If Crosby couldn’t work with Nash, Stills or Young, there was always the Grateful Dead. By 1975, Crosby was living in the same Marin County town, Mill Valley, as Dead singer and guitarist Bob Weir, and in the early months of that year, he began dropping by the quirky, skylight-enhanced recording studio Weir had built above his garage.
The evening of February 20, 1975, illustrated the bonds—musical and otherwise—between Crosby and the Dead. In Weir’s tight-quartered practice space, Crosby settled in with members of the band. At that point, the Dead were on sabbatical from live performances and in the early stages of working up material for their album Blues for Allah. Crosby broke the news that his girlfriend, Debbie Donovan, was nearly nine months pregnant (their daughter, Donovan, was born not long after), and Jerry Garcia asked Crosby if he was nervous. Before Crosby had a chance to answer, someone wondered if Garcia himself had been anxious when his children had been born, and he shot back, “Oh yeah.”
Then came analyses of their favorite weed. Crosby’s stash—stored under his house, as he and Nash’s lawyer, Greg Fischbach, soon discovered—was still renowned as “pullover pot”: if you were driving and took a hit, you’d be forced to pull over and stop to avoid an accident. Crosby’s pot was also legendary for its absence of seeds; only rock stars seemed to be able to afford such a luxury.
“It’s one of the best joints I’ve ever smoked in the last couple years,” Crosby remarked about one of his preferred blends.
“I’ve still got some of that,” Garcia said.
“Save it,” Crosby urged. “That’s for New Year’s Eve and birthdays. You can’t work on it. You can’t drive on it.”
Garcia agreed: “All you can do is go out into the zone.”
Since they’d gathered in a working environment packed with amplifiers and instruments, it was inevitable they would start making music that was also out in the zone. Although he seemed to average only a few songs a year, Crosby nonetheless had two compositions he wanted the Dead to learn. He played one of them, “Low Down Payment,” for Garcia, Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and pianist Keith Godchaux. Another song inspired by random emotions and events—Crosby awoke one morning to hear a lover in tears, an image that appeared in the lyric—“Low Down Payment” was typical of the way Crosby toyed with structure. It started in choppy, irregular 11/4 time, moved to 4/4, slowed down in tempo but remained in 4/4, then revved back to 11/4 for the finale. “We would play in odd time signatures,” recalls the Dead’s drummer, Mickey Hart, who was then on the verge of rejoining the band after several years on his own. “David was an easy jam. Unlike Stills, David didn’t take command. He became part of what was going on, and he watched and listened. He had a different personality than Stephen.”
When Crosby finished, Garcia nodded approvingly and said, “That’s nice.” Lesh and Godchaux joined in to work up an arrangement, and for over an hour, they tried making something of it. They also took numerous stabs at “Homeward Through the Haze,” which Crosby had tried recording during the failed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sessions two months before.
During a break, Crosby mentioned working on what he called “live tapes.”
“How’s that coming?” he was asked.
“We did a lot of good shows,” Crosby said. “I’ve heard enough for one side already.”
Crosby was likely referring to a concert album culled from the previous summer’s reunion tour. With a collection of new studio material scuttled after the Sausalito meltdown, a live record was the logical alternative, yet nothing about that idea would be simple, either. Roughly a third of the shows on the tour had been recorded, but Young balked at the idea of a tour memento. He’d written most of the new material they’d played on tour, and he feared that such a record would be top-heavy with his own tunes. “Listen, if they’d had new songs with the authority that their old songs had, we could’ve knocked off four or five of mine so that just the best two surfaced,” Young later told Mojo. “That would have truly been CSNY. But it wasn’t to be, so the record never came out.” In the years that immediately followed, he would approve the release of only one song from the tour: “Pushed It Over the End,” with overdubbed harmonies from Crosby and Nash, and even then, only on the B-side of a single released in Italy. If Young had wanted to downplay or even hide his participation in that reunion, he couldn’t have picked a better way to do it.
The week Crosby gathered with the Dead to work out “Low Down Payment,” the no. 2 song in the country was the Eagles’ “Best of My Love,” followed four spots below by America’s “Lonely People.” In the absence of new product from CSNY, devotees of SoCal soft rock had shifted their loyalty and record-buying dollars to their musical heirs. (David Geffen had even cobbled together an ersatz CSNY by recruiting former Buffalo Springfield and Poco leader Richie Furay, former Byrd and Manassas member Chris Hillman, and brooding singer-songwriter J. D. Souther for the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band; the group released two albums on Asylum before collapsing.) Rock itself seemed less urgent; it had been absorbed into mainstream culture. In Billboard, Bill Graham bemoaned the waning passion of rock fans. “I remember how kids waiting on line outside the Fillmores would tell me their whole week was empty until we opened up for another weekend,” he mourned. “Now the kids outside my concerts tell me how much they enjoyed the last movie they saw or even how they got off on an evening of bowling or something.”
As the magazine pointed out, rock and roll had gone from “an artistic lifeline for an entire generation to simply entertainment.” A very different, more rhythmic, and less inhibited sound was also beginning to overtake the charts; that week, the Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas became the first major resort to open a disco. Not coincidentally, the New York Times reported that cocaine, while hardly new to the culture, had now become “the most fashionable drug in the United States,” largely because it was cheaper than heroin. At the time, it was also seen as a nonaddictive sexual stimulant.
That spring, the Vietnam War, which had fueled some of the group’s strongest political statements, was sputtering to a close. The city of Saigon fell, accompanied by the sight of Americans and South Vietnamese clambering aboard helicopters to escape the collapse of the country. On April 11, the US government announced it would be closing its embassy in Cambodia amid what it called “a seriously deteriorating military situation.” Back home, Nixon was out of office, and a number of the former president’s men had been indicted or convicted of various charges stemming from the Watergate scandal. A lawyer who had prepared Nixon’s tax returns had also been indicted, on three counts of conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Gerald Ford, the new president, was an inoffensive placeholder who didn’t inspire much of anything, including hatred and protests. He was a complacent commander in chief for a newly complacent time.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, now men without a cultural context, again scattered in the wake of their failed Record Plant work. Early in 1975, Billboard reported that Young was ensconced at a studio in Toronto, working on overdubs for a new album—probably Homegrown, a collection of sober, reflective acoustic songs that would be the follow-up to Harvest that his fans had patiently been awaiting. Stills, eager to resume his own career, decided the time had come to sever his ties with Atlantic and Ahmet Ertegun. Like Crosby and Nash, he felt the label had sabotaged his records, by way of minimal promotion, in hopes that low sales would spur them all into reuniting. “I kinda felt like, ‘Get the idiot back with those other three idiots. Why don’t we let a couple of his records die and then he’ll get the message?’” he told writer Barbara Charone that year. Rolling Stone reported that Stills was also irked that Ertegun hadn’t attended his wedding (despite the fact that he had later thrown a party for the newlyweds), although Stills’ manager, Michael John Bowen, denied that story.
Timing was on Stills’ side. Columbia Records was eager to crack the lucrative Laurel Canyon market. Most of the community’s biggest acts were signed to Geffen’s Elektra/Asylum label or some other Warner-affiliated label. Michael Tannen, Stills’ lawyer, brought a demo tape of Stills’ new material to Bruce Lundvall, the head of Columbia. Impressed with what he heard, Lundvall offered a multi-album deal before he’d even met Stills. With the paperwork underway, Lundvall announced he wanted to finally shake hands with his new signing, who was recording at Criteria in Miami.
Tannen was alarmed. Tales of rock-star excess were making their way back to him, and Tannen was worried that if Lundvall and his team saw Stills in his current condition, the company could conceivably bail on the offer. With Lundvall and his crew already aboard a plane to Miami, Tannen and Bowen leapt into action, swiftly relocating Stills to the legendary Fame studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. When Lundvall arrived at Criteria, he and his team were told they’d just missed Stills, leading them to board yet another plane to Muscle Shoals. By the time they arrived there, Stills had again been transplanted, this time to San Francisco. At that point, the Columbia team gave up. “Eventually they just said, ‘Fuck it,’” says Tannen, “and signed the contract.” Tannen wasn’t happy with the way the deal had gone down, but it was better than the alternative. (As a thank-you gesture, Bowen and Stills dropped a high-priced vase off at Tannen’s office, which he would still have more than forty years later.)
On the other side of the country, Nash was coping with more of the encroaching darkness he had felt the previous year; the sinister side of the culture they had wrought was now staring him in the face. A delusional female fan who claimed she was related to Nash—she would sign her letters “sister of Willy Nash,” after his nickname—materialized outside his home, sitting on a park bench across the street. It was later discovered that she had used cut-up parts of his album covers to construct an altar to him.
One day when Nash wasn’t home, his friend Joel Bernstein, who lived next door, was looking after the place and heard a knock at the front door. There stood a policeman, the woman at his side, asking if her story about being a Nash family member was true. Before Bernstein had a chance to explain that she was likely deluded, the woman slipped past Bernstein, ran upstairs and locked herself in Nash’s bedroom on the third floor. Bernstein had to climb up on the roof and enter the room through the window; he grabbed her and somehow dragged her out of the house. The woman probably didn’t notice the hole in the wall opposite that same window in Nash’s room. The damage had been inflicted a year or so earlier, when a man with a .350 Magnum had fired two blasts into the house. In another incident, Crosby, who had been staying in the house while his Mill Valley home was under renovation, had seen someone trying to steal the hubcaps off the Mercedes he’d parked outside; he had let off a few shots in the air to chase away the thief. Everyone assumed that the person who fired into Nash’s house was that same man who had tried to steal the hubcaps and that he was now seeking revenge, even if he had no idea that rock stars were living there.
By then, the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young scene had already begun wearing on Calli Cerami, Nash’s girlfriend since 1973. “When I first joined this group of guys, I thought they were all pretty cool,” she says. “But then, slowly, everybody got crazier and crazier.” Before long, Nash and Cerami’s relationship petered out in what she calls “sort of a mutual agreement.” As when he and Mitchell broke up, Nash wasn’t alone for long. Lunching at a Hollywood pharmacy-cum-hangout called Schwab’s, he was captivated by Susan Sennett, a twenty-three-year-old blonde actress who’d starred in Pepsi commercials and on TV (including a role as one of the daughters in the Nelson family TV reboot Ozzie’s Girls). Sennett would soon be Nash’s latest flame.
