On an April afternoon in 1995, the backyard of Nash’s home in Encino was transformed into the soft-rock capital of the world. Jackson Browne and former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald milled about; Crosby and Stills were also in attendance. But more than a few heads turned when in walked Young. Although Nash had invited him and Pegi, no one knew whether he would attend. “It was a little bit of a surprise,” says Debbie Meister. “People were pretty excited he was there.” Crosby called it “a wonderful, happy afternoon” to writer Dave Zimmer. “Everybody was in good spirits and very comfortable.”
The reunion was the lesser of several miracles being celebrated in that backyard that day. The mere fact that Crosby was actually alive, defying death once more, was the first. When he’d been admitted to the UCLA Medical Center the previous November, his future had been tenuous at best. At that moment, Los Angeles County was running short of his blood type, O positive, and his name was on national and local waiting lists for a new liver for thirty-nine days; during this time, a potential replacement liver was found, but it turned out to be cancerous. Finally, with Crosby perhaps a week away from death and feeling as if he were dying a little bit each day, a compatible liver was discovered in a thirty-four-year-old African American man who had died in a car accident. After seven hours of surgery, Crosby had yet another chance—his second, possibly third—at life. (He was criticized by some, who thought he had received preferential treatment, but UCLA spokespeople pointed out that thirty-nine days was the average wait time for a new liver.) Three weeks later, Crosby was released from the hospital and returned home.
When Crosby had first been given the grim news of his liver disease, he and Jan also learned that, after months of trying to start a family, she was pregnant. The April 1995 get-together at Nash’s house was a baby shower, and for the occasion, Young brought his family. (Django Dance Crosby would be born a month later, May 9, 1995.) The party marked the first time the four had been in the same space since playing a free outdoor concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for Bill Graham in late 1991, after the legendary promoter was killed in a helicopter accident. At Graham’s tribute, the strains in their relationship showed; they looked tired and sweaty, and the performance felt perfunctory. But time was healing their wounds, as Young admitted to Spin soon after the shower: “If I was going to play with CSN it wouldn’t be that big of a jump. I really like those guys. We’re in touch.” For Meister and others, it felt like a new beginning. “Maybe it was a harbinger of hope,” she says. “I’ll bet you ten to one that Neil was thinking, ‘Well, David’s cleaned up and now having a baby in his life will make things more stable for him to possibly get all of us together again.’”
Any such thoughts would have to wait, however; in the aftermath of his surgery, Crosby needed at least a year to recuperate, and the Crosby, Stills and Nash machine ground to a halt for reasons other than ego clashes. The medications Crosby was taking made his mood swings sharper; even stranger, he told Nash, he was suddenly interested in football, making them both wonder if the donor had been a sports fan.
Crosby’s surgery and reputation aside, an air of stasis hung around the group family tree. Young remained his inscrutable self. He and his family continued to live on the Broken Arrow Ranch amid an array of cattle, peacocks and llamas, and with at least one “private property” sign done up in psychedelic lettering. Journalists seeking interviews were instructed to follow the usual procedure: arrive at the Mountain House restaurant in La Honda, not far from his ranch, at which point Young would take the reporter for a drive in one of his vintage cars, such as his prized 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark IV. Young resuscitated Crazy Horse for Broken Arrow, an album that, thanks to lengthy, slithering-snake tracks that meandered for up to nine minutes, felt like one very long, often exasperating, song.
In the wake of the commercial crash of After the Storm, Crosby, Stills and Nash seemed at an equal impasse; their relationship with Atlantic was adrift, and in 1995, they fired Bill Siddons, Crosby and Nash’s manager of over fifteen years. By then, Siddons felt he’d done all he could have done for them anyway. “I realized that everything I knew in my career about how to do things didn’t matter,” Siddons says. “It affected me for the next three or four years. I lost my ability to make things happen.” Classic rock remained a formidable presence despite the rise of hip hop, alternative rock and dance music in the ’90s. The highest-grossing tour of 1996 was the reunion of the original members of Kiss, followed, after comparative newcomer Garth Brooks, by Neil Diamond, Rod Stewart and Bob Seger. With 1997’s Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan reaffirmed that boomer rock stars in their fifties, still a new concept, could be resurrected artistically and in the business; he even walked away with a Grammy for Album of the Year. But it was still unclear where Crosby, Stills and Nash would fit in that larger picture.
In theory, the full quartet was scheduled to cross paths again on the night of May 6, 1997. As part of its twelfth annual induction ceremony, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame would be honoring Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills and Nash alongside Joni Mitchell, the Jackson 5, the Bee Gees, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Rascals. To make sure they arrived on time, the trio drove to Cleveland in the midst of their spring tour. But in keeping with his mercurial tradition, Young had his own plans. Two years earlier, he’d been inducted on his own into the Hall of Fame by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. Young’s acceptance speech included shout-outs to his wife Pegi as well as to Crazy Horse; his producer, David Briggs; Kurt Cobain; Elliot Roberts; Mo Ostin of Warner Brothers; and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records (whom he thanked for allowing him to leave the label so that he and Stills wouldn’t have solo careers with the same company). Pointedly, Crosby, Stills and Nash were not mentioned.
Given Young’s participation in the ceremony, which was broadcast on the VH1 network, Joel Gallen, who produced and directed the taping, was hoping for what he calls “a CSNY moment” at the 1997 event, especially since Young would be inducted alongside Stills in the Springfield. But Gallen’s hopes were demolished when Young issued a statement: “The VH1 Hall of Fame presentation [sic] has nothing to do with the spirit of rock and roll. It has everything to do with making money. Inductees… are forced to be on a TV show for which they are not paid, and whatever comments they would like to make… are all subject to the VH1 editor. Someone who has absolutely no right to interfere.” Gallen was puzzled. “He was there two years before, onstage jamming with Eddie Vedder and Led Zeppelin, and that aired on VH1,” he says. “And he had no problem with that.” Young was supposedly also irked by the high cost of tickets, which topped out at $1,500 a plate.
Once more, Stills was left holding the bag, this time during the Springfield induction. At a press conference afterward, Stills turned to Richie Furay and cracked, “Well, Neil didn’t show again.” In an unexpected reprise of thirty years before, when Crosby sat in with the Springfield at Monterey Pop, helping to launch Crosby, Stills and Nash, Crosby again joined Stills on “For What It’s Worth” as Dewey Martin and Bruce Palmer stood onstage and clapped along. But Young was nowhere near the stage—or even the state.
BACKSTAGE AT THE Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, a Crosby, Stills and Nash representative made the media rounds, talking up the trio’s renewal to any reporter who would listen. “It’s the rebirth of the band,” he would say, and press releases from the firm’s office claimed they “aren’t surviving… they’re thriving.”
During group concerts that spring and into the following year, the trio did seem newly invigorated—Crosby more robust, Stills more animated. Their set lists continued to rely heavily on the overplayed hits and passed over many of the gems written and recorded for their solo and duo projects, which required too much additional rehearsal. (A rare and welcome exception was Crosby’s “Thousand Roads,” which allowed Stills to inject a blues-steeped solo in keeping with the song’s uncharacteristically low-down groove.) Yet a fair share of new material continued to creep in: Nash’s haunted, solemn “Half Your Angels,” written in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing that took the lives of 168 people in 1995; Crosby’s “Morrison,” a lyrical contemplation of the Doors’ late singer; and Stills’ defiant and rowdy “No Tears Left.” “I think we’re more compassionate with each other now,” Nash told one writer, Gary Graff. “We’re friendlier, more understanding of each other’s failures and weaknesses and we try to amplify all the good.” After Crosby played one of his songs, Stills told Nash backstage, “Man, he nailed the fuck out of that.”
