He wasn’t the slightest bit thrilled that any of them were in his house, asking questions about the state of the band and the next reconciliation. But sometimes the job called for it, and in the early weeks of 1979, Stills had little choice but to tackle the task at hand.
With the trio once more at odds, Stills barreled along relentlessly with his music. The attempt at a CSN follow-up in Miami was barely old news when, in the fall of 1978, he released his third Columbia solo album, Thoroughfare Gap. Dating back to his use of horns and green-world lyrics on 1971’s Stephen Stills 2, he had always kept one eye on the marketplace; this time around, that gaze was fixed on disco, the prevalent pop genre of the time. Radio and sales had been dominated by the Bee Gees and other acts with songs on the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, a 1977 movie about the youth disco subculture in Brooklyn, New York, starring John Travolta, that continued to draw people into movie theaters. Stills had first been drawn to the genre in 1976, while recording in Florida at the same studio where the Bee Gees worked. He and his preferred percussionist and close buddy, the gregarious Joe Lala, had shown up at a Bee Gees session for “You Should Be Dancing” and insisted on adding percussion to it. As Bee Gees drummer Dennis Bryon later recalled, the two, who seemed well lit, nailed the parts, which were used on the finished record. Stills steeped about half of Thoroughfare Gap in Studio 54 sonics, encasing his voice in fluttering flutes, sumptuous strings and burbling bass lines; he even recruited the youngest Gibb brother from the Bee Gees, Andy, to add harmonies. As Stills told the musicians who gathered in his home to record some of those tracks, he wanted “the most far-out disco sound you can imagine.”
Thoroughfare Gap was one of the most privacy-be-damned albums Stills had ever made. In tracks like the desperately hopeful “We Will Go On,” the grim and gnarled “Lowdown” and the Latino shuffle “Woman Lleva,” he grappled with his failed marriage and subsequent depression, recasting the suffering-romantic aura that dated back to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” The remainder of the album was filled out with a sludgy remake of Buddy Holly and Norman Petty’s “Not Fade Away” and “Can’t Get No Booty.” Stills and Danny Kortchmar had knocked off the latter, a flat-footed disco-parody novelty, in less than an hour, during an unproductive Crosby, Stills and Nash session earlier in the year. Only the vintage title track, which compared his life to an ongoing train and had a gently chugging arrangement to match, sounded like the Stills most of his fans were accustomed to hearing; not surprisingly, that song had been written and first attempted six years before, during the Manassas era.
The disco frivolity of the album’s first single, “You Can’t Dance Alone,” clearly dismayed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s base, and the album became the first Stills solo album not to break into the Top 40, peaking at a sobering no. 83. With that flop, Stills had to subject himself to promotion, and reporters began showing up at his sizable home in Bel Air, with “SS” emblazoned on its wrought-iron gates. After walking down a hallway lined with gold and platinum album awards, then past a wood-paneled library, journalists would find themselves in a basement music den housing a bar, a pool table, multiple guitars and banjos, a piano and clumps of extinguished cigarette butts. For one interview, Stills fortified himself with what one writer called “a Tequila Sunrise in a glass chalice that looks more like a goldfish bowl.” Every so often, a visiting writer could catch a glimpse of Stills’ current girlfriend, actress Susan Saint James, known at the time for her role costarring with Rock Hudson in the TV detective series McMillan & Wife. Stills and Saint James had met months before and been instantly smitten with each other, and Saint James soon moved into Stills’ house. By late winter, the gossip columns would be dotted with news of their summer wedding: “I know I’m good for him—why, I’m even going to get him off Coke!” she joked to a reporter. (The writer added, “The actress, a longtime vegetarian, is referring to the cola, not the powder.”) By the spring, the romance had run its course. Saint James later attributed the breakup to incompatible schedules; Stills would generally be working in the studio while she was asleep. But during those early months of the year, they were still together, and he would momentarily brighten when she walked into a room during one of his interviews.
During the promotional interviews, Stills endured questions about his past but clearly preferred discussing songwriting, Thoroughfare Gap and the California Blues Band, a new electric rock and blues group he was taking on the road. With singer Bonnie Bramlett, formerly of Delaney and Bonnie, and former Dave Mason keyboardist Mike Finnigan on board, the band was grittier and more roadhouse than any he’d fronted before. Reporters asking for updates on his career with Crosby and Nash were met with curt, muted responses. “Ask Graham,” was one. “Why all the boring CSN questions?” was another. “I haven’t seen ’em,” he told Dave Zimmer of BAM magazine. Stills did let it slip in one interview that Crosby, Stills and Nash had “half an album in the can,” yet he failed to mention that hardly anyone had the will to finish it.
WITH ANOTHER ATTEMPT at a Crosby, Stills and Nash album in tatters—and the profits from the highly successful reunion album and tour still in their pockets—there seemed to be little reason to stay in touch. “There was no communication I can think of,” says Guillermo Giachetti. In an unintentional return to the post–Déjà vu days of 1971, the four had again scattered, musically and geographically. Stills remained in Los Angeles. Nash and his girlfriend Susan Sennett had married in the spring of 1977, and they had their first child, a son named Jackson, in February 1978. By 1979, they were building a house in the Hanalei area of Kauai, in Hawaii, their new home base. Neil and Pegi Young were hunkered down at his Northern California ranch.
As for Crosby, he was a medium-length drive away from Young, in Mill Valley, becoming ensnared in an increasingly hermetic and unhealthy lifestyle. He and his new girlfriend, Jan Dance, had met when Crosby, Stills and Nash were making CSN in Miami in 1977; Dance’s mother, Harper, was an indispensable part of Criteria Studios’ operations, and her daughter had worked there as well, helping book studio time. A year later, when the trio was trying and failing to make their doomed sequel, Crosby and Dance—a sweet blonde with a sunshine smile—finally connected at the same studio. Soon afterward, he introduced her to freebasing and asked her to move into his home.
Once again, all four retreated to their familiar musical corners. Signing a new contract with Columbia, also home to Stills, Crosby and Nash decided to reboot the duo career. The two gathered together the songs they’d tried cutting with him, reconvened many of the musicians they’d used before and began cutting tracks. Given how productive they’d been together only a few years earlier, the work should have been productive. After sessions commenced in late winter, Columbia was so confident of a new Crosby and Nash album that the label penciled it in for a June 1979 release.
But Crosby’s freebasing habit had begun to tighten its grip on him. Among his peers, he was hardly alone: by then, Jerry Garcia and many other ’60s-rooted rockers were also becoming ensnared in drug addiction. Ever since his Byrds days, Crosby had prided himself on being able to get high while still making cogent music, and few suspected that blueprint would change. Yet it did. Working at Britannia Studio in Los Angeles, Crosby and Nash watched in a control room one day as the Mighty Jitters began working up an arrangement. Slipping into the room to join them, Crosby saw he had left his drug pipe atop a baffle between the musicians. The pipe fell down—either Crosby bumped into a baffle or the vibrations of the thunderous music shook it. Whatever the cause, the pipe hit the ground and smashed into fragments, and Crosby, who needed drugs to stay awake for the lengthy session, dropped to the floor and began gathering up the pieces. The music came to a dead halt. Nash wasn’t above snorting cocaine himself, but seeing Crosby’s habit literally wreck a possible track set him off; he told his friend he’d had enough and had to leave. Angry and in denial, Crosby stormed out of the studio, drove off with Dance and promptly crashed into a parked car. (His manager later tracked it down and paid for the repair.) Disgusted with Crosby, Nash decided to take his unfinished songs and make his own record. It was the first major breach in their friendship since they had become inseparable in 1968.
