The seeds of what would perhaps be their last union were planted nearly five years before, during an unexpectedly dark and troubled time for the country. Once the CSNY2K tour had wound down, Young again followed his muse, this time pointing him in the direction of members of Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the durable instrumental band heard on so many classic Stax R&B records. After playing with them at the Dylan tribute in 1992, Young had toured with the combo; now, in another complete about-face after two years in the Crosby, Stills and Nash vortex, he wanted to deep-fry his new material in their Memphis grooves again.
Over the course of several months in the fall of 2001, Young flew the band’s surviving original members—“Duck” Dunn and keyboardist Booker T. Jones as well as the M.G.’s’ current drummer, Steve “Smokey” Potts—to the Bay Area. The songs—like the bouncy ode to his daughter, “You’re My Girl”—managed to avoid the novelty side of his past forays into rockabilly and Chicago blues. One song in particular stood out for Potts. “It didn’t hit me the whole time we were recording,” Potts recalls. “Then Neil was saying it was for that guy on the plane. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s what he’s singing? Wow.’ It didn’t hit me until later.”
The man in question was Todd Beamer, the field rep for the Oracle tech company who, on September 11, 2001, had led the charge into the cockpit on United Flight 93, which ultimately smashed into a Pennsylvania field. Called “Let’s Roll,” after Beamer’s words to his fellow passengers, the song sounded like David Bowie’s “Fame” put through a hard-rock grinder. Young and the M.G.’s recorded it in the middle of November, and by the end of the month, Young knew the best context for it; he called Crosby, Stills and Nash individually to suggest a post-9/11 series of reunion shows.
Given the typically lengthy gaps of time between tours, the suggestion caught them off guard, but it also made sense: in a country suddenly shaken by an attack that left three thousand people dead in New York City alone, familiar faces singing comforting songs about peace and unity (even if peace and unity sometimes escaped the band itself) had the potential to be a comforting balm. Again in a holding pattern—no new album in the works, no new record deal after Atlantic—Crosby, Stills and Nash readily signed on. They’d been on the road themselves on September 11 and had canceled the remainder of their shows and returned home. About two weeks after “Let’s Roll” was recorded, a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 2002 tour was confirmed. “Neil has always called the shots, economically,” Crosby confirms. “He has that power. When he says, ‘Let’s get together,’ we come. Neil puts as many people in a building as we can by himself, so if we get together, he has that power behind him. It’s part of the dynamic.”
In light of how quickly this next go-round was set in motion, there would hardly be time to rehearse—a mere two weeks—and Young would again be in charge. Not only would Dunn, Jones and Potts be the backup band, but Jones would be assigned the title of “musical director.” The set would include at least four songs from Are You Passionate?, the still-unreleased album Young had recorded with the M.G.’s. Still, in the context of another bout of Crosby, Stills and Nash inertia, an arena tour with Young, with tickets priced at as much as $200 a seat, was a welcome prospect. (When Chicago Tribune music critic Jim DeRogatis confronted Crosby about those prices, Crosby retorted, “I guess you don’t understand how much it costs to put a tour on the road. Well, my advice to you is don’t go.… If you don’t want to pay the money, you should definitely not come. As a matter of fact, we won’t miss you, because all the seats will be sold.”) Stills and Nash talked optimistically about working with the changed-up rhythm section: Stills and Jones had run in the same circles two decades before, when Stills was dating Rita Coolidge and Jones had partnered up with Coolidge’s sister Priscilla, and Jones had played and sung on Stills’ first solo album.
Of all the tours the quartet would embark upon, the 2002 Tour of America would prove to be the least memorable. It lacked the freshness of the 2000 shows, and new Young songs like “Goin’ Home” and “Let’s Roll” weren’t always a natural fit for the other three. The set list contrasted Young’s nonstop creativity with the relatively meager output of his partners. The other three offered up few new songs—Stills’ ersatz reggae “Feed the People,” which had been kicking around for nearly two decades, was an exception, along with Nash’s “Half Your Angels,” the Oklahoma City tribute that took on a new context after 9/11.
On the road, Young continued to make jokes at the others’ expense. “Ladies and gentlemen, the lion from The Wizard of Oz!” he said by way of introducing Crosby one night. Crosby zinged him back later, in Hartford; after they’d played “Woodstock,” Young cracked, “Anybody here go to Woodstock?” When some in the arena responded with a lusty cheer, Young deadpanned, “I didn’t.” Crosby shot back, “Yes, you were there.” Yet it remained clear that Young pushed them hard, whether by resurrecting the entire “Carry On” and “Questions” merger onstage for the first time in decades or making them play sets that lasted three and a half hours. Two years earlier, Nash told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, “When you play together for 30-odd years the way David, Stephen and I have, it’s easy to get into bad habits and let the audience reaction be your standard. As long as the audience is applauding, it’s very easy to think everything is okay. But Neil doesn’t have any interest in that.” Young was clearly still holding their feet to the musical fire.
When the tour ended, they again had heftier bank accounts: its forty shows grossed $35 million, almost as much as the $42 million they’d made from CSNY2K. But to the surprise of absolutely nobody who knew them, the message of unity they conveyed during the tour ended with the last performance. Two weeks after the show, in an echo of the way he’d promoted Silver & Gold as soon as the CSNY2K dates wrapped up, Young was on The Tonight Show playing songs from his newly unveiled Are You Passionate?
IN WHAT COULD be seen as a revolt against playing the oldies with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Young grabbed the wheel and drove it into even more adventurous terrain as soon as the Tour of America finished. His Booker T. and the M.G.’s period would be another fleeting phase. After only a few concerts with them in Europe in the summer of 2002, Young was gone; drummer Potts would never hear from him again (as of 2018). Instead, Young turned his attention to a relic from the ’60s and ’70s—the concept album. Set in a fictional town of the same name, Greendale told the story of a multigenerational family trying to come to grips with a changing twenty-first-century world. Instead of using different singers or actors, Young himself sang each song in the voice of a character: the cranky, outspoken Grandpa Green; his artistic son, Earl; Earl’s eco-activist daughter, Sun; and drug dealer and black sheep of the family Jed. A devil lingered around the fringes, waiting to suck in anyone and everyone.
