Berkeley political activists are going to join San Francisco’s hippies in a love feast that will, hopefully, wipe out the last remnants of mutual scepticism and suspicion. So they’re going to stand up together in what both hope to be a new and strong harmony.
—Radical newspaper Berkeley Barb, January 1967
It was time to cast off divisions, gather forces, and lay foundations for a new society. The radical lion would embrace the psychedelic dove; street fighters would commune with poets; iconoclasts become seekers of eternal truths. The hordes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, were a Gathering of the Tribes, a Human Be-In, in which everyone who sought a revolution of the body or mind could recognize and embody their true selves. “Welcome to the first manifestation of the Brave New World,” said the master of ceremonies.
Speaker after speaker set out utopian visions. Acid guru Timothy Leary unveiled his manifesto: “Turn onto the scene; tune into what is happening; and drop out.” Antiwar activist Jerry Rubin called for rebellion against the conflict in Vietnam. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane let loose their fantasies in music that knew no boundaries. Psychedelic adventurer Dick Alpert dreamed aloud the turned-on, tuned-in future: “In about seven or eight years, the psychedelic population of the United States will be able to vote anybody into office they want to. Imagine what it would be like to have anybody in high political office with our understanding of the universe.”
Beyond the borders of San Francisco, the Mobilization peace activists confronted the draft system that clouded the future of every young American male. Almost two years shy of the presidential election, leading figures in Lyndon Johnson’s own party were clearing open ground to the left of their embattled leader. Senator Eugene McCarthy was the first to speak out unashamedly against the war in February 1967, followed by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. By early March, Robert Kennedy, brother of the late president, was calling for immediate peace talks and a cessation of US bombing raids.
Fantasy was redrawing reality, or so it seemed to the young. True, there were reverses: despite the “riots,” and Buffalo Springfield’s hit record, the disputed haunts of Sunset Strip were being demolished or closed to teenagers. The Trip, for example, rebranded itself the New Crescendo, substituting a Latin dance group for its hippie rock bands. But who cared about The Trip when the trip was becoming a universal experience? There was a brief moment, in the early months of 1967, when LSD—acid, instant expansion of the mind—was freely available on certain streets in California and New York, and (as yet) perfectly legal. No wonder that the drug’s self-styled prophet, Timothy Leary, was the sage of the moment.
Creativity and expansion of the consciousness were synonymous in this new Shangri-la. David Crosby offered his services as a guide: “The inside of your head is a gigantic spaceship, and we are blinded babies walking around pulling switches, trying to find out how to turn on the light. The switch is there, the capability is there. You could be a full telepathic. You could surpass this whole plane and flick to a whole other thing instantly, if you knew how to do it! Anybody could do it if they found the controls, and the controls are in your head. So: get high and look. Play around and find out what you can do, ’cos you can do a lot more than you think you can.”
How did this multidimensional understanding manifest itself? “Rock and roll groups have to use telepathic messages or else they can’t play really good music,” Crosby explained. “You get up to about a seventy percent level with just sheer technique, but to play the really magic stuff you have to be in rapport with the other cats. You’ve got to know exactly what is happening on levels that are nonverbal. You’ve got to be linked to the other people.” Without that telepathy among the Byrds, “we’re shitty,” he admitted. “You can fuck us up with a bad sound system, a bad audience, or by putting us through bad scenes before we get there.” Or, he warned prophetically, “it can happen by one of us, or two of us, or three of us, or all four of us getting our egos involved and forgetting that we love each other, and that we’re all the same person and that it’s cool. We love each other. When we remember that, we play. When we don’t, we make noise.”
All too often in 1967, Crosby’s message seemed to be ignored. Possibly their most vocal fan, Derek Taylor, reported dejectedly that summer: “The Byrds, one of the best groups in the world, were again terrible in the Whisky here. I cannot work it out. They seem to have a death-wish which is only thwarted by their indomitable heartbeat. I love them and deplore them.”
Yet on record, the Byrds’ output was virtually flawless. Their February 1967 album Younger Than Yesterday demonstrated a power shift within the group, as Crosby and bassist Chris Hillman supplanted Roger McGuinn as the prime creative force. Hillman’s songs, like those of Stephen Stills across town, were masterful interpretations of current pop styles; Crosby’s, by comparison, hinted at that fifth dimension heralded on the previous Byrds LP. While his portrait of the “Renaissance Fair” floated and soared with psychedelic majesty, “Mind Gardens” cast off orthodox song structure with melodramatic swagger, as Crosby intoned a portentous, slightly clumsy metaphorical poem over a tangle of electric twelve-string guitars, some woven into the mix backward to heighten the sense of stoned surrealism. So fertile was Crosby’s imagination at this point that he and the Byrds could afford to discard, and then apparently forget, arguably the most beautiful song he had yet composed, “It Happens Each Day.” He recorded a blueprint for the song, multitracking his own harmony vocals for the first time and approaching a wary romantic encounter with imagery that was both eerie and transcendent.
Better still was to come. From spring into early summer, he labored to perfect the song that would become his first Byrds A side, “Lady Friend.” His bandmates were unenthusiastic, especially when Crosby stripped out their vocals and substituted several layers of his own voice. At the last moment, he added a chorus of trumpets, soaring over the ecstatic guitar riff like an angel choir. It was a thrilling, remarkable record, a triumph of solitary inspiration, and the pinnacle of his work with the Byrds. But it didn’t sell, with the result that Crosby himself came to believe that it was an artistic failure, rather than one of the finest records of this or any other year.
I’m cheesed off with everything at the moment. I find it hard to live my life the way I want to.
—Graham Nash, January 1967
Crosby’s collision of creative discovery and commercial disenchantment was suffered by several of his friends that year, as artistic innovation, aided by chemical and herbal stimulation, outpaced the ability of the public to understand exactly what was going on.
The Hollies began the year at a peak of popularity, having established themselves in America with the banal but irresistible “Bus Stop.” But his recent immersion in the acid experience had forced Graham Nash to confront their output with a disenchanted eye. “I analyzed a few of the songs we’d written, and they were bullshit,” he told Barry Miles. “They were really, really bad songs. I decided then I wouldn’t churn out so much rubbish. I would go more on quality than quantity. Now I’m taking my time over songs and really analyzing them as I go along. They’re a lot better for it, I think. Because the kids aren’t fools, you know that, man!”
