on the morning after they’d played Houston, about a week earlier, when Graham somberly informed Nash and Kunkel, who was married to Cass Elliot’s sister Leah, that their old friend, Mama Cass, who had first brought the trio together, had died. After playing the last of her shows at the London Palladium, Elliot had returned to the apartment where she was staying and was found dead in her bed the next morning. In an interview, a doctor on the scene implied that she had choked on a ham sandwich in her room, although it was later determined that the sandwich was untouched. The likely cause of death was heart failure, with Elliot’s weight a factor. Only six years before, they had sung in her living room, but their lives had gone through many changes since then.
TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD—at least to writers invited along to report on the tour—the offstage atmosphere was composed and professional, the four men at its whirlwind core newly centered adults. “We’re mature cats now—we’ve grown up a lot,” Crosby told writer Michael Pousner before their show at Houston’s Jeppesen Stadium, while lounging in the Safari Room (complete with a thatched bar) of the Whitehall Hotel. A report in Time described the backstage scene as “amazingly relaxed” and “all just a bit suburban,” likening the band to “four affable, affluent businessmen bound for a Sunday afternoon of pro football.”
When Bill Graham would invariably barge into whatever lounge they were in to round them up for the trip to the stage, they went along merrily (in Houston, though, Young opted for his own vehicle rather than accompanying the others). When Nash would run up to Stills before a show to hastily inform him of a change in the set, the two men, in front of one journalist or another, were amenable and cooperative. The same team spirit held as they stood onstage on their preferred Persian rug: Crosby and Nash would enhance Young’s “Don’t Be Denied” with high harmonies, and Young played jolly piano behind Nash’s Watergate-chaos-inspired rocker from Wild Tales, “Grave Concern.”
Yet that facade didn’t always jibe with reality. To ship the musicians from city to city, Chris O’Dell generally booked them on commercial flights. But early on, she realized she wasn’t being asked to purchase plane tickets for Young. As she soon learned, Young had bought a GMC motorhome so that he and his inner circle—Mazzeo, their friend “Ranger Dave” Cline, and Young’s son Zeke—could drive from show to show. (Carrie Snodgress was an occasional and not always welcome addition.) Eventually, they switched to a $400 Cadillac he purchased in Chicago for half a dozen shows all located within a half-day’s drive. As Mazzeo recalls, “Neil said, ‘Look, we’re not going to be part of this tour. We’re going to show up for all the gigs, but that’s it. We may have hotel rooms in the towns, but we’re mostly going to be on our own.’ He wanted to avoid all the shit he had on the tour with those guys four years before. He wanted to be with friends and family. Our thing was not to be on that tour as much as possible. And we did a great job of it.”
For O’Dell, Young’s private trips were a relief. “It was easier,” she says. “We didn’t have to worry about Neil.” But for Crosby, Stills and Nash, they were the latest sign that Young was still operating in his own personal orbit. “Neil traveled separately and kept himself separate,” Crosby says. “That was him being honest about how he felt. Neil is a very pragmatic guy when he’s dealing with us. He knows what he’s dealing with, with Stephen, with me and with Graham. And he uses us when it suits his purpose. I wish he wanted to be our buddy. But the music was good and that was what counted.”
Young’s aloofness extended to interviews to promote the tour: in essence, he didn’t do any. The other three sat with numerous reporters during the trip, but always without their fourth wheel. “Neil Young doesn’t talk to anybody—he has been burned,” Nash told the Associated Press. “We fools, on the other hand, will try to communicate what it is we’re really trying to do.” Embedded with the band, Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone was only able to get two sentences out of Young before their St. Paul concert. Young told him he was leaving right afterward for a lengthy drive to Colorado, adding, “You know, I’m not real good at giving interviews. But I’ll tell you, I’m having a lot of fun and it’s getting better every day.” (Message: He didn’t want to talk about it.) Even when he was onstage with the whole band, Young subtly communicated his separate space: at moments during the lengthy jam that followed “Carry On,” he would turn to face Kunkel and play directly to him with his trademark piercing stare. Kunkel wondered how much the stance had to do with Young’s intensity during performance and how much it was his search for a safe space onstage, away from the others.