The Greendale album had a casual, jam-session scruffiness. The songs weren’t monumental, but they were the grainiest, earthiest he’d put on record in years. Played by Young with the reunited Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, they shuffled and scraped along in an unhurried, loping way. If all that wasn’t enough new information to digest, Young took the show on the road, with a stage set replicating a front porch, and performed the album from start to finish to an audience that was most likely expecting reprises of “Cinnamon Girl” and “After the Gold Rush.” As he told Relix, he didn’t want the crowd to like him just “because I’ve been around for a long time and as part of something they related to years and years ago.” The Young classics would arrive, but, to the bafflement of some audiences, only during an encore.
In the immediate years after the two reunion tours with Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash rehired Joe Vitale and Mike Finnigan, who’d been dismissed by Young, and resumed their own grueling roadwork. By 2004, they were still without a record contract, and the modest sales of Looking Forward (which didn’t even hit 500,000 copies) hadn’t improved their market viability. As with many of their fellow classic rockers—such as James Taylor, who half-joked during this period that touring constituted the first nine of ten sources of his income—the road was their primary paycheck.
Dating back to the days when crew members would drop a miniature replica of Stonehenge onto the stage as Nash sang “Cathedral”—making them crack up at the homage to the disastrous prop in This Is Spinal Tap—moments of levity arrived periodically. On their way to a stage in the Bay Area, they marched past a backstage lavatory and joked with each other, “We spent a million dollars in that bathroom!” Crosby laughed along, but for him, life in Crosby, Stills and Nash was still creatively maddening. He remained inspired by working in CPR with his son James Raymond and guitarist Jeff Pevar: in 2001, they had released a second album, Just Like Gravity. Written by Crosby and Pevar, “Katie Did,” one of the album’s highlights, was a conscious attempt to return Crosby to a rock patch and managed a degree of radio play. But it didn’t help the album sell any more copies than its predecessor, and Crosby wound up funding the group’s tours himself with little financial reward. “It meant everything,” Crosby says of the group and meeting Raymond. “But nobody heard of us, and calling ourselves Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation didn’t help. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but we should have just called it ‘David Crosby.’ The music probably went over most people’s heads.” With CPR far from a moneymaking proposition, Crosby had no choice but to return to the mothership. For a while, he, Stills and Nash valiantly included Looking Forward material, including “Faith in Me” and “Dream for Him,” in their set, but inevitably the songs were dropped, and they returned to concentrating on the oldies the audience wanted to hear.
By that time, Crosby and Nash had accumulated a small pile of new material, along with songs written or co-written with Raymond and the other musicians, including drummer Russ Kunkel. In 2002, Nash had included some of his fresh tunes on Songs for Survivors, which, like Crosby’s earlier Thousand Roads, flattened its songs (like “Lost Another One,” partly motivated by the heart-attack death of Jerry Garcia in 1995) under a layer of overproduction. In the next telltale sign of the trio’s dysfunction, Nash and Crosby opted to record their latest material as a duo, leaving Stills out in the cold. Recruiting a group of their own, which included Pevar, Raymond and session guitarist Dean Parks, they set up in a cozy, living-room-style Los Angeles studio and began working them up. “Whenever Stephen hears a Crosby song, he throws his hands up,” says Nash. “He can’t figure it out. We had a lot of music that I knew would make Stephen throw his hands up, and we had Pevar and Dean Parks. We didn’t need Stephen.”
Although they’d tried nailing it with Stills and Young, Crosby and Nash finally produced the definitive version of “Half Your Angels,” now slower and almost ghostly. Raymond supplied the album with two of its best songs: “Lay Me Down,” which sported a vintage-Crosbyesque acoustic flow, and “Puppeteer,” with a tense, accusatory tone that was neither vintage Crosby nor Nash but welcome nonetheless. Crosby resurrected an out-there a cappella piece “Samurai” from the late ’70s and riled himself up in modern protest songs, including the anti-one-percent “They Want It All” (and the anti-fracking “Don’t Dig Here,” written by Nash, Raymond and Kunkel). The arrangements were as impeccable as a freshly cleaned suit, every note neatly in place. At twenty songs, the resulting double CD, Crosby-Nash, overstayed its welcome, a fact the duo almost seemed to acknowledge when they followed it with a single-disc distillation. And with its tasteful adult-rock varnish, the record could have used a few injections of Stills’ sandpaper voice. But the album, which arrived in 2004, contained some of the best recordings either Crosby or Nash had made in a decade, and it would remain Nash’s favorite of the albums he made with Crosby.
When the time inevitably came for Crosby, Stills and Nash to crank up a summer tour, Crosby convinced all involved to make room in the band for Raymond and Pevar, with an eye toward slipping some of the Crosby-Nash songs into the set. To ensure that Stills felt comfortable with another, flashier, lead guitarist in the band, Pevar spent time playing blues with Stills at his home. “I likened it to going into the lion’s cage and pulling out the thorn,” says Pevar. “That’s what it was like for me. Certain musicians are threatened or insecure or just not that gregarious. I wanted to let him know I was a bro.”
But given the personalities and the delicate egos involved, taking the show on the road did not always go as smoothly as the Stills-Pevar jamming. As many as eight new Crosby and Nash songs were included in the set, during which Stills would regularly leave the stage and hand over the guitar chores to Pevar. The band, one of their largest to date, now had two keyboard players and four guitarists, making for a frequently cluttered sound, and tensions began to build. “I think Stephen saw Jeff as a threat,” said Nash. “Jeff is a big guy, a big presence on stage, and quite possibly Stephen didn’t like that.” (As Stills told author Dave Zimmer soon after that tour, “There are just so many notes. With guys like Pevar… you put him and Finnigan in the same band, and you’re going to quickly use up all of ’em. Two years ago, I vowed never to allow another guitar player in the band—except Neil.”) Vitale, still nursing wounds from his firing by Young, also sensed that Stills was less than happy with another guitarist onboard. He also found it puzzling that the band was being asked to learn and play songs from a Crosby and Nash album.