He set himself the task of dragging the Hollies, a bunch of happy drinkers who were wary of outthinking their audience, into the psychedelic era. “Graham began to be quite different from us,” remembered his childhood friend Allan Clarke. “He wanted to be something other than he was with the Hollies.” That was manifested first in his appearance. “Graham was wandering around in a frock, and thanks to him, we all had caftans,” Bobby Elliott recalled with an embarrassed grin.
Nash knew no half measures. If acid wasn’t available, he found other ways to remake the world: “I had four tape recorders, one in each corner of the room, and I would play the signal from one to the other. The distance between the record head and the reproduction head is about a quarter of an inch, so everything would get staggered slightly. And then I’d drink amazing quantities of brandy and put one of those strobe lights on, and I was in heaven for a while.”
His challenge was to persuade the Hollies, and their fans, to let him lead them astray. Everything about their current situation annoyed or frustrated him, from performing live (“I want to pack up a lot of the touring thing”) to churning out three-monthly fodder for teenage kids (“I would like it for once if we did something that really shook people, even if it wasn’t commercially acceptable”). He imagined touring with a string quartet, or ballet dancers, or a poet. “I don’t want to see a bloody poet!” guitarist Tony Hicks exploded.
In May 1967, the London music scene was ripe with rumors that Nash was about to leave the Hollies for a solo career. For once, he was beyond the reach of the pop press, having taken his wife on the hippie trail through Morocco. His destination was chosen, he explained, “because it’s completely different and because no one else goes there.” But he had heard the Rolling Stones expounding about the opportunities that North Africa provided for sunshine and herbal invigoration. “I took the train,” he explained a couple of years later, “from Casablanca to Marrakesh, and also Tangier and Rabat. It cooled me down a lot, I think.” Clutching his acoustic guitar, he began to assemble a song called “Marrakesh Express” that would simply recount what he saw on the trip: “Every line in that song is true,” he recalled. “I was open enough to react to the circumstances and lucky enough to be in the right place for this melody to come through.”
Nash returned to London less angry about the Hollies, but he was already pushing his colleagues beyond the point of comfort. The B side of “On a Carousel” was a psychedelic anthem entitled “All the World Is Love”—five months before the Beatles declared “All You Need is Love” and recruited Nash to sing with them on TV. June 1967 saw the release not only of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper—acclaimed almost in the moment as an epochal moment in Western civilization—but also the Hollies’ Evolution, with flower-power artwork prepared by Nash’s friends in the art collective, The Fool. The Hollies hadn’t traveled as far or as quickly as the Beatles, but this record tackled such incongruous fare as existential despair (“Then the Heartaches Begin”), teenage carnality (“The Games We Play”), and sexual inadequacy (“Rain on the Window”). There was also “Stop Right There,” a frank admission of marital disharmony: “I wrote it the morning the Hollies came back from America,” Nash recalled.
Stranger times lay ahead. That autumn saw Nash admitting to a teen magazine that he had been so stoned the previous night he had shaved off his beard, though he couldn’t remember doing it. The bewildered journalist found him burning joss sticks at his Bayswater home and listening to Frank Zappa. Nash explained that while he had once been “an unenthusiastic atheist,” he now believed “there is someone in control of the universe.” Earthly racial differences could be explained by extraterrestrial intervention, he added: “It’s my belief that other planets each put their own type on Earth, and are watching to see who wins out.”
Despite his rapid transformation from pop star to sage, Nash believed that it was “impossible” that the band would ever move too quickly for their admirers. Only a few weeks after the Byrds’ “Lady Friend,” he masterminded an equally majestic single, “King Midas in Reverse.” For all its orchestral pomp and rhapsodic sense of release, the song was a stark admission of misery amid success, with Clarke and Nash harmonizing: “It’s plain to see it’s hopeless, going on the way we are.” As Clarke recalled, the Hollies’ producer Ron Richards “said that ‘King Midas’ was not going to be a hit. He said that, if it was up to him, he wouldn’t release it; but if we wanted to, he could. And it turned out he was right.”
Although Nash and Clarke still insisted on the value of “King Midas,” the rest of the band wanted to pursue a more conservative path. But it was too late to alter Butterfly, the Hollies’ most overtly psychedelic experiment. Issued just five months after Evolution, it baffled the band as much as their public. There was no mistaking the album’s dominant force, as Nash’s vocals now outnumbered those by the group’s ostensible lead singer. He made no attempt to disguise his sources of inspiration on the blatantly trippy “Postcard” and “Wishyouawish,” or on the declaration, “Ego is dead,” which he contributed to “Elevated Observations,” or indeed on “Maker,” an overt homage to David Crosby’s “Mind Gardens.” Perhaps inevitably, Crosby now proved to be Nash’s strongest supporter. Without actually naming him, Crosby revealed that he had a friend who was “locked in with a certain set of people at a certain level. All of a sudden you walk over and you give him about five times as much room and respect as anybody else has given him, and bam, he goes, Zap! Change! Grow! Give him room, man.”
They are true musicians. I’ve seen them get so engrossed in their music, they eventually got in a circle and completely forgot there was an audience.
—Ottawa Journal profile of Buffalo Springfield, 1967
The success of “For What It’s Worth” didn’t just threaten the internal stability of Buffalo Springfield; it also made them query their future. “We didn’t want to get pegged as a ‘protest’ group,” Stills recalled. “Nothing would have been more silly than finding a list of things to get upset about, so that I could write some more songs about how outraged I was.” Instead, “We were hassling among ourselves as to what to do next, because what to do next had suddenly become very important. We became scared—we didn’t want to blow it.”
The Byrds and the Hollies had evaded a similar crisis by simply repeating the style of their first hit. Only later did they begin to venture into unfamiliar territory. The Springfield’s album had been produced in the same spirit: establish a sound and stick to it. But once Greene and Stone were ousted, and Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun let the band themselves (or, more accurately, its individual members) loose in the studio, any effort at maintaining a distinctive Springfield brand was abandoned. “We want to make every song different,” Stills insisted in 1967. “The Beatles did the same thing.”
