CHAPTER 13

JANUARY 2008–SEPTEMBER 2018

Time refused to stand still for them, but for a moment in 2008, it nearly did. Grabbing scarves and wool caps, the four united again, this time at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25. As they assembled for group photos, chuckling at inside jokes, they looked like Mount Rushmore versions of themselves. Their faces were weathered, their clothes rumpled, and Stills’ glasses lent him the look of a craggy college professor who taught counterculture history. But if one squinted, it was still easy to conjure up the same young men who would gather for photo shoots at the Shady Oak house in Los Angeles, flashing peace signs and goofy, stoned grins some forty years before.

The Freedom of Speech Tour, Young’s most provocative project since the computer-voiced songs on Trans, had wound down over a year earlier. Although it wasn’t the biggest tour moneymaker of 2006—it came in sixteenth place—it had still grossed $32 million. But the work wasn’t done. The documentary about the entire, sometimes fraught undertaking needed to be assembled, and Young huddled with his co-director, Benjamin Johnson—son of Larry “L.A.” Johnson, Young’s close friend and documentarian, and Leslie Morris, Crosby and Nash’s former manager—to whittle down the hours of concert footage, audience interviews and profiles of Iraq War veterans that Mike Cerre had collected. Once the film was finished, and before the Sundance festival, Crosby, Stills and Nash were invited to an early screening in Santa Monica of CSNY/Déjà vu.

Of the three, only Nash was able to make the trip, but he wasn’t happy with what he saw. To his displeasure, Young included footage of the moment Stills had tripped and fallen onstage, and Nash found the ending unsatisfying. During one of the nightly performances of “Find the Cost of Freedom,” with its backdrop of deceased soldiers, the cameras zoomed in on Karen Meredith, whose son Ken Ballard, an army first lieutenant, had been killed by friendly fire in Iraq in 2004. When her son’s photo materialized in the montage, Meredith broke into tears. Nash thought the film should have ended there; instead, it concluded with footage of a veteran navigating curvy highway turns on a motorcycle. Others in the CSN camp would later agree with Nash on these issues. But even though some of the profits from the Freedom of Speech Tour had been used to finance and complete the movie, they were told that no changes would be made; as the director, under his Bernard Shakey pseudonym, Young had final say. “It was wrong,” Nash says. “We should have had input into that movie. If it’s about the four of us but three of us have no say? Gee, thanks. Like we don’t have a fucking opinion about our involvement in this? That’s not right.”

By the time of Sundance, where CSNY/Déjà vu would premiere, Crosby, Stills and Nash had suppressed whatever mixed feelings they had about the movie and Young’s filmmaking skills for the greater good. They posed for their group shots and joined Young for a press conference at the first screening and for interviews. Even there, Young asserted his dominance. Talking with the Associated Press, Crosby joked: “Don’t you think it’d be a good idea if we had a law saying you can’t have control of nuclear weapons unless you can pronounce the word ‘nuclear’? I’m just asking.” (He was mocking Bush’s tendency to pronounce the word as “nu-cu-lar.”) Having none of it, Young reprimanded Crosby in front of the reporter: “That comment is a polarizing comment. It doesn’t have to do with the grass roots of the country in the Midwest. It takes people and separates them.” When Young maintained in the same conversation that younger musicians weren’t writing protest songs anymore, Nash interjected about Eminem’s “Mosh,” but Young ignored him and kept talking—as he also did when Crosby brought up another Bush-era musical commentary, “Dear Mr. President” by pop singer Pink. At the festival, Young invited Josh Hisle, a two-tour combat veteran and part-time singer-songwriter, to perform; when Hisle launched into a fervent version of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Nash, biting some part of his tongue, emerged from the wings to shout along on the chorus with Hisle and Young.

The movie tumbled out into theaters, along with a companion live album that qualified as the first Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young record in nearly a decade. CSNY/Déjà vu Live delivered Young’s dive-bomber guitar in “Military Madness” and group versions of Living with War tracks like “After the Garden” and “Families.” But the quasi-soundtrack didn’t fully capture the wallop of the shows; dumped unceremoniously on the market, it felt like an orphaned child. (It spent exactly one week on the Billboard chart, at no. 153, before dropping off entirely—an ignominious end to the tour.) By then, Young had already moved on. “After an album like that,” he told USA Today, “you kind of have to cleanse your soul. You can’t go around saying, ‘This is how I feel’ for the rest of your life, especially when there’s so much else to talk about.” Those concerns included the environment, audio quality (eventually resulting in his short-lived Pono high-res audio player), and writing his first memoir.

But for the first time since their 1977 reunion, Crosby, Stills and Nash were given a chance to shine without Young. At a meeting of Columbia Records executives in early 2008, Steve Barnett, the label’s co-chairman, mentioned that the company needed a viable fourth-quarter release by an established act—a record that would essentially sell itself without the promotional dollars that labels usually spent breaking in new artists. By chance, Jay Landers, a veteran A&R man who had long worked with Barbra Streisand, one of Columbia’s legacy acts, had been obsessing over Henry Diltz’s California Dreaming coffee-table book of LA rock photos, many of which included Crosby, Stills and/or Nash. Landers, who didn’t know the group personally and had no idea if they were even on speaking terms, thought they could be the veterans Barnett had in mind. Inspired by Diltz’s book, he also had what he considered the perfect idea for them: an album of versions of songs by their California rock peers, with the working title Laurel Canyon.

Barnett, who turned out to have fond memories of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, was thrilled with the idea, and in almost no time, Landers found himself meeting Nash at the home of their managers, Cree and Buddha Miller, to fill them in on his concept. The next day, Nash called Landers and said, “Jay, you’ve come up with the first idea my partners instantly agreed to in forty years.” With hardly any effort on their part, the trio had their first major-label record deal in over a decade—two albums, one of covers, the other a Christmas collection, with a combined, respectable six-figure advance.

By the time the deal was announced in the summer of 2008, a new and even more exciting twist was attached to it. Early in the discussions, Landers and Barnett brought up a natural choice for a collaborator on the covers album: Rick Rubin, who’d recently been appointed co-chairman of the label. Rubin, who was all of six years old when Crosby, Stills & Nash was released, had made his name in the ’80s with hip hop; as co-owner of Def Jam Records and a fledgling producer, he had worked with LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy and, in the ’90s, had sonically reshaped bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Germane to Crosby, Stills and Nash, he had also rebirthed Johnny Cash with a series of to-the-bone albums that salvaged Cash’s recording career and connected him to a new generation by way of smartly chosen covers of alternative rock songs. If Rubin could take the same tack with Crosby, Stills and Nash—and if the label could use the album to remind everyone of their place in rock history without Young, as they insisted—the trio could be similarly reborn, similarly retro “cool.”

Rubin and Landers began a series of phone conversations to discuss which songs from that era the trio could tackle; two of Landers’ early suggestions were Jackson Browne’s “Jamaica Say You Will” and “Rock Me on the Water.” Landers was therefore surprised when Nash called him one day to ask why he hadn’t attended a meeting with Rubin and the group. Landers had no idea the get-together had even been scheduled and soon deduced that Rubin wanted to produce the record himself. In light of Rubin’s track record and reputation, Landers understood and stepped aside. The changeover made sense on certain levels, but it would also prove the undoing of the trio’s last chance at remaking itself in the new century.