In public, some of the sniping of old lingered. Promoting their tour in the summer of 1996, Nash admitted, “Sometimes you don’t like your brother or sister. Sometimes I don’t like David or Stephen. In those moments, we can’t make music.” In an interview with Steve Silberman for Goldmine, Crosby, reflecting on his mixed feelings for Stills, said, “I like him—no, I love him. I’m not sure I like him, but I definitely love him.” But Crosby’s near-death moment had shaken the band anew; for once, it made them all appreciate the group and its fragility. Although Crosby and Stills continued to grate on each other, they also began to value each other a little more. Stills had brought freshly made chicken soup to Crosby’s hospital room after his transplant, and he had issued a rare supportive statement about his bandmate to the press. Posting online during this era, the summer of 1998, Crosby addressed someone who had disparaged Stills: “The guy who feels he has to put down Stills viciously in order to show how cool Neil is… Neil (who is my friend) never says that shit about Stephen. I am much more critical and even I don’t say mean stuff like that. Stephen has problems… I had problems… and if you were living out here in front of everybody you might turn out to have a few too.”
But beginning with their status in the business, the resurgence their team was hoping for remained a goalpost far in the distance. Atlantic, their home of nearly thirty years, was entering a new phase of profitability. Riding a wave of pop, from singer-songwriter Jewel to the loosey-goosey pop band Sugar Ray to the R&B and hip-hop-oriented soundtrack of Space Jam, the label was on its way to earning $750 million in global sales in 1997. (One of those multimillion sellers, Jewel’s Pieces of You, was produced by Ben Keith, Young’s longtime sideman.) Yet in the aftermath of the mediocre sales of American Dream, Live It Up and After the Storm, Crosby, Stills and Nash’s relationship with Atlantic had deteriorated. Although Ertegun remained co-chairman of the company, he was even less involved in its daily operation than before. In 1996, discussions began between the company and the band to end their affiliation. After a tense meeting with executives over a meal, with a typically feisty Crosby confronting them about their lack of knowledge of the band’s history with the label, the group asked to be released. In March 1997, after nearly three decades, Crosby, Stills and Nash were no longer affiliated with Atlantic. “It was our choice,” says Crosby. “Ahmet wasn’t there anymore. He was our cat, our mentor. Without him, they were just another record company. Usually a bunch of guys who couldn’t make it selling shoes, so they went into the record business.”
Without the advances they would have received from Atlantic, cash was now a pressing concern, and the trio, along with Gerry Tolman—who had once managed only Stills but was now guiding the trio after Siddons—went in search of any and all opportunities to generate income. Nash launched Manuscript Originals, which sold framed, handwritten lyrics of his songs, and some by Crosby (“Guinnevere”) and Grace Slick (“White Rabbit”), for $9,500 each. In the fall of 1997, San Francisco’s Triton Hotel overhauled room 620, renaming it the Graham Nash Suite. For as much as $299 a night, guests could kick back in a room that, the hotel declared, was “remarkable for its selection of comfortable, stylish furnishings made and upholstered with industrial hemp.” Nash himself supplied some of the furniture from his own home, along with platinum album plaques and vintage concert passes; the bathroom featured Hollies album covers and mounted, handwritten “Our House” lyrics. For a proper British ambiance, the room also came equipped with a tea set and instructions on the best steeping methods.
Stills continued to exploit his back catalog, licensing “For What It’s Worth” to a Miller Beer ad (“it paid a year’s taxes,” he told writer David Fricke) and allowing it to be sampled by the rap group Public Enemy as the basis for their single “He Got Game.” Meanwhile, once-crass ideas, such as casino gigs and corporate functions, were no longer ruled out. In 1997, the trio played two nights at the Circus Maximum room at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. The following year, they would play the iconic Fillmore in San Francisco—but this time for employees of the telecommunications companies WorldCom and MCI, which had announced a $50 billion merger and wanted to celebrate. As Tolman told the Hollywood Reporter, “There’s a wealth of opportunities out there right now—not only in the traditional sense but certainly within the investment community.”
Coincidentally, classic rock had begun to leverage its future. In early 1997, David Bowie had made headlines in the financial press with what were called “Bowie Bonds”—a deal wherein Bowie partnered with Prudential to raise $55 million by issuing bonds secured by future royalties from much of his back catalog. The thought of instant cash immediately appealed to Crosby, Stills and Nash, and soon enough, their camp had reached out to David Pullman, the New York–based banker who had engineered the Bowie transaction. “After the Bowie deal was announced, they were the first in line to talk about it,” says Pullman, whose Pullman Group would potentially handle the deal in a joint venture with an investment bank, Fahnestock and Company. The company would assess Crosby, Stills and Nash’s various revenue streams, from record royalties to publishing revenues and foreign album sales, to determine their worth.
Before long, Pullman was flying to Los Angeles to lunch with Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Sunset Marquis. After being escorted into a private dining room, Pullman glimpsed the group dynamic at play. Nash suggested Pullman order a healthy fruit salad; Crosby went for the meat dish. All three were affable and fascinated with the bonds idea, but Nash exhibited the sharpest grasp of the intricacies of the proposal. To Pullman’s amusement, Crosby stood up and gave what amounted to a vigorous, animated monologue about the band’s need for independence, bringing up the resolutely indie singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco as an example they should follow. Pullman also sensed their disappointment with Atlantic. “It was uncomfortable for them that things were changing,” he said. “They created what we consider modern music. So this was very painful for them to go through.”
Among the profit-making ideas discussed at the table that day was one that was misguided but potentially commercially viable: an album of remakes of songs from their pasts, which would deprive Atlantic of some of the profits from the old songs and increase their own royalties. They had already made one such attempt, recording, but not releasing, a new version of the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (For similar reasons, Nash had cut an entirely new version of “Our House” for use in a commercial.) In the decades that followed, many other pop acts would do the same, rerecording their own songs with similar windfalls in mind. But Crosby was opposed to the remake-album idea, telling Fricke it “will be perceived badly.”
Given that three writers were involved, a Crosby, Stills and Nash bond would have been more complex than the Bowie arrangement, and it also carried risks. In the end, the band passed. “We didn’t think it was a great idea,” says Nash, “and after the Bowie bonds took a dive [two years later], the idea of maximizing publishing and writing and turning it into stock that would be bought and sold didn’t make sense to us.” At one point, Pullman, unaware of the group’s split camps, asked whether Young would be part of any such deal. “It was like, ‘Well, we’re never really sure if he’s in or not,’” Pullman recalls. Pullman later approached Young and Roberts about a similar arrangement, but nothing was worked out.
That carrot—was Young part of them or not?—was dangled again a few months after their lunch with Pullman. In September 1997, Crosby, Stills and Nash played a week of non-corporate shows at San Francisco’s Fillmore. On the day of the third night, September 16, Stills ran into Neil and Pegi at a nearby restaurant; in the oddest of karmic coincidences, they wound up being seated at adjoining tables. To Stills’ surprise, Young said he was interested in joining the band onstage later in the week, for the simple reason of wanting to hear them all play together once more.
