Buffalo Springfield taught me that frustration, and pressures, was the best way to lose perspective of the music, and what we were supposed to be doing. It gave you the rock and roll crazies.
—Stephen Stills, 1971
In May 1966, Buffalo Springfield opened for Johnny Rivers at the Whisky on Sunset Boulevard. The group “plays with great vitality, but is a bit raucous,” pronounced the LA Times. The Byrds’ bassist, Chris Hillman, introduced himself backstage. “Would you like to manage us?” begged a Springfield guitarist, a snaggle-toothed fireball from the Deep South named Stephen Stills. Hillman murmured something inconclusive but returned with two bandmates. “What do you think of the Springfield?” he asked David Crosby. “I don’t like them,” Crosby snapped, and the subject was closed.
A year later, both the Byrds and the Springfield were booked for the epochal rock event of 1967, the Monterey Pop Festival. Crosby and Stephen Stills were hanging out at the festival offices with the Byrds’ press agent, Derek Taylor, any animosity between the two musicians long forgotten. “The better groups are, everyone knows, bored stiff with their old lineups,” Taylor had declared, after a benefit show where the Byrds had been augmented by two musicians from South Africa for what Taylor called “one of the great experiences of contemporary music.” In Taylor’s office, that spirit continued to excite Stills’s imagination: “The whole feeling is one of giving and exchanging, like the jazz scene. We can trade ideas, sit and jam all night. It’s a breakdown of competition.”
Unbeknownst to Stills, his musical foil in the Springfield, Neil Young, was about to abandon his colleagues on the verge of their most important TV appearance to date, with Johnny Carson. “That’s when Neil had to quit,” Stills noted later, “exactly at the time it meant the most.” Nobody knew whether it was a temporary mood swing (not his first that year), but the band was forced to bail out of The Tonight Show. Young hid in a girlfriend’s house in the San Fernando Valley, passively making it clear that he was not about to return, for the TV show or the festival. The Springfield had to confront the Monterey audience, and D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film crew, with a pickup guitarist who barely had time to learn their repertoire.
Pennebaker’s subsequent movie, Monterey Pop, memorialized and mythologized the festival for posterity. Fifty years on, Stephen Stills’s younger sister, Talitha, added the memories of a high school graduate (her brother had caused havoc at Carmel High by bringing the Springfield to her graduation ceremony). “It seemed that all the high school and college kids on the Monterey Peninsula were there,” she wrote. “A spontaneous group of people formed, and they went and bought flowers by the bushel loads and handed them out to everyone, and so began a wave of people approaching the law enforcement officers and placing flowers in their pockets, on their ears, on their hats and helmets, in their gun barrels. Most of the young women on these warm June days and evenings were pretty scantily dressed and quite effusively showering love, peace and brotherhood in all directions.”
Talitha’s brother was one of the few participants in the festival whose experience was less than ecstatic: love, peace, and brotherhood were difficult to sustain in a band subject to the whims of an elusive guitarist. The only semi-prepared Buffalo Springfield were introduced at the Monterey Fairgrounds by Stills’s friend Peter Tork, once a Village folkie and now a member of the Monkees, the hottest teen sensation since the Beatles. As they took the stage, many in the crowd noticed that the Springfield boasted not one but two new members. On rhythm guitar and slightly hesitant background vocals was a man in a Borsalino hat, who had dominated the Byrds’ set the previous day with a series of wired political pronouncements and a frenetic energy that no natural chemistry could have manufactured. His musical contribution to the Springfield was, in truth, minimal and erratic, but as far as his fellow Byrds were concerned, he might as well have torched their collective future. “It put a lot of people uptight,” David Crosby conceded a few weeks later, “but it didn’t put me uptight, and it didn’t put Stephen Stills uptight, because we were two musicians, and we wanted to make music.”
Two weeks after Monterey, Crosby reinforced his new philosophy at the Hullabaloo Club in Hollywood. “We may be breaking some rules tonight,” he announced, “but it’s about time someone started experimenting. Besides, music shouldn’t have any rules.” With that, he and Byrds drummer Michael Clarke lined up alongside drummer Buddy Miles and the still Young-free Buffalo Springfield for a chaotic but thrilling fifty minutes filled, Tom Paegel of the LA Times reported, with “driving improvisations and vocal combinations.” Paegel imagined that he was witnessing the birth-pangs of a revolution, with “musicians working together for fun and for the betterment of pop music. This theme may be a sign of future pop.”
Another observer of these machinations was more cynical, though he had a vested interest: Denny Bruce was a roommate of Neil Young. “David Crosby has only one talent,” he reflected many years later, “surrounding himself with talented people. He really wanted to be in the Springfield. Even with the success of the Byrds, he knew that Buffalo Springfield were cooler.”
It’s a struggle, isn’t it, if you’ve grown up with one of your parents like . . . [he stops himself and pauses]. I was watching an interview with Ben Kingsley, who was being asked, what sound do you hate the most? And he said: “The sound of a parent barking at a child, over and over again, about something that they don’t understand.” That’ll create fear and anger in a child later on; that will re-emerge.
—Stephen Stills
On the back of the first Buffalo Springfield album, where isolated words were thrown together to create a fragmented account of the five participants, was the ambiguous statement: “Steve is the leader, but we all are.” Or, as an early teen-mag profile put it, “Steve Stills is the leader—at least, he thinks he is.”
“I was trying to be Boss Cat and trying to keep the thing in order,” Stills told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. “You gotta dig that part of my upbringing in the South was very militaristic. I was in this military school and was being taught how to be an officer. That stuff can’t help but stick, way down.” So the boy grew up to the sound of “a parent barking,” and was taught to place himself in the same position over other men. “My father was a sarcastic son of a bitch,” he revealed to Jaan Uhelszki in 2013, and that legacy was passed on. Wounded child and dictator: the inevitable balance of that equation was confusion, resentment, and pain.
While David Crosby grew up in Californian comfort, and Graham Nash in Mancunian poverty, Stephen Arthur Stills could not be sure where he stood. Like Crosby’s parents, Stills’s mother and father parted company when he was in his teens. By then, he had already called a bewildering variety of locations home: Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, and various parts of Central America. Equally unsettling was his father’s enigmatic approach to business, with its inevitable effects on the family. He seemed to acquire great riches with ease, and then watch each new empire dissolve, almost as if it didn’t matter to him. If Crosby’s father was a cinematographer, and Nash’s an engineer, Stills’s was an enigma, snapped for an instant in myriad guises—promoter of big bands, grain dealer, junior corporate executive, designer of “vital war products,” property developer, investment banker, construction boss, marina manager, real estate agent, country club operator. By Stills’s own accounts, his father was warm and encouraging, or cold and abusive; or perhaps both, his temperament uncertain until he opened his mouth. Likewise, his parents’ lack of sobriety: “They drank,” he recalled decades later, “drank a lot.”