LOTS OF OPPORTUNITIES for us to fall on our asses!” Stills wheezed half-merrily as he made his way into a crowded rehearsal space in Manhattan.

With the Rubin project still in its early stages, Crosby, Stills and Nash had taken a break. On a midafternoon in October 2009, they gathered in a windowless space in the Chelsea neighborhood with members of their band as well as Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and James Taylor. In a few short days, they would all be taking part in a concert celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, into which all four members of CSNY had been inducted (CSN as a trio, Young as a solo act, and individually as members of the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield). The concerts, presenting two nights of start-to-finish rock legends, including Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Simon and Garfunkel, U2, Jerry Lee Lewis and many more, offered up the latest possibility of a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion.

That summer, they had had a close call when the trio and Young were slotted to play on consecutive days at the Glastonbury Festival in England. Posters for the event hinted that the four might end up on the stage together. “Of course, the festival had to promote the ‘reunion,’” Stills grumbled to Greene of Rolling Stone. “They had a whole spread, a picture of the four of us. I kid you not. It’s totally misleading.” The Hall of Fame concerts a few months later afforded another, far more concrete opportunity. As planned from the beginning, each segment of the shows would focus on one artist or genre and include guest appearances by fellow musicians or predecessors in that field. (Simon and Garfunkel’s spot, for instance, would include an appearance by some of their doo-wop heroes, such as Dion.) Early on, it was decided that one segment would be devoted to singer-songwriter rock—and, in a perfect world, would be centered around Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, along with appearances by some of their peers.

The concert organizers included Jann Wenner, the editor and founder of Rolling Stone, and Joel Gallen, a television director and producer. They had a feeling Young might not be inclined to join in, especially after his criticisms of the TV tapings of the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony for VH1. But they asked his manager, Elliot Roberts, anyway; Roberts didn’t say no and said he would pass along the invitation to Young. Assuming Young would ultimately decline, Wenner reached out to the likes of Browne and Raitt. As the weeks and months went by, no further updates arrived. In the days leading up to the concerts, Gallen held out hope that Young would show. “I didn’t think there were tremendous odds it would happen, but we always felt there was some possibility,” he says. “Neil can be a last-minute guy.” Finally, the word came down that Young would not attend. No reason was ever given, so no one knew if he didn’t want to be on the same stage with certain people or simply didn’t feel comfortable with the concert and presentation. (Young tended to revel in nostalgia only on his own terms, as in his reunion tours with Crazy Horse.) Young was then offered a guest spot during a “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Friends” segment, so he wouldn’t have to play with them the entire time, but that offer didn’t elicit a response, either.

Still, the mood at SIR Studios on West Twenty-Fifth Street was bustling and upbeat, with musicians, managers, technicians and stone-faced security guards clogging up the various practice rooms and doorways. As Crosby, Stills, Nash and James Taylor milled around in one room, waiting for their equipment to be set up, they heard a roar in the outside hallway: Bruce Springsteen had entered the building. Nash went out and stepped onto a chair to snap a few photos of the parting of the seas. When Elvis Costello arrived, Crosby immediately made his way over to him to chat. Nearly thirty years after the infamous bar fight between Costello and members of Stills’ band, these musicians were pretty much in the same boat in a twenty-first-century sea of hip hop, electronic dance music and indie rock. Everyone was a “rock veteran” now, and the old generational barriers no longer applied.

They finally assembled in one of the rooms and rehearsals for “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Friends” got underway. The musical director of the concert, Robbie Robertson, looked on. Stills had arrived a day late; his youngest son, Oliver, was turning five, so he had flown to New York the day after the birthday party, with Nash’s okay. Crosby approached one of the cameramen to talk about his father’s career in cinematography and how he’d visited the High Noon set as a child, adding that his dream job would have actually been to play a role in the much later western Silverado. Springing into take-charge mode, Nash announced, “Okay, we’re going to run through ‘Teach Your Children,’” and Taylor, Raitt and Browne took their places in front of microphones, concentrating with unblinking focus on each word as they sang. “Sounds good,” Nash said when it was done. “That could be a hit song!” Meanwhile, Stills shouted over to Taylor, who stood at the opposite end of the lineup with his guitar, and gave him instructions on a particular chord change. Stills then went over to Taylor and slapped him playfully on the upper right arm, as if he were a bar-room buddy. Taylor seemed genuinely startled. After everyone left the room for a food break, he stayed in place with his guitar, playing the chords over and over like a student worried about letting his professor down.

After “Teach Your Children” had been rehearsed to everyone’s satisfaction, Nash approached Crosby and Stills. “Guess what?” he told them. “Jackson wants to do ‘The Pretender’ again.” They thought they’d rehearsed Browne’s contribution enough already, but apparently not. Crosby dropped his chin to his chest and sighed, and Stills put a hand on Crosby’s shoulder, grinned and said, in his salty-dog way, “I feel the same way, buddy!” Taking two bites of a roast beef sandwich and a swig of soda, Crosby returned to the practice room, where Browne began putting them through their paces. Stills walked in sporting a grin and a “sleeping baby” sign he’d borrowed from Cree Miller, who had brought her infant to the studio. Browne looked at the sign, smiled patiently and shook his head. He didn’t know Stills as well as he knew Crosby and Nash and was ascertaining how to work with him.

The rehearsal spotlighted what Crosby, Stills and Nash could accomplish when goaded. Along with Browne and the members of both of their bands, they began working up “The Pretender,” which Crosby and Nash had sung with Browne on record in 1976. After one take, Browne stopped the band and said, “It shouldn’t be so loud at the end,” referring to the delicate balance of dynamics and changing instrumental volume in the song. Nash walked over to make sure Stills, who was grappling with hearing issues, had heard Browne’s instructions. They started up once more, and Browne again shut it down so Crosby and Nash could further polish their harmonies. After a few more warmups, their voices sounded almost ageless. Meanwhile, Stills, cradling his electric guitar, sat glumly near an amp at the other end of the stage, unhappy at the lowered volume of his guitar. “I’ll split the difference ’cuz right now I’m inaudible,” he grumbled. After they played the song through one more time, complete with a Stills solo that tastefully fit in with the arrangement, another break was called. Stills went over to Browne’s microphone and sang in a throaty, theatrical way, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…”

Onstage at the Garden a few nights later, “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Friends” came off with no major gaffes. “The Pretender” was flawless, as was Taylor’s reunion with Crosby and Nash on his “Mexico.” Raitt accompanied them on slide guitar during “Midnight Rider.” (“I don’t own the clothes I’m wearing,” Browne said, quoting a line from that song as he watched the rehearsals with Raitt. “They are that guy. Each one of them has been that guy.”) When the segment ended, everyone congregated in the Crosby, Stills and Nash dressing room, watching the rest of the show on a monitor and chatting away. Off to the side of the room, looking disconnected from it all, sat Stills. As was often the case after one of their performances, the shyest member of the band would be the first to leave and return to the tour bus while Crosby and Nash reveled in the attention.