Despite the meager sales of Thoroughfare Gap, Stills plowed on. In 1979, he became one of the first musicians to record digitally, without audio tape, remaking “Cherokee,” his nearly decade-old ode to Rita Coolidge, and he and his band flew to Cuba for a historic concert featuring American musicians (including Coolidge and her husband, Kris Kristofferson). If his irritable interviews were one indication that he had no interest in lingering in his musical past, his 1979 concerts were another. Show after show flummoxed his fans. Stills almost completely ignored the songs he’d cut with Crosby, Nash and Young and focused on material from his solo records (or blues covers highlighting Finnigan), singing in a voice that seemed to fray all too quickly by concert’s end. Ticketholders would not hear “Carry On,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” or “Helplessly Hoping.” They would hear “Love the One You’re With”—but sung by his female backup singer, Brooks Hunnicutt. The move was nothing short of bold—and thrilling for those who yearned to hear him play Manassas tracks, such as the conjoining of “Rock & Roll Crazies” and “Cuban Bluegrass.” But judging from the complaints of disgruntled fans as they left shows in New Jersey and New York, it was also career suicide. But like Nash, Stills had had enough of the past.
NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, the founding trio would be thrown together by roiling times. The Vietnam conflict was over, but a new war raged on, this one against nuclear power. By early 1979, sixty-eight nuclear reactors around the country were generating just over one-tenth of the nation’s electrical power, but the risks were becoming frighteningly clear. That year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would investigate 2,300 incidents at the plants, from inept inspections to poor management. Whether at a nuclear submarine base station in Bangor, Washington, or a site in Groton, Connecticut, antinuke protests were on the rise. The fears were increasingly reflected in popular culture. A January 1979 episode of The New Adventures of Wonder Woman found the series’ superheroine going undercover to foil the sale of a black-market nuke warhead, and in the middle of March, a movie thriller about a reactor meltdown—The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon—opened in theaters.
In a particularly unsettling example of life imitating art, a small blast of steam burst out of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, a mere twelve days after The China Syndrome opened. A malfunctioning cooling system had caused the reactor to overheat; in the worst-case scenario in such a situation, a reactor can become hot enough to destroy its concrete and steel casing, which can cause a leak of radioactive energy into the atmosphere. Over the next five days, mixed messages emanated from the plant and its operator, Metropolitan Edison. Even government authorities encountered difficulties getting straight answers, and the overly busy telephone lines didn’t help. The news that eventually emerged was chilling: small amounts of radioactive material had periodically leaked out, and had wafted toward neighboring towns. Perhaps worse, a hydrogen bubble inside the reactor was threatening to burst. Residents within a ten-mile radius were ordered by the governor to evacuate by way of loudspeakers attached to trucks roaming through the streets. Five days later, the reactor was deemed stable. Presumably, the life-threatening emergency was over, this time. But the country—and the world—had been sufficiently rattled. Protests broke out not only in the United States but also in Europe and Asia. A week after the Three Mile Island incident, Columbia University dropped its plans to open a nuclear research reactor in upper Manhattan.
Nash had already been aware of the issue. Two months before the Three Mile Island catastrophe, he had joined Jackson Browne at the Forum in Los Angeles to protest the opening of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant two hundred miles north of the city. Three months after Three Mile Island, he again shared the stage with Browne, along with Joan Baez and others, to ram home the antinuclear point at “Survival Sunday II” at the Hollywood Bowl. (The first “Survival Sunday,” held at the same venue the year before, had been a disarmament benefit featuring Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie and R&B singer Minnie Riperton.) But those events were a mere run-up to “No Nukes,” five nights at Madison Square Garden in September 1979. The shows would benefit MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) and spread the solar-power word with a lineup that included Nash, Browne, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the Doobie Brothers, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bonnie Raitt, Carly Simon and James Taylor. With disco peaking that summer, and the more radio-friendly new wave taking over from punk, “No Nukes” looked to be the last stand of what was becoming known as the classic-rock era.
Yet even with that lineup, the shows hit a snag: the planned fifth night didn’t have a headlining act, and Browne told Nash it might have to be canceled. (Browne had tried to convince Joni Mitchell to come, but to no avail.) Finally, Browne asked Nash if he would consider calling Stills and Crosby for a one-shot reunion for the final evening; it could be the only way to salvage the show. Nash hesitated, realized he had little choice and put out the calls. Young was not considered: asked three years later by a French TV reporter what he thought of Browne and the No Nukes movement, he paused, then chuckled and said, “First of all, I think anyone who says that nuclear power is no good is just not looking forward. You have to look forward. You can’t look back and say ‘get a horse’ every time someone has a new idea. That’s why I’m not on an antinuke bandwagon.… I’m not out there saying, ‘Build more plants.’ I’m not like that. But I’m not saying, ‘Don’t do research.’ We have to have power. Everything is dangerous.”
Only a year had passed since Crosby, Stills and Nash had last performed together, yet tensions had run so high that, tellingly, the layoff seemed far longer. “We were like, ‘Oh, my God—we thought this would never happen,’” recalls Danny Goldberg, a former journalist and ex-vice president of Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label who was co-producing and co-directing the movie being made of the event. “It seemed like an eternity since they’d been together.”
Visiting the building where the group would be rehearsing, Goldberg decided to steer clear of Crosby and Stills, sensing a “wild look” in their eyes that terrified him. Rather than address them, or even get in their field of vision, he asked Nash to speak to them on his behalf. Yet as the three men converged at the space, they exchanged smiles and hugs and pulled together a set list of songs they knew well enough by then to play without much rehearsing, including “Love the One You’re With,” “Wooden Ships” and “Helplessly Hoping.” The reunion would serve several purposes: it would prevent an embarrassing finale to the multi-night “No Nukes,” it would lend another name act to the concert movie that was being planned, and it would help Stills with his increasingly thorny relations with Columbia Records. That year, he had recorded new material with his touring band, but Columbia had rejected the tracks and the situation remained at an impasse. Ken Weiss, Stills’ new manager (Michael John Bowen had bowed out after seven years of working with him), felt that a strong performance would impress the Columbia executives in the arena that night. Stills delivered, even as he and Crosby acknowledged what they’d been through in an exchange during “You Don’t Have to Cry”: arriving at the line about fast going “crazy and old,” Stills injected, “Check it out, Dave,” and Crosby chuckled back.
But on the troubling side, people in the business had their first warning of Crosby’s growing addiction that night. In the athletes’ locker room, Crosby ordered his co-manager, John Hartmann, to seal up one of the shower stalls. Then Crosby dragged jars and bottles inside. “I walked in and said, ‘David, you’re stinking up the whole place—What are you doing?’” Hartmann recalls. Not completely to Hartmann’s surprise, Crosby was cooking up freebase. When the shows were over, the three again went their separate ways.
MICHAEL STERGIS, a trumpet player through his college years at Southern Illinois University, had moved to Los Angeles and was playing guitar in pop singer Helen Reddy’s band when his phone rang around midnight in late 1979. It was Stills, telling the lanky, shaggy-haired Stergis that he’d heard he was a talented guitarist and could he come to his house and help him write songs—immediately? Although Stergis hesitated for a minute, given the hour of the call, he went and wound up staying up with Stills until dawn, singing and playing. As with Donnie Dacus a few years before, Stills felt the need to turn to a younger musician—Stergis was twenty-seven—to help fire up his songwriting and inspiration. Later, when Stills offered Stergis the job as second guitarist in his band, Stergis watched as Stills phoned his current player, Gerry Tolman, and fired him on the spot.
Amid the manic energy of the Stills camp, it felt almost natural when, in March 1980, Stergis joined Stills at a John Denver–hosted celebrity ski race in Lake Tahoe, California, and Stills suggested on a whim that they drive the few hours to Nash’s home in San Francisco. On the hurried drive, Stills and Stergis wrote a song for Nash and his wife, “You Are Alive,” with Stills, behind the wheel, reeling off verse after verse as Stergis furiously wrote each one down. When they arrived at Nash’s home, Stergis realized the visit was a complete surprise; Stills hadn’t warned Nash they were coming. But Nash was welcoming, as always, and at one point Stills pulled Nash aside and told him Stergis was “the new David Crosby.”