Even his father’s identity was difficult to pin down. It was William Arthur Stills who, in July 1938, married Talitha “Ti” Collard in Hendersonville, Virginia. But in later years, legal documents described his “given name” as Otie Stills, or Otis, or sometimes O. T. Stills. He trained as a teacher in Indiana, and set up home in Carmi, and then Metropolis, Illinois, though when his first child, Hannah, was born there in 1941, he was working in Kansas City. His only son emerged in Dallas in January 1945. Seven months later, William was arrested in Houston after an incident with a seventeen-year-old “hotel information girl,” whose father had complained to the police. But Stills insisted the charge was “blackmail,” and the case was laid to rest after he had spent several days in jail. A Texas newspaper described him as being “reportedly worth a half-million dollars,” the equivalent of $7 million today. His fortune had been lost and regained several times by the time the Stills family established itself in Florida in the 1950s.
By 1958, Talitha Stills was prominent enough in Tampa’s polite society to be profiled by the local Tribune. In keeping with bourgeois America’s strict gender roles, Mrs. Otie Stills was lauded for her skills as a homemaker and hostess, who always “retains her gracious manner.” The family were the proud owners of a Riviera-style mansion with swimming pool in Beach Park, which they had purchased in 1956 from a retired general. The article hinted at the flavor of their lives: Talitha was a superb cook, made her children’s clothes, and was active in a garden circle. She helped out with the Cub Scouts and the local Red Cross.
Her focus was supporting her husband and nurturing her three children—the brood having expanded to include eight-year-old Talitha (nicknamed “Ti” like her mother, though in later years she preferred to be known as “Tai”). While elder sister, Hannah, was portrayed as an artist, who had “already developed her own style,” Stephen (a “thirteen-year-old cottontop”) was being supported in his musical ambitions. He was “a budding drummer,” the journalist recounted. “Stephen’s trap drums are set up in the large paneled family room adjacent to the dining room. All the family loves music and enjoys the collection of jazz records Mr. Stills started in college, the rock and roll recordings from the teenagers, and some of the classical works Mrs. Stills loves.” Otherwise, “She is quite proud that Stephen has ‘grown to the saddle’ so much that he is beginning to look like a Westerner.” Missing from this effusive celebration of American success was any sense of tension or fear; the fractures in the Stills marriage, the succession of boarding schools that had ejected their mischievous son, or the depression that would encroach on the youngsters’ lives.
A year later, the house in Beach Park was gone, and Stephen’s parents were embroiled in a series of court cases—accused of failing to keep up payments on mortgages, business loans, and building materials. Otie opened the Tiotie Beach Yacht & Country Club on Lake Wales, but by 1961 it had ceased operations, though the subsequent legal actions shuffled on until 1963. Long before then, Otie had taken the family on their most disorienting journey to date, from gracious upper-middle-class living in the world’s leading economy to the political turbulence and cultural dislocation of Central America.
I went to high school in Spanish. It was the greatest gift my father could have given me. It flipped my mind and opened it.
—Stephen Stills
Most of Stephen Stills’s musical identity was in place by the time he reached his teens. “I was influenced by anything with rhythm,” he recalled, and his father’s collection of jazz records—the Dorsey bands, Kenton, Goodman, and the rest—ensured that syncopation was his second nature. He would pride himself on his “groove,” on being “in the pocket,” and would bear down on any musical associates who couldn’t match up. His education, formal and musical, was erratic, and scattered, and when he was at home, nobody seemed to have minded that he would steal out with a friend in search of rhythmic stimulation. In Florida alone, he claimed to have seen many of the prime movers of rock and roll and rhythm & blues by the time he was thirteen, from Buddy Holly to B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. “The sheer power,” he said in awe at the memory. “To me, that music was as vital as the Impressionist art period, with magnificent things happening wherever you looked.”
With his friend Mike Garcia, a crucial couple of years older than Stills and therefore able to drive, he would “chase all over Florida looking for little record stores and old blues records. Then we would drive for days to see some obscure artist play.” There were “all these great black showbands playing in fraternity houses” in Gainesville, and he would sit at their feet like a disciple, soaking up experience. “African Americans were my friends,” he explained half a century later, “and they taught me everything useful.”
The young Stills burned to reproduce those rhythms in his own life. As careless about dates as any rock star, he would later claim to have been drumming when he was eight years old and playing guitar at ten. His grandmother was a church pianist, and Stephen’s tuition paid unexpected dividends at Catholic school: “When I finished my lessons, I would pound away at that good old boogie-woogie music at age eleven or twelve. This old priest stuck his head through the door and said, ‘Oh, don’t you stop, I was just going to remind you not to break the piano.’ He used to sit outside reading his prayer book and listen to me play.”
The same school added the solemn intensity of Gregorian chants to his imagination, reshaping the memory of the choral music he had heard in church. From the blues he inherited an unearthly, rasping roar; church expanded his vision of what could happen when voices were raised in euphony, polyphony, or counterpoint. With the bluegrass and honky-tonk he’d heard in Kentucky, and the rock and roll pounding out of the family radio when he and his sisters were in control, Stephen Stills had a collision of tempi pounding through his brain.
School supplied a much-needed sense of structure. For a while, he attended a military academy on the waterfront at St. Petersburg, Florida. “I needed the discipline,” he admitted. “I loved the drill. It was a relief to have some organization, because my house was always in chaos.” For the first time, he could place himself in the middle of a crowd of musicians and create symmetry out of confusion: “I got a sense of construction, of how to put together the different parts of an arrangement, from being in school bands and orchestras.”
For a white kid whose brain pulsated to black rhythms, there was only one feasible outlet in late-1950s Florida: joining a rock and roll band. “As soon as I learned a couple of chords from some friends, I took off,” Stills remembered. “I started hanging around with a couple of servicemen from MacDill Air Force Base. I played drums in a rock band when I was so young that they had to draw little lines on my face that looked like a moustache, so I could work in a bar. I was about thirteen or fourteen, but I looked like I was eleven.” After a few months, he switched from drums to guitar, and joined the Continentals, a schoolboy group put together by an even younger kid, Don Felder. “I moved from acoustic to electric,” Stills said, “having borrowed the lead guitar player’s instrument so often that I could just start to make a sound. And then, just at the moment when you start to bear down, and get obsessed, and maybe get good, we were off to somewhere they didn’t have any electric guitars.”