That same night, during the first encore, the band launched into “Ohio,” as it had started doing that year without Young (beginning with a performance on the Kent State campus for the twenty-seventh anniversary of the shootings). Nash was facing the crowd when he heard what he calls “this big roar” from the audience. Initially, Nash thought a fan had made his way onto the stage, but the guy in the rumpled jacket and trucker’s hat who materialized next to them was Young, who joined them not only for his own song but also “Carry On” immediately after. It was the first time he had played either song with the three of them in nearly twenty-five years. When it ended, Stills grabbed Young in a bear hug and pecked him on the cheek. Band members like Joe Vitale who had never shared the stage with all four at once were thrilled.
Crosby, Stills and Nash hoped—practically assumed—Young would join them the following night, and their crew arranged for a special backstage area for Young’s gear and dinner. But Young didn’t materialize; as show time approached, he was driving back to his ranch. Backstage, the others sighed, rolled their eyes and again returned to the stage without him.
BY THE LATE ’90s, Crosby was beginning to chafe at the trio’s lack of experimentation, the way it was settling into an oldies revival. “All bands start out really excited with each other and with the material and having a blast,” he says. “And at a certain point it’s ‘turn the machine on and play the hits,’ because that’s where the money is. It had started to happen [with Crosby, Stills and Nash] in the late ’70s. And it kept getting more that way.”
At the same time, another lead guitarist became part of the Crosby, Stills and Nash universe. Jeff Pevar, a strapping, square-jawed musician from Connecticut, had witnessed his parents’ breakup when he was ten and channeled his energy into guitar. Working his way into the New York music scene, he met James Taylor, who later advised the budding singer-songwriter Marc Cohn to hire a band and include Pevar in the lineup. Cohn had a hit with “Walking in Memphis” in 1991, and he landed an opening-act slot with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the summer of 1992. Crosby, especially, became a vocal supporter of Cohn’s work. During the sound check at their first show, in Cleveland, Pevar, then thirty-five, saw Crosby, and to get his attention, began playing the chords to “Triad”; Crosby, no stranger to flattery, was intrigued. Early in the tour, Crosby and Nash took to joining Cohn during his opening set, where they were able to play with Pevar as well.
Pevar was far from the first to sense that the Crosby, Stills and Nash rapport was pitted with landmines. One night, he spied Stills backstage and decided the time had come to introduce himself and express his admiration. Reaching out his hand, Pevar was taken aback when Stills, who tended to be withdrawn backstage, seemed to barely look at him and walked away without returning the handshake. “This is not going to be easy,” Pevar thought to himself. During one West Coast Crosby, Stills and Nash show, Crosby invited Pevar to join him and Nash during their duo portion of the set. Returning to the stage for the group portion, Stills said, into the microphone, “So am I fired now?” (It was one of many examples of how he could be easily hurt by perceived criticism.) Pevar felt terrible, since he didn’t want to imply he could take Stills’ place.
In the summer of 1997, after a heated argument with Stills and Nash, Crosby walked out on the band. For two weeks, they were in limbo, but after Stills and Nash issued an apology, Crosby returned. (Crosby has no recollection of this event.) But by then, a possible exit—or, at least, reprieve—had arrived. During Crosby’s hospitalization and liver transplant surgery, small mountains of fan mail arrived at UCLA. Among them was a letter from John Raymond, a broker from San Bernardino who wanted to let Crosby know, in case he didn’t recover, that Raymond and his wife had adopted a boy who was actually Crosby’s natural-born son. Named James, he was the baby Crosby and then girlfriend Celia Ferguson had conceived in 1961, causing Crosby to flee to the other side of the country. Soon after the baby arrived in May 1962, Ferguson had put him up for adoption. Thirty years later, John Raymond asked his son—a musician himself—if he was interested in knowing the identity of his birth parents. A social worker informed James that his father was, in fact, “David Van Cortlandt Crosby.” At first, James hesitated to reach out; he wasn’t very familiar with Crosby, Stills and Nash’s music and didn’t want to be someone who showed up unexpectedly, claiming to be a child of a celebrity. He also wasn’t sure what he would be getting into. One evening he and his wife, Stacia, who were expecting their own child, were watching Crosby on a talk show, joking about an acid flashback. “James looked at me like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know—I don’t know about this,’” she recalls.
Through a mutual friend, James Raymond reached out to Mike Finnigan, the keyboardist for Crosby, Stills and Nash, who in turn passed the message to Crosby, and one day the phone rang in the Raymonds’ home in Altadena, northeast of Burbank. Father and son were soon reunited in the UCLA Medical Center cafeteria—Crosby was there for a postsurgery checkup—and Crosby, who was nervous and not sure what to expect, learned that his son had “absolutely no baggage at all” about his wayward father. Raymond didn’t especially resemble Crosby—the short-haired musician looked more like jam-band rocker Dave Matthews than a Crosby offspring—but the two shared a love of jazz. Raymond, an accomplished keyboard player, had already put in time in studios and studied with a session guitarist, Larry Carlton (who, in another example of their overlapping circles, had played on Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark along with Crosby). Crosby soon gave Raymond a set of lyrics he’d written—“Morrison”—and Raymond set them to music and invited Crosby to his home. Feeling his car stereo system was better than the one in his house, Raymond sat with his father in the front seat of his 4Runner in the driveway, the windows rolled down, as he played his tape. From inside their home, Stacia Raymond watched as Crosby’s face lit up and he exclaimed, “Play it again, play it again!” “What could have been an ugly narrative turned out to be one of the most positive things in David’s life,” says longtime Crosby friend Leland Sklar, the bass player. “It gave David a whole new impetus for writing and recording. CSN were resting on their laurels.”
With that—and a call to Pevar to see if he would join them—Crosby had a new band, dubbed CPR, after their initials and, in a sly reference, Crosby’s near-death experience. With CPR, Crosby had a new and far more open-minded avenue for his songs. In April 1998, the three signed a contract with Samson Music, an Omaha-based independent label. Crosby’s delight at taking a break from the fraught Crosby, Stills and Nash scene, and being in a band with his long-lost son, was palpable from the start. “I think David sought refuge from the CSN craziness in CPR,” says Pevar. “He was enjoying not having to deal with other people’s egos and he was enjoying the opportunity of being of service to his son. It was easy.” Crosby took Pevar for a sail on the Mayan and, in a mailing to his fan base, wrote that Pevar “has long been my absolute favorite guitar player.” (One wondered what Stills thought if and when he ever read that line.) “It’s the night before we start recording,” Pevar posted in the early morning hours of August 4, 1997. “We’re all very excited. New songs are still coming.… There’s been such a natural groove surrounding the fledgling ensemble.”
Unlike the often disjointed Crosby, Stills and Nash sessions of the past decade or more, CPR material arrived in a joyful rush; songs were often recorded in one or two takes. One day, Crosby handed Pevar lyrics for a song called “Little Blind Fish.” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had attempted to record it—it was the only song co-written by all four—on Young’s ranch two decades earlier, to no avail. In its first incarnation, it was a lumpy semi-blues piece, with each man taking a verse. Pevar, who was completely unaware of the earlier version, took the lyrics home and merged them with a bluesy fingerpicking melody and, almost overnight, CPR had finished a song that the quartet never could.