Before their breakup, Nash and Cerami experienced another, more ominous shock. Just before Valentine’s Day in 1975, they were in Hawaii in an attempt to rescue their relationship when the disturbing news arrived: Amy Gossage, Nash’s partner before Cerami, was dead. Described as a “sophisticated waif” with “the winsome look of a choir boy,” Gossage embodied the free-spirit San Francisco lifestyle. But her brother had been traumatized by their father’s death and, starting in high school, had become a serious drug user. That day in February, he had visited Amy in her North Beach apartment, and he later told police he’d found her body in a pool of blood; she had been stabbed and bludgeoned. A half-finished clay bust sat nearby (she was studying art). Amy was nineteen. In short order, police arrested her brother on murder charges. During his trial, it came out that the two siblings had had a heated argument over money—$5,000—connected to their late mother’s estate. Her brother would claim his sister had lunged at him with a hammer and scissors, and that he had “overreacted” in order to disarm her. (Amy’s friends doubted she would have taken such action.) Convicted of voluntary manslaughter, her brother was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, although he would eventually serve only three and later attend college and law school.
Gossage’s brutal murder was devastating for Nash. “It really affected him in a terrible way,” says Cerami. “He did care for her. Even thinking about it made you depressed.” The enlightened, drug-enhanced world they had hoped to usher in with the ’60s clearly now had a darker, more violent side.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the post-tour collapse, Crosby and Nash again gravitated toward each other. Their voices—Nash’s clarinet-high reediness and Crosby’s comparatively lower timbre—still made for a natural blend, and their approaches to work augmented each other as well. “Graham was the hardest working and David was lazier,” says Leslie Morris, the former Geffen-Roberts assistant who, in late 1974, took on the challenge of managing Crosby and Nash after they parted ways with Geffen and Roberts. Crosby and Nash were ready to move on from the turbulent Stills, the noncommittal Young, and the issues that engulfed them: “We felt,” Crosby says, “like we didn’t want to be in their movie anymore.” Jerry Rubenstein, a former Geffen-Roberts accountant who was now the newly appointed president of ABC Records, offered Crosby and Nash a sizable advance to leave Ertegun and Atlantic. When Crosby and Nash’s lawyer, Greg Fischbach, called Ertegun to discuss a release, Ertegun hung up on him. But he called back several days later to finalize the arrangement, and Crosby and Nash became free men.
By the dawn of 1975, the two had a new label and nearly two albums’ worth of substantial material. Crosby had “Carry Me” and “Homeward Through the Haze” from the aborted group album, along with “Low Down Payment.” Continuing his tradition of veiled swipes in song at his bandmates, Nash had written the embittered “Take the Money and Run” about the previous summer’s tour and the cash that had flowed in and out of its coffers. In his “Cowboy of Dreams,” the friend with a home and a barn was Young. In his first draft of the song, Nash had written that he was “tired of the heartache and scenes” around Young, but when Larry “L.A.” Johnson, a filmmaker who had worked with them—and who would go on to work with Young extensively in the years to come—heard the song, he told him, “You’re not tired of Neil. You’re scared.” Nash promptly changed “tired” to Johnson’s word choice. Nash also finally completed “Wind on the Water,” a paean to endangered whales he had started on his 1970 sailing trip with Crosby. The song was partly about Crosby. “David had spent a few years having the press not saying very nice things about him—throwing harpoons—so there’s a lot of Crosby in that first verse,” Nash says. “Nothing’s just about the whales.”
Nor was Crosby averse to portraying his bandmates in song occasionally. Composed the year before, “King of the Mountain,” its theatrical melody enhanced by Craig Doerge’s piano, painted a portrait of a lonely, solitary figure in a stadium—which, unstated, was Stills. “Nash and I were watching Stills go down the tubes and thinking ‘Man, he’s losing his marbles,’” says Crosby. “I was certainly going down the tubes myself, but it’s easier to look at someone else than yourself.” For reasons no one quite recalls, Crosby withheld the song from the new album, however; during this period, he only performed it in concert with Nash.
When the duo began recording in Los Angeles, and at Nash’s home studio in San Francisco, the contrast with the last few Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young studio attempts was palpable. They recruited the same core group that had backed them on Graham Nash/David Crosby—Danny Kortchmar on guitar, Doerge on keyboards, Leland Sklar on bass, and Kunkel on drums, along with Nash’s preferred bassist, Tim Drummond, and multi-instrumentalist string wizard (and Jackson Browne musical sidekick) David Lindley. With Crosby and Nash holed up at the Chateau Marmont during the LA sessions—possibly in one of the same bungalows where John Belushi would overdose a few years later—the finished takes rolled out effortlessly. Crosby’s “Bittersweet,” an elliptical meditation on being torn between shadows and light, was written and recorded in one session, a feat that would have been unimaginable with the full group. “It was night and day,” says roadie Glenn Goodwin. “They were doing four or five tracks a day. It was crazy.” With the aid of the studio pros, the two Crosby songs that hadn’t been successfully put on tape by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sprang to life. “Carry Me” soared on intertwined guitar parts and harmonies, and “Homeward Through the Haze” was firmer than the group version, benefiting from a smidgen of harmony on the chorus from another friend, Carole King. As Crosby told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone, once the album was finished, “That’s not like spending three bittersweet weeks in a studio and coming up with nothing on the tapes. The contrast is stark, to say the least. You talk about your black and white, man. It was glaring there.”
Released in the fall of that year, Wind on the Water reflected its effortless creation: it was the most precision-tooled and forceful piece of music either man had made. The songs were enhanced by deft and understated touches: Lindley’s doleful dobro on “Naked in the Rain,” Doerge’s country piano on “Cowboy of Dreams,” and dueling solos between Kortchmar and Lindley during the finale of “Love Work Out,” a ferocious (for them) stomper. The rockers, including “Take the Money and Run,” had a clean, spare fluidity, while the dreamier songs, such as “Bittersweet,” never drifted into a blur. Crosby’s “Critical Mass,” a dense, wordless vocal fugue he had recorded years earlier, now had newly added Nash harmonies. It served as a prelude to Nash’s whale song, “Wind on the Water,” which felt downright cinematic; the song even started with whale sounds.
Wind on the Water took everyone by surprise. Rolling Stone praised it as showing Crosby and Nash “at the height of their musical powers,” calling it “their best studio work since Déjà vu.” Backstage at one of their shows, a Dallas DJ admitted to Crowe that he’d always considered Crosby and Nash the “George and Ringo” of the band, but added, “Guess I was wrong.”
Onstage, too, Crosby and Nash were experiencing a rebirth. They hired most of the musicians who had played on the album to tour with them, renaming them the Mighty Jitters, both as a play on James Brown’s Mighty Flames and as a none-too-subtle reference to cocaine. The players were costly, but they were worth the expense. Before each show, no matter the size of the venue or the crowd, Nash would say to Kortchmar, “Let’s make history,” an attitude that carried into the performances. When those musicians were backing James Taylor, Carole King or Jackson Browne, they provided tasteful, unobtrusive accompaniment, almost as if not to rattle the featured acts. Crosby and Nash weren’t as concerned. “I can always remember Crosby saying ‘Turn it up!’” says Kortchmar. “He was the first person to ever tell me that.” Kortchmar, on guitar, and Lindley, on lap slide, would trade scalding solos (Lindley, in particular, would tear it up on “Fieldworker”), and the elongated, solo-heavy jams of “Déjà vu” would open with Kunkel dropping coins onto his snare drum for an added twilight-zone effect. “While they are not as spectacular on stage as Mr. Stills, nor as enigmatic, and therefore intriguing, as Mr. Young,” wrote the New York Times’ John Rockwell of one of those performances, “they have staying power.”
Some things, of course, would never change. In the midst of a post-show interview, it was suggested by a reporter that Crosby ask Nash a question of his own.
Crosby didn’t hesitate. “What do you think of the girl in the purple top all the way over to the left?”
Nash didn’t pause: “I’ve got to admit that my main distraction was over to your stage right and through the trees. There was a lady lying down there who kept brushing her hair.”
STILLS’ TEAM WASN’T particularly devastated in the wake of CSNY’s implosion; some of them saw the larger group as a distraction, and Stills himself was eager to move on and return to his familiar and comfortable role as boss. While Crosby and Nash were making Wind on the Water, Stills was cobbling together his first Columbia album. The working title was As I Come of Age; eventually, it was retitled Stills. Consisting of recordings made at various locales over the previous few years, the album addressed his struggles with fame and the seeming tranquility he now felt as a married man with a child (“My Favorite Changes”), his feeling of betrayal by unnamed friends (“Cold Cold World”), and a sense of feeling lost in general (“In the Way”). “To Mama from Christopher and the Old Man” was a bouncy ode to fatherhood; his son with Sanson had been born the previous year. The mood was that of a seemingly humbled man taking stock of his checkered past and promising future.
Like Crosby and Nash’s Wind on the Water, Stills, released in June 1975, included more fully realized, more carefully produced versions of songs that could have been part of the never-completed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album. In “First Things First,” he cautioned himself, to the accompaniment of a chugging Latin groove, about living too much in the past (the song also used Crosby and Nash harmonies recorded the year before). The sensual “My Angel” had a growling vocal that almost seemed like a nod to R&B love men like Barry White, and the stark, brooding piano ballad “Myth of Sisyphus” felt more apt for a solo than a group record. Thanks to engineer Bill Halverson, “As I Come of Age,” Stills’ litany of mistakes and regrets that he cut with Ringo Starr in 1970, finally escaped the vault: after Stills had spent years trying and failing to play the just-right guitar solo in its midsection, Halverson asked Donnie Dacus, who was also working with Halverson on another project, to add the part. Upon hearing it, Stills initially thought it was something he himself had played.
On the cover of Stills, in a photograph Joel Bernstein had taken during the group rehearsals at Young’s ranch the year before, Stills appeared husky and hardened. On the back cover, in slippers and slacks, playing guitars on a patio with Dacus, he was the picture of contented fatherhood. Those contrasting images played out on the album as well. With their emphasis on suave keyboards and smothering harmonies, many of the songs had a maturity and sophistication not heard in Stills’ earlier work, with few hints of the folk rock of the Springfield or his work with Nash, Crosby and Young. Sometimes, as in the gritty “Shuffle Just as Bad,” the change-up worked. But some of the album’s overly pillow-soft arrangements—as well as the double-tracking of Stills’ vocals, which undercut the direct emotions in the songs—stifled the bite and tension. “Turn Back the Pages,” a galloping rocker co-written with Dacus that became the album’s first single, wasn’t as brisk as it should have been.