THE RUN-THROUGHS OF “The Pretender” would be nothing compared to the groundwork for their Columbia debut. After his first gathering with the trio, Rubin called Landers to bring him up to speed. “He went, ‘It was a struggle—they really need to practice,’” Landers says. “He was saying something about Crosby not being as cooperative as he had hoped.”

In Rubin’s mind, the project shouldn’t be limited to California singer-songwriter pop. What if it also included contemporary rock and roll they could have sung back in the late ’60s while practicing at one house or another? Thus began the ritual of the lists. Rubin and the group (with help from photographer and musician Joel Bernstein, a longtime friend of the band) would compile names of possible cover versions, and Bernstein helped work up acoustic arrangements. The trio would go off, learn the tunes, then sing them for Rubin, who would choose the ones he liked before handing them another list. Eventually the inventory included material by the Beatles (“Blackbird,” which they’d been performing on and off for forty years), the Rolling Stones (“Ruby Tuesday”), Bob Dylan (“Girl from the North Country”), Fred Neil (“Everybody’s Talkin’,” which they’d also worked up in the past), the Beach Boys (“In My Room”), the Grateful Dead (“Uncle John’s Band”) and the Who (“Behind Blue Eyes”). It was arduous work for a band unaccustomed to being put through such paces—and with a producer who was, to say the least, unconventional. Rubin, a soft-spoken, bearded music guru, listened more for vibe than technical aspects, and was rarely seen at the newly renovated Sony Music building in Los Angeles.

During its summer 2009 American tour, the trio began road-testing some of the cover versions onstage, and the response was largely positive. It was unusual, to say the least, to hear them play Who and Stones classics alongside their own songs, but the crowds certainly recognized the oldies and seemed open to the interpretations. Asked about the project during a break in the tour, Crosby tried to stay on the positive tip. “It’s fun singing this stuff,” he said. “Rick’s as smart as everyone says he is. He’s brilliant. He can really definitely hear well.” Asked if Rubin was familiar with their work, Crosby replied, “You know, I’m not sure. I know he knows who we are. But I’m not sure which parts of who we are he is familiar with. He has said he’s interested in our contemporaries. Beatles, Joni, Dylan, James [Taylor]. How that’s going to pan out, I don’t know.”

As upbeat as he tried to be, Crosby didn’t sound wholly convinced the album would come together, and Rubin’s out-of-the-gate concerns about his connection with Crosby (and the work they’d have to put into evoking the olden days) would soon play out. Given the numerous projects he routinely juggled, Rubin wasn’t always able to work with them steadily, and the group began to feel disrespected, as if they weren’t worth his undivided attention. (Rubin declined comment for this book.) Among other suggestions, Rubin, who undoubtedly sought to make the best possible album with them at this stage of their careers, wanted the trio to sing together on the same microphone rather than record separately and combine the parts digitally. If they were standing next to each other—as Young had learned during the Looking Forward sessions—Rubin may have felt he could recapture their essence, but they were no longer accustomed to working that way. “I tried to reason with them and say, ‘Let it go and just do it—trust someone,’” says drummer Joe Vitale. “And it was like, ‘No.’ They weren’t going to sit back and do what Rubin said.”

According to Nash, the breaking point arrived when Rubin suggested they learn three other songs: “Morning Has Broken” by Cat Stevens, “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts, and “Ventura Highway” by America. Nash says they simply could not sing the Stevens song given Stevens’ 1989 comment that “[Rushdie] must be killed,” after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran had issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death (although Stevens, now using the name Yusuf Islam, later walked back his comments). The choice of “Ventura Highway” baffled everyone: They were being asked to work up a song by a band that had followed and somewhat copied them? “Some of the songs Rick wanted us to do were insane,” Nash says. “How the fuck can you stand there and ask CSN to do ‘Ventura-fucking-Highway’?” The group wanted to cover two Beatles songs, “Blackbird” and “Across the Universe,” but Rubin preferred they limit it to one; Crosby insisted that he and his bandmates, not Rubin, should make that call. “Without being unkind to Rick, it was the wrong chemistry,” Crosby says. “It was never going to work. I didn’t have a good feeling about it right from the get-go.” Asked about the progress of the album in early 2010, Stills almost uttered something, then mimed closing an imaginary zipper across his mouth.

Before any official recording sessions had taken place, the project collapsed. “I was relieved when it ended,” Crosby says. “There wasn’t a record there. I didn’t think the choice of songs was correct at all. And that highlighted the fact that they were coming from Rick. Wrong guy.” Crosby, Stills and Nash weren’t the only ones who were thankful: Sony, Columbia’s parent company, was so eager to be done with the project that the executives allowed the group to keep their $300,000 advance, a highly unusual move.

The end of the deal was announced in January 2011. (Rubin himself, who never quite gelled with the label, would exit Columbia the following year.) Without Rubin, they tried to keep the covers concept afloat, renting out Browne’s studio and recording a few of the remakes themselves, but it soon petered out. “We cut five things in four days,” says Crosby. “It was relatively easy. Still, there wasn’t a record there. We’d already spoiled the pie.” The Christmas album never even got that far. The rebirth of the band was over before it had barely begun.

TALKING WITH A FRIEND, Young was asked about the possibility of working with Crosby, Stills and Nash again. “Yeah, you can do that,” he replied wryly, “but then you’re dealing with David Crosby. And Stephen Stills. And Graham Nash.” The thought of it—the internal politics, the psychodramas, the ego-juggling—could be overwhelming. But another possibility remained tantalizingly out of reach. Vitale first heard about it while on tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the summer of 2010, when Stills asked him during a bus ride if he was interested in becoming the drummer in Buffalo Springfield.

Despite its exceedingly brief run, the Springfield had remained close to the heart for both Young and Stills; for all the drama in that group, both looked back with doting fondness on the band, those years and their youth. The original Springfield had regrouped every so often, mostly for casual jam sessions, but with the annual Bridge School benefit approaching in the fall of 2010, Young gave the revival more serious thought. By then, two of the founding members had died: Bruce Palmer had succumbed to a heart attack in 2004, and Dewey Martin to unspecified natural causes five years later. That still left Stills, Young and Richie Furay, who had become a conservative-leaning pastor in Colorado. Young reached out to the other two, who were up for a Bridge School reunion. Per tradition, Stills and Young divvied up the rhythm section: Stills was able to use Vitale, while Young recruited one of his bass players, Rick Rosas. Working up songs they hadn’t played in decades—including the multipart “Broken Arrow”—the group rehearsed at an empty theater in San Francisco. In a bar after one practice, Young approached Rosas and Vitale and said, “So what’s it like to be in the Springfield, guys?” It was all happening so quickly; it felt too good to be true.