The Beatles also relished recording songs with anarchic fade-outs: conversation, orgasmic groans, and raucous jamming all crammed into the mix. But the Springfield did it first—only to hide the evidence for a further six years. “Ballad of the Bluebird,” as Stephen Stills originally envisioned the song, was an ode to the imaginary woman in his Judy Collins fantasy. Trimmed in length, to less than two minutes, and title, the June 1967 single of “Bluebird” was an astonishing exhibition of guitar virtuosity and self-confidence. It mixed Stills’s unfeasibly dextrous fretwork with Young’s more visceral lead, striking a perfect balance between tight control and fearless improvisation. But the single merely hinted at what had happened in the studio. Stills’s concept was to dissolve his sophisticated pop song into the kind of extended jam that the Springfield would exhibit onstage. And that was how “Bluebird” survived in their live repertoire, as a vehicle for the band to explore sonic adventures that, as the LA Times reported later in the year, “made the psychedelic efforts of the [Blue] Cheer and the [Grateful] Dead sound amateurish.” It would continue to grow, often encompassing themes such as Ravel’s “Bolero,” until by 1968 it might extend for twenty minutes or more.
By then, Stills was already imagining that the band would record “a symphonically formed rock and roll piece that takes up one side of an album.” In 1967, he prepared a ten-minute edit of his “Bluebird” jam, feral howls, random dialogue and all, for the band’s second LP. Then he thought again, chopped the tape where the jam began, and hired banjo maestro Charlie Chin to add a coda that was the converse of psychedelia: a throwback to the Appalachians before electricity reached the mountains.
Neil Young’s aesthetic favored immediacy over the considered rethinking in which Stills indulged. In 1967, he was already beginning to perfect the “Aw, shucks” style of explanation that would become his trademark response to queries about his work: “Just because I wrote a song doesn’t mean I know anything. I don’t know very much about all the things that are going on around here, all the scenes, all the questions. All I know is just what I’m writing about. And even then, I don’t really know.” His skill was to channel that uncertainty into songs that were both enigmatic and direct, such as “Mr. Soul,” issued alongside “Bluebird” on the Springfield’s first post-hit single. Besides introducing a lifelong guiding principle (“Is it strange I should change?”), the song wallowed in his newfound fame even as he despised it. Young was both inspired and repelled by the girls who surrounded the band. As Tai Stills recalled, “The groupies pursued them relentlessly, like at the backstage door, where they let the guys know they would do anything, which ran the full gamut. My brother would call me at two or three in the morning and ask if I would escort his guests out of his hotel suite and down to a car.”
Teenage fans attracted to those occupying the Top 40 had no further need to concern themselves with the Springfield. No matter that “Bluebird” and “Mr. Soul” represented the band’s creative forces at their respective peaks: the single failed ignominiously to match their previous success (though not as ignominiously as “Lady Friend” did for the Byrds).
It did not help that Young was unavailable to promote the record. Instead, he had fallen into the eccentric company of arranger-producer Jack Nitzsche, veteran of sessions with Phil Spector and the Rolling Stones. Denny Bruce managed Nitzsche for many years: “Jack was a very bright, articulate guy who always ended up getting in trouble. He was just a natural rebel, who hated anyone to tell him what he should be doing with his career.” He was therefore the perfect match for Young. As Bruce recalled, “Neil played me a new song called ‘Expecting to Fly’ in his one-room log cabin. He told me, ‘This is something I’ll probably never get to do with Buffalo Springfield,’ because at the time there was some criticism of his vocals, both from the group and the record company.
“So, he played it, and afterward he said, ‘You know, I can really hear the Everly Brothers doing this song.’ Now Jack was my best friend at the time, and he had a meeting a week earlier to produce the next Everlys LP. So it didn’t take a rocket scientist to say to Jack, ‘I’d like you to meet my good friend Neil Young, who has a great song.’ This was before we all had tape recorders, so I had to arrange a meeting up in Neil’s cabin.
“Neil played maybe as far as the end of the first verse, and Jack interrupted him and said, ‘Fuck the Everlys, you’ve gotta do this yourself.’ Neil got into this whole thing about, ‘I don’t know if I can bring a song like this into the group.’ Jack said, ‘I don’t give a shit about your group. I know guys who can play this the way it should be played.’ ” Nitzsche took Neil into the studio, without telling the Springfield, and helped him create a suitable soundscape for an eerie song about the traps and snares that surround romance. “Jack gave Neil his solo career with that song,” Denny Bruce said. “And it gave Neil the confidence to leave the group. Jack gave a copy to Mick Jagger, who called him up and said, ‘This is the best record I’ve ever heard.’
“Neil was so impressed by that he persuaded me and Jack we should all move to London. So we all got our passports ready—and then DJs in the States started to flip over the ‘Bluebird’ single, and play ‘Mr. Soul.’ When Neil heard himself on the radio, he said, ‘Perhaps I’ll stay here after all’ and suddenly he was back in the band.” Young offered a more prosaic explanation for his return: “I was starving to death. I didn’t have any money.”
Jagger’s reaction wasn’t unique. When “Expecting to Fly” was released, Graham Nash and Allan Clarke played it endlessly and were inspired to write their own avian ballad, “Wings,” complete with two rival sets of lyrics and breathtaking vocal harmonies.
Stephen Stills had one last shot at combining creative advancement with chart recognition. Aside from his ongoing infatuation with the idea of Judy Collins, and the ever-present attention of his more sexually aware fans, Stills harbored an ongoing crush on another female vocalist. Before the Springfield had formed, he had seen “a horrible group with a great singer” at the Matrix in San Francisco: the Great Society, fronted by Grace Slick. In her pre-Airplane incarnation, Slick played guitar, piano, and flute onstage, besides singing like the embodiment of self-assurance. Stills was simultaneously entranced and terrified, desperate to form a group with her, but too scared to ask. “Back then I was really very neurotic and would always think of things to do, then not do them,” he admitted later.
In time, he would be introduced to Slick by Crosby, and lose none of his dry-mouthed admiration, even when he could hang out with her at the Jefferson Airplane house on Fulton Street. Jamming at Crosby’s house around the time of Monterey, the two men became fixated with a simple chord change in the Springfield’s favorite D-modal guitar tuning. Crosby offered a vocal riff, and Stills concocted a song about his imaginary life with Grace Slick. Like the unwitting star of “Bluebird,” the “Rock ’n’ Roll Woman” of his new song was tinged with sadness but remained, like Slick herself, impossible to pin down (not that Stills had dared to ask). Crosby stood over the Springfield in the studio until the track had been perfected. “Rock ’n’ Roll Woman” hit radio hard, climbed valiantly toward the Top 40—and then stalled just outside, ensuring that it would never escape cult status.