Eager to please Columbia, Stills worked at being accommodating. He talked to reporters and even politely signed an autograph for fans who approached him while he was being interviewed during a meal. “I ain’t the asshole everybody wants to make me out as,” he told Barbara Charone in Creem, adding, “Basically CSNY were very sanctimonious. There was something about the vibe that bunch put out that was annoyingly sanctimonious, and I was a part of it, and yes, I’m equally guilty.” Stills told another journalist that he felt a bit guilty about promulgating the image of drugs in the culture, saying, “I’m not going to be a hypocrite and defend anything, but I feel partly responsible and it kind of makes me feel a little ashamed.”
Stills sold only modestly, and pop radio never embraced “Turn Back the Pages,” but Stills toured with a large band that included Dacus along with singer, songwriter and former Flying Burrito Brother Rick Roberts. They were able to replicate, to some degree, the Crosby and Nash harmonies during electric band versions of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” The acoustic segments included full-throated versions of “Find the Cost of Freedom” and a new piece, “Treetop Flyer,” about a drug-smuggling pilot, that may have been based on a real acquaintance. Played with an acoustic slide guitar, the song had a sexy menace. But the shows didn’t always sell out, and during one at the Hollywood Bowl, the audience screamed and talked so much during his acoustic segment that even the trade magazine Cashbox felt the need to weigh in: “While smoking grass at concerts has become a fact of life, poor manners are, in our opinion, a far worse offense.” When Stills grabbed a swim at a hotel in the Berkshires before a show, a teenager in a Neil Young T-shirt sat by the side of the pool and cracked, “Stephen, why are you such an asshole?” Stills ignored him and continued on his way.
For all the maturity in his new material, Stills nonetheless seemed a little lost. His tour bus was dubbed “The Pleasure Dome,” and he half-joked in one interview that he was a member of the “heathen defense league.” Adhering to his military thinking, bandmates would refer to him as “Sarge.” Young’s buddy James Mazzeo was recruited as the tour manager; Stills even asked him to locate a motorhome just like the one Young had used the year before. But by the end of the tour, Mazzeo was so repelled by the atmosphere that he declined a free post-tour vacation to Hawaii with Stills and the crew. Mazzeo lied and said Young needed him back. “But,” he says, “I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.”
THE MOTORHOME WASN’T Stills’ only link with Young. On Stills, he offered up a cover of Young’s “New Mama” and declared he would now include a Young song on each of his records. Yet the real rapprochement between the two began when Young, while recovering from throat surgery, materialized onstage during several Stills shows in California that summer and fall of 1975. By the last one, at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Pauley Pavilion, Stills shouted, “The spirit of the Buffalo Springfield is back!” Talking with the Los Angeles Times after Young’s first appearance with him, at the Berkeley Greek Theatre in July, Stills admitted that a reunion of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young probably wouldn’t happen: “There is no real financial incentive for us to tour because we didn’t make that much money on the last tour,” he candidly explained. But he also let it out that he and Young had spent a weekend hanging out together and had talked about making an album and touring. All they needed, he said, was a rhythm section.
Of all the change-partner pairings they’d attempted over nearly a decade, a Stills and Young project was the one that had never seemed possible, given their competitive sides. But now it was, and according to a source in the Stills camp, the idea began with Young’s management, which made a certain amount of financial sense. (The eventual album would also wind up on Young’s label, Reprise, not Stills’.) After Harvest, Young had abandoned accessibility for albums like Time Fades Away and On the Beach. The records were roughhewn, scalding, often far from easy listening—and some of the most penetrating work of his life. Yet none had replicated the commercial success of Harvest and “Heart of Gold.” On tour with the Tonight’s the Night band (the Santa Monica Flyers) in Europe in 1973, band members recalled seeing Roberts huddled with Young in the back of a tour bus, berating Young for sticking with a project that was increasingly turning off ticket buyers.
By 1975, Young was emerging from a period of personal turmoil that included his final breakup with Snodgress. “I was pretty out there,” he told biographer Jimmy McDonough. “Kinda lost.” Moving out of his ranch and down to Malibu, which was now home to many wealthy superstar rockers, including Bob Dylan and members of the Band, Young finished Homegrown, the album he’d started right before the failed 1974 CSNY sessions. Here at last was the sequel to Harvest—until friends like the Band’s Rick Danko heard the Tonight’s the Night tapes at a party at Young’s home and convinced him to release those recordings instead. As stark and intense as that record was, the public found it another head-scratcher.
By early 1975, Young had fully regrouped with Crazy Horse, thanks to the addition of guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro to take over for the late Danny Whitten, and recorded a new album with them. As if blowing away the ennui of the past few years, Zuma was clear and lucid. (In publicity photos with Crazy Horse, Young was even grinning.) The songs emanated from different parts of his life: they included “Don’t Cry No Tears,” from his early Squires days, and “Pardon My Heart,” from the previous year’s quartet revival (but without Crosby, Stills or Nash on the track). “Cortez the Killer” evoked epic Crazy Horse jams like “Down by the River,” but with even more mystical leanings. As with the previous Stills and Crosby-Nash records, Zuma also rescued a song from the 1974 tour rehearsals: “Through My Sails,” the closing track, was a fragile lullaby of a song, with harmonies wafting in like a summer breeze. It was yet another tease for a group album that would never be.
Even though it was more straightforward rock than Tonight’s the Night, Zuma peaked on Billboard at the same spot as that album, no. 25. Young didn’t care, but others surely did, and the financial prospects for a first-ever Stills and Young album couldn’t be denied. Artistically, each man knew what he could bring to the other: Stills’ tendency to incessantly work over songs and arrangements could make Young’s songs more radio-friendly, and Young’s raw energy could temper Stills’ perfectionism. Another, more emotional reason was also in play: Young rightly sensed that his old comrade was struggling creatively and could use a boost.
The two convened in Miami in January 1976, a mere two months after Young had joined Stills and his band onstage in Los Angeles. The record would be made on Stills’ turf, at Criteria, and with his band: bassist George “Chocolate” Perry, drummer Joe Vitale, keyboardist Jerry Aiello and former Manassas percussionist Joe Lala. For over a month, the musicians took a crack at songs by both men. Stills and Young had first played “Long May You Run” onstage together during the 1974 tour; now they cut a warm band version of it. They worked up Young’s “Traces,” also from that tour, and Young brought in sunbaked ballads like “Midnight on the Bay.” With producer Tom Dowd and engineer Don Gehman overseeing the sessions, they also tried, but didn’t finish, Stills songs such as “One Way Ride” and “Treetop Flyer.”
Perry, a twenty-three-year-old native Floridian, was familiar with the setting: starting in his teen years, he’d played on records by Betty Wright, Gwen McCrae and other artists on the scrappy R&B and disco label T.K. Records, which was also home to KC and the Sunshine Band. (Perry’s nickname, “Chocolate,” was derived not from his African American heritage but from his love of candy bars.) Yet the Miami sessions were his first taste of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young dynamic. In their drive for the ideal take, he sensed a similarity between Stills and Young. “Neil was exactly like Stephen,” he says. “He wanted his songs to be this way, period, and they had to have a certain groove and feel. We’d be finished and he’d say, ‘I don’t like it—let’s go back and do it again.’ We did ‘Midnight on the Bay’ four or five times.”
Yet, as much as they tried, the two leaders’ oil-and-water worlds refused to mix. Young rented and lived on a funky boat docked in a nearby harbor. “How cool was that?” says Guillermo Giachetti, who was still a member of Stills’ crew. “Instead of a hotel, he stayed on this boat. Stephen was different; he wanted the pool and the big house and convertibles. Two different lifestyles.” Meanwhile, Stills’ penchant for working until dawn—or past it—was anathema to Young. “You didn’t see too much of them at the same time in the studio,” says Perry. “When Neil was doing his stuff, we’d be in the studio with him. When Stephen was doing his stuff, we were in the studio with him. Most of the time, they weren’t together.”
In early April 1976, Young found himself back in the Bay Area, returning home after a series of Crazy Horse shows in Japan. One day he unexpectedly stopped into Nash’s house in San Francisco. Nash and Crosby had barely spoken with Stills over the past year, but Nash and Young retained a connection. After the last show of the group reunion tour in 1974, Young and Nash, along with Cerami, Mazzeo, Joel Bernstein, Leslie Morris and Young’s friend “Ranger Dave” Cline, had traveled to Amsterdam for a post-tour vacation (Young had driven there in a Rolls Royce he had bought in England). “I think we needed that, because of the craziness of that tour,” says Cerami. During the getaway, Nash and Young bonded more than they ever had before.
Now, as they relaxed in Nash’s basement studio, Young told Nash that he and Stills had been recording together and he had a tape of some of those songs. “You’re standing in my studio,” Nash replied. “Where’s the cassette?” Young promptly played three or four songs he and Stills had cut in Miami. To Nash, the reason for Young’s visit was clear. “Neil may have thought two things,” Nash said. “That David and I would sound great on these songs. And maybe it would help him with his relationship with Stephen.” Young wanted to know if he and Crosby were willing to come down to Miami, where he and Stills were recording, and take another shot at a group album.
Nash would have had good reason to hesitate about diving back into those choppy seas. With Wind on the Water, he and Crosby had finally found their outside-the-mothership voice. Promoting the album in Rolling Stone, Nash told Cameron Crowe, referring to the quartet’s future, “We still might make another album one day, but now is not the time.” Wind on the Water had peaked at no. 6 on the pop album chart—two spots lower than the high-water mark of Graham Nash/David Crosby, but nonetheless an impressive achievement, given the changes in pop during those three years. Its sales easily bested those of Stills and Tonight’s the Night. The seeming cast-offs of the group were now the stars; maybe they didn’t need Stills or Young after all.
As harmony singers, Crosby and Nash were also being validated in the world outside the group. Anyone listening to AM or FM radio during 1975 and 1976 would have heard their backup voices on records by Carole King, Art Garfunkel, Elton John and Jackson Browne. Their bond with James Taylor was particularly strong, and not simply because Taylor was not averse to his share of carousing at the time. One day in late 1974, journalist Robert Greenfield, a former associate editor in Rolling Stone’s London bureau and a casual friend of Crosby and Nash, was at Nash’s home with his future wife when Crosby and Nash asked them to follow them down to Nash’s basement studio. Excitedly, they cued up the tapes of two songs, “Mexico” and “Lighthouse,” that they’d recorded with Taylor for his album Gorilla; their harmonies brightened the former and lent a sunset quality to the latter. “They were telling us they were going to go out with James, and it would be their next big ticket,” says Greenfield. “They didn’t say, ‘He’s going to replace Stephen.’ But they think it’s going to be Crosby, Nash and Taylor. The expectation was that they were going to be performing with him and they were jacked up about it.” Nash confirms that story: “We absolutely thought about that. We’d sounded great together.” But it was “just a fantasy,” he says. Taylor was never informed of the idea.