As much as they wanted to change, each of the four remained personally driven, and when they were together, they easily set to bickering. “They were very explosive,” says Giachetti, who was part of Stills’ crew on the tour. “It should have been no big deal: you go on tour and play music. But there was a lot of competition. There are many ways to light a stage, and they would disagree about that. They would get angry and start fighting if a song ended in a black-out or a white-out or a spotlight. If one had sex with twins, the other guy had to have sex with twins.”
Giachetti was most likely referring to Crosby’s traveling arrangements. While Debbie Donovan remained at home, Crosby enjoyed the company of two women on the road: Nancy Brown, a Montana-born teenager who would celebrate her eighteenth birthday on the tour, and a mysterious Mill Valley groupie named Goldie Locks. “I wanted to be the center of attention and I was—because the girls loved me and wanted to make me happy,” Crosby wrote in his memoir Long Time Gone, in which he also referred to himself as “a complete and utter pleasure-seeking sybarite.” (Ron Stone, who was married and often took long drives with Crosby on the road, has said, “I lived vicariously through David on that tour.”) One of the band’s business associates realized he had become accustomed to the lunacy when he visited Crosby’s hotel room during one stop. “Two women in dresses and no panties doing cartwheels around the room while I’m watching TV—and I’m annoyed because they’re in the way,” he says. “I said, ‘Could you do that somewhere else?’ After a while, the abnormal became normal and you stopped paying attention to the bizarre.”
Naturally, other disagreements stemmed from the music. At times, frustrated over the lack of impeccable arrangements—the rough-hewn feel of some of the performances reflected Young’s sensibility more than the others’ deliberate choices—Stills would grow irritated and would feel the others were shooting him dirty looks if he overplayed. At one after-party, the letters “CSNY” were carved out in blocks of ice on a table with the usual ocean-sized portion of shrimp, and Stills, angry over how the others had reacted onstage to his playing, attacked the ice with “backfists and knuckle punches and karate,” he told writer Bill DeYoung. “I took it apart in front of them.… I went through the ‘N’ with one punch and it just shattered.”
By the time the tour made its way east, the sheer size of it all was starting to wear everyone down. O’Dell had already started drinking early on in the trek to ward off the anxiety. “It was the only tour I ever did where each member of the band had his own faction,” she says. “It was them and their person who worked for them. It was very stressful.” Upon arriving at the Plaza Hotel in New York, O’Dell was told to report to Crosby’s quarters—he wasn’t happy with the direction of the breezes wafting into the room and was threatening to go back home. Hurriedly they found a new room more to his liking. “Who knew he needed cross-ventilation?” O’Dell recalls. “It wasn’t in the rider.” Meanwhile, Stills’ voice, warbly and boozy, was showing wear and tear. Adding to the madness of the tour, he had also taken to regaling everyone with fanciful tales of serving in the armed forces. (“The crowded years,” as Nash calls the in-joke that resulted from such talk.) In any other context, puzzling statements like those would have raised eyebrows, but during what Crosby would dub “The Doom Tour” that summer, they were par for CSNY’s course.
Bob Dylan famously appeared at their Minneapolis show; afterward, he invited Stills and Drummond to hear the songs that would make up Blood on the Tracks. They sat on facing hotel beds as Dylan played the songs (Nash, irked, stood outside listening in). When Dylan was done, Stills made some vaguely critical comments. “And Dylan, being the arrogant man that he was, he said, ‘Well, Stephen, play me one of your new songs,’” Drummond recalled to Greene. “And that was the end of it.” (As Stills told Cameron Crowe that year, “I’ve been the most obnoxious superstar, arrogant.… I have a bad habit of stating things pretty bluntly. I’m not known for my tact.”)
Yet it was the normally level-headed Nash who seemed most impacted by the craziness. O’Dell found Nash the easiest of the four to deal with: he had his own demands, but he wasn’t belligerent about them. Yet, starting with his shaggy-dog look and his singing—which became unusually ragged and throaty, thanks to the onstage blare—Nash was going through major changes. “All my aware life, from age 16, 17, 18, I’ve been an object,” he told Rolling Stone’s Fong-Torres during the tour. “A fucking object. That’s why I try very hard to be as unrecognizable as possible.” Even before the tour, cocaine was never far from him—a container with an ounce of it always sat in the medicine cabinet of his upstairs bathroom in San Francisco. The group only encouraged that habit—O’Dell saw a baseball-sized hunk of it in one band member’s room—and by the time Nash checked into his own quarters at the Plaza, he was scrawny and gaunt, his ribs poking through his chest. With the help of Cerami, who snapped the photo, he took a self-portrait in his bathroom that showed him looking especially emaciated. During the same era, Allan Clarke, Nash’s former Hollies friend and bandmate, recalls Nash showing up at his Manchester-area home in a red Mustang. “He came into the house with a big ‘How ya doing?’ and packing joints, and I said, ‘Graham, I’ve got kids in the house—if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to leave.’” Nash heeded his wishes.