At first, Nash had greeted the new decade optimistically. Just before New Year’s, he had unveiled a single, “In the ’80s,” whose chorus included an optimistic line about springing to life in the new decade. But whatever hope Nash had for rekindling his own career was quickly obliterated when Earth & Sky, the album that followed in February 1980, sank. A patchwork of new songs and leftovers from the Crosby-Nash and Crosby, Stills and Nash sessions, the album had had a troubled history from the start. It culminated with Nash switching labels, from Columbia to Capitol, when Columbia refused his demand to omit a bar code from the cover. Nash felt the small box would ruin the mood of Joel Bernstein’s evocative photo of Nash in Hawaii, with a rainbow behind him.
Earth & Sky contained one of Nash’s most forceful and gravest songs, “Barrel of Pain (Half-Life),” an antinuclear warning powered by an insistent female choir and Tim Drummond’s deep-pocket bass thump. But the gentle ballads that made up a good portion of the album, such as “Magical Child,” for Nash’s first son, were out of step with the musical times, and the album never rose higher than no. 117 on the chart. During a low-key tour to promote it, Nash occasionally let his frustration spill out when greeted with lackluster audience reactions. “Can someone tune this goddamn thing?” he snapped at a roadie onstage in Florida while grappling with a malfunctioning guitar. Backstage that night, he was angry with his own performance. “Nobody sang ‘Teach Your Children,’” he fumed. “That’s incredible.”
In what was now a decade-plus dance that the three (or four) men had been doing, few expected the next twist. In the summer of 1980, Nash and Stills reconnected in Hawaii: Nash was back home after his road work, and Stills was on vacation. Stills, too, had endured a rude music-industry awakening. After Columbia rejected his album, the label, rather than drop him outright, suggested he head back into the studio with an established producer who could right the ship. Stills had no choice but to cede control, and everyone mutually agreed on Barry Beckett, the Alabama-born keyboard player and producer who had played behind everyone from Aretha Franklin to Paul Simon; as co-producer, he had just helmed Bob Dylan’s born-again records. Despite his control-freak tendencies, Stills went along with the suggestion. To the surprise of those who knew him, he almost seemed to enjoy handing over the reins to someone else.
Stills presented Beckett with a sturdy new song, “Southern Cross,” which had a tangled creation of its own. Originally called “Seven League Boots,” it had been written by two brothers, Richard and Michael Curtis, who had recorded it with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. Weiss, who had signed the brothers to Stills’ Gold Hill publishing company, heard the song and loved the music, but felt that something, namely the lyrics, wasn’t gelling. Weiss played it for Stills, who agreed that the words weren’t memorable: “Let me play around with it,” Stills told him. A few days later, Stills had tightened up the arrangement and drafted new, nautically inspired lyrics. The Curtis brothers gave the rewrite their blessing, with all three men now sharing the credit. The reconfigured album, complete with “Southern Cross,” was again submitted to Columbia. The company agreed it was better but added a stipulation: the label would only release it if, in the future, Stills agreed to work with outside producers. When Stills and his camp balked, Columbia shelved the album, leaving Stills, like Nash, at a creative and contractual impasse.
In Hawaii, Stills’ aide-de-camp, Dave Rao, who attended to his boss’ needs and errands, ran into Nash at a grocery store. Rao had good news: he told Nash that Stills had cut back on his drinking (to make sure, Rao marked a bottle with a grease pen and checked it regularly) and was in surprisingly good spirits. With nowhere else to turn and facing a suddenly indifferent and hostile music business, Nash and Stills found common ground. They finally reconciled, putting the friendship-destroying Rita Coolidge incident behind them. In July 1980, the two played a benefit for a mayoral candidate in Kauai. After Nash flew to Europe to join Stills and his band for a few European shows that summer, Nash’s reservations about Stills melted away. “The man was totally overwhelmed with the strength of you and the professionalism of your show,” wrote Rao to Stills that fall, referring to Nash. “His cautiousness is only related to the long run. He knows you are as stable and intelligent as they come and his rap was only for me to let you know how serious he is. He had given me the ‘only one more shot left for this Limey’ in Hawaii, but in the same breath, an exhilaration of the future of working with you again.… His trust factor is at an all time high.” Rao added that Nash would be back in Los Angeles on October 5, and that Rudy Records, the studio Nash had opened when he moved from San Francisco, was booked for them starting October 13, 1980.
Knowing full well that their Atlantic contract called for a Crosby, Stills and Nash album, Stills and Nash began recording with the hope that Crosby, who was increasingly difficult to track down amid rumors of his escalating drug use, would eventually join them. Everyone assumed Ahmet Ertegun had heard the Crosby rumors, but they hoped he didn’t know how dire the situation was becoming. But when Crosby stopped by Rudy to hear the preliminary work, he dismissed what he called the “bum band” (Stills’ current lineup). He and Nash exchanged harsh words, and Stills and Nash decided to continue without him.
Given that Stills and Nash had never done an album together without Crosby, no one knew what to expect in terms of material or sound. Nash’s new co-manager, Bill Siddons, who had famously overseen the Doors, was unsure: “What’s a ‘Stills-Nash’ record? I didn’t know.” (Even Rolling Stone had a sarcastic “Random Notes” item about it.) One facet of the project, though, became immediately clear: the two had different lifestyles and working methods. With members of Stills’ band as their backup, they began working at the new iteration of Nash’s Rudy studio, a wood-paneled workplace in a courtyard in the heart of Hollywood (in the same compound as the Crosslight Agency, run by Siddons and his partner Peter Golden). Nash would regularly be the first to arrive and ready to work each morning; Stills would generally show up hours later. It wasn’t uncommon to see Nash impatiently checking his watch while he waited for his partner to arrive. Nash preferred to head home to his new property in Encino at a reasonable hour; Stills stuck with his work-till-dawn fervor.
Susan Rogers, an enterprising twenty-something who had taken a night receptionist’s job at the nearby University of Sound Arts and made her way into the audio recording world, had been hired as a maintenance technician at Rudy. (Among her earliest chores: replacing a knob in a Stratocaster guitar that Jimi Hendrix had given to Stills.) Rogers observed the contrast between Stills and Nash for herself. “Personality wise, they were incompatible,” she says. “You couldn’t imagine they would have chosen to be friends with each other outside of artistic collaboration. Nash was a straight businessman and fairly sober. Stephen wasn’t fastidious in the slightest. It didn’t feel like they had much in common at all, but they needed each other.”
Working with Nash in a studio environment for the first time, Stills’ band members were also able to size up the differences between the two. “Graham will make anybody feel like a million bucks,” says Stergis, who played on most of Daylight Again. “That’s what he wanted to project the most and he wasn’t projecting it falsely. That’s what he wanted to be—that humble guy who made everybody say, ‘That guy is just fantastic,’ when they walked away. He would be invited over and do the dishes.” Band members and Rudy employees saw other flip sides of the Stills and Nash dynamic, too—the way Nash was friendly but compartmentalized in his relationships, and the way the often withdrawn Stills could loosen up and invite employees like Rogers to his house for a cookout.
Yet for all their contrasts, Stills and Nash knew they had a job to do—in effect, they had to salvage their careers in a less forgiving new decade and industry environment. Nash noticed the difference without Crosby around. In that atmosphere, Stills, Nash and the other musicians, including Stergis, Finnigan and drummer Joe Vitale, remade “Southern Cross,” from the canceled Stills Columbia album, into a richer, smoother-sailing version that made the best of Stills’ huskier voice. “Stephen came alive without this underlying fear of whatever Crosby would have said to him if he sang something wrong,” says Nash. “When you take that pressure off Stephen, he becomes much more involved in the work.”