Yet Crosby, Stills and Nash shared the bond of remaining outcasts in the same business that had made them stars. In 2005, Young reupped his arrangement with Reprise Records, signing a multiple-record contract worth millions. Crosby-Nash, meanwhile, was released on the British-based indie label Sanctuary, which would fold within a few years; a year later, Man Alive!, Stills’ first full-on album in two decades, was released by the Florida-based indie Pyramid, home to veteran rock and rap acts. Returning to the genres he’d explored on his early solo records and with Manassas, Man Alive! dipped into folk, blues and Latin music, adding a touch of reggae (“Feed the People”) and old-timey country (the traditional “Different Man”). Slowly and painstakingly compiled over a period of years, Man Alive! included recordings dating back nearly thirty years. As motley as Crosby-Nash was cohesive, Man Alive! swerved from the Rolling Stones riffs of 1976’s “Ain’t It Always” to the taut, menacing acoustic blues of “Piece of Me.” Recorded mostly in 1979 and shelved thereafter, “Spanish Suite” was an ambitious, multipart work reminiscent of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and featured a glistening piano part by Herbie Hancock. The later recordings on Man Alive! revealed how Stills had gravitated over the decades toward garrulous rock and blues—as well as how thick-tongued his singing had become over time (even as his electric guitar retained aspects of its old bite).
While promoting the album, the office of Stills’ manager, Gerry Tolman, emphasized to reporters that they shouldn’t ask Stills about his past—but in at least one moment on Man Alive! he commented on his past anyway. “Round the Bend” found him recounting the time when he’d met Young and formed Buffalo Springfield, and then when he’d joined another band of well-known men and had seen it all go to pieces thanks to hangers-on. (Nash contributed a harmony and melodic part to “Wounded World,” but Crosby was nowhere to be heard on the album.) For a bonus dab of nostalgia and electricity, Young overdubbed a guitar part onto the song as well. “Round the Bend” marked the first time Stills had squarely addressed the quartet in any of his songs—and with roughhouse hard-rock boogie diametrically opposed to just about anything Crosby and Nash would ever write or sing.
BY THE MIDDLE of the 2000s, they had each either entered or were approaching their sixties, and age and old habits continued to dog them. On March 6, 2004, CPR, on its last legs, had just played a college in New Jersey, and Crosby was preparing to board the band’s bus out of Manhattan when Pevar stopped by his room for a talk. Pevar was feeling increasingly isolated in the group. “It’s a very unique situation—David and his son making up for lost time,” Pevar says. “And I was feeling like I was kind of getting pushed aside. It’s David’s scene and who the hell am I? But I saw it as a democracy and it was changing.” The two had an emotional conversation lasting so long that, at the last minute, they realized they had to check out immediately to make the tour bus. Thanks to that rush, Crosby left behind one of his bags. As the bus drove off, he told his bandmates he needed to go back and retrieve it—it contained a .45, a knife and a small amount of weed. “I go, ‘What? This is crazy!’” Pevar recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t you forget about it?’” But at 1:00 A.M., Crosby did return—and was promptly arrested as soon as he walked into the hotel. A housekeeper had found the bag and a hotel employee had opened it.
Appearing in court the next day, wearing a T-shirt that read, “A Man in His Truck Is a Beautiful Thing,” Crosby was quiet as he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree (a felony) and three lesser charges: possessing a knife with a blade longer than four inches, possession of ammunition, and unlawful possession of marijuana (which he had never fully given up and now found medicinal). Nash was in London when he got the call. “David was being stupid,” he says. “You don’t go back for the bag. Don’t you think it’s possible the hotel would look inside the bag? Of course they would.” After posting a $3,500 bond, Crosby was freed to resume the CPR tour. When it was learned that the gun had been purchased legally, an assistant district attorney suggested a $5,000 fine (the pot charge was dismissed). Yet in light of his comeback, the incident was painfully embarrassing and again made Crosby the butt of jokes; he himself felt awful and later called the move “completely stupid.” When they heard Crosby had decided to return to his hotel, Young and his manager, Elliot Roberts, had a good, long laugh at the absurdity of it.
More seriously, Crosby received another ominous diagnosis—diabetes—and in 2005 had surgery for a blocked artery that almost killed him. Stills also received bad news: he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery. (In another example of the way Nash could rattle the cages despite wanting to keep things copacetic, he announced Stills’ condition during a TV interview, which mortified his bandmate.) Stills gave up tequila and other hard alcohol in 1999, but the arthritis in his knees was starting to cripple him. His hearing problem was starting to impact the others: during shows, Crosby and Nash would regularly walk over to Stills and ask him to lower the volume on his electric guitar. “We said, ‘Sorry, but if you want to work with us, turn the fuck down,’” Crosby says. “He would get all pissed. It’s not that he was trying to do the wrong thing. He just didn’t know how loud he was playing.” Crosby also lost a degree of hearing, but just in his right ear.
Other signs of mortality were starting to hit them or those around them as well. On New Year’s Eve, 2006, Gerry Tolman, still managing Stills and Nash, was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was fifty-two. Given their shared history, Tolman had a deep understanding of their dynamic and had worked hard to protect them; given his tenure as a member of Stills’ band, he could also speak to them on musicians’ terms. In the late ’90s, he’d approached writer Dave Zimmer, who had written an authorized biography of Crosby, Stills and Nash, first published in 1984 and subsequently reissued two times. Although the band had final say over its contents, they were still commendably frank in their interviews with Zimmer, and the book didn’t shy away from their excesses and disagreements. Tolman, worried about the band’s image, decided the time had come to clean that story up; he offered Zimmer a nominal fee for the rights to the book, with the goal of republishing it after the band members edited out parts they didn’t like. In the contract offered to him, Zimmer would also have been required, bizarrely, to sign off on any rights to ancillary revenue from group merchandising—including, in the words of the contract, “electronic games, toys, comic books [and] apparel”—as well as “theme park rights.” Taken aback by the curious offer, Zimmer declined and retained the rights to his book.