The American leg of the tour wrapped up on September 8 at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. The grounds were damp after several days of rain, but 77,000 fans still waited in the mud or wet grass to see the band along with Joni Mitchell (and the L.A. Express), the Beach Boys and Jesse Colin Young. Mitchell joined them for “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” wrapping her elastic swoon around their harmonies. But the show was also hounded by sour notes. Before it began, Bill Graham informed the crowd, to boos and cheers, that the new president, Gerald Ford, had just pardoned Richard Nixon. Then, as the band was walking offstage after the last song, they were served with legal papers suing them for their only canceled show on the tour.
After their success planning and promoting the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen—a 1973 festival in upstate New York that outdrew Woodstock, featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band and the Band—its East Coast promoters, Jim Koplik and Shelly Finkel, were eager to create a similar event on the West Coast. They wanted Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as headliners, and the Beach Boys, the Band, Joe Walsh and Jesse Colin Young playing before them. The promoters picked Ontario Speedway, a 170,000-capacity raceway in Orange County, and put tickets on sale for an August 3 show. But the prospect of hauling out to the desert in the late-summer heat apparently didn’t sit well with fans: out of 100,000 tickets, only 15,000 were purchased.
A new date, after the band’s lone European show, was considered. Whether it was an accurate report or not, the promoters were told Young didn’t want to return to California right after the overseas trip, and they were offered just Crosby, Stills and Nash for $150,000, instead of the entire group for $200,000. Koplik and Finkel declined and canceled the show. To recoup their expenses, they decided to sue the band, and Bill Graham asked them to serve the musicians the papers at the end of—not before—the Roosevelt Raceway show. “Bill let us go right to the stairs,” says Koplik. “He made sure they would only walk back down one set of stairs so that we wouldn’t miss them. Bill was being good to us. He had no stake in it.”
Out of respect for Michael John Bowen, Stills’ manager, who had been helpful in organizing the original show they had hoped to put on, Koplik and Finkel served the others but not Stills at that moment. In the end, the promoters settled out of court for $150,000. If the idea of mammoth outdoor stadiums hadn’t appealed to the band before, it truly didn’t now.
TO EVERYONE’S RELIEF, the end loomed in sight when the band and crew flew to England a few days before September 14. For an aptly grandiose finale, the tour would wrap up at Wembley Stadium, a fifty-one-year-old venue in northwest London that could accommodate over 100,000. The opening acts would be Joni Mitchell and the L.A. Express and the Band. That year, Mitchell had intersected with the mainstream with Court and Spark, an album that managed to be both whisper-personal and radio-friendly, and she toured arenas to promote it. Despite their unpleasant breakup four years before, she and Nash had patched up their friendship and spent studio time together. She joined the band for two of their mega-shows; although she hadn’t reached their stadium-show level of fame, she was by now one of the most rightly revered and influential singer-songwriters of the era. “As we got more successful Joni was like our mascot,” Crosby says. “She would hang with us. But she was always a little resentful that she wasn’t in the boys’ club and that we had gotten so huge. She wanted to be a lot bigger. I think she felt she deserved to be a lot bigger, and she did, but her stuff is so good it went over the heads of most people.”
At Young’s insistence, the band would only do one overseas show. “They wanted us to go all over Europe,” Drummond told Greene, “and Neil put his foot down and said, ‘No, we’ll do one show.’ I wanted to go all over the damn place. But he was too exhausted or whatever.” If there was only to be one show, it would be a big one. Mel Bush, the British promoter for Wembley, ensured that the band would be treated like the icons they were (and saw themselves as). Five mobile homes, one of which had previously been used by Elizabeth Taylor, were set up backstage, along with a catering van to supply them with whatever food they wanted. Each dressing room would be equipped with “one bucket of water and one woolen blanket” in the event of a fire. For reasons that were odd but in keeping with the recurring insanity of the tour, the venue’s contract stipulated that no hypnotism would be allowed on the premises.