One of the songs under consideration was “Daylight Again,” an expanded version of Stills’ “Find the Cost of Freedom” with a longer introductory section about an unspecified war. Watching Stills record the crisp, trotting guitar part for it in the control room one night was John Partipilo, then known as “Jay Parti,” a photographer whom they had unexpectedly hired to work as an assistant engineer on the project. “The name ‘Daylight Again’ was a joke between us,” says Partipilo. “It seemed like every time we went into the studio, it was daylight again when we came out.” Yet even so, as Stills cut the track, Partipilo saw a hint of what could be. “Even though we were looking through bleary, bloodshot eyes,” he says, “something like that would happen and we’d go, ‘Wow,’ and get goosebumps.”
Since Crosby wasn’t available—and was feeling hurt that he had been left out of the proceedings—famous-friend singers were recruited to help replicate his contributions. They included Finnigan (whose soul-shouter moves bolstered Stills’ singing in concert), Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmit and Nash’s longtime friend Art Garfunkel. Garfunkel’s arrival at the studio prompted Nash to warn workers not to joke around or waste time. Garfunkel took recording seriously, so an air of professionalism, despite the omnipresent drugs and alcohol, had to be maintained. In Hawaii, Nash had written the best of his new songs, “Wasted on the Way,” a rumination on how much music and energy the group had thrown aside over the years. Stills immediately liked the song, and they cut a demo with Schmit singing the Crosby part; Schmit then replicated it on the final version. “It’s about all four of us,” Nash told writer David Fricke, referring to CSNY. “Not just the three of us. The four of us have to take equal blame for the lack of CSNY-ness, or CSN-ness. As much music as we’ve made, a tremendous amount got totally wasted.”
When work shifted to Hawaii to finish up the album, Stills and Nash got high together one day and had a brainstorm: instead of putting their own names on the cover of the album, they’d use a band name, Volkano, playing off the recent eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington that May. The idea was in keeping with one-name rock bands of the time, like Foreigner and Toto, but it was also perhaps a sign that they saw a Crosby-free future for themselves. Few seemed to know where he was anyway.
BAM’S DAVE ZIMMER was at home in Pacifica one spring evening in 1980 when his phone rang. To his surprise, the caller was Crosby. Zimmer had seen his first group-connected show (Manassas) in 1973, and he had begun writing about the four of them in 1977. In the preceding months, he had visited Crosby at his home in Mill Valley several times for interviews for a possible feature story. Crosby had been warm and friendly. People were on his case for doing drugs, he said, but he maintained that he’d made some of his best music while high. In between anecdotes about his life, Crosby’s attention would periodically drift off.
The Crosby on the phone that evening was more focused: he hated to ask, but he needed money and could Zimmer lend him some? Zimmer, who only knew Crosby professionally and wasn’t really a friend, found the request unusual, but Crosby seemed desperate. The journalist dutifully drove to an ATM, withdrew $50 and took the hour-plus drive to Crosby’s home. On his front porch, Crosby thanked Zimmer: “I’ll pay you back. You’re a lifesaver. I gotta go.” Then he went back inside. (He did pay Zimmer back, in full, a month later.)
The jarring and somewhat alarming request signaled that Crosby’s life was unraveling at an alarming rate. Unless he had the occasional show or food run, he stayed inside his house in Mill Valley, using heroin and freebasing cocaine. Looking pale and sore-splotched, he would sometimes be seen walking the streets of Mill Valley clasping a mysterious bag and looking furtive. Few of his Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young associates knew any details, but what they heard, especially after the aborted Crosby and Nash sessions in 1979, was troubling. “We were always expecting that call—‘Crosby’s dead,’” says Rao. “You woke up every day and thought about it.” During an interview in London with writer Johnny Rogan, Crosby freebased constantly. When Rogan asked Crosby how much time he thought he had left, Crosby replied, “About five years or so.” Crosby’s friends grew concerned enough to orchestrate a surprise intervention, and Nash, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner and others, including Crosby’s friend Carl Gottlieb, a screenwriter known for his work on Jaws, showed up at his home. Crosby seemed to take it all in—until Nash found him in the bathroom trying to get high during a break in the intervention.
The situation eerily paralleled a screenplay that Crosby and Gottlieb had worked on in 1979: called Push Play, it centered around a supergroup band member who dies and leaves behind a tape of an unfinished album, with the plan that his former bandmates would reunite and complete it without him. Crosby was hoping to not only score the movie but play the deceased musician, although the script wasn’t ultimately picked up for production. (During this same period, Crosby co-wrote another script, FZ Tango, with journalist Robert Greenfield. A drug-riddled action movie, it depicted a Vietnam War veteran and chopper pilot who grew entangled in a rescue mission with a sleazy defense contractor. Crosby’s “What Are Their Names?” was penciled in for its soundtrack.)
Whether recording or in live performance, music never completely abandoned Crosby, who had still managed to sign a solo deal with Capitol Records. Although the free-form days of If I Could Only Remember My Name were behind him for the moment, Crosby managed to string together stray songs he’d been writing and recording, including “Melody,” a sparkly ode to the way music could salvage a man who had become a “patchwork.” Bobby Colomby, the Capitol A&R man assigned to the project, saw potential in some of the music, particularly “Delta,” a languid, piano-based ramble about someone drawn to the dark side that Jackson Browne had forced Crosby to finish, without drugs, at their friend Warren Zevon’s house. Colomby helped secure additional funding for the album using Crosby’s house as collateral.
But if drugs had fueled If I Could Only Remember My Name, they were now proving a hindrance to Crosby’s long-delayed second solo record. Friends and collaborators, including engineer Stanley Johnston, keyboardist Craig Doerge and bassist Leland Sklar, pitched in, trying to pull the strongest and most focused performances out of him, but Crosby wasn’t in any shape, physically or vocally, to deliver. He was easily distracted by his addiction (Johnston would half-jokingly refer to Crosby’s paraphernalia as “Dave’s chemistry set”) and could often be found barricaded in recording booths, where he would be doing anything but singing. “He was locked in the vocal booth basing his brains out,” recalls guitarist Waddy Wachtel of the one session he was hired to attend. “It was a fucked-up day. I don’t recall anything getting done.” To Sklar, those booths “smelled like a cat box that hadn’t been emptied for eight months.” With the help of punching in—recording vocals line by line, sometimes word by word—Crosby’s voice could still rise to its former glory, as when he cut “Might as Well Have a Good Time,” co-written by Doerge and his wife, singer-songwriter Judy Henske. Even though he hadn’t written it and didn’t connect with one of its lines—about staying ashore as opposed to sailing—Crosby threw himself into the song; its depiction of a wandering, lost soul almost felt as if it had been written for and about him.
Capitol, which didn’t seem particularly taken with having Crosby on its roster to begin with, ultimately passed on the album, as Columbia had done with Stills. “It wasn’t a normal record,” Crosby admits. “There was a lot of really good stuff on it, like ‘Kids and Dogs’ [a vintage take with Jerry Garcia]. The label guy said, ‘I don’t give a fuck about Jerry Garcia.’ But I was wrecked and it was easy to be critical of me, and he had people whispering in his ear.” When Capitol threatened to take control of Crosby’s house, Colomby argued that the label couldn’t afford the bad press, and the threat was dropped. Crosby told a club crowd in Virginia Beach in May 1981, “The record company won’t accept my new album. They feel there’s no audience for my kind of music now.” Of his other band, he added, “The chances of us getting back together as a group are, well, not probable.”
YET, IN A perverse way, the timing would prove to be ideal for a group reunion. By the middle of 1981, reports of a Stills-Nash album, with contributions from Garfunkel and Schmit, were leaking to the press, leading Nash to comment, “David was being a little difficult about certain things. We didn’t feel like hassling.” When Stills and Nash decided to release the album under their names without Crosby, it was left to their managers to inform Atlantic. In a phone call with label executives, including Ahmet Ertegun, Weiss told them that Crosby was driving Stills and Nash crazy. Nash, in particular, was fed up, and they would be proceeding with a Stills and Nash album.