In later years, his time in Central America seemed to congeal in his brain, reflecting a peripatetic lifestyle in which Stills and his family were never quite grounded. “We were primarily in Costa Rica,” he said, “but I spent time in Nicaragua, and more time in Panama, with these people who had a finca there. That was when the Pan-American Highway was just a real wide dirt road. It was there that I learned to drive.” There he also rode out into the country and met a beautiful young woman on a white horse, a serendipity he romanticized more than thirty years later in song (CSN’s “Panama”). Otherwise his adolescent flirtations with romance required strict decorum: “To get a date with a really nice local girl, you had to approach her duenna, her chaperone, after church. It was very formal, very traditional. But at the same time, I had this sense that people were emotional in a way that they hadn’t been back home—they’d burst into tears at weddings and funerals, not keep everything tied up inside.” And people would dance: across the isthmus of Central America they swayed to rhythms with local names—mambo, pachanga, merengue—which tapped into a sensuality and sly sexuality that even the hottest American jazz bands couldn’t touch. The teenage Stills learned enough Spanish to make valiant advances toward young women, and graduate from every class, until his high school life ended in 1963.
Robbed of his apprenticeship in rock and roll, Stills ingested the time signatures of his adopted lands. But, he conceded, “I couldn’t play flamenco guitar very well.” Instead, from long distance, he immersed himself in the same folk boom to which the young David Crosby had pledged his allegiance. During 1962, his father arranged for him to sit in front of a microphone at the relay station that allowed Costa Ricans to hear state-funded broadcasts from the Voice of America. The first surviving document of “Stephen A. Stills,” aspiring musician, was a tape reel that held five songs, four of which—the likes of “Railroad Boy” and “Dark as a Dungeon”—were familiar prey for stars such as Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. The last was the self-composed “Travelin’.” Though it was little more than an amalgam of traditional folk motifs, such as the bear who went over the mountain and the young man who simply had to roam, it was transfigured by its delivery. This was no unskilled child being indulged by an overoptimistic parent, but a fully formed performer. His hands had already mastered the picking style finessed by country star Merle Travis, with the thumb slapping out a rhythm while the fingers sketched out a melody. Equally imposing was his vocal presence: unmistakeably juvenile, yet with a chilling, melancholic authority that dispelled any sense of pastiche. Again there was a distant parallel with the cinematographer’s son in California: both Crosby and Stills owned a voice, shaped by influences but emblazoned with personalities that they would soon display to the world.
Once Stills had graduated, he left Costa Rica, and his family, behind. He dutifully enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he signed up for political science, a passion heightened by his firsthand experience of stumbling across outbursts of civic disorder in Central America. But he was led astray from his studies (after four days, he once boasted) by the lure of music. His old band, the Continentals, was still in town, with two future members of the Eagles (Messrs. Felder and Bernie Leadon) in its ranks. But rather than trying to squeeze out a space alongside them, Stills headed for the city’s meager folk clubs, and a one-girl, two-guy combo with the wonderfully prophetic name of the Accidental Trio. Soon he was in New Orleans, which he would later claim as his hometown; and, within months, Greenwich Village, joining the scrum of would-be Huck Finns who imagined that they might follow Bob Dylan from anonymity to stardom.
The kitchen at Gerde’s Folk City [was] where Bob Dylan first sang me “Masters of War,” and I felt a chill as he sang that was colder than the aluminium sink I was sitting on.
—Judy Collins’s liner notes to Judy Collins #3, 1964
Folk music might be creeping across the nation like a virus, but unbeknown to its inhabitants, its borders were slowly beginning to close in, like the prison walls in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” “I spent a whole year, shivering in winter, listening to that voice,” Stephen Stills recalled of his time in Greenwich Village, and the record that he would hold as a romantic talisman. This woman, with the oval, “cornflower eyes,” her eyebrows permanently arched as if betraying her possession of arcane knowledge, entranced him from the start. Judy Collins #3, a cult success in the Beatle-infested music scene of 1964, was a tapestry of songs she had borrowed or been taught by her friends, from Dylan to Pete Seeger. Supporting her discreetly was another village folkie called Jim McGuinn, with whom Stills would soon be sharing a barbed acquaintance. The album included two songs, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “The Bells of Rhymney,” which McGuinn would draw into the repertoire of his electric folk band, the Byrds. As Stills trailed around the dense maze of Village folk dens where Dylan, McGuinn, and Collins had already served their apprenticeships, it must have seemed that the enticing woman with a voice like sparkling ice was almost alongside him but eternally out of reach. He would not meet her for another four years, only then able to admit that he had held her in his mind as a love object since the first time he had stared into those two-dimensional eyes.
Meanwhile, he circled her old haunts. “I spent two years working these funny little basket-houses,” Stills recalled in 1971. “There was a stage at one end and all the performers used to sing for each other most of the night. Then, when every once in a while a customer did come in, we would all immediately go quickly through our sets so we all had a chance to pass the hat round. My overnight success was when I got a regular job at the Café Night Owl, at twenty dollars a night, playing behind Freddie Neil or whoever was around.” Again, the encroaching circles: Dylan had backed up Fred Neil the same way, and back in Florida, Neil had become a friend-cum-mentor of another young guitarist, David Crosby.
Around the clubs, Stills and a fellow folk immigrant named Peter Thorkelson discovered that they were sometimes mistaken for each other. Inevitably they met, at the Four Winds Café, and as if playing out a scene from a TV sitcom, began to work together, in twos and threes with fellow guitarist John Hopkins.
There followed an entire year, all the longer if you’re nineteen or twenty and impatient for success, when Stills subsumed his identity into a showbiz impresario’s idea of a folk group. This had its rewards: regular employment, paid at that; a professional recording session; comradeship on the road; lessons in arranging vocal harmonies from Jim Friedman, whom Stills would credit as his mentor; even a network TV cabaret appearance, introduced by Diahann Carroll and Tony Martin, the hosts of On Broadway Tonight. “It was hyped up real big,” said Richie Furay, another fresh recruit. “This guy who was Stephen’s manager put us in this little playhouse and we did a play with some popular folk songs of the day.” The Au Go Go Singers sounded like a glee club compared to the barbershop harmonies of Les Baxter’s Balladeers. But their solitary album, eagerly titled They Call Us Au Go-Go Singers, allowed Stills two minutes in which to masquerade as a lonesome country-blues troubadour, on “High Flyin’ Bird.” Three thousand miles apart, he and Crosby were following parallel paths, but on timelines that were markedly out of sync.
As Crosby and the Byrds recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Los Angeles, the Au Go Go Singers were resident at the New York coffeehouse from which they took their name. An opening arose for a pared-down version of the group to undertake a brief tour of Canada at the height of winter. To preserve the purity of the mothership, this offshoot was renamed the Company, and as soon as they escaped the watchful eye of their backers, Stills and his fellow runaways jettisoned the tired Au Go Go repertoire and concentrated on playing contemporary hits from the British Invasion. They were booked for three two-week residencies at franchised clubs in different cities, the first of them Fort William in Ontario. There, in one of several encounters that has been recalled so often as to shed all legitimate claim to being remembered, their paths crossed with a local band called the Squires. The latter’s repertoire stretched from ragged frat-rock to traditional folk tunes, all played with the same raucous energy and contempt for finesse. The Squires’ leader, Neil Young, and Stills recognized kindred spirits, albeit with markedly different aesthetic principles. After two weeks they were separated for almost exactly a year, and Stills returned to Peter Thorkelson in the Village.