Under the circumstances—a second wind few fully expected—Crosby and Nash were now taking control of their music and destiny in ways they hadn’t before. Yet the lure of something magical, and lucrative, remained. Although they were deep into the recording of the follow-up to Wind on the Water when Young visited, Nash and Crosby soon packed their bags and stashes; they boarded flights to Florida the next morning. After several previous failed attempts, the next version of the great lost group album, the one they’d planned on calling Human Highway, was again in reach. Maybe the third attempt would be the charm.
JOE VITALE COULDN’T quite grasp what he was witnessing. Only a few months before, the scrappy twenty-seven-year-old drummer and multi-instrumentalist—who had been born in Ohio and was attending Kent State during the 1970 shootings—had been asked to join Stills’ band after a stint with his college friend Joe Walsh (the former James Gang lead and future Eagles guitarist). With his other band seemingly history, Stills was determined to blast into a more raucous rock-and-roll life, and Vitale and Perry were along for the ride. “Stephen was like a battery on full,” Perry recalls. “He didn’t sleep very much. He was that kind of ambitious cat. He always felt like he had something to prove.” When Stills, Vitale and Perry flew to Houston in January 1976 to join Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue for a benefit for the imprisoned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Stills’ guitar was so loud during the sound check that Dylan commanded his bass player to ask him to turn down his amp for the show. The request was not honored.
But here Vitale was a few months later, on a mid-April morning in Miami, watching Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all together. They had gathered in a studio with acoustic guitars and were playing a new Nash song, “Taken at All,” that seemed to chronicle the band itself. The identity of people who’d “lost it on the highway” and were off in different directions couldn’t have been more obvious. “I watched them do that song sitting around in a circle with a mic, singing and playing,” Vitale recalls. “It was the foundation of what they do—the blend was perfect. It was a great thing to witness.”
Over the next two weeks, Crosby and Nash added their voices to the already recorded Stills and Young songs. To make the record more of a group effort, they also tackled a few Crosby and Nash songs, including “Taken at All” and a wordless Crosby rouser called “Dancer” that dated back five or six years. Many mornings, Nash would meet Young for breakfast at the Mutiny at the Sailboat Bay Hotel, the infamous ground zero for the city’s cocaine world. A semblance of normalcy, at least for them, settled over the project. Was it possible that this album, so long in the making, could be falling into place so fast and so efficiently? Was some version of Human Highway about to come to fruition?
Then one morning Young didn’t show up for breakfast, and a hotel employee informed Nash that he’d left Miami. Young was on his way back to California.
Not for the first time, Nash was confused, but too many factors had been pulling the project apart before it was barely off the ground. Nash and Crosby had already informed Stills and Young that they needed to return to Los Angeles to complete their own album before finishing up the group project. Unbeknownst to them, Stills and Young had already mapped out a summer tour starting in July, which made it imperative to wrap up the album—whoever would appear on it—as soon as possible, so the release would coincide with the shows. “Neil came in with steam coming out of his ears,” Stills told writer William Ruhlmann nearly fifteen years later, with Nash and Crosby in the room. Stills turned to Nash, “I got the impression that you two guys had a fight or something? You and Neil? Some kind of an argument or something.” Nash agreed, noting that Young had probably been offended that he and Crosby were planning to depart in the middle of making a record. Nash rightly surmised that Young wouldn’t have appreciated his and Crosby’s lack of focus on a possible reunion record.
Crosby and Nash returned to California to resume work on their album. While they were there, Stills and Young made the friendship-crushing decision to revert to their original duo concept; as Nash learned during a call from Young, he and Crosby’s voices were stripped off the songs. A few months later, Stills told writer Chris Charlesworth that he assumed Crosby and Nash would finish their record, and he and Young would finish their own. Either way, the Stills-Young backup players were called in to replace the Crosby and Nash harmonies. As Perry recalls, “I’d go home and come back and things would be different.”
Young would voice some regret for the decision: “[Crosby and Nash] sang ‘Midnight on the Bay’ and it was great,” he told writer Bill Flanagan a decade later. “It really was. I never should have erased that. But I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.” Crosby and Nash were hardly in the mood for level-headed conversations. Both were taken aback by the decision, and Nash unleashed his anger in a hot-plate interview with Crawdaddy. “How many times can you keep going up and saying, ‘Okay, I’ll stand here while you hit me again, but just don’t hit me as hard as you did last time!’” he vented. “It was dirty. I won’t work with them again. I will not work with them again! Fuck ’em. They’re not in it for the right reasons. They’re in it for the bucks. I see Stephen’s career going downhill and I see Neil’s career going downhill, and I don’t give a shit.” (As Crosby notes, “Nash has a temper.”) Even those in and around their universe who thought they’d seen it all were stunned. “I thought, ‘This is not good,’” says Ken Weiss of Stills’ Gold Hill publishing company. “Graham and David had every right to be upset. I thought, ‘If CSNY didn’t exist, it certainly won’t exist now.’”
On May 8, Crosby, Nash and a few of the Mighty Jitters reconvened at a Hollywood studio to complete work on their own album, now called Whistling Down the Wire after a line in one of its songs. Nash’s “Taken at All,” rescued from the Miami reunion, took on a new mournfulness, as well as a more fleshed-out arrangement featuring Lindley’s fiddle. Even more striking was “Mutiny.” With its grunting guitar and bass parts, a screechy Kortchmar solo and an atypically yelping Nash vocal, the track, named after the Miami hotel where it all fell apart, was Nash’s angriest song about his partners. It would be the testiest piece of music on their album.
STRUMMING THE OPENING CHORDS of the singer-songwriter legend Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” Young admonished the shrieking crowd at the Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkston, Michigan. “I just want to be able to hear myself, that’s all,” he said in a tone that tried not to sound irritated.
Even though their album remained unreleased, the newly named Stills-Young Band tour nonetheless had to begin as planned that night, June 23. The tour dates had been intended for Crazy Horse; now Stills and Young had commandeered the allotted concerts and rehearsed at Young’s ranch. On paper, the set list amounted to any fan’s wish list. There would be Buffalo Springfield songs like “Mr. Soul”; songs they’d played together during the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour (“On the Way Home,” “Southern Man”); highlights from their years apart (“Heart of Gold,” “The Treasure [Take One]”); fresh material they were debuting (Young’s intensely open-hearted song of devotion, “Like a Hurricane,” making its stage debut); and songs from a duo album no one had yet heard. For the first time since 1968, the two of them would perform “For What It’s Worth” together, Young reviving the haunted, harmonic single-note lick of the original recording.
The set also included a few songs from Illegal Stills, the record Stills had released that spring. Cut with most of his touring band, the album was more cohesive than Stills. Its inspired cover, designed by noted Columbia art director John Berg, displayed a bottle of moonshine emblazoned with Stills’ face. Yet it was disconcerting to cue up a Stephen Stills album and, now and then, hear band member Donnie Dacus singing lead instead of his boss, which happened on pieces Dacus had composed. Dacus’ songs (“Closer to You,” “Midnight in Paris”) were pleasant, middle-of-the-road pop, but hardly Stills’ style. “Stephen had trouble writing,” says Michael Tannen, Stills’ lawyer. “There was a kid [Dacus] he was writing with and Stephen was leaning on him too much.” (For a moment, Stills had considered renaming his band Stills-Dacus.) A bulldozer version of Young’s “The Loner” stood out, and the Latin rocker “Buyin’ Time” and the grinding “Circlin’” kicked up some dust. His affinity for military veterans emerged in “Soldier,” the story of a wheelchair-bound vet set to a Latin shuffle. But Illegal Stills was another missed opportunity, a baffling vanilla wafer of a record.
As the first set of shows rolled along—coinciding with the national celebration of the country’s two hundredth birthday, complete with “Bicentennial Minutes” on TV that reduced major historical events to dramatized sound bites—the makings of a memorable tour were alluringly within reach. Young led the band through the funky stomp of another new song, “Homegrown”; at various times, Stills’ solo set would include gentle versions of “Helplessly Hoping,” as well as the Springfield’s “Four Days Gone,” free of the gargling-whiskey voice that sometimes overtook him. Their guitar styles—Stills’ coiled, Young’s stinging—made for intermittently charged duels. They played before 17,300 concertgoers in Pittsburgh and 16,900 in Cincinnati, sizable crowds for musicians who hadn’t had hit albums in recent years.
Yet, starting with ads that sometimes billed the ensemble as “The Neil Young–Stephen Stills Band,” the Stills-Young Band trek was tainted from the start. For someone who valued control, Young must have felt frustrated. He was touring with Stills’ band, not his own. In order to tighten up their performances, Stills insisted they stick with roughly the same set each night, but Young soon grew impatient with the format. (Stills would later admit the shows were a bit “static.”) “[Young] got me in the dressing room before a gig and said, ‘All right, man, you’re holding back. I wanna see you get out there and hit it more,’” Stills told Charlesworth. One night, Stills berated Young’s sound man, Tim Mulligan, in front of the crowd. And when Stills sometimes failed to remember a lyric or sang off-mic, the band was forced to compensate on a stanza’s notice. “When he forgot a line, you knew to pick up when he started,” Perry said. “Some nights, they would go sixteen bars, some twenty-four bars. I don’t think Neil appreciated that.” Between shows, Young flew back to Florida to continue work on the still-uncompleted Stills-Young Band album, which the tour had been intended to promote.
The July 17 issue of Billboard featured a full-page ad for Illegal Stills, touting Stills’ “history-making tour with Neil Young that will take his powerful music all over the country for more than three months.” Three days later, on the bus after a show in Columbia, South Carolina, Young decided he’d had enough and instructed his driver to head in another direction. (Stills was traveling with his band on one bus, Young with his team on another.) When the Stills band buses rolled into Atlanta and arrived at the appointed hotel the next morning, each musician was given a room key and a telegram from Young. Stills’ read, “Dear Stephen, Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil” (a reference to their arrival in the Peach State). Even though about twenty shows remained on their itinerary, the Stills-Young Band experiment was shut down. Perry was stunned. “I had never been on a tour that just quit in the middle,” he marvels. “When you’re a side musician, you have your forecast of expected income. You’re thinking about what you’re going to do with the money when the tour is over. And the tour is over faster than you thought. I was making $250 a night. To lose that kind of money in one flash was shocking.”