In light of such relentless oversight of their career and image, Tolman’s death rattled the band. “He took care of Stephen, meaning it took a lot of that pressure off me and David, so it was a terrible loss,” Nash says. “Gerry kept us together.” The impact was equally clear to those who worked for them. “Gerry kept the energy going and had all these ideas and excitement and thoughts about moving forward,” says Vitale. “He was a real positive thinker. Always left the band with a great feeling that we were a good band. He was the coach of the team.” Stills signed up with Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, but the group together would now be managed by the wife-and-husband team of Cree and Buddha Miller, who also worked with their friend Jackson Browne.
Not long before Tolman’s death, in March 2005, Young had a life-rattling experience of his own while he was shaving in his hotel room in New York. The night before, he had inducted the Pretenders into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, sitting in with them on “My City Was Gone.” But now, looking in the bathroom mirror, he noticed what he thought looked like “a piece of broken glass” in his eye and was quickly diagnosed with an aneurysm. In typical Young style, he stuck with his plan to fly to Nashville and record a new album, Prairie Wind, even penning several new songs on the flight down. He completed most of the work before returning to New York for surgery. (Whether or not it was a result of his health issues, Prairie Wind would also be one of his most uncentered records, an odd lot of singer-songwriter ballads, horn-driven vamps and some of his least noteworthy songs of the decade.) Although he later busted an artery during a postsurgery stroll, he miraculously recovered. Adding to his life complications, his father, Scott Young, died in June.
“All I know is, I don’t want to die,” Young told Time after his operation. “I have a lot left to do. I don’t feel like people are giving up on me, and I won’t give up on them.” At that moment, he wasn’t going to abandon his old friends, either.
IT WOULD TAKE another war, another photograph and another connection to Ohio to weld them together again. In late March 2006, Young and his wife Pegi visited their daughter, Amber Jean, then in her early twenties, at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Copies of USA Today were distributed at the Youngs’ hotel, and one article and its accompanying photos—“Lifesaving Knowledge, Innovation Emerge in War Clinic”—immediately seized his attention.
Almost three years before, America had gone to war yet again. For reasons that would be contested for years to come, George W. Bush had signed off on an invasion of Iraq following the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. Bush, along with his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and just about everyone else in his administration claimed that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction, and American missiles were fired into Baghdad in 2003. Since Iraq had little or no connection to the September 11 strikes, the focus on that country made almost no sense, beyond a way for America to flex its military muscles somewhere, but the country still rushed into battle. By the time the Youngs arrived in Ohio, more than 1,700 American soldiers had lost their lives in Iraq. In November 2005, US Marines had killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including, horribly, girls between the ages of one and fourteen. A presidential commission concluded that “the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments” when it came to whatever weapons had existed inside Iraq before the invasion.
The USA Today story reported on two American hospitals and numerous field hospitals in Iraq—modern versions of the ones depicted in the TV series and movie M*A*S*H, set in the Korean War. Reading the article, Young learned about how the doctors had been ordered to carry weapons while operating, and the breakthroughs in medical technology to help soldiers recover from the gruesome advances in warfare: a “portable heart-lung machine,” bandages that could stem bleeding, and new clotting drugs designed to prevent extensive hemorrhaging in soldiers who had been shredded by roadside bombs.
Everything—the incursion, the casualties, the disquieting reasons behind the invasion itself—felt eerily familiar. Returning to his hotel room, Young was so disgusted that, as with “Ohio,” he felt compelled to set his thoughts to music. Out tumbled “Families,” about an American soldier yearning to come home and finally doing so—with the unspoken implication that he was returning in a coffin. Then came another song, then another: his first full onslaught of what could be called protest songs, from a songwriter rarely known for them. Given their back catalog of odes to war, ecology and social justice, it would always irk Crosby, Stills and Nash that “Ohio” made Young seem more like a topical songwriter than they were, but in one creative outburst, he made the case that he could speak out about current events as fiercely as they could.
Back at the ranch after the Youngs’ trip, Niko Bolas, who was still working for Young as an engineer, took a call at the studio from Young, asking him to come over for dinner. Bolas had grown accustomed to his boss’ whims and spontaneity, so the request was not surprising. During a post-meal drive, Young asked, “Man, how come no one’s doing protest records?”
“I don’t know,” Bolas replied. “Kids aren’t like how we grew up.”
“We gotta do something,” Young replied.
A few days later, Young arrived at the studio with bassist Rick Rosas and drummer Chad Cromwell, his old Bluenotes players, and the three straightaway worked up and recorded two of Young’s new antiwar songs; by the fourth day, they had eight. Between March 29—a week after he’d seen the USA Today article—and April 16, they had made almost an entire album. In one day alone, March 31, Young pounded out the intentionally incendiary “Let’s Impeach the President” before he’d had breakfast, followed by “Lookin’ for a Leader” (options included Colin Powell and Barack Obama, who was then a US senator) and “Roger and Out,” written in the voice of a soldier addressing the buddy with whom he’d signed up for service—and who was now seemingly dead. The process reminded Cromwell of the fast-and-furious creation of the 1989 EP Eldorado, when the same three musicians had cranked out equally ferocious songs. “He’d go back home or someplace else on the property, write the song and then come back to the studio and we’d jump in and track it,” Cromwell says. “And it went that way until the record was complete.” Bill Bentley, Young’s publicist, was in touch with Young during this time and recalled his outrage. “He was sick of the war and sick of Bush,” says Bentley. “He was pissed. He wanted to register how he was feeling.”
In light of his adopted country attacking another country for reasons that turned out to be scurrilous at best and illegal at worst, Young’s rage was understandable, and he channeled his indignation into his fiercest album in years. From its thunderous power-trio arrangements to Young’s equally roiling guitar, Living with War bristled and jabbed. On its best songs—the semi-apocalyptic “After the Garden”; the protest-anthemic, Dylan-referencing “Flags of Freedom”; and “Shock and Awe,” which looked back on Bush’s premature “Mission: Accomplished” photo op with seething sarcasm—he and his musicians sounded as if they’d been rewired for added voltage. (A choir overdubbed later onto some of the songs added an eerie undercurrent.) Young later admitted the songs were rudimentary for a reason; as he would say, he didn’t want to waste stronger, more worked-over melodies on George Bush. But what the recording lacked in sophistication it more than made up for in an urgency lacking in his music over the previous decade.