Released in 1998, CPR, the trio’s debut, was a strikingly precision-tooled work, far more so than any of the recent Crosby, Stills and Nash records. With Raymond’s sparkly keyboards and Pevar’s snaky guitar leading the way, it veered more toward jazzy pop than rock; Crosby’s admiration for Steely Dan came through more than ever before. The emotional centerpiece of the album, “At the Edge,” found him surveying the previous few years of his life and giving thanks for surviving, and its choral harmonies were vintage Crosby. Later he would call it his favorite piece of music out of everything he had ever made.
In interviews, Crosby would frequently refer to Crosby, Stills and Nash as “my day job.” Yet as creatively invigorating as CPR was for Crosby, it would not prove to be an escape hatch from his more famous but often frustrating band. CPR sold modestly, not helped by the fact that Samson, in spite of proclaiming itself “The Strongest Name in Music,” couldn’t compete with the major labels for distribution and radio play. That October, Crosby wound up back in the hospital; while singing, he had pushed so hard with his diaphragm that his sutures broke. He and CPR would continue for a bit longer, but for Crosby, it would be back to the world of Crosby, Stills and Nash—although with a twist that few, Crosby included, would have expected.
SITTING IN THE control room at Conway Recording Studios in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles in January 1999, Bill Halverson was witnessing a sight he thought he’d never see again. Crosby, Stills and Nash were gathered around a microphone; on the other side of the glass were Halverson and Neil Young. “You guys are sounding pretty good,” Halverson recalls Young telling them as he watched his onetime partners sing. “Maybe you can put some vocals on a few of my tunes.”
A few months before, Halverson had returned to his home in Nashville to find a voice message from Crosby asking if Halverson would be willing to help him, Nash and Stills out. The call arrived nearly thirty years after the producer and engineer, now fifty-seven, had huddled with the trio at Wally Heider’s in Los Angeles to piece together their first album. Halverson had worked with them sporadically afterward, on Déjà vu and on a handful of their ’70s solo and duo projects. But by the ’80s, he’d burnt out on the scene and had left California. Crosby, Stills and Nash, however, had never forgotten the way Halverson had brilliantly captured their harmonies on tape, and now, decades on, they offered to fly him to LA to work similar magic. Halverson soon found himself at Conway, a studio that, with its thicket of surrounding trees, guaranteed a degree of privacy. (In the years to come, Britney Spears would record there, fending off paparazzi as she walked in.) Crosby, Stills and Nash were industry outcasts without a record deal, but they had proceeded with a new album anyway, financing it themselves, and the engineer was confronted with bits and pieces of songs that had been cut at various locations beginning in early 1998.
Initially, Halverson had only been hired for a week, but everything changed when, early in 1999, he saw a vintage car pull into the parking lot. Young, carrying a guitar, emerged from it.
Young’s arrival was not completely unexpected. For nearly a decade, a Buffalo Springfield boxed set had been discussed and planned, but Young and Stills had only recently settled into the project, congregating at Young’s ranch to sift through vintage tapes and reminisce. In the early days of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the two had butted heads the most, but as the years wore on, they grew closer and took on the air of brothers who tolerated each other’s idiosyncrasies. “There was always a competitiveness,” says Pegi Young. “Their mothers were competitive. Rassy [Young] used to say, ‘I’m the mother of the star!’ And Tai [Stills] would say, ‘I’m the mother of the star!’ The apples didn’t fall far from those trees. But over time they learned how to give each other room and space and play to each other, not at each other.” In May 1996, Stills had married for the third time, to Kristen Hathaway, his children’s onetime governess. (Crosby and Nash attended the wedding, which was held in Florida while all three were on tour.) They eventually had two sons, Henry (named after Henry Diltz) and Oliver Ragland, whose middle name was also Young’s mother’s maiden name.
During the Springfield archive-digging meeting, Stills played Young “Acadienne,” a Cajun-inspired romp he’d worked on with Crosby and Nash, and asked if Young would consider adding a part to it. Stills also confided to Young that he felt his new songs weren’t going over well with Crosby and Nash, and Young promptly gave Stills a pep talk about self-worth and offered to pitch in on the Crosby, Stills and Nash record that was in progress. Nothing was pinned down, however, so Stills was surprised when, one day at Conway, he was told Young was on the phone. “I’m on my way,” Young declared. Stills offered to send a car to pick Young up at an airport, but Young said, “No, you don’t understand—I’m in the car.” He had driven from his ranch to Los Angeles.
Young was drawn back to his old partners for a variety of reasons. “American Dream was an attempt that failed to reach anything like its true potential,” he told Mojo in 1995, “but that’s no reason for me not to try it again sometime.” Not having to be the center of attention may have played a factor, along with the idea of fresh inspiration. The year before, 1998, had been a creatively low-key one for Young. For the first time in ages, he hadn’t gone on tour or released a new album; when he played his annual spots at the benefits for the Bridge School and Farm Aid, he sported a gray beard that implied he’d been off the grid. He’d spent the decade cycling through most of his past backup bands, as well as Crazy Horse and a new version of the Stray Gators. He’d played unaccompanied. Other than resurrecting the International Harvesters, his country band, or one-shot moments like the Ducks or the Restless, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were the only configuration he hadn’t revisited in recent times. The idea that his former bandmates were making a new album on their own dime, with no record deal or corporate backing, also appealed to him. “He admires it when people continue to make music,” says Pegi. “And they weren’t sitting around waiting on his call. They were doing their own thing.” Young would tell Los Angeles Times writer Robert Hilburn that he just went with his gut. “I don’t know why I felt this was the time,” Young said. “But I knew it was going to work. I just went with my instincts.”
At Conway, Young heard a tape of a new Nash song, “Heartland,” a grandiose epic about workaday people, and wound up overdubbing guitar parts onto it. He did the same with Stills’ aggro-blues “No Tears Left.” But the work didn’t end there. Although he had just completed a new album, a largely low-key, acoustic affair called Silver & Gold, Young offered the group the chance to cherry-pick a few of its songs for their own album. “I have no idea why,” Crosby said. “It was out of left field, but that’s how it is with Neil. He shows up and says, ‘I want to do this,’ and we say yes. Yes, I want the money, but I love it that he’s always pushing the envelope. And he very often has great songs. Not always, but often.”
Naturally, Young would never make it easy for any of them. One of the Young songs they selected was “Slowpoke,” a beautifully wrenching ballad—appropriately, about middle or late age—with references to slowing down but also wising up. The song had a languorous beauty, and its chorus cried out for harmonies. As Young and Halverson sat side by side in the control room, Crosby and Nash gathered at the microphone; Stills was relaxing in a nearby lounge. “Why aren’t they singing together?” Young asked Halverson, who replied that this system seemed to work for them, especially in light of Crosby’s relatively recent liver transplant. “David doesn’t always have the energy and can run out of gas before Stephen can learn his part,” Halverson told Young. It was best if Crosby and Nash nailed their parts and added Stills in later. Stills’ hearing issues also made it logical to separate him from the others.
Young nodded and accepted the reasoning but soon grew fidgety as Crosby and Nash tried to devise a harmony for the song. “David, can you go into the lounge and get Stephen and have him sing with Graham?” Young said through the talk-back button. “Let’s see how that works.”