Young announced that he was coping with a recurrence of a throat issue that had led to surgery the previous year. But not everyone accepted that explanation. The road work and time with Stills had ceased to be enjoyable for him, and per his usual response, he was gone when the fun ended. Stills holed up in his hotel room, while his manager, Michael John Bowen, spoke with each of the band members and arranged for their return trips home. When the musicians finally saw Stills, he wasn’t in much of a mood to talk. “Stephen was heartbroken,” Vitale says. “There were going to be lawsuits and all sorts of shit. He was almost in tears. It was very hurtful to him.” Reached by phone at a hotel bar, Stills told Cameron Crowe—who was chronicling the tour for Rolling Stone but didn’t yet know Young had bailed—“I have no answers for you. I have no future.” Valiantly, Stills made up for a few of the nixed shows. On August 24, he played what had been planned as a duo performance at the Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles, but the Los Angeles Times called it a “disappointing substitute” for a Stills-Young show. That night, Stills sang “Long May You Run,” a farewell to the tour, and to the album that had collapsed the month before.
A few weeks after that show, the Stills-Young Band album, Long May You Run, finally arrived. Disappointingly, it didn’t recapture the feel of Buffalo Springfield as much as Stills had hoped it would. As in the recording sessions, the two men alternated songs and lead vocals on the album, but it still felt strangely lopsided. Most of Young’s contributions—the trifling “Ocean Girl,” the lulling “Midnight on the Bay,” the quasi-country shuffle “Let It Shine”—were as casual as beachwear and about as weighty. (Stills’ squawking lead guitar on “Ocean Girl” was lively, though.) Stills’ songs, such as the underwater-dive tale “Black Coral” and the pained “12/8 Blues (All the Same),” with his grunting, sputtering solo, had a toughened intensity. “Fontainebleau,” Young’s swipe at that upscale Miami hotel, spewed vitriol and included some of his most furious guitar parts, and the title song, a tribute to Young’s legendary hearse, featured Stills’ sandpaper harmony and Aiello’s calming organ. But mirroring the way it was made, the album sounded like the work of two different people. Only in the fading moments of the last song, the jazzy “Guardian Angel,” did Stills and Young trade guitar parts—a thrilling moment that lasted all of twenty seconds.
Whether it was the bad karma around the tour or the uneven music, an album that should have been historic was greeted with indifference, only reaching no. 26 on Billboard. The reviews amounted to a collective pile of shrugs. Reflecting the media consensus that Young was now overtaking Stills in the quality of his work, in spite of the lightness of some of Young’s contributions, Crawdaddy headlined its review “Stills Water Drowns Young.”
Meanwhile, after a strong start of their own, Crosby and Nash were beginning to hit a rough patch. They parted ways with Leslie Morris, their manager of barely a year and a half. “You can’t manage David,” she says. “He didn’t like me as his manager and I didn’t like being his manager.” Whistling Down the Wire, their follow-up to Wind on the Water, was rushed out in early summer. A blend of new material, including “Mutiny,” and leftovers from Wind on the Water, it was a markedly more low-key and complacent affair. The record had much to recommend it: the duo’s versions of “Time After Time” and “Taken at All” made the case that they could handle those songs just fine without Stills and Young, and Crosby and Nash’s harmonies never felt more tender. But other songs felt slight, and the absence of the meaty arrangements of Wind on the Water didn’t help. “Spotlight” captured the way their fans identified with them, but it also demonstrated how they backed away from their fans. (A press release for the album kept up the hope for a reunion of the four band members, declaring, “CSNY have recorded several songs together in recent years which are as yet unreleased, but a new CSNY album is projected in the near future.”) Crosby and Nash had a potential hit in “Out of the Darkness,” an atypically commercial ballad—it would have worked well on a romantic-movie soundtrack—but they declined to edit it for radio play, dooming its chances. (It never got higher than no. 89 on the charts.) Ironically, the album peaked at exactly the same position as Long May You Run.
They were still rock stars, and they still lived that life as much as possible, as David Rensin, a Los Angeles–based writer who covered rock and roll, observed. ABC Records had hired Rensin to coordinate on-the-road interviews for Crosby and Nash during the summer of 1976. He found them largely amenable. Their continuing prestige was apparent when the tour rolled into Tanglewood in Massachusetts and Rose Kennedy could be seen sitting in the bleachers with some of the Kennedy grandchildren. After a show in Akron, Ohio, on August 22, Crosby and his crew were late for a flight out of O’Hare. Crosby, his girlfriend Nancy Brown, a roadie, and Rensin made a crazed dash for the airport, their stash coming along for the ride. Since they arrived with only minutes to spare, there was no time to officially return the vehicle, so it was ditched at curbside. “We thought, ‘Someone will see it’s a rental car,’” Rensin recalls. “So we just left it there.”
Although almost no one in the world acknowledged it at the time, a very different sound was making its presence known in pop. That spring came the release of Ramones, the first album by four dressed-down guys from New York who preferred their songs short, terse and rivet-gun-like. They sang about Nazis, sniffing glue, and beating on brats with baseball bats. Ramones only sold seven thousand copies that year. But combined with Patti Smith’s Horses from the previous fall, as well as singles drifting over to the States by the Sex Pistols, England’s most confrontational punk band, the new album showed that rock was about to make an abrupt turn toward a leaner, angrier and spunkier style. Albums like Whistling Down the Wire and Long May You Run suddenly felt fusty, self-satisfied or both.
When Crosby, Nash and the Mighty Jitters pulled into Holmdel, New Jersey, to play two shows at the Garden State Arts Center in August, they found themselves face to face with another member of rock’s new guard. By chance, Bruce Springsteen’s lighting director was friends with Crosby and Nash’s tour manager, Glenn Goodwin. When he learned Crosby and Nash would be playing on Springsteen’s home turf, the Springsteen employee had an idea: a softball game. Springsteen and his band and his crew had formed a softball team, the E Street Kings, and they challenged Crosby and Nash, who quickly assembled a team of their own. In another coy pharmaceutical reference, they dubbed themselves the San Francisco Hoovers.
On the appointed day, the teams assembled at an empty mid-Jersey high school field for the private, no-press-allowed event. The mood was jovial, complete with an outdoor cookout and plenty of beer. But as crew members like Goodwin had feared, the E Street Kings proved to be far more experienced players once the teams took to the dusty field for the game. Nash kept catching the ball with his right hand while wearing his mitt on his left. “They kicked our ass,” Goodwin says. “David wasn’t super athletic and I don’t know if Graham had ever played baseball before. We said, ‘Let’s make him the pitcher,’ but he didn’t know what to do with a glove or how to throw. It was the funniest damn thing.” When Springsteen briefly left for a few innings, the Crosby and Nash team scored a few runs. But when Springsteen returned and saw the scoreboard, he whipped the Kings back into shape, and his team won. Afterward, the players assembled for a friendly group shot, but in a way, the day was a symbolic passing of the torch.
THAT AUGUST, THE FOURSOME never seemed more entrenched in separate corners. Crosby and Nash, working with their own band, remained embittered about the aborted Miami sessions. “I suspect it was Stephen more than Neil,” Crosby says. “But the whole process was insulting enough to us that we went back and said, ‘Okay, that’s it, we’re done.’” Young was holed up in Malibu recording a slew of strong new songs, including the troubled self-portrait “Hitchhiker,” the surrealistic “Pocahontas,” and “Powderfinger,” which, with its lyrics about a family fighting off an unnamed enemy, felt like a mythological folk tale. He was also still coping with his breakup with Carrie Snodgress. Nash remained so angry with Young over the Miami episode that, according to one source, he didn’t allow “Pushed It Over the End” to be included on Decade, a three-LP retrospective that Young was preparing.
Once more, Stills seemed to be isolated from the others; to make things worse, his world was unraveling. Neither Stills nor Illegal Stills had been hits, and the modest sales of Long May You Run made for a trifecta of middling success. (To rub a certain amount of salt in the wounds, his former label, Atlantic, also released two Stills albums, a concert record and a compilation, which Tannen, Stills’ lawyer, interpreted as the label’s way to spite Stills for leaving.) Taken aback by the excesses of the American rock-and-roll world, Sanson filed for divorce from Stills in August. Stills moved out of their Colorado home and holed up in the penthouse of the Beverly Rodeo Hotel on Rodeo Drive. With promoters calling for his and Young’s heads in light of the canceled shows, Stills was forced to embark on a solo tour. (Young, meanwhile, his voice apparently recovered, would soon begin an American tour with Crazy Horse.) “It’s a question of finances,” Stills told BAM, a magazine covering Bay Area music. The article said he sounded “somewhat distant and melancholy” while discussing the upcoming tour.
Yet just when the group had arrived at what felt like a hard-to-conquer impasse, another chance at a revival materialized. On August 12, Crosby and Nash were scheduled to play the first of two shows at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. At Stills’ hotel room, Weiss argued that his friend should attend to show his support. Given how close the venue was to the hotel, it would be more than noticeable if he didn’t show up. As Weiss knew, the risks were enormous. If Stills ventured backstage, Crosby and Nash could easily ignore him or unload on him. Yet Weiss also sensed that the power had shifted: Crosby and Nash were in a positive place in their careers, and Stills was humbled. Stills hesitated, but eventually he relented.
Before Stills left for the Greek, Weiss reached out to John Hartmann, the former Geffen-Roberts manager, who, along with his partner Harlan Goodman, was now handling Crosby and Nash’s career. Weiss, who wouldn’t be attending the show himself, wanted to ensure that Stills would be allowed backstage without any issues. He received assurances, yet throughout the night he still regularly called his contacts at the show for updates. Meanwhile, Nash warned his team that, should they spot someone wearing a football jersey, they should keep him away. Nonetheless, Stills made his way back—after Joel Bernstein saw him standing by the side of the stage—and he, Crosby and Nash wound up huddling in a dressing room. As Weiss predicted, the issues that had driven them apart a mere three or four months before weren’t brought up. “What were we going to do, especially if people knew Stephen was there and that we didn’t invite him onstage?” Nash says. “We said, ‘Let’s just do the encore and we’ll be fine if they see us together.’ Of course we were pissed at him, but… showbiz. ‘You’re here and we’re here.’”