All of these songs—“Bluebird,” “Mr. Soul,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Woman”—were included on the November 1967 release of Buffalo Springfield Again, arguably the most eclectic album of the mid-1960s. So too was Richie Furay’s first recorded composition, “A Child’s Claim to Fame,” which affectionately scolded Young for his semidetached attitude to the band: “Make-believe is all you know, and make-believe is a game.” Young clearly wasn’t too affronted, as he played on the track. Only close inspection of the album credits revealed exactly how fragmented the Springfield had become, and how many outsiders were required to translate a year of isolated sessions into a group. The New York Times reviewer described the record as “one of the most varied and weird and beautiful things I’ve heard”; too varied, as it transpired, for significant success.
David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young had all pushed themselves to peaks of creativity, imagination, and artistic courage in 1967, and each had failed to gain mass acceptance. They had outgrown their bands and were in danger of isolating themselves from their audience. Something had to change, and inevitably it would be Crosby who signaled the path all four would soon follow.
I want to retire in five years and sail off in a big schooner.
—David Crosby, May 1966
For all the energy and industry devoted to creating and preserving the image of 1967 as the Summer of Love, the twin Californian capitals of psychedelic pop were displaying extreme symptoms of exhaustion. An alternative society seemed to have been born in San Francisco, around the intersection between Haight and Ashbury streets (where David Crosby could sometimes be found at the collective HQ of the Grateful Dead). Now, as George Harrison discovered when he accompanied Derek Taylor on a post–Sgt. Pepper sightseeing tour of this supposed paradise, “It was like the Bowery, with down-and-outs, desperate sick people all thinking that Derek and I were one of them.” What had once been a joyous carnival had become a commercial bonanza, as hawkers sold “hippie” trinkets and artifacts to day-trippers who had come to see the long-haired animals in their natural habitat.
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, where nobody would be shocked by commercialism, pressure was coming from within. The Mamas and the Papas were the prime movers, and headlining act, of the Monterey Pop Festival, but their progress was being checked by marital discord between John and Michelle Phillips and the increasing erraticism of Mama Cass. Her weight seesawed according to her intake of chemicals; she was arrested in London on a theft charge and opened her home to any taker who came to the door.
John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful had migrated from New York to LA, and inevitably fallen into Cass Elliot’s social circle. But their perennial air of stoned grooviness was undercut by a drug bust in which two of the band avoided arrest by fingering their pot dealer to San Francisco police. Overnight, they metamorphosed from darlings into pariahs, who were forced to bail out of the Monterey festival to avoid the possibility of a subpoena. Back in Los Angeles, there were calls to blackball and boycott the group. “DEMONSTRATE YOUR DISLIKE,” screamed the ads placed by the Freedom League of the Brotherhood of Smoke. “WOULD YOU PAY FOR A FINK’S TRIP? Complain to your DJ about Spoonful on radio. Burn your Spoonful albums, pictures and mementoes,” just as evangelical Christians had burned Beatles albums during John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” controversy the previous year. There was also a message for the Spoonful’s female fans: “Don’t ball them.”
It was ironic, to say the least, that the Spoonful should be busted, while David Crosby openly proselytised the use of a glittering variety of hallucinogens and other illegal stimulants. But Crosby’s enemies were closer to home. For all the stoned majesty of his public persona, epitomized by his flamboyant raps about the JFK assassination and the joys of LSD during the Byrds’ Monterey show, he was becoming increasingly isolated inside the band he had helped to form. He was omnipresent on the Californian scene, one of the few who could bridge the widening gulf between the (supposed) authenticity of the San Franciscan acid-rock bands and the (equally supposed) plasticity of Hollywood’s purveyors of pop. He could jam with Jimi Hendrix, who joined Stephen Stills and their mutual friend, drummer Buddy Miles, for an epic bout of improvised madness after Monterey. (Meanwhile in London, Hendrix was being encouraged to write songs with Graham Nash, who shared a house with Jimi’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell.) Crosby was the star most likely to pontificate on Vietnam or LBJ, free love or free dope; a twinkle-eyed presence in every significant room. But, in the eyes of his fellow Byrds, he had also become a monster of egotism and arrogance; “a little Hitler,” as Roger McGuinn would dub him.
Crosby told Johnny Rogan in 1981 that the other Byrds “were worried about me hanging round Stills, because they knew he was better than they were.”
“He was always eating into somebody,” McGuinn complained. “He was starting to lose interest in the group, and his buddies in the Buffalo Springfield and the Jefferson Airplane were saying, ‘Come on, David, you can do better than that.’ And he was saying, ‘Yeah, man, but I’ve got to be loyal to McGuinn and Hillman, I can’t let them down.’ Being noble and everything. And all this time we were wishing he’d split, because he was heavy, hard to handle, being a little too outspoken and hip for the wrong reasons, and he started getting very like a tyrant on the material.”
Gary Usher, the latest in a line of Byrds producers to meet with Crosby’s disapproval, recalled that “David was usually fighting the rest of the group” in 1967. “He was extremely difficult to work with in those days . . . if he didn’t have his own way. He knew what he wanted and could be very distasteful to be around.” Usher recalled the Byrds attempting to record “Goin’ Back,” a touching but sentimental Goffin-King song about childhood. Crosby turned it down flat, then “reluctantly agreed to cut the song, but let it be known that he would not participate or help out with any ideas. McGuinn got to a point where he just couldn’t take it anymore. Finally, he said, ‘Look here, Crosby, I’ve had enough of your bullshit. If you don’t want to be part of this song and the group, just get your ass out of here. We don’t want you or even need you.’ Crosby turned red, and you could sense him burning. He just picked his guitar up and walked out of the studio and never came back.” McGuinn’s recollection was that Crosby headed immediately over to a Jefferson Airplane session, taking with him a new song that the Byrds had attempted but never finished. “We all agreed he had to be sacked,” McGuinn said.
Around the second week of September 1967, McGuinn and Chris Hillman drove their Porsches over to Crosby’s house in Beverly Glen. What happened next has been retold so many times that it is fixed as a fake visual memory in the minds of everyone who wasn’t there. McGuinn recalled: “It was terrible, because David was in a really happy mood. David was like, ‘Hi, man, how are you?’ We walked up to him like storm troopers and said, ‘David, sit down. I got some bad news for you.’ He said, ‘What, man?’ and I said, ‘Look, Chris and I have been talking, and we have decided that we don’t want to work with you anymore.’ ‘Oh, man,’ he said. ‘Wow, man, we could make some good music together, wow,’ and I said, ‘I know, but we can make some good music without you.’ I felt bad. I still do. I’m sorry I did it. Stupid decision.”