As Crosby, Stills and Nash were grappling with the Rubin project, Young immersed himself in his usual bevy of projects, rolling out a new album nearly every year. He also became obsessed with fuel conservation, converting his 1959 Lincoln Continental into LincVolt, a vehicle that would run on electricity or natural gas. With songs titled “Get Behind the Wheel” and “Fuel Line,” his 2009 album Fork in the Road was nearly a concept album about that project; “Just Singing a Song” argued that saving the planet was more important than making music. For the follow-up, he, like Crosby, Stills and Nash, opted to work with a younger, authenticity-inclined producer: in his case, Daniel Lanois, who frequently collaborated with U2 and Dylan. Le Noise, a play on the producer’s name, was both familiar and singular. At heart, it was the sound of Young singing and playing, backed only by his guitar. One of the tunes was also recognizable: written in 1976 and long bootlegged, “Hitchhiker” was a detailed and far from flattering chronicle of his mid-decade ennui, although the Le Noise version included an updated verse in which he expressed thanks for his kids and loyal spouse. Other, brand-new songs returned to recognizable topics: “Love and War” recalled the tales of soldiers in Living with War, and “Peaceful Valley Boulevard,” a history of America from the takeover of Native American lands to the impacts of climate change, continued the bullet-scarred landscapes in everything from “Down by the River” to “Powderfinger” to “Driveby.” (Crosby may have been the gun-toter of the band, but Young, interestingly, wrote about weapons and their lethal implications far more regularly.) But Lanois swathed Young’s voice and songs in waves of electric guitars, which rumbled and whooshed around Young as if he were turning himself into a one-man Crazy Horse. The sonic boost transformed Le Noise into a haunted, gothic-forest album, a welcome return to form after undistinguished 2000s records like Prairie Wind and Fork in the Road.

Though rarely one to dwell in the past, Young had spent the preceding decade dipping into it more than usual. The Springfield boxed set of 2001 was one such move. In 2009, he rolled out the first volume of his long-in-the-works Archives retrospective, eight CDs with 128 songs, some released, some surfacing for the first time. Young had been shaping his own retrospectives as far back as 1977’s Decade, but Archives, accompanied by an inches-thick scrapbook of lyrics and photos, took his self-cataloging to a new, hippie-librarian level of fastidiousness. To the surprise of Crosby, Stills and Nash, it also included several live recordings and concert footage from their 1970 Fillmore East shows. “Without asking our permission,” Nash shrugged later. “It’s Neil’s world.”

Stills remained aware of the vastly different public perceptions of his work compared to Young’s. “Who knew that Neil would step in there and keep coming back?” he told Uncut in 2009. “He makes this whole succession of really bad albums, and then pops up a good one and suddenly he’s preeminent again.” A portrait of Young taken by Nash (the same one later appeared on the cover of Jimmy McDonough’s Young-authorized biography, Shakey) was mounted in Stills’ living room, but he could also still be competitive with him. Starting in 2006, separate boxed sets devoted to the solo works of Crosby, Stills and Nash began rolling out. Nash’s and Crosby’s each contained three discs, but when Stills learned of the massive size of Young’s Archives, he made sure that his collection contained at least four CDs. Called Carry On, it made the case that he had been unjustly underrated; as a special treat, it contained the version of “Black Coral” from the aborted 1976 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recordings with Nash and Crosby’s harmonies still intact—apparently, their voices hadn’t been wiped out completely.

Over the course of two rainy nights at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, in October 2010, Buffalo Springfield rumbled back to life—even though only with acoustic guitars and a rhythm section—and the songs, from “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” to “On the Way Home,” survived the more rugged voices singing them. The shows went so well that the band regrouped six months later for a handful of West Coast shows (Tom Petty sat happily in the first row at one of them), as well as a performance at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee in mid-2011. A full thirty-show East Coast tour was planned for the fall of that year. Stills opted out of a summer Crosby, Stills and Nash tour as a result, and Vitale canceled other work assignments to clear the way for the Springfield.

But the group’s twisted history repeated itself when Young changed his mind and canceled the fall trek, and Buffalo Springfield again became extinct. Later, a source told Rolling Stone that Young was “disappointed with their playing,” but whatever the reason, the other band members, Stills in particular, were stunned or livid, particularly over the loss of income. “Neil’s doing what will take the music to a place he wants it to go,” Crosby says. “He’s been pretty consistent about that. He runs over people and fucks people over when he’s doing it, but that’s not his primary concern. His concern is making sure the music goes where he wants it to go. Looking at it from the outside, it’s easy to say, ‘Neil, what the fuck?’ But in his mind, he’s following his muse. It’s led him astray sometimes, but it’s also led him into some great areas.”

Young further baffled his Springfield comrades by returning to Crazy Horse, with whom he recorded not one but two albums: an idiosyncratic collection of folk and rock oldies called Americana and a two-disc set of new material, Psychedelic Pill. The latter resurrected the fluid, long-and-winding Horse jams of the past, albeit to lyrics that were bizarrely stream of consciousness even when painting a portrait of a booze-soaked relationship (“Ramada Inn”) or saluting Dylan and the Dead (“Twisted Road”). Its most compelling number, “Walk Like a Giant,” described the dashed hopes of his generation; it was one of the most resigned songs Young had ever written.

Perhaps in keeping with that song, Young’s interest in the quartet seemed to dim considerably. In 2013, they regrouped one more time at a Bridge School benefit, but the performance was under-rehearsed, and Young spent much of it wandering around behind the trio as they sang. Pegi Young thinks he may have been “playing to the kids,” the physically challenged students who sat behind the stage, but for Nash, “it was a little nerve-wracking. I wasn’t crazy about Neil walking all over the place.” The following year, CSNY 1974, a boxed set of live recordings from that year’s tour painstakingly pieced together by Nash, Bernstein and loyal engineer Stanley Tajima Johnston, was finally completed. With its inclusion of new material by all four, the album dispelled the notion that Young was the only one who was actively creative at that time. And with its group versions of “Carry On,” “My Angel” and “Pushed It Over the End,” among others, it was the closest anyone would ever come to hearing the aborted Human Highway reunion album. Not surprisingly, Young, who had long expressed his disillusionment with that tour and the way he had written the bulk of its new material, signed off on CSNY 1974 but didn’t consent to even a single interview to promote it.

IN THE 2010s, the Crosby, Stills and Nash road machine carried on with added technological help. Stills had been talked into using in-ear monitors so he could hear himself better, and his singing and guitar playing, while not quite at 1970 levels, recovered enough. The additional musicians now included a new guitarist, seasoned British musician Shane Fontayne, who was less obtrusive on stage than his predecessor, Jeff Pevar, and knew how to take a low-key role when playing in the band. The other musicians continued to join in on the harmonies to bolster the group’s sometimes shaggy vocal sound.

They could still get into testy public debates. Visiting the Rolling Stone offices in 2008 to talk about their fortieth anniversary, their first singing session came up. Stills still insisted it occurred at Cass Elliot’s house. Crosby immediately shot him down: “You are welcome to it, man, [but] you’re wrong. But it’s okay, we love you anyway.” Shooting Crosby a look that wasn’t quite loaded with affection, Stills retorted, “Yeah, well, then quit with a smug look, ’cause you’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not,” said Crosby.

In light of the collapse of the Rubin album and their own subsequent effort to salvage it without him, the odds of another record emerging from them seemed slim to none. With record sales sinking, thanks to streaming and downloading, many of their peers were beginning to feel the same way about recording and releasing new material: Why bother if the sales would be minimal and there wouldn’t be much of an industry to support it? Instead, Crosby, Stills and Nash opted to follow the example of Jackson Browne and launch their own label. Next to the possibility of a Rick Rubin–helmed record, the first release on CSN Records, a live album called CSN 2012, was a considerable letdown, a largely redundant retread of the old hits.