Stills ended up joining them onstage for “Teach Your Children” to a rapturous response. In another conciliatory gesture, Nash, at the suggestion of his girlfriend Susan Sennett, invited Stills to his second home in the Los Angeles area, where they got drop-down drunk together. “All I’d heard was what a monster Stephen Stills was,” Sennett (later Susan Nash) told Crosby, Stills and Nash biographer Dave Zimmer. “And when I met Stephen, here was this shy man who didn’t seem too terrible.” When Stills eventually returned to his hotel on Rodeo Drive, Weiss thought he seemed like a different person, as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
As inconceivable as it would have seemed weeks before, plans for a Crosby, Stills and Nash album were now again in the air. From the moment preliminary work on the album began in Los Angeles in December, a new sense of productivity was in the air. Nash and Crosby dropped by a Stills session, and Nash brought along “Just a Song Before I Go,” a wispy ballad inspired by a dealer’s dare for him to write a song in the few hours before boarding a flight. With Christmas less than a week away, the three men, accompanied by the CSNY tour rhythm section from 1974, nailed the song in a few takes; Stills’ lead guitar conjured smoky barrooms. “There was a different vibe,” recalls Vitale, who played vibraphone on the track. “CSNY was a project, but CSN was a band.” The smoothness of the session made them decide to forge ahead with an album, but pointedly, Young was not invited.
The next month, the three flew to Miami, where everything had fallen apart only eight months before. Taking a cue from his Manassas days, Stills suggested they rent and live in the same house for camaraderie. Naturally, the arrangements had to be just so. Charged with setting up the living quarters, Guillermo Giachetti found a Miami mansion and installed Nash upstairs, Crosby on the first floor, and Stills on the same floor as Crosby, yet on the other side of the house. Giachetti needed to ensure that each room had something special to offer so that no one felt they were getting the short end of the luxury stick. “The main requirement was not to bruise anyone’s ego by getting them a funky room,” he says. Dinners were arranged in the house, followed by studio time until dawn. On more than a few occasions, the three would bump into each other sneaking a donut out of the refrigerator in the middle of the night.
On their first day of work, January 19, 1977, Miami was hit with a fluke snowstorm, its first of the century, which left snowflakes clinging to palm trees. But nothing, not even freak weather, could stop their reunion. “Everyone came in every day on time,” says Howard Albert, who would co-produce with the trio and his brother Ron. “It was more down to earth and controlled, more ‘Let’s make the best record we can.’”
After so many derelict group efforts, making the best record they could was paramount; the public was starting to move on. Early in his career, Glenn Frey of the Eagles had studied the mistakes some of his predecessors had made. Those precursors had included Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and the lessons he and bandmate Don Henley had learned about maintaining and controlling a band had paid off; it was now the Eagles, not their mentors, who were America’s leading band. The release of their massively popular Hotel California album dramatically underscored that shift. The same month, Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded “Just a Song Before I Go.” Their reputation and legacy were at stake.
With the band working in Miami, and with the Alberts on hand, the situation catered to Stills’ need to feel unthreatened, which helped him to be productive. “Graham and David let Stephen do his thing,” says Howard Albert. “He was the driving force. There were fewer power trips going on.” Born of both necessity and maturity, a sense of cooperation took over. The backup musicians included key players from both Stills’ band and the Jitters. The days of Stills playing most of the instruments were over, and each man would have final say on the finished version of his songs. As a result, the blowups of old were largely missing in action. “I didn’t see any arguments or negative vibes,” says George Perry, who played bass. “We were actually having fun. David would come in and say, ‘Are you ready for my part yet?’ or ‘Check this out, it sounds great.’ I didn’t see confrontation.” At last they nailed a version of Stills’ “See the Changes,” which Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had attempted at Young’s ranch nearly four years before. (The song had outlived the marriage that inspired it.) Leaving behind the drums and the congas of the version with Young, the new rendition featured only one guitar and three voices. What emerged was an older, wiser sequel of sorts to “Helplessly Hoping,” with a concluding high note from Nash as a dramatic capper.
Hedonism was always only a few doors away. For all the sensuous pleasures he was experiencing, Crosby was still coping with Christine Hinton’s death and a growing emptiness. Although Crosby remained with Debbie Donovan when their daughter Donovan was born in 1975, he continued his relationship with Brown, even paying for her rent in a house near his. All three knew of the arrangement. Donovan would end up leaving with the baby, and Brown moved in to take her place. Crosby’s downcast mood stemming from Hinton’s death poked out in songs he’d been writing the previous few years: the fame-questioning “Homeward Through the Haze,” the dazed and confused “Bittersweet,” the self-lacerating “Foolish Man” (the latter from Whistling Down the Wire). “We didn’t have any instruction booklet so we were dealing all the time with how to deal with fame, money and loss,” Crosby says. “How to deal with life. We externalized everything. It was a cathartic deal with us. We would come up against a problem and write about it and try to work through it. That’s how we processed it.” For the reunion, Crosby also brought “In My Dreams,” a direct expression of his snowballing isolation from the world as his drug issues deepened; the reference to various “nearby” versions of himself suggested that different parts of his personality weren’t communicating with each other.
Crosby’s growing void also began expressing itself in harder drugs. During the time the album got underway, he learned he had a perforated septum from snorting too much cocaine, which opened the door to a new experience, freebasing the drug. In Miami, Crosby’s immersion in his new habit quickly made itself known: he’d often be holed up in his room rather than at the beach, only emerging later in the day for dinner and nighttime studio work. As Crawdaddy reported, Stills actually challenged Crosby to a race one morning. At the appointed time, Stills was ready to go, outside the home where they were staying, and tore off down the street. Crosby stayed in bed, blowing off the challenge. “There was a lot of wretched excess,” Crosby says. “There was a lot of cocaine. But there was some good music that happened. The songs made it work.”
While the band was crafting the record, their managers were assessing their bargaining power in the business. Technically, the collective group was still contracted to Atlantic. Speaking with a reporter that year, Ertegun admitted he had allowed them to record for other labels on their own—“with the understanding,” he added, in pointedly terse language, “that when they recorded together again, they would be with us.” John Hartmann, working with Stills’ manager, Michael John Bowen, had other ideas and wanted to make sure the reconvened trio landed the most lucrative deal possible. Despite Stills’ connections with Ertegun, Hartmann let it be known to Walter Yetnikoff, the boisterous new president of Columbia, that the band would consider leaving Atlantic. That suggestion also played into the ongoing battle between Columbia and Atlantic’s sister label, Warner Brothers: Yetnikoff had lured James Taylor away from Warner Brothers, and now Paul Simon, with whom Yetnikoff didn’t remotely get along, was on the verge of leaving Columbia for Warner.
After flying to Miami to hear the finished tracks, Ertegun decreed that the album was “very powerful.” Then, at Hartmann’s invitation, Yetnikoff and other Columbia staffers jetted to the studio to hear portions of the record for themselves. They liked what they heard. On the ride back, Yetnikoff asked Hartmann what it would take to sign them. Hartmann knew Atlantic’s original deal with the band—which called for sixty-nine cents an album in royalties—was outdated and no longer adequate. Once Atlantic heard that another party was interested, Ertegun gave in, awarding Crosby, Stills and Nash one of the most lucrative contracts of the time: a $1 million advance on each group album, and complete artistic and creative control (even over the cover art). The royalties would double if they sold over a million records; those figures would also increase if the list price of the records rose. Even better, that rate would apply to their back catalog on Atlantic. Knowing well the band’s history, Ertegun questioned how many more records they would actually make together, but he nonetheless flew out to Los Angeles for the signing of the contract.
During the making of the album, the band celebrated in its own way, leaving for a nearly weeklong sailing trip to the Bahamas along with several of their employees. They went scuba diving and snorkeled, and Bernstein, along for the trip, snapped photos of them onboard the boat for an album cover. Given Crosby’s vampire-shift hours, it was the first chance Bernstein had had to shoot them in daylight. To their employees, the mood was noticeably relaxed, even hopeful. “Obviously they must have had a good time with that album,” Giachetti says. “They went off on that trip instead of flipping each other off.”
AS THE FIRST Crosby, Stills and Nash album in eight years was nearing completion, Ron Albert took a break. He strolled out into Criteria’s parking lot to clear his head and stay awake—a regular part of his and his brother’s method of working with Stills. This time, he glimpsed a shadow by the shrubs, “some guy not exactly dressed for a prom, pissing in the bushes.” When the man turned around, it turned out to be, of all people, Young. They invited him inside to listen to his erstwhile bandmates’ new album.
Young and James Mazzeo had recently arrived in Fort Lauderdale, where Young had settled onto his new boat, the Evening Coconut. He, Mazzeo and reclusive singer-songwriter Fred Neil would lounge aboard the boat as the sun went down while Young and Neil played each other’s songs. Mazzeo eventually returned to California, but Young stayed in Florida. When Young found himself at Criteria that night, the four exchanged hugs and laughs, despite the disastrous attempt at a quartet album in that same studio less than a year before. Crosby, Stills and Nash proudly played Young the final mix of “Shadow Captain,” the opening song on the album, and stood around him singing their parts live.
Written by Crosby and keyboardist Craig Doerge, whose unleashed-stallion piano would drive the track, the song was based on a semiautobiographical lyric that had come to Crosby fully formed in the middle of the night during a sailing trip down the coast of California. The melody and arrangement surged, crashed and receded like waves on a beach. In the way Stills’ rough edges countered Nash’s higher, purer parts, it was also a fitting showcase for their more mature harmonies. When the tape finished, Nash recalls Young loving the song. Vitale, also observing, saw another part of their dynamic at work. “It was, ‘I hope you like this,’” Vitale recalls. “They were relieved and thrilled when he said, ‘Man, I love this.’ They wanted Neil’s approval.”
Stills and Young had patched up matters between them a few months before, when both showed up at the Band’s farewell concert in San Francisco, “The Last Waltz,” and participated in an end-of-show jam session together. Now, in Miami, Young was so intrigued by the reunion that they tried recording one of his songs, “Will to Love,” a lo-fi, seven-minute epic about a fish swimming up a river. It was both loopy and exquisite. “We tried to learn it, but we could never get past it as a band song,” Young later told writer Bill Flanagan. “I couldn’t sing past the second verse without forgetting what I was doing, losing it totally and getting all pissed off because it didn’t sound right. I couldn’t get through it.” The song was abandoned, and Crosby, although a fan of the tune, made the case that they should remain a trio, at least for the time being. Once again, Young parted ways with Crosby, Stills and Nash—but amicably this time.