The answer from one executive was unequivocal: “That’s not going to work.” Stills and Nash had already spent nearly half a million of their own dollars to finance the record. Ertegun now made it clear that he would fork over their contractual $1 million advance—which would help pay the men back—but only if the album was going to be a Crosby, Stills and Nash project. When word of the meeting trickled out, the musicians who’d played on the record so far were stunned. “I thought, ‘Is this the end?’” says Vitale. “‘They don’t have a record deal for this thing?’ It was disheartening. I thought about looking for another job.”
On the beach in Hawaii, Stills, Nash and their musicians watched the sunsets and grappled with how to proceed. It had become glaringly obvious that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fans were far less interested in their individual work than in group reunions, and now their own label was similarly unresponsive. Eventually, they knew what they had to do, half-heartedly or not: in order to recoup their investment and release the music they’d slaved over for the better part of a year and a half, they would have to ask Crosby to be part of the album. Nash telegrammed Crosby with the invitation, and Crosby agreed to contribute. “Ahmet said, ‘You can’t do it without him. It’s not a record. You do that and I’ll put it out,’” Crosby recalls. “So they called me.” To ensure that Crosby still had a singing voice, given his freebasing, Stills was in the audience when Crosby and his band played the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach in the fall of 1981.
Starting with Nash, everyone involved in the record felt apprehensive about Crosby’s arrival at Rudy Records that fall. Since none of the local hotels were likely to give Crosby a room, because of his growing reputation, Nash recruited Susan Rogers to use his credit card and check into a room. After securing one, Rogers drove across town, picked up Crosby and Dance and sneaked them into the hotel by way of a back entrance and service elevator. To Rogers’ dismay, Crosby carried a cardboard box that read “David’s Clothes.” In the room, Crosby lit up and started freebasing, burning a hole in the mattress.
On the designated day in late 1981, Crosby arrived wearing a parka. Stills wasn’t there, but Crosby and Nash locked eyes and embraced. Crosby had a chillier introduction to Stergis: although Crosby shook the guitarist’s hand, he also imitated pouring a can of soda on Stergis’ lap. “All I knew was that I was there in case he died on the road, to take his place,” Stergis says. “I was the insurance policy, and David didn’t like it at all.”
Starting with Nash’s “Song for Susan,” Crosby began attempting to add his voice to the already finished tracks. To Zimmer, who was observing the proceedings, the lyrics of that devotional song—about someone deceiving himself about “how to exist”—seemed to impact Crosby emotionally. But finding a place for his voice wasn’t as easy as it had once been, and he spent the next few days searching for the right harmony parts. “He was real humble and like a scared kitten,” recalls Vitale. “He knew he was in the shit. But he wasn’t arrogant or any of that. He was, ‘Yeah, I’ll try that.’ You could tell the poor guy just wanted back in and wanted to prove himself. But it wasn’t like on CSN. Here he had a problem staying focused and remembering words. It wasn’t the same.” When Crosby would take bathroom breaks, Nash would grow agitated.
During those rest periods, Crosby would sometimes retreat to freebase in the tech shop where Rogers worked. “It was a place where I could get high and not get in their face,” he says. “But I was wrecked. I had come down just far enough to do good work and then I’d go out and get high again. ‘Wasted on the Way’ is absolutely true. We could’ve made so much more music if we hadn’t wasted time arguing with each other or being ‘fuck those guys!’ or being too smashed to work. Which I frequently was.”
A few short years later, Rogers would find herself working for Prince, but in 1981, she was already a fan and had hung a poster of him in bikini underwear and trench coat (from his Dirty Mind album) on the wall of her office. During a later visit to her shop, Crosby looked up at the poster and asked Rogers why she liked Prince. “I said, ‘Why wouldn’t I like him?’” she recalls. “‘He’s a clever musician with a guitar. That was you. What’s not to like?’ My intention wasn’t to be mean. My intention was to say, ‘He’s like you.’ But I did use the past tense.” Crosby didn’t respond.
Since drama was still part of the group’s DNA, no matter the configuration, the album naturally did not wrap up when planned. “Feel Your Love,” one of Stills’ songs, had a midtempo dance-floor sway and one of his most tender vocals. After the song was finished and added to the record, Rogers walked into the studio as it was playing and told Nash how much she loved the song. Confused, he asked what she meant; it was the first time he had played it for all of the crew to hear. Rogers began singing the melody of the disco band Rose Royce’s 1978 hit “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” and Nash’s face turned white. After Rogers was asked to run out to buy a copy of the record, they realized Stills had inadvertently copied the song. (Garfunkel also pointed out the similarity to Nash in a separate encounter later.) A musicologist hired by attorney Greg Fischbach to compare the two numbers determined that a lawsuit was likely, so “Feel Your Love” was yanked from the album at the last minute. In its place, Nash inserted a dark, throbbing rocker, “Into the Darkness,” about Crosby’s addiction and physical condition. (In Crosby’s 1988 memoir Long Time Gone, Nash insisted the song had been inspired by a screenplay he’d been given. But he now admits he told a white lie: “It sounds like I was evading answering the question. But no, it was completely about David.”) Crosby glared at Nash when he heard the song—although he later came to understand and somewhat appreciate why Nash had written it—but the band had to fill the void left by Stills’ accidental infringement somehow. When Siddons realized the mastering engineer for the album had just left for a two-week vacation in the woods, he scrambled to track him down and paid him $1,000 in cash to redo the album at the last minute. “That,” Siddons says, “was a high-melodrama day.”
In light of the way it had been cobbled together over several years, with and without Crosby’s participation, Daylight Again was a seamless marvel. Each song easily glided into the next. Only those with a predilection for reading liner notes would have noticed that Crosby’s two contributions didn’t feature any instrumental work by Stills or Nash, or, for that matter, by any of the musicians who played on the rest of the album—a sure-fire indication they had been recorded separately. It was also their first album without photographs of each man on the cover; in place of a group portrait was “Celestial Visitation,” a painting by artist Gilbert Williams depicting three hovering spaceships. Again, only an insider would have known that corralling all three for a group photo in 1982 would have been next to impossible.
By force of will—and creativity—Stills had traditionally placed the most songs on their albums, but this time he clearly dominated. He had written or co-written five of the eleven songs, not counting two outtakes. His tracks ranged from the middle-of-the-road balladry of “You Are Alive” to the semi-boisterous rocker “Too Much Love to Hide.” Nash’s input, especially the way he counterbalanced Stills’ musical overkill, was apparent in the way those songs were sung and played: there was nothing close to an off-key note or overly indulgent guitar solo. Thanks to Nash, Daylight Again was far less grizzled than Thoroughfare Gap, although Stills’ presence—including his lead guitar on “Into the Darkness”—added a hint of grit that had been absent from Nash’s Earth & Sky.
With its buffed polish, Daylight Again was more impeccably produced and easier on the ears than 1977’s CSN. Yet it also had little use for the snug harmonizing that had drawn so many listeners to their sound. The elongated “Daylight Again” ended the new album, and in doing so brought them full circle to their earliest days together (even if Art Garfunkel largely replaced Crosby on the recording). But it was also the only purely unplugged moment on the album. Now sporting fulsome harmonies and a chunkier, more airtight arrangement that made it an instant group standard, “Southern Cross” was aimed squarely at radio airplay and hit that target, breaking into the Top 20, following up the success of the album’s first single, Nash’s “Wasted on the Way.” Yet the type of radio that took those songs to its bosom was also revealing. By the early ’80s, a new format, “adult contemporary,” or AC, had come into the world. It mirrored the aging of the baby boomers, who were now approaching or into their forties. On so-called “Lite FM,” out went ballads crooned by the likes of Andy Williams and Robert Goulet. In came ballads crooned by the likes of Lionel Richie, ex-Eagle Glenn Frey and Chicago, signifying the settled-down phase of many baby boomers. Each of those acts had Top 10 AC hits in the fall of 1982, where they were soon joined by “Southern Cross.”