Thanks to a startling turn of events few would have expected—even given the decades of dysfunction—CSN Records would exist for a total of one release. The disorder began in the summer of 2013, when Nash published his memoir, Wild Tales, with help from writer Bob Spitz. Surveying his life from childhood through the later days of the band, the book placed particular emphasis on Crosby’s decline and fall (although not in as much candid and often squeamish detail as Crosby himself had done in Long Time Gone, his first memoir). Nash says he had the trio’s managers send advance copies to Crosby and Stills for their approval; if they had any objections, material could be removed. Stills had a few concerns, but Crosby claims he never received the advance copy; by the time he read it (and asked his friend Bobby Hammer to fact-check it), he was told it was too late to make changes.

Up to that point, the bond between Nash and Crosby had appeared to be unbreakable. Starting with Crosby’s addiction and his friends’ failed interventions (and then his imprisonment), their alliance had survived more than anyone could have expected. After Crosby was released from prison, Nash had helped him and Jan find a house by cosigning a lease and lending them rent money. The two still gravitated together musically, embarking on duo tours in the 2000s that made little money but allowed them to play songs outside the group standards. That bond could fray at times. One evening in the late ’90s, James and Stacia Raymond had an unexpected midnight visit from the Crosbys. Crosby, still wearing the suit and tie he had donned for an industry event with Nash, told them he had had an argument with his old friend. According to Stacia, Crosby was “completely freaked out and shaking,” although she didn’t ask specifically what had caused the fight. As in other breakdowns, though, Crosby and Nash managed to patch it up. As recently as 2007, Crosby had told Classic Rock magazine that Nash was “a wonderful man, a true Renaissance man… an honorable man, which is rare, very rare. He’s been as good a friend to me as a human being could be.”

Wild Tales extended Nash’s tradition of both upholding the band and upsetting their apple cart. But starting with Crosby’s reaction, it would have several band-shattering ramifications. In an interview with Rolling Stone six months after the book’s release, the normally talkative Crosby went silent when asked about Wild Tales. But friends sensed Crosby felt betrayed by the emphasis on Crosby’s foibles over Nash’s own exploits, although Nash was unapologetic. “I copped to all the drugs I took and copped to being unfaithful,” he responded. “I don’t know what dirt there was about me that I needed to say. One thing David doesn’t understand is that every fucked-up decision he made affected me and that’s what I wrote about. It affected me on a very deep level. He was my best friend.”

As always, they shelved their discontent and went on tour in the summer of 2014. But another, weightier shoe dropped months later. To the astonishment of many in the music community, not to mention Young’s fans, Young filed for divorce from Pegi that season, after thirty-six years of marriage. “We were having a rough patch,” Pegi admitted to Rolling Stone two years later. “But I never would’ve thought in a million years we would be getting divorced. So, yeah, there was a bit of a shock value there.” Young had a new partner, actress and activist Daryl Hannah. The year before, Hannah had accompanied Young for part of a cross-country drive in his LincVolt. One newspaper report described her as a “friend,” but the two had clearly connected.

In interviews—and now on social media platforms—Crosby was rarely known to hold back; his Twitter swipes at everyone from the Doors (“the band never swung once”) to Kanye West (“useless as tits on a bull”) to Taylor Swift (“shallow”) would give his account must-read status. At times, his public comments stirred up more than he’d hoped, no more so than in September 2014. During an interview with the Idaho Statesman, he was asked about Young’s divorce and relationship with Hannah. “I happen to know that he’s hanging out with somebody that’s a purely poisonous predator now,” Crosby said. “And that’s karma. He’s gonna get hurt. But I understand why it happened. I’m just sad about it. I’m always sad when I see love get tossed in the gutter.” Crosby later claimed he had been talking off the record (the reporter, Michael Deeds, says Crosby gave no indication he was doing so), but the damage was done; the quote went viral almost immediately.

Dating back to the earliest days of the quartet, Young and Crosby had had a mutually supportive friendship. Young admired Crosby’s cheerleading ability with the band (if not, most likely, his dismissive comments toward Crazy Horse), and Crosby’s rebel-king attitude appealed to Young’s anticonformist ways. Crosby had been there for Young when support was needed, and Young had repaid the favor, as much as he could, during Crosby’s addiction days. Even if American Dream had been a dissatisfying experience, Young’s pledge to rejoin the band if Crosby cleaned up was a sincere offer to help. In 2010, Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene asked Crosby if there was any truth to rumors of a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour. “God, I wish it were [true], you know,” Crosby replied. “It’s really exciting music and it’s one of the ones that I like to do really a lot. I love working with Neil because he pushes the envelope. I feel really good making music with him. I love it.” Young similarly had fond words for Crosby in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, where he also made room for flattering comments about Stills’ musicianship and Nash’s harmonies. Having seemingly mellowed about the group compared to earlier, harsher comments, Young now wrote glowingly about his time with the trio.

Crosby’s remarks about Hannah, though, shattered his alliance with Young, at least in the immediate months and years that followed. Niko Bolas, the engineer and producer who’d worked with Young on and off since the ’80s, was driving to Capitol Studios in Hollywood to work on Young’s next record when the musician called to tell him about Crosby’s comments. Young, Bolas says, was “less than enthused,” to put it mildly. “Big-time pissed” is the way Young’s longtime friend James Mazzeo puts it. According to Bolas, the comments didn’t break Young’s concentration. “Nothing affects Neil when it comes to the work,” he says. “Everything fuels it.” Young told Bolas he hadn’t written a new song in years but, in part because of his relationship with Hannah, he had a fresh batch ready to go. After singing his tunes to Bolas, Young returned to perform them, live, in front of an orchestra, even unearthing Barbra Streisand’s microphone for added vintage feel. “Neil was fearless,” Bolas says. “He’s standing in the middle of the room with ninety people around him all looking at his music. You talk about the willingness to be naked. I know very few human beings who can do that.” Young’s concentration only seemed to be broken occasionally when he would call Hannah on his tablet. “Put the iPad down—we have to sing,” Bolas would order him. On the 2014 album that came to be known as Storytone, string arrangements lent Young’s songs a dreamy, romantic feel unlike anything he’d done in years.

Shortly before the album came out, and about a month after Crosby’s reported comments, Young was asked about the state of the band at a public interview during the annual New Yorker Festival. “Nash, Stills and Young?” he replied, straight-faced. He denied any “feud” and spoke glowingly of Stills as his “brother”—“There will never be another Stephen Stills”—but couldn’t even bring himself to utter Crosby’s name.

Eight months later, Crosby would apologize to Hannah while appearing on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show. In the spring of 2017, he amplified those comments: “I’m not in a position to criticize anybody. I’ve made more mistakes than anybody I know of who’s still alive. So I apologized for it. I didn’t have any right to criticize his choice. I called Neil up and said, ‘Listen, Neil, that was wrong. I said it off the record but I don’t think I had the right to say that.’ It was a mistake but not the worst I’ve ever made.” Nash, meanwhile, wondered why it took Crosby so long to offer an apology, further imperiling any future CSNY reunion tours.