Unlike with “Ohio,” Crosby wasn’t around to witness the writing of Living with War, but he and Nash learned about the material soon enough. In April, they received a call from Young asking them to join him at the five-star Hotel Bel-Air near Beverly Hills; he had something he wanted them to hear. Although Crosby, Stills and Nash had appeared with Young at the Bridge School benefit concerts in 2003 and 2005, it had been four years since their last tour, and communication between them was once again sporadic. Crosby and Nash, who both happened to be in Los Angeles, arrived at the hotel expecting to spend time in Young’s room, but instead they piled into one of his vintage cars and began tooling around the hills and canyons of Topanga.
The locale was home to hundreds of memories—Young’s old house, for one, was still tucked away there—but little about the drive was nostalgic. With Crosby and Nash side by side in the back seat, Young blasted Living with War. As the songs played, the two nodded at each other, making mental notes of where they could insert harmonies. Young’s goals were unclear, but when the music stopped, he told them he wanted to play the songs on tour with them. “I don’t know if Stephen had heard any of it,” Nash recalls. “But Neil is good at playing the game. He knows that if he gets me and David in, what choice does Stephen have?” They told Young they would help him out in whatever way he wanted, and then called Stills to tell him he had to hear the songs too.
BY THE SPRING OF 2006, news correspondent Mike Cerre had experienced more than most men and women his age, starting with serving in Vietnam and then as a war reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he was still taken aback when he received a call from Lookout, Young’s management, asking if they could purchase footage from his time embedded with American troops in Iraq in 2003. The buyer would be Neil Young, and the footage would be used for a tour—but, as Cerre was told, not “a regular tour but something more meaningful.”
If anyone could help channel Young’s feelings about the war, it would be Cerre. As a forward air observer in the Marines during the Vietnam War, Cerre, who had a tough but regular-guy demeanor, helped coordinate medevacs, air strikes and reconnaissance missions with American troops who confronted enemy soldiers. In that role, he flew 110 missions until he was sidelined when shrapnel penetrated his cockpit, resulting in chest and arm wounds and a ripped tendon. The camera skills Cerre exhibited while aboard his plane led to him working on TV documentaries, and decades later, the ABC series Nightline recruited him to tag along with Marines and special forces in Afghanistan immediately after September 11. With a Marine division, he then ventured into Iraq in 2003, winning an Emmy for his role as lead correspondent on an ABC special, Brothers in Arms: The Untold Story of One Marine Company in Iraq.
As Cerre soon learned, Young was building a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour around his freshly spewed antiwar songs, but Young was being particularly sensitive to the situation on all levels. “They were very concerned about this tour being antiwar,” Cerre says. “They wanted it to be antiwar but not anti-troop. Neil was very concerned about how he was going to walk that fine line. Once he told me, ‘Who am I to tell people about this? I’m Canadian and didn’t serve in the war.’” Cerre was reluctant to sell the footage but offered to film new pieces about veterans to show the ways in which war forever changed those who’d served in it.
By that point, Young had been technically savvy for decades, using wireless microphones and guitar-controlled volume switches for his amplifiers during the Rust Never Sleeps tour in 1978, and learning about computers, both for his music and to help his son Ben. Now, seeing himself as a modern town crier, he wanted to spread the word about Living with War and his visceral dislike of Bush as quickly as possible. Although he had an active hatred of MP3s and digital audio, he bit that particular bullet. By the last week in April, less than a month after he’d recorded it, the Living with War songs were streaming for free on his website—and as a continuous stream, forcing people to listen to the entire record. He also launched a website, the Living With War Network, complete with video footage, protest songs by a wide range of other musicians and a logo meant to resemble that of CNN.
Still, Young knew from the start that that plan wasn’t enough; he needed a larger forum in which to deliver his message—hence his decision to take Crosby and Nash on the Los Angeles ride. “He realized he has a certain audience of a certain number, but if you want to spread an idea like Living with War, it would be more powerful and the message would get around to more people with the four of us,” says Nash. “It’s a much bigger deal when the four of us do it.” Stills came onboard, and the same week Living with War went up on Young’s website, a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Freedom of Speech Tour was announced, starting July 6, 2006, and continuing through just after Labor Day. “When there’s a vast amount of money to be made and a message to be delivered,” Nash says, “it can move pretty fast.”
Everyone in Young’s world and in the Crosby, Stills and Nash camp, musicians and managers alike, knew the financial ramifications of any such reunion. One northeastern show—in the same venue where Crosby, Stills and Nash had only taken home $125,000—would gross $800,000. But for once, a financial windfall wasn’t the only motivation. “He wanted us for legitimacy and to spread out the responsibility,” Crosby says. “He wanted his brothers in arms when he took on the US president.”
Even more than in any previous group tour, Young laid down his particular laws about nearly every aspect of the shows, starting with a call to Cromwell about his participation. “I said, ‘Tell me about the band,’ and he said, ‘Hang tight, I’ll get back to you and tell you who’s doing what,’” Cromwell recalls. “He called back and said ‘Here’s the band.’” The backup musicians consisted of Young’s current, non–Crazy Horse unit: Cromwell, Rosas, Ben Keith and keyboardist Spooner Oldham. “It was fair to assume he was calling the shots,” Cromwell says. “Presumably there wasn’t a lot of discussion going on [with Crosby, Stills and Nash] about that. It was, ‘This is who it’s going to be, okay, fellas?’ What were they going to say?”
Within weeks, the musicians were assembled at a rehearsal space in the San Fernando Valley, and the production manager, Tim Foster—who had first worked with Young in 1973—faced a challenge. For the stage floor, Young wanted the words to the US Constitution written out on a canvas sixty feet wide and forty feet deep. Foster had to scramble to find a set designer who could assemble it in a matter of weeks. Stills wanted his usual small patch of wooden flooring that would allow him to move around, and the designer had to ensure he wouldn’t slip and fall on the Constitution canvas. When sound modifications were needed during rehearsals, Stills suggested parachutes to diffuse the sound and offered to reach out to his connections in the military; in the end, Foster and the crew were able to work around the problem.