Much of Daylight Again, including the modest trot of “Wasted on the Way,” wandered into similarly plush, unthreatening musical territory. Other than “Daylight Again,” the two songs that most conjured the trio’s formative days were, ironically, Crosby’s. “Delta” had the zoned-out beauty of his best earlier songs, while his poignant rendition of Doerge and Henske’s “Might as Well Have a Good Time,” accompanied by Doerge’s piano, was the album’s most human and most relevant track. In light of the legal issues that would soon ensnare him, the song took on the air of a burnout’s graceful farewell.
Before the album was unveiled, it became imperiled by one final legal complication. As everyone knew, Stills had cut the first version of “Southern Cross” for an album Columbia had shelved two years before. A provision in Columbia’s contract, standard for most such deals, asserted that artists could not remake any song made for the label within five years of recording. Since Columbia had failed to release “Southern Cross,” the issue seemed a moot point—to everyone save Columbia’s legal department. Rather than risk another lawsuit or a delay in the album’s release, Atlantic negotiated a monetary settlement with Columbia. In exchange for allowing Atlantic to release the Crosby, Stills and Nash version of the song, Columbia would also collect a substantial royalty from future album sales. It seemed like a small price to pay for a reunion—to some degree, anyway—of one of the label’s most significant acts.
STARTING WITH THE Los Angeles Times, the what-about-Neil questions started to arise as soon as Daylight Again appeared in June 1982. “It’s hard to approach him,” Nash told the paper. “We’re so afraid of rejection. We’re scared of him. I swear we are. We’ve had so much heartbreak with him. Who wants to be rejected by a mad musician? It’s grief I don’t need.” Later, Nash added, “Maybe Neil doesn’t think CSN music is very good. I don’t know how he feels. I haven’t asked him.”
By that summer, communication between Young and the Crosby, Stills and Nash camp had reached its lowest point. Employees and friends of the trio never saw Young in their vicinity; some, like Stergis, would never meet Young at all. “Those were the years when David had an issue with drugs and Neil didn’t want any part of it,” says crew member John Vanderslice, who had worked on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s 1977 tour before switching over to Young’s team the following year. “Neil wasn’t interested in that side of things. He was more music oriented. And also, Neil had lost some friends [as a result of drugs] along the way.” Never one to withhold his opinions, Crosby articulated some of those conflicts during his solo performance in Virginia Beach in 1981. Describing each of his occasional bandmates to the crowd, he said Nash “lived a tough life, grew up very poor,” described Stills as “tough, macho, the drinker,” and summed up Young with “a totally isolated guy who hangs out only with the people who work for him. And only those people.”
But Young had already begun outpacing them on several levels. On their own tours in the late ’70s, Crosby, Stills and Nash would broadcast footage of whales to the accompaniment of the prerecorded “Critical Mass.” Their technology was decidedly low rent: Vanderslice would find a seat behind the stage, pray that it aligned with the center of the screen, and press “play” on a projector. On tour in 1978, Young was several tech-savvy steps ahead of them. One set featured an oversized microphone and amp—and scurrying roadies dressed in brown-hooded garb, in homage to the Jawas scavengers in Star Wars. Young could even control his amps with a volume switch on his guitar.
Young was taken with the energy and vitality of punk rock, a genre that appalled most of his peers. With the help of the Ducks’ Jeff Blackburn, who provided the key line about it being better to burn out than to rust, Young had written “Hey Hey, My My (Out of the Black),” which referenced Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. On that same tour with Crazy Horse in 1978, Young largely ignored Comes a Time, the album he was ostensibly promoting. Instead he blasted out songs like his Blackburn collaboration, along with happily primitive pounders such as “Welfare Mothers” and “Sedan Delivery.” None of them were punk, to be sure, but they shared a musical primitivism and volume with that genre. Dispensing with another trademark of his hippie days, Young even chopped his hair short. The combination of proud musical crudity and his stage’s technical savvy spoke to the many contradictions in Young’s persona—and again set him apart from his erstwhile partners.
Although few outside his immediate circle knew it, Young had other, more urgent reasons to stay in Northern California and avoid the choppy Crosby, Stills and Nash waters. In November 1978, he and Pegi had their first child, Ben, but Ben was soon diagnosed with cerebral palsy; he was also quadriplegic and unable to speak. Already dealing with his son Zeke’s diagnosis of mild cerebral palsy, Young was sent reeling. Then, in early 1980, Pegi had surgery for a congenital arteriovenous malformation in her brain, which had affected her ability to speak. She gradually recovered, slowly learning to speak like her old self. Months later, the Youngs began welcoming volunteers into their home to help with Ben. At the time, little or none of this utterly tragic situation made it into the press. Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, capably kept the label executives in the dark.
While Crosby, Stills and Nash coped with music industry rejection, addiction issues and internal psychodramas, Young, grappling with his own harrowing family struggles, almost heroically continued to churn out new music. Between 1979 and 1982, he completed five albums while his partners struggled to patch together one. In June 1979, when Crosby and Nash split asunder and Stills was trying to relaunch his separate career, Young took his usual approach of combining separate recordings from different periods, this time to major effect. The first half of Rust Never Sleeps focused mostly on songs from his tech-enhanced Boarding House run, while the flip side featured onstage live cuts with Crazy Horse from months later. With one half of it hushed and the other thunderous, Rust Never Sleeps took each side of Young’s musical personality to its extreme, but the experiment paid off. On the unplugged songs, which included his biting Crosby, Stills and Nash evaluation “Thrasher,” his acoustic guitar was so ethereal it sounded like wind chimes. Combined with surreal tall tales like “Pocahontas” and “Ride My Llama,” the music was almost mystical. The Crazy Horse side managed to be both more crunchy and thinner-sounding than they were on stage, but “Powderfinger,” his river gun-battle ballad from 1976, was so cinematic it didn’t need a screenplay. Young’s guitar sliced through that song as well as the intentionally thumpier stomps, such as “Sedan Delivery,” where the guitars clomped like prehistoric monsters emerging from the woods in a sci-fi movie. “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” worked beautifully as a woodsy folk song; its electric version, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” sounded like natural heavy metal, or at least Young’s version of it. The Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll of nationwide critics voted it the no. 2 album of the year, behind Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks.
Around the time Stills and Nash were starting what became Daylight Again, in late 1980, Young unveiled Hawks & Doves, an album that was half folkie gentility, half frisky honky tonk about unions and the bonds of love. On it, he finally unleashed “The Old Homestead,” his 1974 song about the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion that year. During the period when Crosby returned to Nash’s studio to finally contribute vocals to that project, in the fall of 1981, Young released Re-ac-tor, a lumpy but intermittently forceful record with Crazy Horse (including the splattering “Shots” and the locomotive-tug “Get Back on It”). In retrospect, his work on that album revealed how pressing his family matters had become—they were beginning to distract him from his music. Leaving his longtime home and supporters, Reprise Records, for a new deal with Geffen Records, which his former co-manager had now founded, Young relocated to Hawaii in 1982. There, he recorded a more traditional but lightweight folk-rock set, Island in the Sun, with a ragtag band that included veterans of all his previous ensembles: Nils Lofgren, former Buffalo Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina and Stills-Young Band percussionist Joe Lala.
But by the dawn of the ’80s, facile folk-pop was no longer the commercial force it had been, and Geffen knew it, leading him to reject Island in the Sun. Although stung by the news, Young returned to a project he’d begun before that record, songs using regular synthesizers as well as a vocoder—essentially a voice synthesizer that would make him sound like a talking or singing robot. On several levels, computer-driven music spoke to Young—as a way to communicate with his son Ben and as outlet for his rebellious streak. “A lot of that… singing through the vocoder and everything… people not being able to understand what I was saying, was a representation of what I thought it must be like for [Ben],” Young later told Patrick Doyle of Rolling Stone. “It may be a little bit, um, complex for people to understand where I was coming from with that.”