In November 2015, Hannah threw Young a seventieth birthday party in Los Angeles. Stills and Nash were invited and attended; Crosby was noticeably absent. Whether it was coincidental or not, Young’s 2016 concert album Earth included a new version of “Hippie Dream,” his devastating flame-throwing of Crosby during his low point as an imprisoned addict. It had not appeared on a record of his since 1986.

NASH’S Wild Tales would rattle another relationship close to the band. In the book, he wrote glowingly of his wife, Susan, and their enduring marriage, which had survived his frequent infidelities. In chronicling it all, though, Nash experienced a life-changing realization. “It was only after it came out that I began to really absorb what I had done with my life,” he says. “I began to realize that what I thought were the happiest parts of my life in fact weren’t. I said, ‘Look, how much longer is my life going on? I can just settle and coast through it or I’ll follow what my heart said I should be doing.’ Which is what I did.”

Backstage at a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2014, Nash, then seventy-two, met Amy Grantham, a photographer, artist and cancer survivor who was almost exactly half Nash’s age. Within months, Nash had separated from Susan and was spending time with Grantham on the East Coast, where she was based. It wasn’t long before divorce proceedings between the Nashes began. “I was getting older and I wasn’t in love with Susan anymore,” Nash says. The separation shook Nash’s family. “I understand the pain I’ve put them through, but I had to save my life,” Nash explained. “There’s only me in here. And I’ve got to be whatever ‘happy’ is, because I’m coming to the end of my life.”

Simultaneously, Nash, long credited with trying to hold the group together as a working band and business, even during its bleakest years, lost patience with them. The collapse of the Rick Rubin album was one of the first points of exhaustion. “It was actually getting to be typical,” he says. “It almost felt like the myth of Sisyphus, in a way, pushing a big rock up a hill. And it’s slipping back occasionally and pushing it further and it’s slipping back.” The way he, Stills and Crosby were excluded from the making of the CSNY/Déjà vu movie provoked Nash to send a long, enraged email to Young in 2010, in which he resurrected all the ways he’d felt disrespected over the decades: the time Young pulled songs from the 1991 CSN boxed set, the argument over Nash licensing songs to commercials, and now the movie. “I asked him who made him king of the world,” Nash recalls. “There’s four of us here. And I’ve always felt that Neil in a way treated us as background singers. It wasn’t nice.” According to Nash, Young wrote back, “What a load of shit,” but later sent a follow-up note saying he had been coping with the sudden death of his friend and musical soulmate Ben Keith.

In addition, onstage and off, Nash and Crosby were suddenly being sharp with one another, like an old married couple who could no longer tolerate each other’s idiosyncrasies. In September 2015, the trio took part in a cruise on the Queen Mary 2, where fans paid a minimum of $1,499 per cabin to sail with them (and see them perform on the boat) from New York to Southampton, England. Aboard the boat, Crosby seemed uncommonly subdued, and to a friend who was there, Nash compared the trip to the Titanic. (Stills, on the other hand, grew unusually animated during one shipboard dinner, sharing stories and laughs with Crosby’s daughter-in-law Stacia, who had never seen him lighten up that much.) To the bafflement of the fans aboard, the trio didn’t eat or mingle with them during the entire trip.

Then, on December 3, 2015, the trio were invited to perform at the annual tree-lighting ceremony at the White House, joined by an odd-lot lineup that included the emo-punk band Fall Out Boy, the US Coast Guard Band, and Miss Piggy from Sesame Street. Putting off their song choice until the last moment, Crosby, Stills and Nash settled on “Silent Night,” the simplest and quickest Christmas carol to learn. But silent would not be the word for what followed. At the beginning of the performance, each man was supposed to say his name and state his favorite national park, with the help of a teleprompter. By mistake—although others weren’t so sure—Crosby began his part and kept going, reading everyone’s lines. Confused and realizing Crosby was talking over him, Stills shot his partner a sharp look and flicked a guitar pick at him in disgust—all as the event was being live-streamed. “I can’t believe you,” Stills said to Crosby, for all to hear, as they were about to start singing. If that wasn’t uncomfortable enough, the microphone feeds were not properly synced, leading to cringingly out-of-tune harmonies. “It was horrifying,” Crosby says. “They had mixed up the monitor feeds so Stills was getting Nash’s feed and I was getting Stills’. Stills couldn’t hear himself and didn’t know what he was doing. They had some words we were supposed to say in sequence and I didn’t get the sequence right. Stills was really mad at me.”

To Stacia Raymond, it was a telling sign of the bandmates’ long-simmering resentments. “When you let hurtful things go by without addressing them and just let them fester and pile up, then of course a couple years later someone’s going to lose their shit,” she says, recalling how one of the trio’s tours in the mid-2000s almost shut down early after a blowup. “And that’s what happens. And it’s so violent and it’s so bad when it happens that it makes it harder and harder each time it does happen to ever come back from that. They’re human and they’re allowed to make mistakes. They’re allowed to hurt each other. But then what do you do afterward?”

That night, tensions truly boiled over. In the backstage green room afterward, Stills and Crosby had words: Stills snapped at Crosby for speaking his lines, and Crosby shot back about Stills not singing in key. Nearby but with his back to them, Nash heard someone gasp—and turned around to see Crosby and Stills lunging at each other. A member of their management team jumped to attention and pulled the two apart. All the strains that had been simmering between them for decades—dating back, at the very least, to the Stills and Crosby shouting match that had been captured on film at the Shady Oak house in the summer of 1969—erupted like a geyser.

Asked by Rolling Stone in 2008 whether they would still be a working band in another ten years, Crosby had replied, “I just don’t know, man. The answer is when it isn’t fun, we won’t do it.” Nash added, “And when that is, we have no idea.” The day after the Christmas tree ceremony, they knew.

BY THEN, THE rhythm of their lives and interactions—the coming together, the collision, the breakup, the reconsolidation—were like twisted clockwork. Even after a successful reunion, it would only be a matter of time before one of the wheels would come off their bus. Now, fifty years on, they had come full circle to where they were before they banded together.

Back in the late ’60s, Crosby and Nash, while having already met, were still in their own worlds—Nash in the Hollies and Crosby looking for a life and career after the Byrds. They were living thousands of miles apart. Now, all these decades later, the two men were once more living separate lives. Nash had fully relocated to New York City and lived in an apartment in the East Village, just blocks away from the former location of the Fillmore East. Shortly after his break with Crosby and Stills in 2016, he returned to his own career—much as, during his waning days with the Hollies, he’d felt it was time to express himself. In another repeat, divorcing his longtime wife, Susan, and moving far away to be with a new partner echoed how he’d left his first wife, Rose, in England and moved to America, where he eventually moved in with Joni Mitchell. With Fontayne as his new collaborator and co-songwriter, he pounded out a slew of songs that addressed his new love and the uncertain road he was now navigating personally and professionally. The album, This Path Tonight, arrived only months after Crosby, Stills and Nash had essentially disbanded.

