This is a science fiction story about a bunch of people who decide they’re gonna band together and try to survive together. So, they work out a common language, with music or whatever, and find that they really dig each other, that they’re kinda brothers—and they sail off into the sunset. Mind you, it’s only a fantasy.
—David Crosby introduces “Wooden Ships,” Chicago, December 13, 1969
As chaos and stardom impinged on CSNY’s world, the “Wooden Ships” fantasy entered a new dimension. Stephen Stills was the first to realize that the song’s mysterious narrative might support a motion picture. “David thought I was crazy,” he recalled. “It took three days of telling the story for it to sink in, then we all started making up bits.” Their scenario involved a nuclear holocaust, from which a handful of Western refugees—rock stars, perhaps, with young, blond, long-haired girlfriends—would seek out the only other survivors, a distant tribe in South America. Together, they would build wooden ships and sail for virgin land where civilization could be reimagined. But however they spun the tale, an ending eluded them.
“All we need is a scriptwriter, and a producer and a director,” Stills said in late 1969, and “a budget from someone who doesn’t want to take our song publishing in return.” He imagined that CSNY would act in the movie—he and Crosby both had experience from school—but that they would also hire Hollywood professionals to keep the project afloat.
The success of Easy Rider, and the anticipation aroused by Woodstock, convinced Hollywood that rock music might reconnect the teenage audience with the movie business. Warner Brothers, who had Woodstock in development and also owned CSNY’s record label, agreed to bankroll Wooden Ships. But this wasn’t the only movie on the band’s horizon. Concert promoter Bill Graham had sent them a script called Please Don’t Feed the Guerrillas. Written by Robert W. Goldman, it told the story of a small American town, taken over by a band of revolutionary outlaws. Graham circulated it around his rock star clients, in the vain hope that someone might bite.
Meanwhile, the rock critic Paul Williams had connected David Crosby with one of his science fiction heroes, the novelist Theodore Sturgeon. As a teenager, Crosby had read and reread Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human. It highlighted the author’s fascination with Gestalt theory, and especially the notion that several individuals might combine to form a single homo gestalt, the next step forward in evolution. As he had with Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Crosby inhaled Sturgeon’s concepts and vocabulary, employing them in Byrds interviews with teen magazines.
The Wooden Ships script promised to advance Sturgeon’s screen career, which amounted to a handful of screenplays for Star Trek, but no major film credits. By November 1969, he had met the band, digested the rudiments of their story, and set to work. Almost immediately, Stephen Stills’s mind jumped ahead to the problem of who might direct the CSNY film. He selected Stanley Kubrick, never imagining for a second that the genius behind 2001: A Space Odyssey might turn them down. (Kubrick was preoccupied with trying to raise funds for a film about Napoleon, in which he imagined Jack Nicholson taking the central role.) Of course, Stills said, their film “won’t have the same cold feeling as 2001—I hope it will be more like Kubrick’s earlier films, with the characters laid out so well. It’s got to be done properly.”
And characters did indeed prove to be the crux of the matter. Many decades later, David Crosby reflected that CSNY had subjected Sturgeon to “a really unbearable experience . . . We were all such complete egotists by that time.” If the ethos of the project was the submission of individual wills to the greater cause, CSNY’s behavior totally undermined it. As Crosby recalled, “Each guy would get him alone and tell him how he wanted the script to be. And, of course, in each guy’s view, he was the hero. Mine was populated with young girls—and had all this sex in it. Stephen’s was populated by this lonely military hero out there. Neil took one look at the whole film idea and said, ‘No . . . no, man, I don’t think so, man . . .’ It was hysterical.” Sturgeon tried to cram these conflicting visions into a coherent script, but eventually admitted defeat when it became obvious that CSNY’s own dramas would make the project untenable. The Wooden Ships movie never quite died, however; two years later, David Crosby and Peter Fonda were still kicking it around, although the vision that seemed so real in a cloud of smoke on the deck of their own wooden ship could never be translated onto paper, let alone celluloid.