It was late-spring 1965, and almost every folkie in town had found himself a band, or at least a bunch of session men prepared to impersonate one in the recording studio. The Byrds broke, Bob Dylan reinvented himself as a pop star, and a Billboard reporter announced the arrival of something called “folk-rock.” Stephen Stills recognized that this was something he could easily fake himself and scrambled to find some suitable comrades. He briefly thought he had talked his way—as a bass guitarist, despite never having played the instrument—into the Lovin’ Spoonful, the group formed by another protégé of Fred Neil, John Sebastian. But the vacancy was closed, and before Stills could map out an alternative route to fame, the Spoonful had joined the Byrds on the national pop charts. Then Thorkelson realized that success could be located on the map of California, and feeling increasingly isolated in the Village, Stills followed suit.
In Los Angeles, Stills hooked up with the remnants of the Shaggy Gorillas Minus One Buffalo Fish, a folk and comedy ensemble reduced to a duo. But the folk scene was now as anachronistic as a hand loom in the era of mechanical reproduction, and Stills yearned to participate in the ecstatic carnival that surrounded the Byrds. He had begun to try his hand as a composer, fixing chords from the Beatles’ songbook together and trying to reproduce the slightly cynical romanticism of their latest releases. An encounter with a draft dodger en route to Canada spurred him to write “Four Days Gone,” a soulful piano ballad that lamented “government madness” and allowed him to step outside his own post-adolescent melancholy.
Armed with these songs, and the steely self-confidence hidden beneath his overt shyness, Stephen Stills responded to an ad he’d seen in the Hollywood Reporter. “Madness!” it promised. “Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for four insane boys, 17–21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.” Stills checked off the requirements: he’d acted at school, hung out at Ben Frank’s all-night diner on Sunset among other aspiring stars, could surely outplay and outsing all the competition—and what twenty-year-old kid wasn’t acquainted with madness?
So he joined approximately four hundred hopefuls, waiting in line to meet the founders of Raybert Productions, who had conceived a television sitcom about a fictional pop band provisionally entitled The Monkeys.
Bob Rafelson, who conducted the auditions, recalled two years later that, “There was one guy, Steve Stills, whom I liked enormously. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite right, but he had musical intelligence, and I went so far as to ring him up and ask him along again. When he realized he wasn’t going to make it, he suggested I get in touch with somebody he knew, a certain Peter Thorkelson.” Renamed Peter Tork, Stills’s Village buddy adopted the TV role of banjo-playing loon—an extension of the madcap comedy routines that folk audiences had already witnessed.
In retrospect, Stills was adamant that he had never wanted to act in the series; he merely wanted an outlet for his songs, and was disappointed that Raybert had already commissioned material from the likes of Carole King and Gerry Goffin. In 1967, when Stills was still unknown in England and the appetite for Monkees gossip was desperate, there were frequent references in the press to an applicant who “although good, had not been endowed with a very photogenic set of teeth.” Stills’s heavily recessed front tooth was not the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, although it could surely have been corrected if Raybert had been desperate to recruit him. The most likely story is that Stills would have snapped up the job if it had been offered, especially as another recruit, Michael Nesmith, quickly managed to bypass the prohibition on the Monkees contributing their own songs. But Raybert may well have recognized that loading their “insane” TV pop group with two men born in Texas, both of whom took their musical careers very seriously, might have undercut their series’ comic potential. At heart, Tork was an entertainer, but Stills was a craftsman, for whom ridicule triggered uncomfortable memories that stretched back to the cradle.
This fleeting encounter encouraged Stills to cast around for other avenues of escape. He began to envisage himself as the creative hub of a rock and roll band; all he needed was disciples. He wrote to Neil Young in Canada, and received a note back from his mother, explaining that her boy had traveled down to New York to make it as a folk singer, and left no forwarding address. An aspiring music publisher named John A. Daley heard Stills play, and offered him a deal, cash in hand. He eagerly signed contracts promising to deliver songs such as “You Got It Wrong, You Can’t Love,” “Break Up Easy,” and “I See Another Man,” five in total, for which he pocketed $125—and then walked away, only being reminded of his legal commitments when Daley sued for $180,000 five years later.
In the fervid, compressed music scene of Hollywood in 1965, Stills could hardly avoid stumbling into interesting company. Late in 1965, he met Frank Zappa, leader of an ensemble named the Mothers of Invention. Zappa read him the lyrics of the Mothers’ latest song, “Who Are the Brain Police?,” which depicted a psyche, and a society, melting into madness. Stills also encountered Van Dyke Parks during his brief term as a member of the Mothers. Parks had been a child prodigy as a musician and actor, who had lived through the folk craze and was now playing sessions for anyone who asked with sufficient grace. Fiercely intelligent, given to talking in dense, glittering metaphors, Parks would soon make the fateful decision to collaborate with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. (He also played keyboards on the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension, turning down David Crosby’s invitation to join the band permanently.) Meanwhile, he was attempting to bring musical imagination and a sense of culture to Los Angeles rock and roll, and had concocted an orchestral folk-rock arrangement of the “Song of Joy” from Beethoven’s final symphony, retitled “Number Nine.”
To prepare for its release, Parks assembled a band capable of handling “a combination of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, harpsichord, vibraphone and jingle bells.” Stills volunteered, alongside another experienced folkie, Steve Young. As the Van Dyke Parks, they supported the Lovin’ Spoonful at one uproarious show in the State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. “I played one gig, for screaming teenyboppers,” Stills recalled, “and there I was, an impressionable twenty-one, and was smitten with the bug.” That night he discovered that the more he moved onstage, the more young girls screamed; “they almost went wiggy,” wrote an intrepid reporter from the Arizona Republic. Besides their revolutionary take on Beethoven, the Van Dyke Parks tackled recent R&B hits such as “Dancing in the Street,” as rearranged by Stills. The journalist captured Stephen Stills’s earliest philosophizing about the purpose of his musical career: “We write most of our own [songs]. And if it’s someone else’s, we do our own arrangement of it. But if it’s not your own, it can’t possibly put your own message across, and if it can’t say what you want said, why do it at all?”
I have to write songs. There’s something inside me I’ve got to get out. Music is the best way I know.