Young also had a laser-focused plan about the songs they’d play and the way the band would communicate with the audience. He decreed that the set list would consist almost entirely of their political or social-awareness material. While the quartet had a number of songs that easily fit that bill—from “For What It’s Worth,” “Ohio” and Nash’s “Southbound Train” up through recent material, including Stills’ “Wounded World,” Crosby’s “They Want It All” and Nash’s “Milky Way Tonight”—it still took time for them to wrap their heads around that idea. “They kept trying to break the mold and go, ‘We’d like to do a song about the whales,’” Young told Mojo later. “No way. I said, ‘We’re doing songs about war and politics and the human condition, that’s it. Don’t let people off the hook, don’t give them any relief, just keep slamming them with the same information.’” (“‘Wind on the Water’—why not?” Nash would muse later. “Neil doesn’t like people singing with him. We love it.”) To make sure everyone remembered the lyrics, a few teleprompters were rented.
Although Stills had deeply held political beliefs—and even campaigned for local Democrats along the route of the tour—Young had to work especially hard to convince him that such a concept would work. (Some in the Crosby, Stills and Nash camp rolled their eyes at other parts of the show, like Neil slapping his strings with flip-flops to call attention to a line in “Let’s Impeach the President.”) More than any of the four, Stills needed regular affirmation and encouragement to do his best work, and the idea that some audience members might be rattled by the absence of nonpolitical material left him with feelings of “misgivings and ambivalence,” as he later told Mojo. He also worried such a show would only serve to galvanize Republicans. Even when it came to the name of the undertaking—the Freedom of Speech Tour—Stills retorted to a reporter, “I wasn’t at the meeting” when that decision was made.
In the end, Young prevailed, as always. “When he has a head of steam like that, you have to go with it,” Nash says. “We said, ‘Okay, you’re the boss of this—we’re with you.’” During rehearsals, they drew up lists of pertinent songs and, in a sign of cooperation, offered to remove some of their own material to make room for that of others. “What I clearly saw from Neil was, ‘Hey, man, if we’re going to do this shit, we’ve gotta kill it,’” Cromwell says. “He had to make them do that.” Crosby’s wife Jan and their son Django (then eleven) were recruited, along with the crew member and musician Larry Cragg, to hoist aloft one of the gigantic old Rust Never Sleeps microphones as if they were all raising the flag at Iwo Jima; some in the crowd didn’t realize it would also serve as a call for the audience to sing along.
During the first electric set they would play four straight numbers from Living with War (“After the Garden,” “Living with War,” “The Restless Consumer” and “Shock and Awe”). In the second set, they would veer back to unplugged chestnuts that, while not antiwar, were songs the audience would want to hear (“Helplessly Hoping,” “Our House,” “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and others), lulling the crowd into a nostalgic haze before hitting them with “Let’s Impeach the President” toward the end of the show. Young put an end to the standard between-song patter of Crosby, Stills and Nash, which could range from political commentary to self-congratulatory information about who wrote what tune; he wanted the songs to speak for themselves and avoid any pontificating. The move would also be a protective measure: if the group went from one song right into another, it gave the more conservative members of the audience less time to react against what they’d just heard.
After filming a few interview segments with veterans to show Young, Cerre showed up at rehearsals, but, to his annoyance, was kept waiting outside a dressing room for two hours. He had the distinct impression, right or wrong, that Lookout Management was not as jazzed about the tour as Young was. Finally, Cerre barged in, holding a videotape, and said, “Here’s a great fucking story!” and walked out. Young dragged him into a bathroom and told him he’d back him completely and take care of management’s concerns. “I really respected Neil for that,” Cerre says. “He said, ‘I think there’s something there not fully baked but let’s keep doing it.’” With that, Cerre would be officially embedded in many of the Freedom of Speech shows.
In the four years since they’d last performed together on tour, additional rust had set in, and the first weeks of rehearsal had more rough patches than usual. “It took those guys time to get their chops up, to really get back to form,” says Cromwell. “The first week was like the wheels were rusted up and we’re not sure how we can get them to turn so let’s keep banging on it and greasing it until something happens. I was wondering there for a minute when it would start sounding great.” But after a few weeks of relentless pounding, it began to come together during a run-through of “Wooden Ships,” which always fired up Stills’ and Young’s guitars.
ON THE SIXTH NIGHT of the tour, at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, Crosby was in the midst of a dressing-room interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene. “When we do it right, they fucking get it,” he was saying. “To me that’s us being valid, like we were in the beginning. That’s us doing what we were put here to do.”
Then came a knock on the dressing room door and in burst Young, dressed in his stage garb—fatigues and floppy hat—that made him resemble a South American rebel fighter. Young said “Excuse me” to Greene and then went into the third verse of “Families,” singing the “Oooh ooh” part. In his mind, the others weren’t singing it correctly.
“Do you wanna go through it?” Crosby said.
“Yeah,” Young said, singing the part, “I’m going back to the U.S.A.”
“Oh, that’ll be brand new,” Crosby replied. “I’ll try to remember the ‘U.S.A.’ one.”
“Don’t remember it—do it,” Young said curtly.
“Do you want it from Willy to the end?” Crosby asked, using Nash’s longtime nickname.
“You keep on doin’ it,” Young said. “Just do it like you’re doin’ it, short but very effective: ‘Oooh, oooh…’”
“How about we do it in the next verse too?”
With a trace of irritation in his voice, Young said, “That’s the one I told ya. Once you come in, you never get out. Two sets in and ‘U.S.A.’”
“Look at me funny when we get close,” Crosby said before Young was gone. No sooner had Young departed than a visibly rattled Nash dashed into the room; he’d received his own visiting lecture from Young. With very little time to spare until the show started, the two rehearsed the harmonies Young had just laid out for them.