About fifty years before, Crosby had been booted out of the Byrds and was forced to forge a new sound with new partners. Now that he and Nash were no longer on speaking terms, that cycle, too, repeated itself. Knowing full well that his ravaged body could betray him at any moment, Crosby—who had undergone bypass surgery in 2014—began urgently making up for lost time, fashioning the albums of his own music that he’d neglected to make over the dissolute decades. On 2014’s Croz, collaborators like Fontayne and James Raymond supplied him with crisp guitars (“Set That Baggage Down”) and smooth hooks (“Radio”), and new Crosby songs, including “Time I Have,” which grappled with balancing contentment and anger, addressed his mortality. He began working with the New York–based multi-instrumentalist and producer Michael League—who, despite being forty-two years younger than Crosby, shared the same inclination toward the experimental, jazzy and abstract. League, who also fronted the band Snarky Puppy, produced and played on Crosby’s next album, Lighthouse, which focused on Crosby’s voice and acoustic guitars—no drums or electric guitars. Lighthouse evoked the loose-fitting, hazy-days mood of If I Could Only Remember My Name, and though it lacked that album’s moments of gorgeous intensity, the bossa-nova feel of “Look in Their Eyes,” and songs like his springy ode to New York, “The City,” were the kind of delicate beauties Crosby had concocted decades before. When Crosby recruited League and singer-songwriter-musicians Michelle Willis and Becca Stevens for his touring band, he had a new part-time group, and the addition of female voices added a never-before-heard element to his music. Reteaming with Raymond, with Jeff Pevar on guitar, Crosby then completed Sky Trails, his third album in three years, which reveled in smart Steely Dan–style pop. Crosby was now dubbed one of the founding fathers of “yacht rock,” as pop-culture ironists called the soft rock of the ’70s and ’80s. It was hard to imagine a more unexpected second—third? fourth?—wind in pop music.

Just as Crosby and Nash had returned to their separate corners, replicating the days before they met, Stills and Young also circled back to life circa 1967 and 1968. With his ex-wife, Pegi, taking over the ranch after their divorce, Young moved south to Los Angeles—for the first time since the mid-’70s—to be with Hannah; in doing so, he began reconnecting more with Stills. The odds of another Buffalo Springfield resurrection were slim (in fact, a 2018 Springfield tribute concert in Los Angles included only Richie Furay), but the two began spending more time together than they had in years, and Young participated in Stills’ annual Light Up the Blues benefits for autism. (Stills and his wife Kristen’s oldest son, Henry, had been diagnosed with the condition.) Given all the upheavals in his own life, Young appeared to find new comfort in playing guitar onstage alongside Stills, who was one of a dwindling group of his musical compadres and collaborators. By then, the long, sobering list of deceased musical collaborators and backup musicians (for Young and any of the trio) included their old art director Gary Burden, producer David Briggs, former Manassas percussionist Joe Lala, Young’s longtime sideman and touring partner Ben Keith, bassists Tim Drummond and Rick Rosas, Young’s filmmaking collaborator Larry “L.A.” Johnson, and former group drummer Dallas Taylor.

Even before the group fallout of 2015, Stills had been tooling around new avenues. He’d been approached about re-creating Super Session, the 1968 surprise-hit jam album he done with Al Kooper and the late Mike Bloomfield. When Kooper wasn’t available, ideas for other guitarists were bandied about, and they settled on the youngish sparkplug Kenny Wayne Shepard, along with a keyboardist, Barry Goldberg, who had also been part of the original Super Session project. Thus was born the Rides, which finally gave Stills a full-on outlet for the blues-warrior side he had long had to suppress in Crosby, Stills and Nash. The group made two blues and boogie albums; the second one, Pierced Arrow, featured “Virtual World,” a Stills-sung lament on the impact of social media that, unlike “Seen Enough,” was fluid and touching. Stills seemed both cognizant of and embarrassed by his past exploits, but given that people in the music business had been predicting his demise since the ’70s, at least he could say he’d outlasted and outlived his dark periods.

In an even more striking example of the circle-game aspect of this point in all their lives, Stills was suddenly reunited with his great lost love of 1968, Judy Collins. The two had remained friends in the decades since; in 2009, they had cut a remake of Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind” for one of Collins’ albums. (At Collins’ studio in New York, Stills noticed the corns on her feet and was immediately reminded of how her feet had looked back then.) In 2017, they finally made their first complete album together, Everybody Knows. Then they embarked on a series of tours in which they played songs about each other, from a bit of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” to Collins’ “Houses” and Stills’ “So Begins the Task.” During the duo’s summer 2017 tour, Stills looked and sounded more relaxed onstage than he had during his later years with Crosby and Nash, and his guitar playing, while not fully recapturing the lucidity of his ’60s and ’70s work, regained some of its delicate nuances. Like Crosby, he also dropped some of the extra weight he’d been carrying for years. “He’s very relieved,” Collins says brightly when asked how Stills was holding up in light of his group’s collapse. “He’s taking care of himself now. When you’re faced with autism, you grow up a lot.” Collins also seemed to know instinctively that confronting Stills would not pull the best out of him. (Young had once told Crosby not to criticize Stills if he played badly, but only to encourage him.) When Collins and Nash ran into each other at a concert in New York just before the start of the Stills-Collins tour, Nash said, “Stephen is so wonderful and he’s the last person to know it.” Collins detected a degree of envy on Nash’s part that she, not he, would be hitting the road with Stills.

In 2018, fifty years after he’d met them, Young circled back as well, reconvening with a revised version of Crazy Horse: Ralph Molina on drums, Billy Talbot on bass and, substituting for Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on guitar, Nils Lofgren, who himself had first worked with Young and the Horse all those decades ago. Young began opening up even more of his archives, thanks to a relaunched website, and he continued pumping out albums at a pace that shamed every one of his boomer-rock peers. The albums were spotty and made one wonder how David Briggs—Young’s producer, friend and quality-control gatekeeper, who succumbed to lung cancer in 1995—would have felt about them. But Young refused to sit still. When making Peace Trail in Los Angeles in 2016, he invited Jim Keltner to the studio to try out a few new songs. One day turned into four, and Keltner was shocked when Young used an early run-through of one of the songs—not even a fully practiced tape—for the album. “With Neil, you usually get the first take, maybe the second,” Keltner says, “but in this case, not even a take. I was still learning the song. And, of course, that’s what goes on the record.” It would have been unimaginable for Crosby, Stills or Nash to release anything so unpolished; half a century later, the keen differences in record making between the two camps were still in effect.

They had now shifted archetypes: Nash was the rebel, Crosby and Stills the domesticated husbands, but Young was still the ornery loner, traversing his own proudly idiosyncratic route (and eventually marrying Hannah in the summer of 2018, although he would lose his home in the devastating California fires that fall). During the making of Peace Trail, Young played a guitar part that struck Keltner as unlike any sound he’d made before. “You’re playing different,” Keltner said.

Everything’s different now,” Young said, not unhappily.

IN THE FALL OF 2017, Nash sat in a coffee shop a block away from his new Manhattan home. Confirming his worst fears, he scrawled through the lyrics to Young’s new album, The Visitor.

In the months that followed the Christmas concert debacle, Nash continued upending his life, telling any reporter who would ask that Crosby had wrecked the band and that he, Nash, was never going to sing with him again. Nash had said similar things about Stills and Young exactly forty years before, but now his words had a rattling finality to them. Although he mostly held his tongue publicly, Crosby did take a few digs at Nash’s book on his Twitter account, as well as in a 2016 newspaper interview. The back and forth was just another extension of the barbs they had all shot at each other over the decades—ones that would eventually be forgotten—but with a new Crosby-versus-Nash twist. This go-round, Crosby never went as far as Nash had and claimed he would eagerly work with the quartet again (but not the Crosby, Stills and Nash configuration), but longtime friends and associates remained stunned at the latest, least expected turn in the saga.