But that approach didn’t do it for Young either, so he ordered Nash to bring Crosby back; Stills was given a break, and Crosby and Nash vocalized together again. Still not hearing what he was hoping for, Young then joined the duo at the microphone himself. After they had sufficiently practiced, Stills was again roused and asked to sing, this time with Crosby and Nash for the full trio effect. “See how that sounds,” Young was heard saying to them. After all the permutations had been exhausted, the harmony blend that wowed the world reappeared. Halverson was stunned: they suddenly sounded as if twenty-five years hadn’t flown by.
Young wasn’t about to let the work dissipate. For the next several hours he had them repeatedly work on harmonies for his song.
“You make the whole album sound like that,” Young finally said, “and I’ll stay.”
Halverson, who hadn’t spent much time with all four of them in the studio, even during Déjà vu, belatedly caught a glimpse of Young’s skill at coercing them into doing what he wanted. “Neil has this way of acting like a bumbling kid, awkward and talking in half sentences,” he says. “He fumbled his way into tricking them. It was masterful. He knew exactly what he was doing.” When their former manager, Bill Siddons, visited Conway, Nash played him some of the songs. “How come this sounds so much better than anything during my era?” he asked Halverson, who said it was all a matter of having them sing to each other—a physical reminder of their bond after so many highs and lows.
With almost no planning, a new Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album suddenly seemed like a possibility. Perhaps Young felt bad for his former comrades, now seemingly exiled from the music business. But he informed Howie Klein, then president of Reprise, about his new plans. “He came to me and said, ‘I’m doing a record with CSNY that’s going to be a classic, incredible album and tour,’” says Klein. “What was there for me to say? If Neil wanted to do it, we did it.” Once Young came on board and brought along his record company, the financial concerns eased up. Crosby was able to fly back and forth to his new home in the ranchlands of Santa Ynez, outside Santa Barbara, instead of making the grueling three-hour drive from Los Angeles.
The album in progress, under the working title Heartland, recalled the days of Déjà vu, when Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded material without Young while Young worked on tracks on his own. This time, with Halverson back on board, Young added parts to songs Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded, and the trio overdubbed harmonies onto Young’s barn-recorded numbers. The process, Nash says, was “a little weird. It wasn’t a real album.” Yet the long-dormant chemistry between them began to reappear. Using Crosby’s son James Raymond as well as drummer Joe Vitale, they settled in to work on one of Crosby’s new songs, “Dream for Him,” a wafting lullaby to his son Django, who was then preschool aged. Recorded in the morning, when Crosby’s voice was still at full strength, the song was gentle and fluid, the rhythms cresting and receding like waves. (It felt like a belated companion piece to the group version of “The Lee Shore.”) Stills and Young added dots-and-dashes electric guitars. “They couldn’t generate the magic all the time,” says Halverson. “It came and went. But when they got the blend going, it would blow their minds that they could sound like they had thirty years ago.”
The past revisited in other ways. As he used to do, Crosby rolled joints for anyone who wanted to partake. At one point, another guest from the early years arrived. Nash and Halverson were working at the studio when a limousine pulled up, and, with the help of his driver, out stepped Ahmet Ertegun. At seventy-six, the Atlantic chairman was frail but dapper as always, and Nash eagerly played him songs from the work in progress. Knowing that Reprise had the rights to the album, Ertegun listened attentively without commenting, then headed out after half an hour.
Yet the sessions also laid bare a number of changes—some obvious, some subtle—since the days when they had first come together. Crosby, now fifty-seven, often looked and sounded fatigued from his operation. “If you hadn’t made me sound so good back in the day,” he snapped at Halverson after one grueling session, “you’d be gone by now.” After decades of ear-drum-decimating amplifiers, Stills was now saddled with two hearing aids. Even Young, although only fifty-three, had a senior moment as he was leaving Conway after a day’s work. In the next studio, the modern punk band Green Day was working on an album. As Young walked by in the courtyard, one of the bandmates shouted out that the remake Young and the others had just cut sounded fantastic. Young had no idea what he was talking about—but soon realized the Green Day dude was referring to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young version of “White Line,” from 1990’s Ragged Glory. Young had completely forgotten he’d cut the song nearly a decade before. The quartet version, which Halverson felt wasn’t as strong as Crazy Horse’s, was relegated to the archives.
As committed as he was to the album and to the prospect of resurrecting the decades-old partnership, Young remained his unpredictable self. He would periodically bolt for home. When he would step out for a break, no one was absolutely sure if and when he would return. His stubborn nature reared its head during the recording of Crosby’s “Stand and Be Counted,” a call to political action co-written with Raymond. A grownup reboot of “Almost Cut My Hair,” it was similarly primitive—a thunderous crunch closer to Crazy Horse’s sound than the quartet’s—and would also provide an opportunity for Stills and Young to let loose with alternating solos. As the tape rolled, no one noticed that the sliding glass door of Crosby’s recording booth had accidentally been left ajar, resulting in noisy leakage in the background of the finished take. The band wanted to take another stab at it, but Young was insistent that it stay the way it was; much as with “Almost Cut My Hair,” he relished the raw energy of the performance. “You replace it and I’m outta here,” he told them, and the matter was settled.
By summer, the album was finished, or so they thought. Just as the mastering was set to begin, Nash received a call from Young; he and Stills were back at the ranch and felt the record needed more work. Crosby and Nash hauled up north, Halverson driving the tapes from Los Angeles. “Neil wasn’t hearing an ‘Our House,’” says Nash. “He told me, ‘Hey, man, write a song like “Our House.” We need it for this one.’” The musicians stayed in houses on the property and Young’s chef whipped up meals; Halverson was given a personal tour of Young’s massive toy-trains set. (Thanks in part to his sons, he’d become an obsessive Lionel Trains collector and, several years before, had been part of an investment group that had bought the company.) With Stills banging along on a cowbell, they bashed out Young’s “Queen of Them All,” the silliest song the four of them had ever concocted, and an acoustic Nash lullaby, “Someday Soon,” inspired by a teenage fan of the group who’d died of cancer (it also hinted at some of Ben Young’s recent health struggles). Nash played a tape of “Sanibel,” an island-breezy outtake from Live It Up that Neil and Pegi Young both liked so much that it was included on the album, with Young singing one of the verses himself.
The songs were whittled down to a workable sequence, leaving at least two gems on the studio cutting-room floor. With its gentle, loping interplay between acoustic and electric guitars, Crosby’s “Climber” was even looser and more mystically inclined than “Dream for Him,” but it was cut loose, along with Nash’s “Half Your Angels.” Another Crosby song, “Kings Get Broken,” was attempted and left out, but later revived by CPR. Perplexingly, they stuck with Stills’ “Seen Enough,” a cranky-old-man talking blues about the Internet, the military-industrial complex and internet addiction. In a freakish replay of his Daylight Again accidental copyright infringement, someone realized the verses of “Seen Enough” bore a melodic resemblance to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” In this case, the song stayed on the album—but with a credit saying it was “inspired by Bob Dylan,” who also took a cut of the royalties.
When the music was finally completed, family and friends convened at Conway for a listening party. Sitting on the floor and wearing his train engineer’s hat, Young seemed content; Pegi Young snapped a photo of young, blond Henry Stills. In another sign of Young’s clout, the album title was changed at the last minute, from Heartland to Looking Forward, and Nash’s planned cover design—a logo-type image of a rooster, inspired by coffee-bean bags in Young’s studio—was replaced with the photo of Henry that Pegi had snapped. (“It was out of our hands,” says Nash.) The encouraging vibrations continued when the band invited various Warner Brothers and Reprise executives to Conway to hear the album. On a bright, blue-sky Los Angeles afternoon, all four men ate, drank and hobnobbed with label representatives. They’d rarely looked or acted more like an actual band.