—Neil Young
Scott Young was a familiar name in Winnipeg, Canada, his words eagerly awaited by sports fans in the pages of the local newspaper. He was well respected among the community he reported, and several local luminaries from the sporting world attended his stag party in June 1940. His bride was Edna Ragland, daughter of prominent businessman William N. Ragland. She was a student actor, locally ranked tennis player, and denizen of the Winnipeg Canoe Club, who came from sufficient stock to ensure that her family’s travels were dutifully chronicled in the society columns of the Winnipeg Tribune. The paper noted their regular summer retreat to William’s place up on Falcon Lake, which his grandson would later commemorate in song. Edna’s marriage was documented with the meticulous eye for detail usually reserved for a baseball game: the guests at her two pre-wedding celebrations, a week apart; the precise makeup of the floral arrangements in Crescent Fort Rouge United Church; every stitch and seam of her bridal dress and trousseau; and finally, the couple’s honeymoon at Lake on the Woods, straddling the Canadian-US border.
Four months after the wedding, the family was uprooted to Toronto, where Scott Young had been recruited as sports correspondent for the nation’s largest press agency, the Canadian Press. Now his reportage would be read across the country, lending him celebrity status in the era before television relegated the importance of the printed page. He would occasionally stray outside the field of sporting combat; when a bunch of German prisoners of war escaped from a camp in Heron Bay, Young was assigned to follow the story, which ran and ran (as did the POWs). But his byline would usually be found above game reports or insider sports gossip of unimpeachable repute, Young being trusted as much by hockey players, golfers, and football stars as by his loyal readers.
Two events in 1942 interrupted this comfortable schedule. In April, Edna gave birth to a son, Robert Ragland Young. Within six months, Scott Young volunteered for exceptional duty overseas, leaving the rink and the gridiron for the perilous role of wartime correspondent in London. Edna and young Bob returned to her parents in Winnipeg. Meanwhile, Scott endured the privation of bombing raids and rationing, in his pursuit of stories about the heroic exploits of Canadian servicemen in the front line.
His twelve-month tour of duty over, he returned to Toronto, and his family, in October 1943. Any sense of normality was short-lived: the following March he signed up for the public relations arm of the Royal Canadian Navy. By April, he had headed east to a secret location, and Edna and her son made the familiar journey back to the Ragland home. Scott vanished wherever the navy wanted him, which by late summer 1944 meant joining Canadian troops landing in France to consolidate the advances made on D-day. And then, in December, he was home, Edna and Bob rejoined him; and within three months, she was pregnant again. Her second son, Neil Percival Young, was born on November 12, 1945. He would grow up accustomed to his father leaving home on assignment, and occasionally for less professional reasons.
For a man whose artistic manifesto favored spontaneity over planning and embodied a scorched-earth attitude toward the past, Neil Young would become obsessive about preserving, sorting, and chronicling his life—almost as if it was the only way in which he could make sense of it. In addition, something about Young’s work and personality has persuaded many outsiders to immerse themselves in the minutiae of his creative life. The result is that almost every step has now been documented in sometimes excruciating detail: concert by concert, note by note, every artistic whim, abrupt shift of direction and fiery illumination of genius traced, reported, and analyzed. It is as if the painstaking archaeology of his disciples has freed Young to conduct himself without fear of the future or conscious burden of the past, secure in the knowledge that someone else will always unearth the hidden meaning of a career that has often seemed willful and disjointed, despite its brilliance.
From his father, young Neil learned the value of discipline and perseverance for a writer, the magical power of celebrity (reinforced when his mother later became a TV star on a weekly quiz show), and the more dubious lesson that a man can always remove himself from a situation that has become unpleasant or humdrum. He was also given an early education in the vagaries of fate, when he was stricken with polio in the epidemic that swept through Canada in 1951. And throughout his childhood, he was well acquainted with change, his parents shifting town every two or three years until the frail bonds of their marriage came untied, and Scott told his sons that he was leaving home. Neil provided a capsule history of his youth in his song “Don’t Be Denied,” addressed to an anonymous “friend of mine,” but more likely aimed at the man he saw in the mirror.
There were other principles to be gathered from his father’s career: that a man should always change to avoid becoming typecast; and, therefore, that it did one’s audience—readership, in Scott Young’s case—no harm to be shocked or surprised. That was how Scott ended up writing controversial articles on subjects such as abortion, years before the practice was legalized in Canada, or outraging royalists in England by daring to portray the reigning monarch, King George VI, in a short story he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. (It was “a cheap and nasty insult,” a London paper complained.) One minute he was penning radio plays; the next, dramatic novels set in Canadian cities, or short stories for Ladies’ Home Journal, or whimsical columns about family life; and, through it all, truest to his heart, the sports journalism that was his trademark, and which came to him more naturally than anything else.
The young Neil inhaled his father’s freedom and his mother’s sense of yearning and disappointment and refashioned them for his own personal and professional use. But he also echoed Stephen Stills in his passion for music—rock and roll, especially the guitar instrumentals of the Shadows; rhythm & blues, as discovered on late-night radio stations; and the trusty tales of Americana, the folk and country heritage available to anyone in North America at the turn of a radio dial.
Like millions of other kids, he dreamed of being in a band; like thousands, he tried to make it work; and like few others, he persevered for years with an ever-shifting cast of characters and an array of band names, from church dances, high schools, and glee clubs in Winnipeg to occasional forays into the Fourth Dimension club in Fort William, Ontario. His most enduring combo was the Squires, with whom he discovered a guitar sound, heavy on reverb; an ability to craft songs that were almost like those on the radio, except with an individual twist that annoyed most listeners but enthralled a few; and a singing voice that was anything but orthodox yet expressed the way he felt with the same individuality displayed by mavericks such as Bob Dylan.
But small clubs and school halls in Canada could only take Young so far, and as he approached his twentieth birthday, he searched around for a viable route into the future. As with Stephen Stills, the destination was more important than the journey; which is how at one moment Young might be attempting to keep alive the spirit of the Squires; at the next, channeling the spirit of Jimmy Reed on some purposefully banal blues tunes with an old school friend; or sneaking across the US border without a passport, to audition as a soloist at Elektra Records.
On December 15, 1965, he taped a series of one-man demos for the folk label that already boasted Stills’s female icon, Judy Collins, and his guitar mentor, Fred Neil, among its roster. The seven songs he unveiled that afternoon included “Sugar Mountain,” a boyish lament about old age (written when he passed twenty) that would endure in his concert repertoire for decades, and “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” the first of a long series of enigmatic lyrics that painted all around a subject without ever quite revealing their focus. But any gleam of promise was disguised by Young’s uniformly dull guitar playing—every piece set to the same plodding strum—and the banality of his other material: mock-poetic, undoubtedly Dylanesque, but entirely lacking in insight or cohesion. Elektra let him down gently.