As ever, Young had continued to chug along without them. With Hannah in the director’s chair, he returned to movie making, acting and performing in an oddball western called Paradox. On tours, he was joined most often by Promise of the Real, a scruffy roots band fronted by Willie Nelson’s son, a scruffy singer, songwriter and guitarist named Lukas, with Lukas’ brother, Micah, sometimes participating. They were younger, more energized and less prone to internal drama and baggage than Crazy Horse. And with their prodding, Young was giving newly revved-up shows that dug deeper into his back catalog. His anger toward the corporatization of the country spilled out into the first record he made with them, 2015’s The Monsanto Years. Starting with Living with War, Young had become a late-bloomer protest songwriter, and The Monsanto Years aimed its arrows at Walmart, Starbucks and Chevron, while also announcing he was in love again.

Young recorded another album, The Visitor, with Promise of the Real during the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. In it, he issued a series of calls to resist those in power, oppose the “Boy King” running America, and fight for the planet, the environment and women’s rights. The songs weren’t as specific in their targets as those on The Monsanto Years, and neither record had Young’s most memorable melodies, but The Visitor was nevertheless another topical-song grenade.

In light of the Freedom of Speech Tour, it would have been easy to imagine Young singing those songs with three people in particular. But it wasn’t to be. Looking at the lyrics to The Visitor in an email on a cellphone, Nash, who still sported a sizable wave of hair, read slowly, carefully and quietly, absorbing every word. His demeanor was somber. Finally, he put down the phone. “Normally, with this, he would’ve been calling us to go out and do this,” he finally said of Young. “Interesting that he’s made no such approach to us. Very sad.”

He continued: “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe it’s all finished. Maybe it’s crumbled to a nonexistent entity now. When you’re forty, you make rash decisions. But when you’re seventy-five, it may be completely over. And now that I’ve seen Neil’s words, which we should’ve been singing with him, it’s another sign it’s over.”

By that point, he and Crosby had not spoken in two years, a once unimaginable thought. (By the end of 2018, that breach would extend to three years.) Months earlier, in January 2017, friends, family and associates of Nash’s long-standing engineer, Stanley Tajima Johnston, had gathered in Los Angeles for a memorial; Johnston had died suddenly on Thanksgiving. Stills, Nash and sundry members of their old band and crew attended, but Crosby, who was in town finishing up Sky Trails, told friends he was too busy working to make the memorial. Instead, the mourners heard the Beatles’ “In My Life” sung by Nash, Stills—and Joel Bernstein.

In the spring of 2018, Crosby spent several weeks in New York making yet another new album—his fourth in four years—with League, Stevens and Willis. Released that fall, the glistening, harmony-laden Here If You Listen was his first collaborative group effort since the headiest days of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Crosby traded songwriting and lead vocals with the others, and the album even sported a song, “Vagrants of Venice,” that was a lyrical counterpart to “Wooden Ships.” (This time it was climate change, not nuclear weapons, that would wreck the planet.) The East Village studio where Crosby was working was probably a ten-minute walk from Nash’s apartment, yet they never connected in any way during Crosby’s visit. Nash didn’t even know Crosby was in town until someone told him.

BY THE FALL OF 2018, fifty years had elapsed since that evening at the Whisky a Go Go and the first night Crosby, Stills and Nash had sung together, wherever it was. Since then, they had embodied so much about their generation, from rock and roll to substance abuse to a wanton lifestyle to multiple partners. Now in their seventies, they had survived it all: later-life health scares, near-fatal accidents and overdoses, financially crippling divorces, the invading armies of punk rock, the ravages of drug and alcohol abuse. Three of them were now grandparents. Like many their age, they were coping with receding hairlines, hearing loss, and aches and pains all over their bodies; they also remained proud political progressives, as seen by a new, Hannah-directed video for “Ohio,” released in the fall of 2018, that protested the NRA.

After years in which the group’s legacy seemed to dim, it received a vote of confidence from a new generation. A fresh wave of harmony-inclined bands like Fleet Foxes and Dawes openly admitted to CSNY love. “For What It’s Worth” became a folk protest standard, covered in the new century by everyone from Ozzy Osbourne and Rush to Lucinda Williams and Heart’s Ann Wilson. Nash’s Songs for Beginners was the subject of an indie tribute album featuring the likes of Bonnie “Prince” Billy covering all of its songs, while Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name was acknowledged as a misunderstood cult stoner classic.

Whether they would ever work together again, or ever even assemble together in the same room, remained almost as unknowable as the locale of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first harmonies. Newly apart, they seemed more comfortable in their own skins. They could look back on their past foibles with a sense of head-shaking humor. They had made their contributions to rock history, and they had the awards, the album sale plaques and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions to prove it. At this point, they simply wanted to do what they wanted to do and make the most of what was left. Their generation understood that, too—about themselves and about these men.

By way of social media, their followers asked them on a daily basis to reunite, but not even the musicians themselves were sure if and when that would happen. “Very hard decision this time,” Crosby admits of parting ways with the others. “We had a good band. It was easy. I made a good paycheck. But we had gotten to the point where we didn’t really like each other. I don’t have bad feelings, but Nash and Stills dislike me intensely. And it was unpleasant. It had gotten to the point where it was just awful.” As Nash would put it, “If CSN and CSNY never play another note of music, look what we did. As complicated as it was, we made some pretty good music and we talked to a lot of people about shit we felt was important. If it never happens again, so be it. Things come to life and they come to an end.”

Those who were close to them could only imagine a reconciliation happening for financial reasons. Except for Young, the days of playing large venues were gone; on their own, they were headlining clubs and small theaters. Revenue from CDs and streaming services was minimal. As a result of that changing business model, Crosby toured three separate times in 2018 in order to pay his bills. By then, he had also sold the Mayan for financial reasons.

But even after the most tumultuous era in a career filled with them, it was impossible to break the bond between them. They’d been through too much together, so a surprise reconciliation, for a tour or a one-shot show, could never be ruled out. Given their history, in fact, it could almost be expected. Even though he seemed utterly content with Hannah and working with Promise of the Real, Young refused to publicly rule out another go-round. In 2017, he told Mojoa lot of things have to be settled” before a reunion but “that’s what brothers and families are all about.… I’m open.” A year later, he admitted to Huffington Post, “I don’t plan things like that.… I want to make music with people who want to make music—that have the same sensibilities that I have. I don’t care who they are.” For all their disagreements, Nash and Young remained in touch and even met for a New York meal during this period.

In early 2018, Crosby participated in a night of protest songs at New York’s Carnegie Hall, joining League, mandolinist, singer and radio host Chris Thile and others. At the end, all the participants came together and performed “Ohio.” Young was nowhere near New York and probably wouldn’t have joined in if he were. But the song and the performance—which could be interpreted as Crosby’s olive branch to Young—were still chilling and newly relevant, especially in light of the spate of police shootings over the previous few years. The future of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young experiment was in doubt. Yet the performance proved that the legacy would endure.