THE MORNING OF October 12, 1999, in New York City brought two equally jolting sights. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were once again on the same stage—this time, at Madison Square Garden. And one of them was rolled onstage in a wheelchair.
After American Dream had stumbled out of the gate eleven years before, Young had told the band he didn’t intend to tour behind it until they’d made another album. Eleven years later, he was living up to that vow. Even before Looking Forward was completed—before Young had even fully committed himself to it—speculation about the first quartet tour since 1974 had started bubbling up. On January 31, 1999, just a few weeks into Young’s participation on the project, the Los Angeles Times reported that promoter Michael Cohl, who had worked with the Rolling Stones and other heavyweights, was offering the quartet a guarantee of $500,000 per show, twice the amount many of their peers were commanding at the time. The following month, Nash confirmed a fall group tour in an interview.
When the details were rolled out months later—for a tour to start in 2000, and thus coyly dubbed “CSNY2K”—Young’s impact on the band’s income couldn’t have been more apparent. For the first time in over a decade, Crosby, Stills and Nash would be playing arenas, with tickets priced as high as $200. “When it’s CSNY, it bumps up twenty notches as opposed to just CSN,” says Bill Bentley, then Young’s publicist at Reprise. “I used to make a joke: just add a zero on the end for the guarantees for the live shows.” When Crosby ran into an old business associate and was asked what it was like working with Young again, he acknowledged the difference between $60,000 a night and $600,000. Later, Crosby again readily admitted to the Neil Young effect. “It changes the money,” he says. “It changes how you travel. It changes the size of the venues. It makes sure you can have your own catering and stay in good hotels. A lot of ancillary benefits you love if you’re out there on the road.”
Several stumbling blocks had emerged. Health issues involving Ben Young delayed the planned tour launch until early 2000, and a freak boating accident also threatened to sink them. In the years leading up to CSNY2K, each man had had a mishap. During a Crosby, Stills and Nash tour of South Africa in January 1996, Stills had slipped in a hotel bathroom and broken his nose. A year and a half later, Young had been forced to postpone five weeks of European shows with Crazy Horse after accidentally slicing his left index finger while making a sandwich; the injury had left him temporarily unable to play. But nothing compared to September 12, 1999, when, on a sailing trip with his wife, Susan, their son Will, and some friends, Nash’s powerboat had smashed into an unexpected wave in Hanalei Bay on Kauai. The boat had dipped, and when a second wave hit, Nash had been thrown up in the air. He landed hard on deck, breaking both legs and smashing his right ankle, and had to endure a two-hour ride to the nearest hospital and four hours of surgery.
As serious as Nash’s injuries were, plans for the CSNY2K tour proceeded. By the time of the press conference announcing the shows, he still needed a wheelchair to get around. It was far from the only sign that they were all advancing in years—both Crosby’s and Nash’s hair had gone Alps-white. Yet, gathered at a long table onstage at the Garden, they still exuded their anti-group individuality: Stills, who by now had a goatee in the style of his mentor Ertegun, donned a sports jacket, while Young wore a black Route 66 T-shirt and one of his Lionel Trains caps. As they answered questions from a battery of reporters, they did their best to keep the mood jocular. “I’m taking a slightly different approach in that I’ll be awake,” Crosby joked. “We really want to play,” he added. “We’re not good at anything else.”
“You can see that from this press conference,” Young joked.
Young’s renewed investment in the band continued in the weeks that followed. In the past, he had rarely made an effort to promote the group when he was part of it, but now, that stonewalling fell by the wayside, perhaps because nothing could be taken for granted. The pop music landscape had been shaken yet again; it was now dominated by expertly choreographed acts like Britney Spears and boy bands capable of selling a million copies of an album in one week. Rock itself had shed any pretense of sunshine and light in favor of rage; a new wave of rap-influenced hard rock bands had engineered a hostile takeover of the music. When the third Woodstock festival took place in the summer of 1999, the overheated crowd, egged on by acts like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, trashed vending booths, lit bonfires and bashed cars in the vicinity.
The concept of four men gathered around stools and microphones, holding acoustic guitars and harmonizing, never seemed more old school, and making the public aware of the reunion was never more urgent. With Reprise footing the bill, reporters were invited to hotel rooms in New York, San Francisco and London to meet all four and chat up Looking Forward just before its release on October 26. Deferring to Young’s wishes, vintage hotels were chosen, and the coffee tables in each room were covered with candles and flowers as Looking Forward played on stereos. (“We had to test the sound system,” recalls Bentley. “Oh, my God—heaven forbid it didn’t sound good in the room.”) Whether intentionally or not, the meet-and-greet at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel was held in the General MacArthur Suite, which had been named after the decorated military man renowned for his World War II speech and its phrase “I shall return.”
The group interviews had their expected moments of amusement and only hints of the old friction. “I love how you dress, but I can’t stand the food you eat,” Crosby told Stills as USA Today reporter Edna Gundersen looked on. Startled, Stills replied, “What?” (Given Stills’ auditory issues, Nash would often stare Stills in the face and repeat questions so that his partner could answer.) Crosby groused about meat, Nash deadpanned about how they’d tour with individual hairdressers, and Young, eager to shut down the silliness, added, “We’ll have really good organic food of every type for everybody. A healthy variety.” During an interview with Guitar World, Nash and Stills took to joking while Young rolled his eyes. In another interview, Young mentioned the “White Line” mix-up and Crosby chided, “See how much we like you? We didn’t even rag on you.”
Demonstrating how fully he could commit to group projects when he chose to, Young remained effusive. “This is gonna be a great tour,” he said at the Dorchester Hotel in London, the same place they’d stayed in early 1970. “We’ve never reached our potential and I think we can now.” His mood hit a small speed bump during another interview, when Stills unexpectedly brought up the day Young bolted from Buffalo Springfield just before they were scheduled to perform on The Tonight Show. “I bailed on the Carson show because at that point we were very young and I think we’ll leave it at that,” Young replied curtly. “Let’s move on.” Yet Young still participated in group chats and posed with all three for photos, something he had rarely done in thirty years. In a few of the shots, he was even grinning. (For the back cover of Looking Forward, photographer and longtime workmate Henry Diltz coerced them into loosening up by telling them a bawdy joke.)
Asked by a European reporter at a press conference why he was working with Crosby, Stills and Nash again, Young responded, “I mean, God only knows why. I really don’t. But I’m glad it happened.” He added, “It’s one day at a time, one song at a time.” As he had at the New York press conference announcing the tour, he said the group was already at work on a follow-up to Looking Forward. The idea seemed fantastical, but stranger things—like the first Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour in twenty-six years—had happened.
ON A SOUNDSTAGE outside San Francisco in December, the four were in the midst of practicing for their upcoming shows when the moment Crosby half-expected finally arrived. Huddling with the other three, out of earshot of their backing musicians, Young said, “There are three guys on stage here who aren’t us.” Crosby thought to himself, “Uh, oh—here it comes.”