Yet at the moment when he was seeking solo recognition, Young was also signing up for an adventure in which he was guaranteed merely a supporting role. James Johnson Jr. enlisted in the US Navy in his mid-teens but fled to avoid Vietnam. He took the customary draft-dodger road to Canada, where he founded an R&B group with the ironic name of the Sailor Boys. To camouflage his identity and legal status, Johnson disguised himself as Ricky James Matthews—and then effectively subverted his attempts at secrecy by forming another band known as the Mynah Birds (after a Toronto café) in which he was the only black member.
His sidekick in the band was “a superbad bass player named Bruce Palmer,” who numbered among his acquaintances Neil Young. Memories of this period were murky and contradictory, but around the end of 1965, the Mynah Birds found themselves a man short, with the prospect of an audition at Motown Records in Detroit on the horizon.
Matthews’s stew of contemporary R&B and Rolling Stones–inspired garage rock might have been designed to intrigue at least one of Neil Young’s musical personalities. But in keeping with his rebranding as a folkie soloist, Young had just swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic twelve-string. Matthews wasn’t daunted; Young might be able to add some folk-rock mystique to the band’s style. In mid-January 1966, the Mynah Birds drove to Detroit, where they laid out their repertoire for Motown’s staff producers. The professionals helped to tailor Matthews’s songs into acceptable shape, and after three days of sessions, a single was created, entitled “It’s My Time.” Young added only a distant acoustic guitar, and any chance to expand his role was thwarted when Motown discovered that Matthews was a fugitive from military justice. He was persuaded to turn himself in, on the promise of a future Motown deal. While he moldered for a year in a navy brig off Brooklyn, the white Mynah Birds flocked back to Canada.
Their paths would soon collide with another bunch of young hopefuls. Richie Furay, his prospects of folk stardom squashed by the collapse of the Au Go Go Singers and the Company, was now reduced to working in a factory in Massachusetts. Early in 1966, he wrote to his distant friend Stephen Stills. To his surprise, he received a phone call from California. Stills gushed down the wire that he had just formed a folk-rock band and that Furay was the vital missing ingredient. Furay packed up and flew out to California, to be greeted by an exuberant Stills and the news that his combo was now a duo. “We started shooting folk songs we had written at each other,” Furay recalled. The pair set themselves up in a one-room apartment on Fountain Avenue, four blocks down from Sunset Boulevard, and waited for fate to intervene.
Meanwhile, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer set out from Toronto on an erratic course southwest, which would lead them across the US border—with the customary Canadian explanation that they were merely taking the long cut to British Columbia on superior American roads (US customs officials always approved). Mishaps and delays perfectly timed their arrival in Hollywood to coincide—in an accident that would surely make the perfect opening for the screenplay of The Buffalo Springfield Story—with Stills and Furay heading along Sunset in the opposite direction. Precisely who recognized whom is lost in the endless retelling of this story, although Young made identification easier by driving a hearse. “Neil came over to the apartment that night, and he brought Bruce Palmer with him,” Richie Furay recalled.
“Everything happened fast for us,” Furay remembered with awe. “One day, Stephen and I are sitting around in a little apartment, writing songs; the next we’re playing for fifty people at the Whisky. Three weeks later, we have people lined up around the block to see us, including all these record company presidents.” In Young, Stills, Palmer, and Furay, they had the makings of a band, minus a drummer. Barry Friedman, who worked at the Troubadour and was an early booster, put them together with Dewey Martin, an outspoken would-be R&B singer with more professional experience than the other four combined. Martin tipped the balance in favor of Canada, three members to two, and ensured that four of this putative band now believed they could be the front man. Only the enigmatic Bruce Palmer (accurately portrayed on their first album cover as “inscrutable” and “the unknown factor”) was content to lurk in the shadows.
Friedman’s informal network ensured that the five men rented two adjoining rooms in a beat-up Hollywood motel, which boasted an empty lounge that now doubled as a rehearsal studio. Within a few days, the quintet (still unnamed) was offered an unbilled set at the Troubadour. At which point someone saw a steamroller, somewhere, which carried on its side the brand of the Buffalo-Springfield Roller Company. The sign was discreetly purloined, and Buffalo Springfield were born. Van Dyke Parks always insisted that he had christened the band, while others assumed Friedman was responsible. Assorted variants of the tale appeared in interviews and press releases ever afterward, although two ingredients remained constant: there had been a steamroller, and there was now a band.
Four days after the Troubadour show, and with just a handful of songs to their name, they were on a brief California jaunt, opening for the Byrds; then a run of local high schools, to check their teen appeal; and finally, just a month into their collective career, they were resident at the Whisky for six weeks, and such a hot folk-rock property that they required careful supervision. Instead, they found a couple of managers.
I had seen these two way-out record producers riding around in their long limousine, one of them skinny and quiet, the other one with a beard and a carload of enthusiasm. They were just right for us.
—Stephen Stills, 1966
Blame Tom Wolfe, whose 1965 profile of Phil Spector (“The First Tycoon of Teen”) in the New York Herald Tribune created the myth of the modern pop starmaker. Thereafter every entrepreneur worthy of the name needed a gimmick, a style, a presence that would cast their clients into the shadows. Charlie Greene and Brian Stone did not disappoint. Having set their mark by manufacturing unlikely stars—not to mention proto-hippie icons—out of Sonny and Cher, they were happy to bask in their own self-styled charisma. The details mounted up: matching limos, each equipped with a TV, a desk, and a bar; antelope tuxes; an office on Sunset, peopled by girls in waist-high miniskirts. No wonder that they were being cited as “Hollywood’s hit purveyors of the mod mystique and trog cult.”
Greene and Stone moved in on Buffalo Springfield like cheetahs. No matter that Stephen Stills and Richie Furay had just signed a management contract with Barry Friedman; the predators nudged him aside and began to talk about sums of money that sounded incredible for an unsigned band. On June 8, 1966, they procured the requisite signatures on a contract that would give them not only the customary 25 percent of the band’s earnings, but also 75 percent ownership of the publishing company they intended to form for the band. Later that week, they approached Atlantic Records, to whom they had shopped Sonny and Cher eighteen months earlier. Label boss Ahmet Ertegun flew back from Mexico City to see the Springfield at the Whisky. “I was completely blown away,” he recalled. “The talent in that band was obvious, from the first time I saw them. And I couldn’t resist Stephen Stills. He reminded me of Bobby Darin, who I had signed about ten years earlier. The great thing about Bobby was that he probably had a better sense of time than almost anyone I ever worked with. He was always swinging. And Stephen was like that, too. Bobby would not play second fiddle to anybody. He basically had to be in the driver’s seat. And I recognized the same thing in Stephen.”