From the vantage point of 1970, when Crosby could peer down at the Byrds far beneath his lofty perch with CSNY, he could afford to exaggerate the encounter: “They said I was crazy, impossible to work with, an egomaniac—all of which is partly true, I’m sure, sometimes—that I sang shitty, wrote terrible songs, made horrible songs, and that they would do much better without me. I took it rather to heart.” Four years later, he was prepared to admit that during his final months with the Byrds, “I was a thorough prick all the time. I don’t blame them for not liking me.” On occasion, McGuinn would suggest that the decision to leave the Byrds had been made at least in part by Crosby himself: “He just had to get out.” Stephen Stills, well acquainted with all three participants in the drama, noted wryly in 1971 that “David likes to say he got thrown out, but I think his leaving was by mutual agreement.”
That was certainly the story sold to the press in the days after his departure. Then the first issue of a new underground magazine named Rolling Stone offered the first of many subsequent variations: “His patience gone, McGuinn decided it would be better for the group’s morale if [Crosby] left. Crosby went willingly, asking only that it be made public that he had been asked to leave.”
Before this confrontation, Crosby had been waiting for the Byrds to complete their next album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Instead, he was gone before he had recorded his lead vocals for three new songs. To his everlasting disgust, the remaining Byrds did not abandon those tracks but added vocals themselves—in some cases rewriting his lyrics, because they did not have Crosby or his original manuscripts at their disposal.
One song they did not retrieve was “Triad.” Instead Crosby passed it to Jefferson Airplane, and Grace Slick’s interpretation illuminated their 1968 album Crown of Creation. The Byrds’ unfinished version, faster and sloppier, reflected a vain attempt to turn it into a pop song. It was perhaps better suited to Slick’s fearless image than to the Byrds’, being nothing less than a defense of multiple sexual partners. Once again Crosby couldn’t resist reviving the “water brothers” imagery from Stranger in a Strange Land. But the lyrics made clear that this particular threesome would involve the singer and two “sister lovers”; and that the women, or rather girls, had minds that were “still growing,” as if he was back outside Tamalpais High with Dino Valenti.
The Byrds certainly performed “Triad” at the Whisky during Crosby’s final appearances with the band; the LA Times carped that “Crosby’s voice slipped into a hackneyed nightclub style.” Yet by the time that he chose to revive the song during his CSNY concerts in late 1969, it suited Crosby to boast that his previous outfit had refused to consider playing it, on the grounds of moral outrage. “A certain member,” Crosby told an audience in Detroit, “got red in the face, and stormed out of the room saying, ‘That’s a freak-out orgy song, and I won’t sing it.’ ” McGuinn explained patiently that “David thought I was censoring him, that I was mindless and unhip . . . But ‘Triad’ was simply a bad song.” When Crosby briefly reunited with McGuinn and Hillman in 1991, the latter insisted on setting straight “one common misconception” about Crosby’s departure: “Roger and I didn’t have any trouble with David over moral grounds.” And finally, the guru of sexual experimentation had to come clean: “I spread that one around to make them look bad for throwing me out of the band.”
A few weeks before he left the Byrds, when he still imagined that he might fold “Triad” into the band’s philosophy and stay, Crosby had been anticipating a trip to Scandinavia: “I’m going to buy a boat. I got the money in the bank. Sailing is the most joyous and consciousness-expanding experience in my life, next to making love and my music.” His fantasy, besides accumulating pliant young women, was that other people might join him: “Get a bunch of boats traveling around together, a sea tribe of people that live mostly off of what they get from the seas and a little off what they traded in various places, and some of their royalties from the songs they used to write.” That last phrase was telling; Crosby clearly didn’t imagine that he would always be making music for a living.
A few weeks later, a Californian magazine declared that “Crosby has acted out his dream and dropped out! David has purchased a 58-foot schooner, and is at this moment sailing serenely somewhere in the blue Caribbean.” A more cynical reporter suggested that he had set out on a world cruise but had to cut his journey short in Florida “when he discovered that his ship had a rusty bottom.” Crosby had indeed bought a schooner designed by John G. Alden, Mayan, and it did require repairs before it could embark on epic voyages beyond civilization’s grasp. Until his settlement from the Byrds’ partnership came through, he borrowed the $22,500 required from Peter Tork of the Monkees. (Strangely, the official US Coast Guard records show that the Mayan was not legally transferred into Crosby’s name for another eighteen months, and that the purchase price was just $10; apparently such discrepancies were common in maritime circles, where sales tax was seen as an unnecessary evil.)
Crosby found the Mayan in Fort Lauderdale, having decided to revisit the welcoming community he had found in Florida five years earlier. Mama Cass flew down to see him and begged him to take her fifty or sixty miles into the Caribbean, to the shores of Bimini, in the Bahamas. It was there, so she had heard, that “a temple has been spotted, protruding two feet above the surface of the sea in well-sailed waters.” She believed this was evidence of the lost city of Atlantis. Crosby and Elliot never solved that mystery, though they did manage to track down Fort Lauderdale’s renowned Polynesian restaurant Mai-Kai, where they were spotted together in early November 1967. By then, Crosby had abandoned his immediate plans to set out on a world cruise, but not because of any deficiencies in his boat. Quite simply, he had fallen in love—not with Cass, but with another singer who would affect his life, and those of his closest friends, in surreal and unimagined ways.
As if they take their cue for their lives from the shifting shale beneath them, the people of Los Angeles are always involved in some rapturous, spectacular earthquake.
—Ellen Sander, Trips
In the final weeks of 1966, David Crosby, Peter Fonda, and former child actor Brandon de Wilde were tight companions in Hollywood—photographing the Sunset Strip riots or experimenting with new designs for “electric” clothes fitted with flashing lights. At Christmas, two of the three set off for the island of Cozumel, down the coast of Mexico from Cancun. In his memoir, Fonda recalled that Crosby’s stay was brief, as he was “totally paranoid that Gram Parsons was going to run off with his girl in his absence.” Crosby was right to worry, as the devilishly charming trust-funded Parsons did steal his girlfriend, Nancy Marthai Ross, away.