Young had always been a tough taskmaster, but his emotional investment in the Freedom of Speech Tour was especially marked, permeating every aspect of the expedition. A few hours before he had crashed into Crosby’s dressing room, the musicians and their family members had congregated in a cinder-blocked backstage room for dinner, talking, laughing and eating. Crosby and Pegi Young, who was along for some of the shows, conversed warmly. When Young walked in, the room immediately quieted—and largely remained that way while he ate. The usual backstage jokes were never hurled in his direction. “I saw the rest of them teasing each other,” says Cromwell. “But nobody beat up on Neil. I never saw that.” The minute the St. Paul show ended, Young was in an SUV being driven to the airport. Stills wanted more time so he could shower at the venue and continued to insist on it—until he was told, point-blank, that there was no time: everyone had to meet Young at the airport, now. Stills consented.
When Cerre caught up with the tour, in Philadelphia, he saw firsthand how Young reminded everyone, in schoolteacher tones, about the no-chatter rule between songs. “He told Crosby in no uncertain terms, ‘No political patter, no ad-libbing. Let the music speak for itself,’” Cerre says. “Crosby didn’t say anything. I could see him holding himself back. It was tough.” (“Maybe I don’t agree with the way he says things, not always,” Young later said to Mojo about Crosby, “but we are all coming from the same place.” As Crosby says, “There were a lot of rules.”)
The rusty moments that dogged rehearsals carried over into the early leg of the tour; as Young would later admit, “We had some shows that were a little rough.” With their rumpled clothes and scraggly hair, the band members usually looked as if they had just rolled out of bed. (After his Rolling Stone interview in St. Paul, Crosby walked right onstage in the clothes he was wearing.) At the Toronto concert, less than a week before St. Paul, Stills—who had put on additional weight before his prostate surgery—tripped over wiring and fell onstage. Joking about his weight gain later, Stills cracked, “I even made Crosby look good,” but the moment when he had tumbled wasn’t funny for anyone. The backup musicians held their breaths, wondering if they would be playing the rest of the tour without Stills, but Stills stood up and went on with the show.
Yet the intensity that drove Young invested the shows with a crackling vitality missing on the previous reunion jaunt. The impetus behind them made “Ohio” and “Wooden Ships” transcend nostalgia. The back-and-forth solos between Stills and Young in “Wooden Ships” and “Déjà vu” felt more robust and extra-metallic, the two now resembling elderly lions hurling their chests at each other with guitars. By including songs they hadn’t played much together in decades, such as Nash’s “Southbound Train” and Crosby’s “Carry Me,” they sounded less rote than if they had merely worked their way through the hits. “They’ve been singing about things they’ve believed in,” Young told Billboard later, “and also just singing a lot of love songs, and a lot of songs that people enjoy, so it could become kind of like date night going to see them.” They even exhumed Crosby’s “What Are Their Names?” from If I Could Only Remember My Name, which Crosby had rarely performed live before. Now it was an a cappella piece, with the audience keeping time with its applause, and the lyrics about the mysterious men who controlled the country hadn’t sounded that relevant in decades. Pegi Young hadn’t heard the song before and cried every night they performed it.
The emotional highlight of every show was “Find the Cost of Freedom,” which they sang against a backdrop of photos of soldiers who’d been killed in the Middle East. With Stills fingerpicking the lead parts and the four locking into harmonies, the performance came as close as humanly possible to re-creating a night from 1970. “It was very emotional,” says Cerre. “It gave them a great sense of purpose.” While interviewing audience members for the movie Young was making, Cerre encountered older, graying fans who had brought their children to the show. They wanted them to see and hear what a ’60s concert was like.
THE ALARMING NEWS hit while the band and crew were slogging from West Palm Beach to Atlanta. On August 10, British authorities announced they had foiled a potentially horrifying new attack: a plan to detonate liquid explosives on as many as ten flights from London to various cities in the United States, including New York and Chicago. Since the plot had called for smuggling the explosives in carry-on bags, security at US airports was ramped up. The Department of Homeland Security had raised the threat alert, and liquids and lotions of any kind over a certain amount would now have to be checked with luggage. Some American Airlines flights along the eastern seaboard were canceled. Talk radio exploded; here, those hosts argued, was proof that America was still at war, even nearly five years after September 11. The day felt almost like a repeat of September 12, 2001.
In light of how quickly the tour had been conceived and scheduled, it was inevitable that the routing—the city-to-city order of the shows—would be complicated. “It was almost like a Star of David tour, all over the place,” says Nash. “It was pretty brutal.” The trip from Florida to Georgia was expected to be one of the more manageable legs of the journey, but, with his eye on the news, and given his own broadcasting background, Cerre sensed that Atlanta could be volatile for them, and not only because they were now deep in the red states. Cumulus, a conservative-leaning radio conglomerate, was based in that city and owned several stations there. Three years before, the company had taken it upon itself to ban the Dixie Chicks from its stations after they had dissed Bush during a concert in London. Cerre told Young he wanted to leave Florida for Atlanta earlier than the band so he could visit conservative talk show hosts in town and ferret out the mood of the city. Young and others told him he was just being a “negative news guy,” and that they weren’t concerned. But Cerre and his crew stuck with their plan. When they dropped by stations to interview talk-show hosts, such as Neal Boortz, they found, as they had predicted, that few were thrilled to have Crosby, Stills, Nash—and especially Young—in town. In their minds, who were these old liberals to tell them what to do now that the country was newly under siege?
Thanks to an hour-long delay and the extended crowd drinking that resulted from it, the thousands who gathered at the Philips Arena in Atlanta were already in a volatile mood by show time. The first signs of trouble came early, during “Families,” which was accompanied by footage of dead soldiers in coffins. At least a few in the hall were offended and screamed back at the band or left. “We knew there were bound to be people who weren’t going to like what we were saying,” says Nash, who, like the others, couldn’t always see or hear what was happening in the crowd that night. “If you buy a ticket to a CSNY show, what the fuck do you expect? Lovey-dovey shit all the way through?” The parade of hits that followed appeared to settle them down, even if the jostled audience members didn’t grasp that “Déjà vu” (which immediately followed “Families”) was now a commentary on the times rather than merely a favorite song from their second album.