In preparation for their relaunch, the band also got its first-ever logo, one that would endure for decades. Hartmann’s younger brother Phil was the de facto art department at the Hartmann-Goodman office, where he had already designed album covers for clients like Poco and America. Although no one asked, Phil conceived a logo for Crosby, Stills and Nash that intertwined the first letters of their last names. “He chose the colors carefully, saying Crosby was red for his passion, Stills blue for his soul, and Nash green for his earthy honesty,” recalls his brother John. Phil later dropped the second “n” from his last name and went on to become a brilliant comedian and mimic, especially during his time as a cast member of Saturday Night Live. He wasn’t paid for his work on the logo, but Nash gave him a Martin D-45 acoustic guitar to express his appreciation. Hartmann treasured the guitar right up until his death in 1998.
In June 1977, the impossible came to pass: a new album by Crosby, Stills and Nash appeared. In its early stages, they’d considered calling it Jigsaw Puzzle, but they settled for the less inspired, more generic CSN. Depending on the pressing, their portrait on the cover (taken by Bernstein on the boat trip) showed them either dour or smiling. Either way, the record inside captured three very different men, now in their thirties, struggling to solve a puzzle: the search for common ground. A sense of compromise and conciliation had been there from the start. “Shadow Captain” kicked off the record with its rush of harmonies. In previous years, it would have been easy to imagine Stills playing an attention-craving solo on it. Instead, his slide guitar was undermixed, almost buried, taking a back seat to Doerge’s piano.
So it went for most of the album, which was engulfed in a muted, morning-after sedateness appropriate for men who’d endured several lifetimes’ worth of triumphs and train wrecks in the eight years since Crosby, Stills & Nash came out. From its emphasis on voices over intrusive instruments to Stills’ terse, largely reined-in solos, the album captured men tip-toeing on eggshells for the sake of their careers and solidarity. Rattled by the soul-gutting experiences of his past year, Stills had set aside his wariness of psychiatrists and begun weekly sessions with a therapist in California, exploring his neuroses and self-destructive ways. (“I guess maybe I don’t like myself,” he told writer Peter Knobler for an article in Crawdaddy.) He came off as newly reflective in such CSN contributions as “See the Changes” and “Dark Star,” said to be inspired by a long-past affair with Joan Baez. (Asked about it in 2017, Baez confessed to being unfamiliar with it: “Do I know that song?”) With its celestial bounce and a skipping-stones electric piano solo by Doerge, “Dark Star” was brooding but effervescent, and Stills avoided the oversinging trap he often set for himself.
His partners contributed sober or contemplative songs to match. Unlike his friskier earlier group contributions, Nash’s “Cold Rain” and “Carried Away” were somber and elegiac, the former conjuring his parents’ working-class stasis. In the self-deprecating “Anything at All,” Crosby poked more than a few holes in his renowned ego, breaking into a quick laugh that made the song all the more human. Nash’s “Cathedral” was initiated by a visit to England’s Winchester Cathedral, where he was tripping on acid and stumbled upon the grave of a soldier who’d died on Nash’s own birthday. Solemn in its verses and freaked out in its chorus, the song, complete with swirling orchestration, almost replicated the highs and lows of a trip. The arrangement of “In My Dreams” marked a group effort: Nash had suggested the extended finale, and Stills had added a snappish acoustic guitar solo.
CSN lacked the sunshine-daydream joy of their first album together, and it didn’t try to airbrush the state of their music or their lives. In “Run from Tears,” Stills grappled with the breakup of his marriage, answering his doleful words with bursts of lead guitar. “Fair Game,” one of the album’s few missteps, merged a forceful Latin groove by Stills with lyrics about women on the prowl in singles bars. (“As Graham said to me once, ‘David and I are above the waist, and Stills is below the waist,’” says Bill Siddons, who would later become their manager. “Stephen was the groove and rhythm and sex of the band, and Graham and David were the ephemeral ones.”) An even more desperate Stills breakup song, “I Give You Give Blind,” ended the album on a resigned but strong note. The song was the grown-up version of the concluding “49 Bye-Byes” on Crosby, Stills & Nash, but with its battle scars up front—much like the album itself.
The reviews of CSN were largely kind—“Crosby, Stills and Nash Recapture Magic,” read the Copley News Service’s wire story—although John Rockwell of the New York Times noted, “Ultimately, one senses a defeatism here.… This sounds like a tired last recourse—an attempt at commercial success by three men whose egos make it hard for them to collaborate, but whose relative lack of popular success by themselves makes it difficult not to do so.” The general public just seemed glad to have them back. “Just a Song Before I Go” went Top 10, and the album peaked at no. 2, held out of the top slot by Fleetwood Mac’s ubiquitous Rumours.
Starting in early June, Crosby, Stills and Nash embarked on their full-scale first tour as a renewed trio. Keeping in mind their nitroglycerin nature, the crew had to determine exactly how far Stills’ overpowering Marshall amp stacks had to be from Crosby and Nash. The length of the tour itself had to be carefully considered. “Anything more than four weeks was pushing it,” says crew member John Vanderslice, who was on his first tour with the band. “It was almost like a chemical reaction. You can put these two chemicals together, and it would take this amount of time to corrode the case. So no more than six weeks. If you did eight weeks, something would happen.” Fittingly, the first leg of the tour was restricted to a month.
The scale of the undertaking—and the rewards of a reunion—became apparent as two tractor trailers full of equipment pulled into the Pittsburgh Civic Arena on June 11 for the fourth show of the tour. The trucks carted amplifiers and 120,000 watts of lights that took sixteen roadies, two forklift operators and ten stage hands to unload and install. The rider in the trio’s backstage contract called for a cutting board and knife (perhaps not only for food), a carton of Marlboros and plenty of liquor: two cases of Heineken beer, two bottles of Jose Cuervo Gold tequila, a bottle of Mouton Cadet wine and a bottle of Rémy Martin Cognac. The band would be paid $40,000 along with an unheard-of 85 percent of the ticket sales. At this show alone, they would play before 16,950 people. Backstage, Nash asked a visitor wearing a Mercedes Benz T-shirt if he could exchange it for his; naturally, the man complied.
At each show, backed by Vitale, Lala, Perry and Doerge, the band members worked at balancing nostalgia and modern times. The sets were peppered with songs from their own records but brought in the expected group favorites. In one high-tech touch, Stills was able to gallop around the rim of the stage by way of a wireless guitar pickup. (When Stills would periodically drop and break it, Giachetti would quickly have to scout out a replacement for a few thousand more dollars.) Nearly every review of the show mentioned Stills’ self-discipline, Crosby’s new girth (“bear-like,” as one reviewer called it) and the spontaneous arena sing-alongs to “Our House,” complete with flicked lighters. The hyper energy of the 1974 tour with Young was largely absent—again, for the greater good. “The dynamics were different,” says production manager Glenn Goodwin of the shows compared to that tour. “It seemed like they were a tighter unit.” Despite occasional shouts for Young, audiences seemed relieved to see at least three of them reunited on the same stage.
AT LEAST FOR the immediate future, there would be no arenas in Young’s life—just the opposite, in fact. Returning to California, he reached out to Mazzeo, who had moved onto a communal farm in Santa Cruz with his guitarist friend Jeff Blackburn. A beach town roughly seventy miles south of San Francisco, Santa Cruz had a population of just over thirty thousand—a size that would have fit into one of the venues on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s reunion tour.
Young told Mazzeo he didn’t want to be alone on his ranch. “There were still a lot of Carrie vibes there,” says Mazzeo. Mazzeo invited him over, and Young made himself at home on the farm. Blackburn had been playing local clubs with his eponymous band, and Young was fascinated. “I said, ‘Buck has a band together,’” says Mazzeo, using Blackburn’s nickname, “and as soon as he hit town, Neil goes, ‘God, they need another guitar player.’”
“Will to Love,” the salmon saga Young had tried recording with Crosby, Stills and Nash earlier in the year, finally appeared on record—without them—in June. The song was part of American Stars ’n Bars, which arrived the same month as CSN. The difference between the two albums spoke to the opposing creative approaches of the two camps. CSN was recorded in the same period with largely the same musicians, while Young’s album, harking back to an approach he took with After the Gold Rush and Harvest (and parts of Tonight’s the Night), was pieced together from sundry sessions with varied players over a longer stretch. The trio preferred a somewhat orderly process; Young thrived on the grab-bag approach.
In Young’s case, the gamble usually paid off, and it happened again with the almost schizoid American Stars ’n Bars. Its first half was barn-burner country rock featuring Crazy Horse, with Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson as backup singers; the two women added sisterly vocal firepower to “Bite the Bullet” and “Hold Back the Tears.” The songs brought out a looser, less monolithic side of Crazy Horse, much like the one they’d shown on the Danny Whitten–led album in 1971. In addition to “Will to Love” and the electric hoedown “Homegrown,” the second half was centered around “Like a Hurricane,” which had morphed from the solo acoustic rendition in the Stills-Young Band tour into a musical trip into the Young cosmos. Goaded by his extended Morse-code-freakout guitar and Poncho Sampedro’s Stringman synthesizer—and stretching out to over eight minutes—it was both vast and intimate, yearning and erotic. The type of recording that felt like an immediate, eternal gem as soon as it was heard, “Like a Hurricane” would become one of Young’s most popular and played songs.
Normally, an album with Crazy Horse would have meant a tour with them, but much to the surprise of Jeff Blackburn and his band members (former Moby Grape bassist Bob Mosley and drummer Johnny Craviotto), Young began rehearsing with them instead. In early July, the newly renamed Ducks, after a duck’s landing they saw in town, played its first shows—in local bars in Santa Cruz. In what the Santa Cruz Sentinel called “the worst-kept secret in town,” the Ducks would drive to a club and ask the opening act for their slot (“They were fine—they knew they couldn’t draw what we could,” says Mosley). Charging only a few dollars for admission, they would tear through sets of songs by Young and by Blackburn. Young debuted new material like “Sail Away” and “Comes a Time” in more electrified versions than were later heard on record. “It was unfathomable,” recalls Mosley. “Some of the guitar solos took me into outer space. It was incredible shit.” Starting in mid-July and ending around Labor Day, the Ducks would play more than twenty gigs in bars like the Back Room, the Crossroads and the Catalyst. Young’s only stipulation was that they play within the Santa Cruz city limits (his contract with Crazy Horse forbade him from touring without them). As Young told local music writer Dan Coyro that summer, “I’m starting to get back that certain feeling for playing my music.… It’s like being born again.”