Crosby knew Nancy from Santa Barbara, where both were notorious for defying convention. So it was inevitable that they would bond when their paths crossed in 1965, by which time the five-years-older Crosby was a rock star and Ross had already abandoned one marriage to FDR’s grandson and was sleeping with movie star Steve McQueen (who was married to actress Neile Adams). Ross seems to have seduced Crosby’s imagination by refusing to have sex with him immediately, unlike the groupies who regularly serviced stars on Sunset Strip. “He thought I wouldn’t stay unless he bought a house,” she told Parsons biographer Ben Fong-Torres, “so he went and bought a beautiful house on Beverly Glen.” The purchase was insufficient to ward off the challenge from Gram Parsons, although Ross’s betrayal didn’t capsize relations between the once and future Byrds. Crosby would join Parsons in the studio in 1969 to sing a soaring harmony part on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Do Right Woman.”
Nancy Ross and Roger McGuinn had one thing in common: they both regarded David Crosby as a tyrant. He was also, Ross remembered, very unwilling to share his money. Despite this, she had apparently promised to marry him in early 1967 (although Crosby never confirmed this story). The imbalance of power between stars and their girlfriends allowed—perhaps even legitimized—such behavior. Another young woman recalled her first encounter with Stephen Stills around the same period: she said he walked up to her at a club, and without an introduction said simply, “I think you and I can make it.” She politely turned him down.
Christine Hinton, who celebrated her seventeenth birthday when “Mr. Tambourine Man” hit the Top 10, and two friends became utterly infatuated with the Byrds around 1965–66, and started a fan club for the group, which they figured would ensure regular rendezvous with the musicians. Hinton’s passion was focused on Crosby, while the others set their hearts on Chris Hillman and Gene Clark. The three even rented an apartment opposite the Whisky so they could monitor the Byrds’ regular visits there. By 1967, Hinton had moved in with Crosby, though onlookers found it difficult to decide if she was his lover or his maid.
The folksinger Roberta Joan Anderson was made of tougher stuff. Under her married name of Joni Mitchell, she had written several songs that were becoming standards. Among them was “The Circle Game,” intended to counter the mock-defeatist message of “Sugar Mountain” by her friend, fellow Canadian and fellow childhood polio victim, Neil Young. The two musicians had shared a house briefly after the collapse of her marriage. Joni’s song gave its name to an album by Tom Rush, who in turn alerted Judy Collins to Mitchell’s songwriting—the result being that Collins cut three of her songs on her Wildflowers LP, which was being readied for release as David Crosby left the Byrds.
Mitchell’s work ranged from the deeply poetic to the frankly twee, the latter sometimes taking precedence in front of an audience. Though her giggly stage persona suggested she was only in her teens, she had already packed vast experience into her twenty-five years: her illness, her battle to escape her conservative upbringing in Saskatchewan, her pregnancy at age twenty-one after a brief relationship, her marriage to an older singer, and her decision to have her months-old daughter adopted. She had made regular TV appearances in Canada; set up her own publishing company; mastered a slew of alternative guitar tunings, which helped to give her songs an otherworldly air; experimented briefly with an electric rock group, the Siegel-Schwall Band; and performed at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, where she was stunned to discover that the audience already knew who she was, even if they had never heard her sing. There she connected with another Canadian poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, in a passing liaison that would be renewed in time. She painted, which was a vocation, made hippie jewelry and decorations as a hobby, and had a voice that could slip around the octaves with ease, to the point that she would occasionally sacrifice melodic unity to the pleasure of indulging her rich vibrato. She was also shy, apparently, prone to crippling bouts of self-doubt, and, at the same time, supremely self-confident, almost along the lines of a California rock star. She looked frail and defenseless behind her chic makeup but lacked nothing when it came to ego.
Mitchell had freshly returned from her first visit to England when she settled in for a week’s residency in late September 1967 at the Gaslight Café in Coconut Grove, twenty-five miles down the Florida coast from Fort Lauderdale. Joni was the headliner, as befitted the woman whose songs had been recorded by nationally known artists. She was preceded every night by Estrella Berosini, seventeen years old, who knew David Crosby from his previous visits to the Grove. “David would sweep into the clubs with his Byrds cape on,” she recalled to Sheila Weller, and one night at the Gaslight, he marched in and told Estrella that he planned to become a record producer and wanted to work with her. Perhaps doubting his motives, Estrella told Crosby that he should hear Joni Mitchell. She claimed that Crosby replied, “She’s just another blond chick singer,” with the same certainty that he’d dismissed Buffalo Springfield. But he stayed and slid immediately into Mitchell’s growing band of well-connected acolytes.
Their encounter became an essential part of rock mythology. Cameron Crowe heard Crosby’s most succinct version of the tale: “I stopped taking drugs for a while, bought my boat, and started getting healthy out in the sun. I stayed there a few months and felt real good. I walked into a local coffeehouse and there was this girl singing ‘I had a king in a tenement castle.’ I went, ‘What?’ Then she sang about two other songs, and after I peeled myself off the back of the room, I realized I had just fallen in love.”
He was ripe for reinvention, having shed not only the Byrds but also his home in Beverly Glen (now rented to his friend disc jockey B. Mitchel Reed) and, effectively, his commitment to Christine Hinton. She couldn’t match Mitchell’s effervescent charisma but maintained her ambiguous place in Crosby’s circle.
Crosby would describe himself much later as being “extremely fascinated with the quality of the music and the quality of [Joni Mitchell]. She was such an unusual, passionate, and powerful woman.” They passed songs back and forth, Crosby unveiling work in progress such as “Guinnevere” and “Laughing,” Mitchell able to trump him at will with half a dozen new masterpieces. “I think she just outgrew me,” Crosby would admit with long hindsight, Mitchell’s talent and presence forcing him into a rare position of humility.
Despite later differences between them, Crosby never retracted that initial flash of amazement and devotion. Mitchell, by comparison, grew more acerbic about Crosby with age, her original affection for him decaying into little short of contempt: in an interview just before she suffered a debilitating health crisis in 2015, she described her former lover as “a human-hater.” In earlier decades, when her life and psyche were perhaps more balanced, she acknowledged his sense of humor, his twinkling eyes, his boundless and (at the time) much appreciated passion for her work, his generosity, his prowess as a sailor. Even at her most positive, however, she remained a keen judge of character. In two lines, she captured the core of the man: “He can make you feel like a million bucks. Or he can bring you down with the same force.”