In preparation for the CSNY2K tour, the wants and needs of both camps needed to be fulfilled. John Vanderslice, who had worked in the road crews of both camps, was rehired, this time to be Nash’s assistant and help with his post-accident recovery. By the time of the rehearsals, Nash was miraculously walking again, but on tour he would need to exercise consistently and take regular walks. Young required a small upright piano in each of his hotel rooms in case a new song needed to burst out. The staging had to be fashioned to each man—or team’s—liking. Stills and Young would continue to stand on opposite sides of the stage. Crosby, Stills and Nash preferred in-ear monitors that allowed them to hear themselves and adjust their voices while singing harmonies; Young craved a wall of sound around him, to literally lose himself in the music. “It was like Ford and GM putting a merger together,” says their production manager, Mason Wilkinson. “Two successful businesses that went on for years and you had to figure out a way for them to work together. Neil had to be comfortable, and so did CSN.”
Those adjustments proved to be minor compared to the one that became necessary as soon as rehearsals began. At the outset, everyone had agreed that the band would include Vitale on drums and Finnigan on keyboards—both were long-standing members of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s touring and recording band—as well as Donald “Duck” Dunn, the veteran bass player who had recently recorded with Young. As in the past, Stills would get his drummer, Young his bass player. Over the course of a month, the collective diligently rehearsed songs from Looking Forward as well as chestnuts like “Southern Man” and “Southern Cross.” At one point, Vitale noticed a microphone hanging over his kit but didn’t give it much thought. But the feel wasn’t right for Young. “It’s not that Neil didn’t think they were accomplished musicians,” says Vanderslice, “but he said, ‘I don’t want this to be a jukebox tour, playing the same hits the same way they’ve been played forever.’”
At a group meeting, Young announced that he wanted to switch up the backup players. Stills, who had utilized Finnigan and Vitale the longest, wasn’t happy and made his feelings known. But he was outvoted, just as he had been in 1970 with the firing of Dallas Taylor at Young’s request. “We knew Neil didn’t want Joe or Finnigan,” says Nash. “They didn’t play simply enough. When Neil says, ‘He can’t play my shit,’ you have to take notice of that. What are we going to do—force Neil to play with a drummer he doesn’t like? It was very hard.” In the production office, where he was making calls to organize hotel rooms and transportation, Wilkinson heard the news. “We were like, ‘Uh, what?’” he recalls. “You’re not exactly starting from scratch, but it was a scramble.”
When the musicians returned to their hotel, Nash visited Vitale and Finnigan to inform them that, at Young’s request, their services were no longer required. Both were stunned. Vitale soon heard a theory about the microphones dangling overhead: he’d been secretly recorded so that the tapes could be sent to a replacement drummer to learn his parts. “That was a pretty low blow,” Vitale says. “It destroyed friendships for a while. It went away, but that night I hated all of them. It was, ‘Fuck all of you.’ That really hurt.” As Crosby recalls, “It was a mess.”
Young already had a beat-keeper in mind: Jim Keltner, a well-regarded drummer best known for his work with the various Beatles after their breakup. The Tulsa-born Keltner had an impressive and eclectic resume—those were his drums on Steely Dan’s “Josie,” Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver,” Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” the two Traveling Wilburys albums, even the Ramones’ End of the Century, to cite only a few of hundreds of examples—but he was also Young’s kind of player, direct and unfussy, and with an endearing straightforwardness to boot. Young had worked with him off and on in the ’90s. Young’s suggestion—to replace two Crosby, Stills and Nash players with his own rhythm section of Dunn and Keltner—was the most indisputable evidence that Young was master of the group domain. “From the CSN side, the underlying sense was: Neil has to be happy,” says Vanderslice. “If he ain’t happy, it ain’t gonna happen. If Neil wants it to be a certain way, they’re the ones who blink.” Asked about the incident a few months later, Young was somewhat apologetic but unyielding. “It may seem to be a little harsh and disruptive to make a change like that,” he told David Fricke, “but it’s like anything else—you have to go with your gut feeling and the music is number one.”
Young now had his players in position, and the tour was scheduled to begin early in 2000. An even more rigorous round of rehearsals began a few days before Christmas 1999, and Stills invited Keltner to his home for two days so the two could get acquainted. (Keltner felt Stills wanted to ensure the drummer could play his songs the way Stills wanted.) Rearranging some of the harmonies to include Young’s voice took time. “Neil will always sing in tune,” recalls Keltner, “but they were working hard on the vocals and sometimes they were really bad.” In the new year, the hard labor continued: the entire band regrouped in San Mateo for more practice, followed by four days at the empty LA Forum.
The clash-of-titans Stills-Young dynamic reemerged while they were working up Stills’ “Dark Star.” Keltner’s drum part varied from the recording of twenty-two years before, which pleased everyone except Stills, who preferred that it replicate what Vitale had played on the original recording. Young made it clear he sided with Nash and Crosby. “It wasn’t a bad fight, just a verbal exchange,” recalls Keltner. “Neil liked it and I got my way. Neil doesn’t like the beat to be real tidy. He wants a vibe. A sound and a beat but for it to be swimming.”
Stills backed down, and the impact of that exchange carried over into the band’s new version of “Love the One You’re With,” which had a bumpier, grittier rhythm than normal. Keltner was worried that Stills would again be displeased, but this time he said nothing, and the altered beat stayed in the set. “If Stephen saw Neil was upset in any way, he’d back off,” Keltner says. “I remember hearing somebody say, ‘They’re all concerned about keeping Neil happy. If he goes, there goes the tour.’” Young’s elevated stature was also felt in the set list, which included songs from his solo career—“Cinnamon Girl,” a newly relevant “Old Man,” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Yet aside from Stills’ “Love the One You’re With” and one attempt at Nash’s “Chicago,” the list didn’t include songs from any of the others’ non-group records.
Still, Young could be unusually protective of his former bandmates. One day, Keltner expressed his concerns about playing one of Nash’s songs, which he found uninspiring. Young immediately defended Nash. In Keltner’s mind, that made the situation acceptable: if Young could handle that material, then Keltner and Dunn could as well.
STARTING IN LATE JANUARY 2000, the band and their crew hunkered down in another empty arena—the Convocation Center at Cleveland State University—to continue warming up. The concerts would revive the format they’d used in 1974—an electric band opening, a mid-show unplugged segment and then a return to the full band. In another throwback to their first tours, they covered the stage floor with a Persian rug. (This outing, however, they decided to open, rather than close, each show with “Carry On,” fearing their voices would be worn out if they reserved it until the very end.) By the time they arrived in Cleveland for final rehearsals, most, but not all, of the kinks had been worked out to Young’s satisfaction. In a red flannel shirt and baseball cap, he had everyone bear down on “Old Man,” pressing Crosby, Stills and Nash to keep refining their harmonies and shooting alternately appreciative and disapproving looks at them.
“Old Man” was far from the only song they tweaked in the days leading up to the first show, five days later, in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Young instructed Nash to play “Someday Soon” on his guitar with his fingers, not a pick. “The pick makes it seem too busy,” Young said, before using Nash’s nickname. “We just have to remember to be soft and gentle with it, Willy. This is a great song.” He ordered them to get “in the groove” with “Marrakesh Express”: “It’s not swinging,” he opined. While working up “Wooden Ships,” Stills went into one of the standard Crosby, Stills and Nash concert shticks—holding the last syllable in the word “language” in the introduction as long as possible while looking at his watch. “Wait a second—what the fuck is this?” Young snapped, and that gimmick was now out of the show. With little time to waste, Young taught Stills to play the riff to “Cinnamon Girl.”