Rain had dogged the area for several days leading up to the show, right up to that morning. Gazing out at the throng stretched before him, Mazzeo saw what he recalls as “thousands of the whitest, skinniest English people you’ve ever seen in your life.” The sound system combined the band’s equipment with additions from a local company. At least the indulgences were the same, albeit even more potent: awaiting the band and their employees was a pile of Merck cocaine from European pharmaceutical labs, resulting in a truly pure stash.
The final show of the tour began the way it had in Seattle, with Kunkel initiating a beat that would lead into “Love the One You’re With.” But as he sat down at his kit, he was momentarily off his game. Kunkel had rolled with the craziness of the tour. Onstage, he had kept a watchful eye on Young, since Young seemed to lose himself in the songs, and it was never clear how long his solos would last. But at Wembley, as Kunkel took in the heaving ocean of people, the screaming and yelling was so overwhelming that he was thrown off at first; for a moment, he was worried he would blank on what he was supposed to play. “Oh, God, it was like being in a hurricane,” he has said. “I’d never experienced anything like that before.” A consummate pro, Kunkel didn’t flub, and by then, the sun had broken through, as if the band had brought the California weather with it. By the end of the show, all those pale British bodies were sunburnt.
Yet the accumulated grind of the expedition announced itself on the Wembley stage. As in America, few in the crowd seemed to notice or care; the mere sight of the four men reunited—for their first group performance in the country since early 1970—was satisfying enough. But the band sang sharp and looked and sounded hopped up: by “Word Game,” his acoustic blues from Stephen Stills 2, Stills looked like he was going to nod off. The patchwork sound system made it especially difficult for Crosby and Nash to hear their own singing, and the harmonies, especially on “Carry On,” were often painfully out of tune.
The night and the tour ended in an appropriately rock-and-roll manner. Nash, Young, Stills and Cerami visited Paul and Linda McCartney at their home immediately after the show. McCartney danced to Jackson Five records, Linda showed off her prized art collection, and Stills, to the mortification of a few, gave the former Beatle pointers on how to play bass. At a party at Quaglilino’s restaurant in London during their stay in town, Young and Stills, both clearly inebriated or chemically enhanced, jammed with Jimmy Page and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin.
With an eye toward an ABC-TV special to air in May 1975, the Wembley show was preserved on video. Watching the footage later, though, the band saw for themselves how mangy they looked and sounded and decided to shelve the special. “We were just too wrecked,” Crosby says. “We knew it and watched the video after and said, ‘Aw, fuck.’” The footage was relegated to the expanding vault of unreleased and aborted attempts at reconciliations.
“WE SEEM TO HAVE a two-month half life, and then it blows,” Crosby told the New York Times backstage at Long Island’s Roosevelt Raceway, as he watched Mitchell’s set. “Actually, there are no hard feelings now. We just want to take a well-deserved rest, and then we’ll go into the studio in November and record an album.” Crosby’s words were well considered, but as sensible as the plan sounded, they were pushing it. Most bands would make a new album, then tour behind it. Flouting the standard rules once more, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young opted to spend four months in each other’s faces on the road and then, despite the ensuing stress and anxiety, reconvene in a studio for months shaping and polishing new songs.
Given what they’d just put themselves through, the plan was, to say the least, risky. It didn’t help the mood when the receipts for the tour were added up after the final show. At the time, much of rock was a cash business, so it wasn’t unusual for Bill Graham and Geffen-Roberts employees to find themselves in a hotel room after a show, stuffing wads of bills into duffel bags and then waiting for an armored truck to haul the money to a bank. But once the production costs were added in, along with the lavish spending—including the ornate pillowcases and the teak plates—the estimated $10 million profit shrank. According to Nash, each man emerged with only about $300,000. (Stone disputes that figure, saying each made $1 million—but before expenses.) As Crosby says, “We were not sufficiently aware that we were being taken to the cleaners.”