The two songwriters enjoyed the briefest of idylls in Florida, Crosby driving both Mitchell and Berosini at breathtaking speed through the streets of the Grove and around Miami Beach. Three days after Joni finished at the Gaslight, she began a stint at the Second Fret in Philadelphia. There she wrote and performed a song in which she delineated her romantic options, among them a man who is “waiting for a schooner / and he thinks he’s met a queen”—confirming that the Mayan was not yet seaworthy; and, more pertinently, that Mitchell perhaps doubted that she could live up to Crosby’s fantasies. By the end of the year, the song had gained an extra verse which summarized the philosophy she had chosen (“She will love them when she sees them / They will lose her if they follow”) and a suitably spiky title “Cactus Tree.” By then, she had returned to the Gaslight and camped out on the Mayan, so she could sing, “He takes her to his schooner / And he treats her like a queen,” the inference being that this was merely what she deserved.
Between her two sojourns in Florida, Mitchell inhabited folk clubs across North America, including a one-night stop at Stephen Stills’s old folkie haunt in New York, the Café Au Go Go. There she entranced a young booking agent named Elliot Roberts, who gave up his job at the William Morris Agency and accompanied her to her next engagement in Detroit. Almost without discussion, he became her manager. He then met David Crosby, assuming the same role for him.
Once Joni Mitchell left the Gaslight at the start of October, Crosby was torn between staying in Florida and becoming her traveling companion. He was there with her at least once in Philadelphia, and in New York, where Crosby and Mitchell taped the briefest of demos at her apartment—a tantalizing blueprint for a vocal partnership that might have been. Just one minute long, it featured their two voices joined in harmony on a song she was writing about him, “The Dawntreader.” (True to form, she would eventually come to deny any link between Crosby and that tale of a sailor.) Then, after a lengthy run in Toronto, she joined Crosby in California, where they (and Roberts) crashed at the house he had rented to Mitchel Reed.
While they were there, Crosby introduced Mitchell to Mo Ostin, boss of Hollywood’s hippest record label, Warner-Reprise. A man who had already offered recording contracts to Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman was never going to be wary of a woman so obviously talented. Ostin agreed to sign her, Crosby inserted himself in the deal as her producer, and the pact was made before Christmas 1967. An official photograph documented the signing. It showed Crosby, his hair already draped down over his shoulders but visibly thinning on top, looking distinctly seedy between Roberts, in a mod London jacket, and the conservatively attired Ostin.
The company executive probably imagined that the novice producer would create a typical Warner album of the time: poetic, eclectic, wrapped in lavish orchestrations, most likely arranged by Van Dyke Parks. Mitchell wanted the songs to run as free as her persona in “Cactus Tree,” and for nothing to obscure the lyrics. Crosby placed himself defiantly between the singer and corporate expectations. The only outsider allowed to contribute to the sessions was Stephen Stills, who added bass to one song. Mitchell explained during the making of the record that she had initially been excited by the potential of a multitrack recording desk: “I went crazy and thought of all kinds of harmonies. But between David and me, we managed to laugh and sort of realize we were ruining it. Cut back, and take maybe one little three-note passage that really did enhance it, and scrap all that other gunk that we’d put in.”
Mitchell was recording at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. At first, she had to wait for gaps in the lengthy sessions Stills was staging for the final Buffalo Springfield album. When Neil Young made one of his rare appearances at the studio, Joni proudly introduced him to Crosby as an old friend. Most often, though, she waited patiently for Stills and Crosby to finish their men’s talk. Then Sunset opened a second room, which Mitchell was the first to use. She had already boasted of Crosby’s skills as a producer: “He has very good judgment. He also gets very good sound out of me in the studio.” But, as her friend Joel Bernstein reflected, “David really didn’t know what he was doing. When they handed the record in, the master was rejected for technical reasons. There was distortion on the vocal track in the mix, which hadn’t been there on the original tapes; there was really loud hiss; and you could hear Joni’s foot tapping on the mike stand.” The much more experienced John Haeny was recruited to rescue the tapes. At the time, Joni was happy to blame the original engineer, jazz pianist Art Crist, who died soon after the sessions: “He was very ill, drinking a lot, his wife had just left him.” Several decades later, she placed the burden squarely on Crosby’s shoulders.
By the time the Joni Mitchell album was finished, she was already drifting away from her mentor-disciple. She would later recount happy memories of riding up and down the Hollywood Hills in Crosby’s Mercedes, listening over and over to a cassette of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album. He remembered that “We went back to LA and tried to live together. It doesn’t work.” “They were breaking up in the studio,” Bernstein recalled, “both crying, with the glass window to the control room between them.” Stephen Stills dubbed her a “love gangster” and wrote a song to cement that image. Crosby’s most revealing commentary came when he stopped by a Monkees session on February 16, 1968, and recorded a new song called “Games.” Ostensibly intended for the Monkees to cover, it was actually an effort at catharsis. Crosby recounted how an affair that had blossomed “in the sunshine” had then decayed “in the rain” and “bad air” of New York and LA. What killed it was competition: the quest to be the better songwriter, the dominant ego, the most successful performer. Despite that, Crosby could not restrain a final message: “Love you.” They would continue to hook up throughout 1968 but were no longer a couple.
Instead, he concentrated on the joy of introducing her talents as a singer and composer to his friends. As he recalled, “My favorite trick at the time was to invite everyone over, get a joint of dope that was stronger than they could possibly smoke, and get her to play, and they would walk out stupefied.” Graham Nash would soon fall under the same spell.
It used to break my heart when the group were away for great stretches at a time. That was a long time ago now. I think I’ve become hardened to the fact that he’s not always going to be around.
—Rose Nash, spring 1968
Like many pop wives in the late 1960s, Rose Nash did not accompany her husband on tour. Unlike most, she did not always wait patiently at home for her husband Graham’s return. She spent four months in New York during 1967, accompanying the girlfriend of Hollies guitarist Tony Hicks on her assignments as a model. But she had no interest in infiltrating Graham’s scene. “It’s not my nature to make small talk with people I don’t know and have nothing in common with,” she explained.
Life as the partner of one of Britain’s most visible pop stars did not exactly thrill her. “I wish he’d give it all up,” she complained. “I think it’s a drag.” She was happiest when they were alone in their apartment, and he was playing her songs he’d just written. But those moments were rare. “The flat is so noisy,” she said. “Most of our friends are in the pop business, and they just drop in and start strumming on the guitars we have around. Usually it’s two chords and the same six words—until I want to run out screaming!”