Intentionally or not, it was a savvy decision. In the early years of the Reagan era, electronic-driven pop was nearly everywhere, from New York dance clubs to the radio, where hits in the new style—including the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go”—were dominating the charts by the summer of 1982. Outside and down the street from Nash’s Rudy Records studio, employees could see massive billboards advertising new albums by the Cars and Talking Heads. “The excitement in LA about the new style of music was evident, and it was so visible in Hollywood,” says Susan Rogers. “A new day had arrived.” For now, there was little the rock establishment could do about it except occasionally rail: at a solo show at the Greek Theatre in the summer of 1980, Stills made a crack about “the guys with skinny ties” who were trying to overtake him and his peers.*
In interviews, Young began praising bands like the Human League as modern folk music, and those comments extended to his early promotion for Trans, his computer-pop record. In August 1982, with the record nearing completion, Young invited writers like David Gans of Record, Rolling Stone’s offshoot music magazine, to his ranch to talk up his change in sonic direction. At times, Young, at thirty-six, sounded startlingly like a Cali-rock-dismissing punk rocker. Discussing new wave bands like Devo and the way they were rewriting the rules of pop music, Young told Gans, “The more of the past you have, the less validity you have. And I really understand that concept.” When talk turned to acoustic music, Young slammed his own past. “It’s like having Frank Sinatra and Perry Como come back and try to do a concert for us,” he said. “It’s bullshit. It’s what their parents like.… They don’t care what Perry Como thinks.”
When Gans pressed Young about his musical heritage, Young publicly unleashed on his former partners: “But Neil Young’s Perry Como! It’s the same thing, you know. Neil Young from the ’60s and early ’70s is like Perry Como,” Young said. “That’s the way I look at it. If I was still taking that seriously, I’d be where Crosby, Stills and Nash are today.” (“I remember reading that,” says Rao. “I’m sure he felt that way at the time. I felt that way at the time. But I thought, ‘Jeez, would you guys mature? It’s not third grade.’”) He also took a swipe at CSNY’s irregular work habits: “It wasn’t like a band that got together and played.” In every way, it felt like an era was over—an energizing thought for Young, a crippling one for Crosby, Stills and Nash.
AS A VALUED art director and photographer and a member of the Los Angeles music community, Jimmy Wachtel, the brother of session guitarist Waddy Wachtel, thought he knew what to expect when dealing with Crosby, Stills and Nash. He’d designed the cover for Replay, an unnecessary 1980 compilation that Atlantic had released in lieu of a new album; he had done the same for Daylight Again, down to hiring a company to build a six-foot-high neon sign with the trio’s name. (The contraption implied a group cohesion that the album itself lacked.)
But when Wachtel arrived at Studio 2 of the Zoetrope film lot in Hollywood, he realized he didn’t know at least one thing about the band in 1982. The musicians were rehearsing on the long part of an L-shaped structure; on the shorter end lay a seemingly out-of-place, one-room structure, like a rent-a-shed found at hardware stores. “I said, ‘What’s that?’” Wachtel says, “and they said, ‘That’s where Crosby goes.’” The unit would be a place for Crosby to retreat to freebase without having to leave the studio compound. “That was extreme, even for the times,” Wachtel says. “I know a lot of people who were out of control, but that was out of control.”
Even before the album was released, the litany of horror stories around Crosby seemed to grow by the day. On March 28, he was driving a rented Granada to the nuclear plant in San Onofre, where he was scheduled to join Stills and Nash at a protest concert. On the 405 freeway, Crosby had a seizure, and his car drifted from the right lane to the center, and finally into the concrete divider. When the police arrived, Crosby was miraculously unharmed, but officers found a .45, a film canister with white powder inside, quaaludes and drug paraphernalia. Crosby was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
About two weeks later, on April 12, Crosby, on one of several solo tours he did for desperately needed cash, was in a makeshift dressing room at a Dallas club called Cardi’s, waiting to play the second set of the night, when two police officers, who were in the area to assist with another call, decided to conduct a “routine inspection” of the club. Approaching a black curtain to the side of the stage, they pushed past an assistant—who warned them not to enter—and came upon Crosby holding a propane torch and a glass pipe. They also found a gym bag with a .45 in it. A roadie who worked for Crosby tried to knock the pipe out of Crosby’s hand to convince the police it wasn’t his boss’, but it was too late. Once again, Crosby was cuffed on drug and weapons charges; once again, he was out on bail. When the group attempted another reunion, at a “Peace Sunday” rally and benefit concert in June, Crosby attended, and his voice was reasonably strong during a performance of “Long Time Gone.” But few were happy to see him there. “David was like a bad penny at Peace Sunday,” says Rao. “He was persona non grata. When he did show up, they didn’t flock to him. It was very stressful.”
Once Daylight Again had finally been cobbled together, the band—or at least Nash—put the best possible public face on the project. The reasons for Crosby’s initial lack of involvement were glossed over or ignored. “When we put all the songs together, we realized that a lot of them were CSN songs in disguise,” Nash told the Los Angeles Times. “We needed Crosby’s voice. We could force the album through as a Stills-Nash album and forever hear in our heads what these songs should really sound like or, we could get Crosby.” When “Wasted on the Way” was unveiled as the first single, few listeners knew that they were probably not hearing Crosby at all. “Stephen and Graham had a mask on as far as the public,” says Vitale. “But it was their band and their family. One of the members of their family was screwing up. They wore it well on the outside, but inside I could tell it was tearing them up.”
A tour was the inevitable next step to promote the album, but the logistics and even the morality of working with Crosby’s addiction offered no easy solution. One night at Rudy, Nash agonized over whether to take Crosby on tour with them—and risk having him die on the road—or not supporting his family. (He and Susan had two boys—Jackson, then four, and Will, two—and were expecting a daughter, Nile, in July.) “I remember thinking what a terrible moral dilemma it would be,” says Rogers. “For the need of money, you need to risk your friend’s life.” That income was considerable: individually, Crosby, Stills or Nash could command, at best, $15,000 to $20,000 a night, but together, they could now earn as much as $100,000 a show.
Nash remained torn. Although dates had been booked starting on the last day of July, Siddons was prepared to send telegrams to promoters saying that the tour was being canceled due to an unspecified illness. “I didn’t know David that well,” Siddons says. “So I said to Graham, ‘What do you get when you get David clean?’ He said, ‘You get a clean asshole!’” They laughed—though Crosby could be taxing, he was still endearing—but a decision had to be made. The tour, if undertaken, would employ forty crew members. To haul people and equipment, they would need five tour buses and three tractor-trailer trucks.
Finally, Nash gave the go-ahead. He wanted to see if they could make it work, and part of him also hoped the demands of having to perform would set Crosby straight. (Others in their camp also felt Atlantic was exerting pressure.) The band hired Richard “Smokey” Wendell, who had worked as a drug-abuse enforcer for John Belushi, to keep Crosby from overdosing; Wendell had also been a Secret Service agent for Richard Nixon. At a picnic table at Rudy, Wendell came by to meet Crosby, who stiffened and flashed a wary look. Charged with making the intros, Rao explained that Wendell would be living with Crosby, adding that Wendell had worked for Belushi—who had overdosed a few months before. Crosby looked at Rao and said, “Great reference.” Stills and Nash would refer to Wendell by his code name, “Mr. Washington,” and to Crosby as “George’s guy”—sometimes in front of Crosby, who didn’t grasp the reference.
When a young woman visiting Zoetrope heard the band rehearsing and asked who it was, she replied, when told, “Really? I didn’t know they were still alive.” Not surprisingly, the scene inside the studio was productive but often tense. Stills would often call out Crosby for being late or missing notes. “There were some big arguments, yelling and screaming, at Zoetrope,” says Vitale. “Typical stuff in any band, but more intense because of Crosby’s condition. After a while it gets to the point where you go, ‘Why can’t we be a normal band and have just a few arguments and not full-blown warfare?’ It was intense.”