Young eventually rented a home on East Cliff Drive, prompting the Sentinel to call him “a full-fledged resident,” and he was often spotted riding his ten-speed up and down Seabright Avenue. “Neil loved that,” Mazzeo says. “He was like a regular person. Neil knows he’s not going to be anonymous, but he likes to pretend he’s anonymous.” Mosley doesn’t recall Young ever mentioning Crosby, Stills and Nash, but to Mazzeo, the allure of a low-key Santa Cruz lifestyle (and band to accompany it) was more than obvious. “After the Stills-Young thing and the CSNY ’74 thing, he just decided to come and hang out,” Mazzeo says. “Neil would say to me, ‘It’s over, it’s too fucking big.’ This was all a reaction to that.”
That summer, a series of robberies in the area rattled the community. On the night of August 17, a woman in her car outside of a bar called the Crow’s Nest was robbed of her bag at gunpoint. Later, local police learned that one of the same men involved in the robbery had broken into Young’s home and stolen guitars, tapes of gigs and what the police described as “new songs for Young’s upcoming record albums.” The burglar, it turned out, lived on the same street as Young. Newly disillusioned, Young was gone before anyone knew what had happened. “It was the end of the summer,” says Mosley, “and he just disappeared.”
REVIEWING CROSBY, STILLS AND NASH’S show at the Inglewood Forum in late June, the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn raised a critical red flag. “Whereas Crosby and Nash, who have toured and recorded as a duo, seemed relaxed and celebrative, Stills looked like a man uncertain about the reunion and its impact,” he wrote. “The night’s closing glow didn’t erase the question mark over the band’s future.… CSN revived its former glory well. The burden next time will be to come up with new reasons for the audience to believe in it.”
Hilburn’s words would prove to be eerily prescient. In October, the trio embarked on the second leg of the tour—again, for a mere five weeks, to ensure a degree of sanity and harmony. At the fifth show, at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, Stills unleashed an abrasive solo during Crosby’s “The Lee Shore.” Crosby and Nash clearly did not approve. Sitting in the audience, writer Dave Zimmer noticed both men glaring at Stills. Some of their crew members weren’t surprised. “Sometimes there would be amazing harmony, like a couple in a good mood who had a great dinner,” says Giachetti. “And all of a sudden, it would be the opposite. Bad vibes. I would notice it would be clicking and the show would be fabulous, but there were shows when they’d be rushing through the songs.” Crosby and Stills began arguing over who had the most songs in the set, leaving it to Nash to keep the peace. “Nash would always say, ‘Fine, take out one of mine,’” says Vanderslice. “He was always the one to make a compromise.”
But on multiple levels, the group was quickly coming apart. By the fall of 1977, Stills, who had briefly reunited with Sanson, had already begun work on a new album—his own, thanks to his obligations to Columbia. (As Stills would later tell Goldmine of CSN, “There was this feeling over in our end of the building that we were making the album of the year. And I didn’t hear it.”) Crosby’s drug issues were also becoming more obvious, at least to their musicians. During their shows, Perry would watch as Crosby walked back to a speaker and pretended to drink a soda, when in fact he was snorting cocaine off the top of the can. “I didn’t appreciate that at all,” Perry says. “You know somebody saw it. It scared me.” Perry was equally shocked when Crosby would return to the microphone and never miss a beat: “He played his parts! He sang his parts! How do you do that? Which was strange, cool and horrible all at the same time.” Crosby was hardly the only one indulging in whatever at the time. On or around the same tour, as he later recounted to author Michael Walker, John Hartmann witnessed Stills having what seemed like a seizure—swallowing his tongue, eyes rolling back—thanks to a “mucus mass” in his chest. Only Hartmann’s repeated pounding on Stills’ chest appeared to save his life.
The tour over, they decided to quickly begin a new album. “Now let’s hope it’s not an accident—let’s hope they’re already putting together material for a more immediate follow-up album,” wrote the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York, in a concert review. They certainly tried. In Los Angeles in late 1977, and then in Florida a few months later, Crosby, Stills and Nash reconvened with the Alberts for a follow-up. Material wasn’t a problem: Nash had the whirring “Helicopter Song” and a pretty ballad, “Love Has Come.” Crosby brought “Distances,” one of his open-tuned meditations on broken connections, along with an escapist fantasy called “Drive My Car.” Stills had, inconceivably, a disco pop song, “What’s the Game.”
In his concerns about whether the reconstituted group would make a second album under their new contract, Ertegun proved astute. Now that the three had a hit release under their belts, any sense of urgency or need to prove themselves as individuals evaporated. The sessions became so unfruitful that guitarist Danny Kortchmar, from the Mighty Jitters, was flown to Florida for added juice. “That was insane,” Kortchmar has said. “They were having trouble getting along with each other and I guess they liked and trusted me.” But too many cooks overtook the kitchen. “Everybody had their own set of guys, all good cats, but they came and went,” says Vitale. “Everyone was ‘I want to do this or that,’ but there was no real focus. It just drifted along. Their priorities weren’t lined up. It wasn’t the focal point of everybody’s lives.” Crosby’s former Byrd bandmates Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman and Gene Clark were also at Criteria, working on what amounted to a Byrds reunion album without Crosby (or drummer Michael Clarke). McGuinn would see Crosby poke his head into their recording room. “He was kind of feeling it out: ‘Do I want to do this?’” recalls McGuinn, who was under the impression that Stills had warned Crosby not to get involved and to stick with his obligations to CSN.
During this time, Stills had a brief, platonic reunion with Judy Collins. For all the hard feelings that had accompanied the end of their affair, they remained connected. She had written a song, “Houses,” that was superficially about Stills’ personality and wardrobe (along with the properties he owned). She also recorded her own version of “So Begins the Task.” In 1978, Collins got sober after a two-decade drinking problem that had nearly destroyed her voice. She had just checked out of treatment when she ran into Stills in New York and invited herself down to Miami for a getaway. “He said, ‘Don’t come—you’ll never stay sober down here,’” she recalls. “I’m sure he was absolutely right. But I was impressed that he said it and knew it.” On his advice, she stayed north.
Everyone was so optimistic about a follow-up to CSN that a summer tour for 1978 was booked to promote it. The album was abandoned, but the tour—again, a mere five weeks—proceeded as planned. In repertoire and, for the most part, in musicians, it was a retread of the previous summer’s shows. Rolling Stone noted as much in its review of their New York stop with the sarcastic headline, “Sentimental Journey.”
The previous year, Rolling Stone had rhapsodized over CSN, calling it “honest and surprisingly humble.” Of one of their concerts, it had said, “Audience and band went home happy, having learned how easily dormant passions can be rekindled.” But the about-face wasn’t restricted to one publication, and it was emblematic of the media’s revised attitude toward the genre the group embodied. The year 1977 would prove to be a banner moment for the California singer-songwriter rock that had dominated the decade: it was the year of CSN, Rumours, Hotel California (which, though released in late 1976, dominated 1977), Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams, James Taylor’s JT and Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty. Ronstadt made the cover of Time, while Crosby, Stills and Nash appeared on People. But overnight, with punk making the genre look and sound stodgy, their kind of music was deemed passé. In Crosby, Stills and Nash’s case, their public images didn’t help: between Stills’ oversized aviator glasses and Nash’s penchant for shag haircuts and mustaches, they couldn’t have looked more like the picture of ’70s fashion if they’d tried. The cover of CSN, depicting them on a boat, seemed to signify that they were now living wealthier, more upscale lives; certainly, they were no longer the down-home hippies of the Crosby, Stills & Nash cover.
In the midst of the latest round of Crosby, Stills and Nash disarray, Young released Comes a Time in the fall of 1978, complete with a cover image of what Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus aptly described as “Huckleberry Neil.” Recorded in Nashville with a large ensemble of pickers and string players, who overdubbed their parts onto his solo recordings, Comes a Time was mostly gentle; even the two tracks cut with Crazy Horse were largely unplugged. With its swell of multiple acoustic guitars, and Larson’s harmonies providing a lush bed for Young’s becalmed voice, the album returned him to Harvest territory in tracks like the wryly swinging title song, “Already One” (seemingly about his son, Zeke, and the bond they still had), and a version of Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds.” (Thanks to the profits from Young’s version, Tyson was able to buy a sizable ranch in Canada.) The placid tone of the album coincided with a major change in Young’s life. In late 1974, he had met Pegi Morton, a born-and-bred California blonde who was working as a waitress. In the spring of 1978, the two were married in a low-key ceremony in Malibu. Afterward, they lived on his ranch, which had grown. Young had purchased property around the original ranch, and it now occupied a thousand acres.
Early in 1978, at an intimate San Francisco club called the Boarding House, Crosby temporarily became a Byrd again, joining McGuinn, Clark and Hillman for an impromptu onstage reunion. Together they resurrected the songs—including “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Eight Miles High”—that had established them as rock’s vanguard over a decade before. But musically and electronically, Young was already several steps ahead of all of them, even Stills. Three months later, he headlined the Boarding House himself. For two shows a night over the course of five nights, he debuted his now standard stash of previously unheard songs, including “Thrasher,” an exquisite but subtly brutal song about the now-distanced trio. With its reference to those who were coddled and dead weight from the past, “Thrasher” was a clear shot at life with Crosby, Stills and Nash. “Well, at that point, I felt like it was kind of dead weight for me,” he told writer Bill Flanagan in 1985. “Not for them. They were doing fine without me. It might have come off a little more harsh than I meant it, but once I write it, I can’t say, ‘Oh I’m going to hurt somebody’s feelings.’ Poetically and on feeling, it made good sense to me and it came right out.”
Stills may have had a wireless unit that allowed him to bolt around the stage while playing, but Young went one gearhead step further: thanks to a miniature microphone tucked into his harmonica rack, he was able to wander the Boarding House stage without constraints. Yet he would soon be set apart from the others in the most dramatic of ways. It would be the beginning of a long, complicated period of estrangement that would threaten to destroy not only the band but also its most animated member.