The first night, at the Palace in Auburn Hills, had its share of stumbles: they lost their way momentarily during “Cinnamon Girl.” But the audience—a blend of fans who’d seen them in the ’60s and ’70s and those who weren’t born until then—stayed with them for the entire show, which lasted three hours and forty-five minutes. On subsequent nights, the harmonies that Keltner felt needed more work didn’t always rise to the occasion. When they played “49 Bye-Byes” onstage with Young for the first time ever, it lacked the sinuous groove of the original. So did the revamped and newly joyless “Love the One You’re With.” At the Staples Center in LA, Stills looked irked when Young walked over and made a set change, leading to additional tech issues. “One Buffalo Springfield song and we’re already tuning for an hour,” Young cracked.
When Crosby and Nash took over the stage as a duo for the inevitable, clear-as-a-mountain-stream version of “Guinnevere,” Young would exit but tell the crowd, “I’m gonna leave you with Crosby and Nash. Don’t worry, they’ll take care of you. You’re in good hands.” But Young could still be irked when the others almost literally patted themselves on the back—or gave each other high fives—after a song, or by the way Nash exclaimed “David Crosby!” after they’d played a song Crosby had written (and vice versa). One night, Nash offered an unsolicited plug for the upcoming Springfield box, and Young shot back, into the microphone, “That was a commercial, an advertisement!” Stills remained given to attention-getting gestures—gesticulating during his acoustic guitar solo on “Someday Soon,” for one—but the show actually did need the occasional jolt of visceral energy, given how much less movable Nash and Crosby could be.
Backstage, everyone had separate quarters, as if socializing could exhume lingering antagonisms. The less time spent in each other’s company, the less chance someone would blurt out the wrong opinion or request at the wrong time. During breaks in the set, Young would retreat to his offstage area with Keltner and Dunn; Dunn and Young would share a joint, and Keltner observed that Young would have precisely one shot of tequila. (On his tour bus Young would regale Keltner with tales of the Stills-Young Band fiasco: “Stephen used to bug the shit out of me—he always wanted me to change this or that,” Young would say.)
Yet as the tour progressed, moments of the wired-up energy of the 1970 and 1974 excursions surfaced. “Mr. Soul,” nearly thirty-five years old, was revived, with Keltner slamming down on his kit while Young and Stills blasted away; Stills even re-created his counterpoint harmony. Stills and Young also wailed back and forth at each other during “Almost Cut My Hair.” Recalls Nash, “Neil really loves Stephen, and there was one particular time on stage when Stephen played a great solo and Neil came up to me and said, ‘That’s why he’s here, man—I can’t do that.’ And he was right.” Keltner opened “Ohio” with a martial drum beat. When Young sat down at his pipe organ for “After the Gold Rush,” with Crosby and Nash joining in, the crowds still whooped it up when he arrived at the line about getting high.
Onstage, they looked and sounded like men who’d survived more than three decades of punishing road work and self-indulgence, but during moments like “After the Gold Rush,” the decades of roiling disharmony seemed to dissipate. “No matter what else was going on around them, politics or whatever, when they got on that stage it all disappeared,” says promoter Arthur Fogel of The Next Adventure, the touring division of Live Nation that promoted the tour. “They were kind of intuitive or instinctive about meshing their voices. After a few shows, it started to come back.” The encore was always given over to an acoustic version of “Long May You Run,” taking them full circle back to voices and guitars—and on a song that had ripped them apart nearly a quarter century before. It was now a love song not just to a car but to the idea of the quasi-band itself.
At times, they could still make each other laugh, often at Crosby’s expense. Just before the start of the tour, a February 2000 cover story in Rolling Stone answered one of pop culture’s pressing mysteries: Who was the biological father of the children of singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner at the time, filmmaker Julie Cypher? To the shock of the planet, the sperm donor turned out to be Crosby, at his wife Jan’s suggestion. Backstage at CSNY2K, Crosby was teased mercilessly about the news, with the others dubbing him “The Sperminator.” “Watch out, you might get pregnant!” Stills roared at a backstage visitor talking to Crosby. Just before their encore at the Tacoma Dome, Nash, Stills and Young held back before returning to the stage, leaving Crosby to walk out alone. During one introduction, Young said, “This is a Crosby song, but we’re gonna do it anyway.”
The set also included a good chunk of the new material on Looking Forward, which had been released in late fall, a few months before the start of the tour. Looking Forward would never make anyone forget Déjà vu. Their harmonies were gruffer, less giddy and, in cases like Stills’ “Faith in Me,” compressed to the point of sounding flattened. Nor did the album resolve the central creative conflict between the two camps: Young’s love of the primitive versus the others’ love of polish. That contrast was especially jarring when the album lurched from the gangly rhythms and harmonies of Young’s “Queen of Them All” to the studio perfection of the Live It Up leftover “Sanibel.”
Yet given the Frankenstein’s-monster way in which it was bolted together, Looking Forward was far more cohesive than the all-together-now mood they had attempted on American Dream. Young’s title song, “Slowpoke,” and “Out of Control” (the latter an exquisite modern parlor song that grappled with keeping a relationship going after years of trials) had an autumnal feel befitting the musicians’ ages and tribulations. On each, Crosby, Stills and Nash’s harmonies fit so snugly and seamlessly that they sounded as if they’d all been together when the songs were taped. The album was better than anyone had a right to expect: looser, more natural (no synthesizers), more self-aware. Whether it happened organically or was the result of overdubs, it offered moments of their vintage blend, like the sound of Stills and Nash harmonizing on “Heartland” as Young peeled off lead lines behind them.
To launch the album, Reprise couldn’t decide whether radio would take to Nash’s “Heartland” or Crosby’s “Stand and Be Counted,” so the label released both. Billboard was withering about the former: “Of such colossal musical and lyrical banality that it defies belief,” read its review, which added that Young’s solo “is so timid that it sounds as if he just wanted to leave the room.” “Heartland” didn’t make much of an impact, along with the album itself, which peaked at no. 26. At their shows, songs from Looking Forward were greeted politely, in line with its tepid sales. Perhaps public fatigue played a role: after American Dream and Live It Up, fans’ hopes for a triumphant return on record may have been extinguished.
By the time of the final performance, in St. Louis on April 19, the initial estimates of the tour’s potential profitability proved accurate. The tour wound up grossing $42 million, averaging $1 million per show in arenas holding between ten thousand and fifteen thousand concertgoers. As in 1974, rumors of extending the shows to Europe progressed no further than talk. A mere two weeks after the last CSNY2K show, Young was already looking forward to resuming his own career; he headed for New York to do Saturday Night Live. Looking Forward would have benefited from such a plug; instead, that showcase went to Young alone, who played two songs from his new solo album, Silver & Gold. “Neil had his own career to look out for,” said a source close to him at the time. “Maybe he and Elliot thought, ‘Let’s protect the brand.’”
Just as discussions of more concerts faded, so did any attempt to quickly make another album together, as they’d hinted at their press conferences. “It’s not goodbye—we’re not done yet,” Young told Halverson at the last session, at Broken Arrow Ranch. But Halverson would never hear from him again, at least as of 2018. Rather than push it, they would let it rest after accomplishing something they’d never done before: they’d spent months on the road together without melting down.