But when the band started in on its first encore, “Let’s Impeach the President”—with its lyrics displayed on a large screen behind the band to encourage a sing-along—a small but loud contingent unleashed its anger. Some tossed water bottles at the stage, others flashed middle fingers, and at least one-tenth of the house began angrily streaming out. Those who opted to stay began yelling at the ones leaving. “We knew in Atlanta we’d piss off a shitload of people,” says Crosby. “We knew that would happen: ‘I wanna kill that sumbitch Neil Young! You can’t say that about a great American!’ Some funny shit.”
At that moment, though, it wasn’t very amusing. “Probably because of the previous two CSNY tours, it caught people off guard,” admits promoter Arthur Fogel. “It was a shock to the system.” To capture the disruptions, Cerre sent a crew to film people near the exits, the most well-lit areas of the arena. The cameramen bore the brunt of the rage as people pushed them against the wall; fortunately, one of Cerre’s soundmen was able to catch one of the cameras before it smashed to the ground.
When the main set ended soon thereafter, the group hurried backstage only to find Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, screaming at him, “No fucking encore!” Young responded in kind, announcing they would be doing one; after all, he retorted, this was called the Freedom of Speech Tour for a reason. Young led the musicians back out for one more song—“Woodstock”—but the tension didn’t subside when the music ended and the lights went up. Instead of jumping onto tour buses, the musicians and Cerre were driven out of the venue and straight to a nearby airport in SUVs flanked by a motorcade of Georgia state troopers. Since the major airlines had shut down their flights as a result of the terrorist threat, a DC-10 was quickly chartered, and nearly two dozen musicians and crew members piled on for the flight out. “They were really shaken but also invigorated,” says Cerre, who joined them on the plane. “It was like, ‘Yeah, that is what music is about, and I guess we got people’s attention.’ And at the end of the day, it could have gotten much worse. Nobody got hurt and it didn’t turn into a riot.”
FOR THE FIRST TIME on the tour, Young was rattled. He and the group were confronted with a startling new reality: that some portion of their fan base, solid counterculture types from the Vietnam era, no longer shared the group’s political leanings. In 1972, according to an American National Election Study, 51 percent of eligible-voter boomers identified themselves as Democrats, and 29 percent as Republicans. But in a similar poll that would be published in 2008, two years after the Freedom of Speech Tour, the number of Republican-leaning boomers would jump to 48 percent. The unnerving aftermath of the ’60s hadn’t just revealed itself in drug casualties or Gordon Gekko–style career changes, but in voting habits as well.
Especially after the Atlanta fiasco, the implications of this generational drift were immediately felt. In Young’s hotel room in Washington, DC, before the next show in Bristow, Virginia, security guards poked behind the curtains in search of unwanted intruders. Before they went onstage, the four men had a long-standing tradition of a band handshake, which replaced the shared joint of years before. That evening, at the Nissan Pavilion concert in Bristow, Young huddled with Crosby, Stills and Nash and instead told them how nervous he was. They slapped him on the back and did their best to comfort him. “We got your back,” Stills responded. For a moment, at last, Young no longer needed them just for musical or financial reasons; he needed them for emotional support.
That night, as bomb-sniffing dogs were ordered up for that and future shows, some booing again erupted during “Let’s Impeach the President.” But showing a fortitude that had escaped him during the Stills-Young Band tour of three decades before, Young gave no thought to canceling. “We thought, ‘Let’s just keep going,’” recalls Pegi Young. “If we stopped, would the terrorists win?” The shows weren’t Pegi’s first encounters with hostile fans; she still recalled the extremely vocal reactions to her husband’s Trans tour decades before. But another month of shows awaited them, and those in the touring party who weren’t accustomed to those responses made peace with the new normal. Fans in Missouri also walked out during “Let’s Impeach the President,” and the bomb detectors continued to try to protect them. “The first time I saw the bomb squads, I thought, ‘This is not good,’” says Cromwell. “I thought, ‘Is this going to be the gig where the bomb goes off? Is this how it will end?’ I was nervous, but after a few more gigs, it wasn’t that bad. Everyone settled into it.” The set list never changed, and “Let’s Impeach the President” remained the first encore.
At the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York, about two weeks after the Atlanta showdown, they were greeted with an unusual sight: Patti Smith, Donald Trump and Salman Rushdie all seated near each other in the first few rows.* Finally, on September 10, they played their final show of the tour, in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. Young made sure there would be no concert booked on September 11; even for him, that would be tempting fate—and audience reactions—too much.
For the first time in years, if not decades, the quartet had a cultural and political reason to exist. After the last concert, Nash hoped Young would extend the tour in one form—or country—or another. The Iraq War was hardly over, and, as it turned out, American troops would remain there for another five years. Young begged off—although this time, his decision wasn’t entirely due to the exhaustion involved with dealing with the Crosby, Stills and Nash world. The entire experience had left him shaken: they had met the enemy, and some of them were their own kind. “No amount of protection or bomb-sniffing dogs make you feel like you’re covered,” he later told Rolling Stone’s Greene. “It was a very emotional journey and very tiring. It wiped me out for a long time.” Other than his regular appearance at the Bridge School benefits in the fall and a few cameo spots with other artists, Young barely performed for the rest of the year. Nor would he take to the road again until the fall of 2007, a year after the last Freedom of Speech shows. He’d made his point, and the trio had served its purpose.
* Trump, who had been an admirer of Young’s music for years, had appeared backstage at several of his concerts: “He always came with an entourage and usually a lovely lady on his arm,” Pegi Young recalls. “When we were playing in Atlantic City, Neil was in his dressing room and I said, ‘Neil will be out in a few minutes.’ Trump didn’t seem to like that very much.” Crosby later retweeted a photo of Young and Trump together from 2014, before Young and Trump had a public falling-out over Trump’s use of “Rockin’ in the Free World” at campaign rallies. “Everybody makes mistakes sometimes,” Crosby tweeted, of Young.