In that tainted-well atmosphere, the last thing they needed was to see more of each other, but starting in early December, they congregated at Rudy Records, the cozy studio in the basement of Nash’s home in San Francisco. The week before, Young had been in Nashville. He was already at work on his own new album—a bleak series of songs ruminating on the end of his relationship with Snodgress, along with “The Old Homestead,” a gently galloping piece that addressed, obliquely, how he was grappling with issues arising from the group’s reunion. But he’d committed to the group album and dutifully showed up at Nash’s house, along with the same rhythm section they’d used on the tour and Ron and Howard Albert, Stills’ producers of choice.
According to studio paperwork, little happened during that session. Work began on one song—possibly Stills’ “Thoroughfare Gap”—but the situation quickly deteriorated. As Young, Nash’s neighbor and friend Joel Bernstein, and others watched, Stills and Nash got into an argument—“a coke-fueled, stupid-ass thing,” recalls one of those present—over the placement of one note in a song. “Stephen wanted me to sing this vocal part and my body wouldn’t physically let me do what he was asking,” Nash says. “It didn’t make musical sense, and every time I tried to do it, my body said, ‘What the fuck are you trying to do?’ I told him and he got infuriated with me.”
In an adjoining part of the studio, Glenn Goodwin caught the tail end of the ruckus. “There was some yelling,” he recalls, “and when the door opened, it looked like something had happened.” Young was soon out the door, and Nash retreated to his bedroom on the third floor with Cerami. Stills raged on in the basement, threatening to cut up a tape of the recording with a razor blade. Unsure what to do, Nash called his assistant, Mac Holbert, who lived next door, and asked him to physically eject Stills from his house. “I was actually a little disappointed that Graham didn’t go down and confront him, that he had someone else go first,” says Cerami. “I thought, ‘Hell, this is your house—what do you mean?’ But I don’t blame him.” With Cerami’s support, Nash put on an early copy of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (ironic, given Dylan had previewed those songs for Stills months before) and waited for his partner to be evicted from his home.
A few days later, about a week before Christmas, they decided to give it another go. Since Nash’s home studio was fairly small, they reconvened at the Record Plant in nearby Sausalito, a more professional setting that should have made them focus. But on what may have been only the second day of work, someone forgot to turn off the talk-back microphone in the control room, allowing those in the recording room to hear what was being said about them. Exactly what was overheard remains vague: it may have been critical words about Young or about how much bass player Tim Drummond was being paid. As Nash recalls, “The Albert brothers were listening to us argue and someone came out of the control room and said something about what we’d been saying, and everyone got crazy.”
Almost immediately, Drummond was gone. They replaced him with bass player Leland Sklar, a musician with a mountain-man beard and a caustic sense of humor who had been James Taylor’s stalwart player as well as a contributor to Graham Nash/David Crosby. Sklar walked in and found, he says, “not the most comfortable atmosphere.” Over the course of two days, they managed to record a full take of a new Crosby song, “Homeward Through the Haze.” Built around Crosby’s own murmuring piano, the song, which touched on Los Angeles and critical barbs they’d taken, had a glum stateliness, and two more Crosby songs, “Time After Time” and “Carry Me,” both played on the recent tour, were also attempted. At some point, Bill Kreutzmann, the Grateful Dead drummer who lived nearby, was invited to play, but he was so dismayed by the vibe that he went back home. The band tried to bribe him to return with one of the fur coats they wore on the inside of Crosby, Stills & Nash, but Kreutzmann still begged off. Tellingly, the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young world was too crazy even for a member of the Dead.
On the planned fourth day, December 20, crew employees showed up for work only to find John Talbot, a member of Young’s organization (and the brother of Crazy Horse’s Billy Talbot), packing up and carting away his boss’ gear. Clearly, the work was over. “Neil could say, ‘They drove me crazy and I couldn’t stand to be around it,’ or ‘It was Stephen’s fault for doing too much dope,’ or ‘It was Crosby’s fault for being too much of a baby,’” Crosby says. “And I would agree with all of the above. But for Neil, the music has to be exciting for him. You should follow the music and not the money. He’s right.” As Cerami adds, “I don’t blame Neil. It wasn’t pleasant.”
As they later learned, Young had been driving to the studio when he realized he no longer wanted to put himself through the psychodrama. He turned the car around and drove back home. Returning to his ranch, he ran into his friend Mazzeo. “It was too much, too much,” he told Mazzeo. He didn’t have to say more. Young had been to that particular circus one too many times, and the merry-go-round was over.