Greene and Stone had given the band a $5,000 advance on signing the management deal; now they recouped immediately, as Atlantic not only splashed out on the band, but paid the canny managers $12,000 for half their share of the Springfield’s publishing. The two entrepreneurs proceeded to sell themselves with the same vigor that they were applying to their new clients. They even claimed to have been responsible for finding the legendary steamroller sign and then seeking a group to fit the brand. As Charlie Greene noted, “Money is now no problem. We have it. What counts now is achievement.”
First came publicity. The hand of a Hollywood agent could be detected when the press were informed that Dean Martin’s daughter, Deana, had heard the Springfield on the radio, and phoned their “manager,” one Steve Stills, to request that they play her eighteenth-birthday party. “Steve asked her for a date,” this unlikely tale continued, “but specified it had to be in the morning because he’s busy all the rest of the time. Now he’s showing up at the Holmby Hills home of the Martins to pick up Deana and they go for horseback rides.” Two objectives achieved: publicity for the Springfield, on the back of the Rat Pack, and a timely boost for a teenage girl who was about to launch her own singing career. Nothing more was heard of the Stills-Martin liaison.
“Everyone in the music industry these days seems to be talking about a new group, Buffalo Springfield,” an influential teen magazine claimed four months into their career. Peter Noone, the toothy heartthrob who fronted chart sensations Herman’s Hermits, did his best to sell the Springfield to British fans (“They’re fantastic . . . going to be really big”). As Richie Furay remembered, “We were told from the very first time we performed that we were going to be the biggest thing that ever happened. And we believed it.” Only in retrospect could Furay recognize that “there were so many vultures around us that were trying to lead us this way or that way. It was really difficult for us.”
None of that difficulty was apparent when the band performed live. Like the Beatles, who were adamant that they never sounded as good as when they were unknowns in Hamburg, the Springfield launched from a peak. Their sets combined original material, contributed almost entirely by Stills and Young, with raucous covers of R&B hits such as “In the Midnight Hour” and “Keep On Pushing.” Their “gimmick,” at a time when pop guitarists restricted themselves to an interruption between verses, was the guitar reciprocity between Young (ostensibly the band’s lead instrumentalist) and Stills. Their interplay would almost always be described in terms of combat—duels, battles, wars—but the protagonists shrugged off this interpretation, preferring to see it as a conversation. As Stills recalled, “We developed that thing where, after each of us has gone nuts, one of us will pick up a little phrase we learned from Jimmy Reed, or Chuck Berry, or Keith Richards—the masters, in other words—and the other guy plays exactly the same thing. It was never that sense of competition that everybody made it out to be.”
Sadly, as with the Beatles, the ecstatic catharsis of the band’s live performances was never captured professionally on tape, although early in their career they did briefly explore the outer limits of melodic expression in the recording studio. “Buffalo Stomp (Raga)” pushed the Byrds’ post-Coltrane modal explorations into the realm of the avant-garde, over a single unwavering chord. As Stills flirted with the melody of the Beatles’ “If I Needed Someone,” Young pushed out beyond key signatures with a reckless, joyful lack of concern. It was as if the band had been allowed a preview of the Velvet Underground performing “Run Run Run”—which is possible, as VU acetates had been given to the Springfield’s label many months earlier. (Meanwhile, David Crosby and Graham Nash had seen the Velvet Underground perform with their Exploding Plastic Inevitable revue at the Trip on Sunset Strip in May 1966.) Onstage, the Springfield would extend this free-form extravagance, Stills never quite leaving the harmonic terrain of the blues, Young content to offer atonal shards of guitar noise.
Nothing like this ever came close to appearing on Buffalo Springfield’s albums. Having imbibed their own publicity too deeply, Greene and Stone now viewed themselves as record producers, with the result that the band’s early singles and debut LP were rickety wooden frames, ready to be fleshed out by someone who understood how to build a wall of sound.
The Springfield themselves were too engrossed in internal politics to notice, at least until it was too late. The war that many observers claimed to witness onstage was actually enacted in the studio—quietly, but with demoralizing consequences. When the band’s three avowed composers entered Gold Star Studios in Hollywood to show off their wares, Richie Furay had to take a minor role compared to Stills, George against the latter’s John-and-Paul. Meanwhile, Young offered up his own compositions, with Stills and Furay chiming supportively behind him.
To Stills’s fury, Young’s “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” was earmarked as the band’s first single. To Young’s horror, his voice was declared uncommercial by Greene and Stone, and Richie Furay was schooled to imitate the composer’s phrasing, but not his whine. The same substitution was maintained during the album sessions, although Young was permitted to chant two songs that Furay simply lacked the vocal menace to handle. As a sign that their producer-managers didn’t fully understand what they were doing, one of those Young cameos, “Burned,” was chosen as their second release. Whether or not he could sing, the Springfield were being presented as Neil Young’s band.
In terms of orthodox song construction, of reflecting the scene around him, Stephen Stills was by far the most commercial composer of the three. His songs added the slightest tinge of folk and country to the pop melodicism of Lennon and McCartney, and echoed the romantic irony the Beatles had displayed on their Rubber Soul album.
In keeping with his public image, Young’s material was more mysterious and melancholy. The first lengthy press profile of the Springfield painted Stills as loud and extroverted; Young as “Sensitive, poetic and extremely nonviolent, because ‘I used to get beat up a lot when I was a kid.’ ” The first two of those qualities were evident in his songs, couched in a mood of gentle desolation. He might be inaudible on the band’s first single, bar the keening voice of his harmonica, but his soulfulness could not be masked. On their second, he cried out incoherent words of despair (“burned . . . flashed”) as if he were speaking a secret teen language. Stills, meanwhile, was approaching his lovers with medieval courtesy, as the title of “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” illustrated. Young’s songs were urgent, compelling, oppressive; as yet, Stills’s work was merely melodic, well-crafted, and eager to impress, shining where Young’s clouded any possibility of romantic fulfilment. But, crucially, Young’s songs did not sell.
PROTEST! Police mistreatment of youth on Sunset Blvd.
In front of PANDORA’s BOX, 8118 Sunset Strip.
Youth will not be pushed off the Sunset Strip!!! Police must stop being the pawns of unscrupulous real estate interests!!
NO MORE shackling of 14 & 15 yr olds; arbitrary arrests of youths; disrespect and abuse of youths by police.
—Leaflet handed out to kids in Hollywood, November 1966
The Sunset Strip in West Hollywood was the playground of movie stars and socialites, a gallery of flashing neon, deluxe convertibles, and celebrities who lived out their hedonistic fantasies in front of photographers and gawking onlookers. Then in 1965 the Byrds took up residence at Ciro’s, where the menu’s Early Bird Special was rechristened to celebrate the quaintly spelled guests. Other venues shifted their focus teen-ward, and a street once synonymous with adult sophistication was now filled with underage admirers of youthful rebellion.