As CSN discovered (but Neil Young never quite learned), it was easier for musicians to lend their songs to movies, rather than become film composers. It was easier still to offer old songs rather than conjure up a soundtrack from scratch. Neil Young had to abandon his original scores for The Landlord and The Strawberry Statement (which used previously released songs by Young and CSNY). Graham Nash’s “Teach Your Children” was featured in the teen romance Melody, while three Stephen Stills songs by the Springfield appeared in Homer, a drama about teenage rebellion. “Wooden Ships” itself was heard in the surfing documentary Pacific Vibrations, promoted as being “like Woodstock on a wave.” All of these projects emerged in 1970, exploiting CSNY as a direct route into contemporary youth culture.
The same goal led actor Dean Stockwell to commission a soundtrack for his screenplay After the Gold Rush from his next-door neighbor Neil Young. “It was all about the day of the great earthquake in Topanga Canyon,” Young told Mojo magazine, “when a great wave of water flooded the place. They tried to get some money from Universal Pictures. But that fell through because it was too much of an ‘art’ project.” That was precisely why it inspired Young in a way that The Landlord and The Strawberry Statement hadn’t. He began to accumulate a set of songs that he didn’t bring to CSNY sessions.
Although Stephen Stills talked up his movie ambitions throughout the 1970s, dabbling with stories and treatments and volunteering himself as an actor, it was David Crosby who seemed most likely to achieve a career in film. In January 1971, he was in Hawaii with Carl Gottlieb, the head writer for TV’s Music Scene, working on a script entitled Family. United Artists picked up the rights to both the movie and the soundtrack, which Crosby was expected to compose. This was no fantasy of wooden ships, spaceships, or even rock stars, but “something of a new concept in filming,” as co-producer Robert Hammer promised while scouting for locations in Colorado. “The story deals entirely with one day in the life of a nomadic-type family, which sets up camp in the mountains. There will be no nudity, no violence, no obscenity.” Perhaps it was the absence of those marketable qualities that led United Artists to withdraw their financing, even before filming had begun.
As a human, you’re always messing up, always hurting people’s feelings quite innocently.
—Joni Mitchell, 1970
There was one final sweep of CSNY dates from Pennsylvania to California before Christmas 1969. Gradually, the new material they had recorded (but not yet released) began to infiltrate their live sets—“Woodstock,” “Teach Your Children,” “Helpless,” even “Country Girl,” performed by Young alone. In Houston, Stephen Stills tap-danced while Graham Nash slowly worked up the courage to play piano in public. His playing was rudimentary in the extreme (one finger of the left hand, three-finger chords with the right) and his singing painfully off-key, but the audience at the Hofheinz Pavilion were treated to the premiere of a song “about my woman”: “Our House.” It joined a growing catalog of material that had been committed to tape but would not be released to the public, or heard on radio, for another four months.
When unveiling his hymn to Joni Mitchell and her home, Nash didn’t mention that he was also purchasing a house of his own, almost four hundred miles from Lookout Mountain Avenue. His three-story Victorian mansion at 737 Buena Vista Avenue West in San Francisco sat on the edge of Buena Vista Park and looked across Haight-Ashbury, still the city’s hippie locale. It required almost total renovation and would eventually incorporate a recording studio (Rudy Records), a photographic dark room, a home cinema, and a spare room that was kept permanently for David Crosby. Its purchase consolidated CSNY’s new roots in Northern California and marked a distinct step away from Joni Mitchell. She and her black tomcat, Hunter, remained in the Canyon, where Nash was still officially semi-resident. But in November 1969, she had begun to separate herself from her obligations, professional and personal.
She began by informing her management that she was coming off the road. After completing her existing schedule, she would play nothing but very occasional festival appearances and impromptu guest spots with friends, for the next two years. “She hasn’t been able to write since trying to become a superstar,” Elliot Roberts explained. She immediately fled to Canada for a month before fulfilling her US commitments, throwing in one last cameo with CSNY in Detroit.
Traveling with them to London in January 1970, she betrayed exactly how alienated she had become from her own existence. “My personal life is a shambles,” she admitted, “and it’s hard on me knowing I’m not giving anything to people I love. I’m a very solitary person, even in a room full of people.” As she reflected later, “I was very frightened.” She hated being scrutinized in public or having her lyrics scoured for personal references. Yet at the same time she reserved the right to expose herself utterly in her songs. As David Crosby would recall, “Mitchell can write about people, or your own heart, or your most personal feelings—and she’ll drag them right out, just to dangle them in front of you.”