Rose insisted that Graham “hates clubs.” But however impatient her husband had become with the British pop scene, he was still naturally gregarious and eager for fresh experiences. Equally, he loathed the idea of begging shamelessly for public approval. Yet that was what he and the Hollies did when they recorded “Jennifer Eccles,” a playful but embarrassingly banal tune which took its title from Rose (Eccles) and Jennifer (Clarke). “Graham and I were very down about our lack of success with ‘King Midas,’ ” Allan Clarke remembered, “so we decided to write something that couldn’t fail. And it turned out to be one of our biggest sellers. Graham was appalled, but to me ‘Jennifer Eccles’ represented stability. I wanted to be in the business for a long time, and I thought we should give the people what they wanted.” Nash’s distaste hardened when he registered how his new friends in California reacted to the song.
No sooner had the Hollies flown in from London in February 1968 than David Crosby plucked Nash from his hotel room and took him to a party at Peter Tork’s house. Earlier that day, Crosby had jammed with Jimi Hendrix and friends before the guitarist’s Shrine Auditorium show. Now almost everyone he knew in Los Angeles—apart from Joni Mitchell—was gathered at Tork’s new Laurel Canyon home, previously owned by television actor Wally Cox. As Crosby and Nash wandered around, they came into a room where a man was hammering feverishly at a piano. Nash watched openmouthed until the madman paused. “That’s the guy I’ve been telling you about,” Crosby said. “That’s Stephen Stills.” Four nights later, the three men were together in Stills’s car after the Hollies’ show at the Whisky, sketching out a fantasy future in which they might all share.
Nash resumed life with the Hollies in Florida. One month and a dozen cities later, they arrived in Ottawa, Canada, on the afternoon of March 15. Local journalists were pacified with a brief press conference, during which Nash insisted, “We’re a happy group, and all our songs are intended to make people happy.” Then they played two sellout shows at the Capitol Theatre. Afterward . . . well, here stories diverge. Nash recalled a press reception at which he was introduced to a stunning young woman with long blond hair, clutching a massive Bible. By contrast, concert promoter Harvey Glatt remembered taking Nash to Le Hibou, a local coffeehouse, where the same meeting took place after Joni Mitchell had finished her late-night set. He said that afterward, he, Nash, and local rock performer Bruce Cockburn went briefly to Mitchell’s Château Laurier hotel room. “It was clear something was happening between Graham and Joni,” Glatt recalled, “so Bruce and I left.”
Nash himself was too dazzled to be concerned about the details. Crosby had already played him some of Mitchell’s work, but the experience of hearing her live, singing the best songs he had ever heard in his life, in that voice, floored him. So, no doubt, did the night of lovemaking that followed. The Hollies star awoke the next afternoon alongside the still-sleeping Mitchell, suddenly aware that he had to be onstage a thousand miles away in Winnipeg before nightfall. There was a hurried goodbye, but no promises from Mitchell, leaving Nash to stagger back to reality—doubting everything in his life that he had assumed was set in stone.
Neil Young has again quit the Buffalo Springfield, which might suffer the dwarfism which has afflicted the Byrds.
—LA Times, March 4, 1968
The disintegration was slow and all too public. Dates were canceled, touring schedules crumbled away, record sales slowed. By March 19, 1968, it had become impossible to assemble a quorum of Buffalo Springfield members in one studio. Studio engineer–turned-bassist Jim Messina took on the thankless task of trying to persuade his new colleagues to finish another album. Stephen Stills never turned down an opportunity to record but was forced to rely on friends and session men to make up a band. Neil Young offered “I Am a Child,” a wry retort to Richie Furay’s critique on the previous Springfield LP, but didn’t even perform on the other song he contributed, “On the Way Home.” Stills interpreted the lyric as Young’s farewell message to him and the band: “I won’t be back till later on / If I do come back at all.” Then Young confirmed what was already obvious: after their next US tour, he would no longer be a member of the Springfield. Their first European visit, planned provisionally for late summer, was left to hang in the wind.
So too were three members of the band, Young, Furay, and Messina, when police raided a house on Topanga Canyon Road. Neighbors had complained that there was a loud party in progress, and when police entered the premises, they found five men and ten young women, several ounces of marijuana, and a quantity of dubious seeds—but not the ostensible resident of the property. That was Stephen Stills, who had bailed out of a window as the cops knocked at the door. Also left behind was English guitarist Eric Clapton, only there because Cream’s gig that night in Denver had been canceled on short notice; plus Stills’s sisters and his current girlfriend. They were carted away to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women; the men to county jail.
Initially, the entire party was accused of being present in a house where illegal drugs were being consumed. Despite the prima facie evidence against them all, charges against the women were dropped, while prosecutors chose to proceed against all but one of the men on the lesser count of disturbing the peace. They were found guilty by Malibu Justice Court and fined. The exception—the price for being English, perhaps?—was Clapton. His drug case went to trial, but the judge threw it out of court.
The convictions shattered any last sense of unity among the Springfield and did nothing to dissuade Neil Young from leaving the band. The road ended where it had begun, in Southern California on May 5, as Buffalo Springfield headlined a five-act package. “This is it, gang,” Stills announced as he took the stage. Two minutes later, the performance was cut short by security demanding that exuberant fans resume their seats. “Sorry for that interruption,” Stills drawled sarcastically, before kicking back into “Rock ’n’ Roll Woman.” The hourlong set ended with a twenty-three-minute extrapolation of “Bluebird,” which gave Stills and Young—each of whom had acknowledged how tense they were feeling—a last opportunity to act out their complex relationship through their guitars. “The Long Beach audience left their seats to mass at the edge of the stage during the long last song,” reviewer Pete Johnson reported, “applauding and cheering emotionally as the group concluded their set.” “We love you,” Stills said plaintively, and with that, the Springfield were gone.
What had finally driven Buffalo Springfield apart? The Chicago Tribune blamed lack of airplay and managerial problems. Rolling Stone pinpointed “a combination of internal hassle, extreme fatigue combined with absence of national success, and run-ins with the fuzz.” In time, almost all the protagonists would have their say. Neil Young’s account was typically vague: “We all got tired of it, and just couldn’t hang in there. And as far as our interrelationships were going, they were being hurt because the group was becoming bigger than us. And it was all hanging us all up, and whatever we had for each other was disappearing, because the group was getting too much.” Dewey Martin blamed economics: “The people who handled our business screwed us out of a lot of money.” Richie Furay identified “ego clashes . . . It was supposed to have been a group and it wasn’t.” And Stephen Stills spoke from his heart: what killed the Springfield was “sheer frustration.”
It was Stills’s friend Ellen Sander who delivered the most convincing and prophetic verdict, in the New York Times: “One of the most obvious reasons for the group’s demise is that there were too many leaders.”