The city fathers regarded this development with distaste and collaborated with the local police department to banish these low-spending, high-maintenance, provocatively clad kids from the Strip. Several venues had their permits to admit customers under the age of twenty-one withdrawn; others were forced to insist that no one under eighteen could be admitted to dance, let alone drink, unless accompanied by a responsible adult. The final stage in the forced rebranding of this entertainment paradise was the introduction in early November 1966 of a ten o’clock curfew for those unwanted teenagers.
On the eleventh of that month, the first disobedient teens gathered in protest but were quickly dispersed. A more organized rally was planned the next night, outside Pandora’s Box, one of the clubs crippled by the curfew. Every weekend into early December, rival lines of riot police and righteous teenagers glared, sparred, and jostled with each other. The youngest of those who had ignored the 10:00 p.m. deadline were carted away in cuffs, while their peers marched with picket signs, blew bubbles in the faces of their enemy, or simply offered them flowers. As the Los Angeles Free Press noted, “The enormous crowds that have gathered around Pandora’s Box to demonstrate, to agitate and to spectate are a powder keg. If this powder keg is ignored, if its nature is over-simplified, it may well explode.” For Hollywood teenagers, either too young or too privileged to be serving in Vietnam, the skirmishes on the Strip provided a gentle introduction to repression and the politics of generational divide.
Not everyone in the wider pop community shared this sense of outrage. A few days after the first of what were soon branded “Riots on Sunset Strip,” Frank Zappa composed and recorded a song that simultaneously accused the CIA of infiltrating Hollywood’s privileged neighborhoods and dismissed the marchers and their friends as “a vast quantity of plastic people.” But the “riots” drew musicians and actors alike to witness, and in some cases join, the protests. David Crosby, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson went down the first weekend with cameras; Crosby watched from an amused distance while Fonda threw himself into the crowd and was promptly arrested.
Crosby now moved easily among Hollywood’s young lions, artists, and radical fashion designers, and Fonda shared his lifelong passion for sailing. (Fonda had also just finished making the movie The Wild Angels with director Roger Corman—who regularly employed Crosby’s father, Floyd, as a cinematographer.) Such elite company was still only visible from a distance by Buffalo Springfield, who were in San Francisco when Fonda was arrested. But two weeks later they were back at their spiritual home, the Whisky. Their Saturday-night show on November 26 featured a reunion between Stills and Peter Tork, who briefly joined the band onstage for an a cappella rendition of a kid’s song written by his brothers, “Alvin the Alligator.” Then Stills drove a few blocks over to Pandora’s Box: “I went down to see what it was about—or drove past it, actually,” he explained a few weeks later. With several decades’ further hindsight, he recalled: “I’d been working on [a song], a shout-out to the guys on the line in Vietnam. Then I came upon this stupid situation on Sunset Boulevard. I turned the car around and went back to my house and finished the song in the time it took me to write down the lyrics.”
As his lifestyle became more erratic in the 1970s, Stills would sometimes claim that this song, given the semi-ironic title “For What It’s Worth,” had nothing to do with Sunset Strip—that it was solely about Vietnam, or maybe about some revolution that he believed he had seen firsthand, bullets flying around his head, as a kid in Central America. Sometimes he even boasted that he’d written it in 1964. But nobody in Los Angeles at the time believed for an instant that Stills was writing about anything other than their very own riots, which petered out before Christmas 1966.
By then, the Springfield had recorded Stills’s song, hooked around a bass line, guitar harmonics from Young that rang like a ship’s bell, and a chorus so wonderfully vague in its disgust and unease that it could be transferred from protest to protest down the decades without a word being changed. Yet for all its timeless universality, “For What It’s Worth” was less a plea for action than a disconsolate request for a generation to notice what was happening beyond its psychedelic bubble. Stills was a reporter, not a participant, and even those on the barricades were nothing more than “children,” crying “hooray for our side.” In the end, the fear was not injustice, or violence, or repression, but the very act of being afraid; the paranoia that the man might “come and take you away,” rather than the man itself.
Further afield, “For What It’s Worth” served as a beacon for those alarmed by the war in Vietnam, protestors and soldiers alike; and its gentle humanity, embodied by Stills’s expertly controlled vocal performance, ensured that it fit into all-hit radio alongside the likes of “Penny Lane,” “Happy Together,” and “Dedicated to the One I Love.” It proved to be an unrepeatable achievement for the Springfield, combining utter simplicity with a political resonance that would endure beyond the lifetime of the band.
For three glorious weeks in spring 1967, Stills could bask in the pleasure of seeing two of his compositions in the national Top 40 chart, as the Springfield were joined by Van Dyke Parks’s genteel, baroque arrangement of “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” for the Mojo Men. It may be no coincidence that this was exactly when Neil Young’s commitment to the Springfield began to waver, leaving Stills’s fresh dominance unchallenged. As his songwriting suggested, Young regarded the pressures of fame with the same ambiguity that a cat greets a plate of vegetables. Success was fine; being constantly under scrutiny and under obligation was much less comfortable. “Neil flipped out in the Whisky, and so did I, and so did Bruce,” Stills recalled, “because there were all these chicks hanging out and feeding us more and better dope.” Young had begun to suffer from epileptic fits, and soon he would recognize the link between his seizures and psychological pressure. Then another discovery: to prevail in a confrontation, he could suggest to his bandmates that he was about to lose control. And that in turn seemed to enable him to keep the fits at bay.
Meanwhile, even the least acute observer of the backstage relationship between Stills and Young could register the tension. Dewey Martin was both acute and an unwilling referee: “They were both egomaniacs. There was always a fight—over who played what solo and how long it would be. We were playing somewhere down in Orange County, and they came off the stage and started fighting, and it was like two old ladies going at each other. I had to get between the two of them and pull them apart.” Stories like this accumulated, with a variety of weapons—chairs, guitars, sometimes simply fists—but always with the same protagonists, and the same inconclusive outcome. (One exception was the Springfield’s first night in New York, where Bruce Palmer turned up his bass to the point that it exacerbated Stills’s congenital hearing problem. Stills asked him to turn down, and Palmer “slapped me across the face. So I went completely purple with rage and put him through the drums.”)
With Johnny Carson and Monterey looming, one of the Springfield’s two creative linchpins suddenly vanished. There were multiple reasons why Neil Young might have abandoned the band on the verge of recognizable success: fear, boredom, physical and psychological insecurity, resentment at being outflanked by Stills, ultimately a refusal to play the game when the game got serious. For the moment, Buffalo Springfield survived; but, not for the last time, Young’s passive withdrawal placed him in a position of power, leaving Stills behind him to pick up the pieces and somehow carry on. Meanwhile, Young watched from a distance, waiting for the right moment to return.