Once the tour began, the change in Crosby was more than noticeable. In his long-sleeved flannel shirts, he looked heavier than he’d ever been. Even more shockingly, he talked to the audience far less than he once had. Music critic Geoffrey Himes, reviewing their Baltimore show, noted Crosby’s “immobile, untalkative presence,” and Crosby sang fewer lead vocals than ever. The most movement anyone saw from him would be his lips. As Vitale recalls, “David was up there like a prop so people who paid money to see CSN could see CSN. It was very disheartening.”
The crowds flocking to the arenas to see the band’s first tour in four years were unaware of the on-the-road arrangements that had been made to accommodate its ailing third wheel. A special room dubbed “Jump Street” was added to the side of the stage near Crosby to ensure he could take a break twice during every show to get high. Crew members were told to be respectful of Crosby and not to expect lengthy, in-depth conversations. On his first tour with the band, Crosby’s guitar tech, Mason Wilkinson, would see Crosby get a certain look in his eye and realize it was time for him to take a break. “Nobody knew if he was coming back for the next song or the fourth song or the rest of the show,” says Wilkinson. To ward off any bad notes or strums emanating from Crosby, the engineer working the sound board, Stanley Johnston, became expert at turning the volume of Crosby’s voice down and replacing it with the voice of the keyboardist, Michael Finnigan. (He did the same with Stills if he was singing flat.) Johnston could also turn down Crosby’s guitar and replace it with Stergis’. Stills and Nash had hired their biggest band to date—three guitarists, two keyboardists, a rhythm section and an added percussionist—to ensure that they would be able to compensate for Crosby’s occasional missing-in-action guitar or voice.
In spite of everyone’s concerns, Crosby made it to every show; the band was never forced to cancel, even though at times he would appear backstage at the last minute. But one musician who had been recruited for the tour, bassist George “Chocolate” Perry, saw the difference in him. “David and I used to lock on stage and look at each other eye to eye and groove to each other as Stephen was soloing,” Perry says. “I’d stand in front of David, and he’d dig that. All of that went away when David was spaced on stage. We didn’t have any of that face-to-face playing anymore. I used to look at him and say, ‘Hey, turn around and jam!’ and he was staring into the crowd or past the crowd.” Before many of the shows, Stergis, feeling a bit guilty about his backup role, would drop by Crosby’s dressing room and offer his support.
When the band played New Jersey’s Brendan Byrne Arena in August, coinciding with Crosby’s forty-first birthday, Crosby was nowhere to be found when they wanted to celebrate it with cake. Ertegun asked Stills to get him, and Stills begged off. Ertegun himself went up to Crosby’s hotel room and dragged him down for the cutting of the cake. Crosby posed for a few over-the-top photos sticking the knife into the cake, but within minutes he was gone, back to his room.
Despite the difficulties and the worry, and the fallow years that had preceded it, the tour demonstrated that the ties between the band and its audience, if anything, had strengthened. The crowds would roar during every note they hit—or almost hit—during “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” They forgave Crosby’s muted presence, Nash’s tight, zebra-striped T-shirts and new-wave buzzcut, and the rough patches in the vocal harmonies. The payoff would be simple: that moment, every so often, when an inert Crosby would break into a small, blissful smile after a moment of harmony or an audience response. It was a small gesture, but one that communicated something all too real: hope.
THE Daylight Again tour began to wind down in the middle of November 1982. Rolling Stone reported that Stills was so unhappy on the road with Crosby and Nash that he was eager to reform Buffalo Springfield (which he later denied, attributing the rumor to a Springfield reunion meeting that didn’t lead anywhere). After the band’s November 14 show in Iowa, Stills checked into his room at a nearby Radisson. He indulged in military rifle drills with his guitar for a while, then settled down to examine a series of photo proofs under consideration for a Crosby, Stills and Nash biography that Dave Zimmer was writing, with accompanying photographs by Henry Diltz.
Using a small magnifying glass, Stills focused on a series of photos taken behind the Shady Oak property in Los Angeles in 1969. One shot especially grabbed his attention. “You can tell by the way Neil is looking in this shot that he’s saying, ‘Man, I’m here, but I’m not really part of this group and I’m gonna break your heart again, Stephen,’” Stills said to Zimmer, his voice radiating disappointment. Asking Diltz not to use the photo, Stills marked it with an X with such force that the pen ripped through the proof.
By that point, Young was no longer even in the same country. What came to be known as the Trans Band had worked on its repertoire in California clubs before heading to Europe for a theatrical presentation unlike anything Young had yet attempted, complete with a stage that jutted out into the audience. To play the new material from the album Trans, he would make use of a vocoder. The tour had been a chore from the start. Returning guitarist and keyboardist Nils Lofgren had to sit down and patiently play Young standards with an addled Bruce Palmer over and over again to make sure he remembered them. “One day Neil says, ‘I need you to do me a favor. After rehearsal, go to [Palmer’s] house and sit there and play the songs for a few hours with him,’” Lofgren says. “So we played ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ over and over. It was an exercise in helping Bruce with muscle memory.” It was just a prelude to a chaotic tour that baffled audiences who were hearing synthesizer-dominated material from an album that wasn’t even out yet.
Crosby, Stills and Nash coped with at least one last stage challenge before the Daylight Again tour stumbled to a close. Their three nights in November at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles should have been relatively easy to get through; they would be playing in their hometown, before friends, family and industry supporters. But they would still have to work around Crosby’s issues, and the pressure had been turned up a notch: the band had been offered a six-figure sum by Universal to film the shows for cable or video distribution, a cash infusion no one was eager to turn down. (In one of the earliest signs of the growing affluence of the baby boomers, higher-priced tickets for the first twenty-five rows included dinner at a restaurant in Huntington Beach and a bus ride to the theater.) Nash joked to Siddons that they might have to use a cardboard cutout of Crosby for the filming, but deep down, everyone knew the situation was fraught. Nash secretly hoped the idea of being filmed for posterity would help Crosby focus. Before the show, Crosby himself was nervous, and a makeup artist lathered him with a putty-like substance to cover the sores on his face.
Once again, they made it through the performances. But the editing process that soon began turned out to be even more arduous. Working with a production team, Nash did his best to keep the camera from lingering on Crosby while ensuring he was present in enough shots to show them singing together. Stopping by the editing room, Susan Rogers heard cries of “Pull it back, pull it back!” when the shot zoomed in on Crosby. Even in the fleeting close-ups of the final video, it was hard to miss Crosby’s glazed-over expressions. Watching the film, Vitale—who, sitting at the drum kit all night, had only seen the backs of his bosses’ heads—was shocked at how Crosby looked. “I thought ‘What the hell is wrong with Crosby?’” he recalls. “Until I saw that video, I had no idea that was the look on his face the whole night.”
As with Daylight Again, Nash, with input from Stills and their team, was able to cobble together a viable product that again attempted to demonstrate that Crosby, Stills and Nash were a unified front. But by then, even Nash’s faith in them was fraying. “It was a mess to deal with,” he says. “We were trying our best to put this face up to the world that we were together and everything was okay. But it wasn’t. It was rotting from the inside.” Somehow, all four of them had made it through a troubling patch. What they didn’t realize, together or separately, was that the rot would only grow deeper in the years to come.
* In 1979, Stills’ band was involved in a highly publicized fracas with Elvis Costello. When both acts were on tour, they wound up in the same hotel—and same hotel bar—in Ohio, where a very drunk Costello goaded the Stills band by insulting Ray Charles and James Brown. “They just seemed in some way to typify a lot of things that I thought were wrong with American music,” Costello told Rolling Stone several years later. “And that’s probably quite unfair. But at the exact moment, they did.” Bonnie Bramlett slugged Costello; Stills was in his room at the time.