As Mitchell finished her third album, Ladies of the Canyon, Graham Nash was aware that the world would soon be listening to “Willy,” which everyone knew was about him; and “Blue Boy,” the protagonist of which “made himself an idol, yes, so he turned to stone.” Mitchell’s threat was barely veiled: “He will come a few times more / Till he finds a lady statue standing in a door.” Perhaps that time had arrived. “I had never been so much in love,” Nash recalled, before adding: “I had never been so unsure of myself. I had never been so fragile.” Through it all, the two of them were creative to an almost manic degree—painting and drawing, sculpting, writing songs, of course, and taking photographs—as if to stave off a moment of reckoning.
In late 1969, Nash chose to be alone in San Francisco, where he began to experiment with his new Wurlitzer piano. As chords formed into a melody, he found himself examining his life, his romance, his expectations, and his dreams. By the time that “Girl to Be on My Mind” was released in 1972, his partnership with Joni Mitchell had been dead for two years. Long before then, he was already peering beyond Lookout Mountain Avenue for distraction and—who could tell?—resolution, too.
We get criticized for spending a long time tuning up . . . But when Neil gets nervous, he plays very hard and puts his guitar out of tune, and then has to tune it back down again.
—Stephen Stills, February 1970
The tour schedule inevitably led CSNY back to California. Four days before Christmas 1969, they lined up before thirty-four thousand people in San Diego. Balboa Stadium had been abandoned by the San Diego Chargers because of fears that it might collapse during an earthquake. But its owners were prepared to risk the lives of teenage rock fans. Balboa had one other disadvantage as a concert venue: it was just over half a mile from the city’s airport. Sure enough, as the “Suite” approached its climax, an enormous jet passed over the stage, drowning out the music. The sonic problems didn’t end there. The onstage monitors issued squeals of feedback, distracting Stephen Stills to the extent that he lurched into the wrong key.
Everything seemed to be out of sync. Bassist Greg Reeves was harangued by members of the Black Panther Party before he took the stage, for the crime of prostituting his talent by playing with honkies. It was no consolation to learn that Jimi Hendrix was enduring similar pressure. “Greg’s just been hassled by his own kind,” Nash said clumsily, “and it’s really far-out, I’m telling you.”
The electric set was even more chaotic—tuneless harmonies, cacophonous solos, and such an absence of unity that it became impossible for the group to synchronize their rhythm. The singers were spending as much time off-mike, complaining to the crew, as they were struggling to find a harmony blend. Stills had to take command during “Long Time Gone,” counting the time like a drill sergeant. “Wooden Ships” sounded as if they’d never played together before. Even the reliably triumphant “Down by the River” was sabotaged by the wayward tuning of Young’s guitar. But still he and Crosby ended the song bouncing up and down in excitement, while the audience danced like the psychedelic freaks at the Monterey Festival. It was as if it didn’t matter how or what CSNY played; just seeing them was enough.
Afterward, Stephen Stills was outraged, and adamant that their stadium days were over. “We’re not doing any more of those,” he insisted. “You get so many people that it’s ridiculous. That essential intimate feeling is lost in a football park.” Crosby was less concerned: he had met a belly dancer named Annie backstage and briefly set his grief aside. A few days later, CSNY set out on the long-awaited journey back to London, and the Royal Albert Hall.
There is no limitation in anybody’s head as to what we can do or what we are willing to try. I can’t see any boundaries in sight.
—David Crosby, London, January 1970
In crossing the Atlantic, CSNY were moving from a continent where they carried huge cultural weight to territories where their status was far more ambiguous. In Britain, they were still “Nash’s supergroup,” an impression reinforced by the Top 20 success of “Marrakesh Express.” The Crosby, Stills & Nash album had reached a much smaller audience, barely registering in the sales charts, and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” had been ignored by the UK public. Early in 1970, New Musical Express held its annual Readers’ Poll, which was widely regarded as the most accurate reflection of current pop trends. The Hollies were voted the fourth most popular vocal group in the world; CSNY didn’t even feature in the list.
For Graham Nash, of course, the trip was a homecoming, specifically to the venue where he had played his final show with the Hollies. He relished the prospect of an audience who would understand his sense of humor—who might chuckle when he compared David Crosby to the TV puppets Pinky and Perky, for example. Crosby had spent enough time in the UK to understand its cynical view of brash outsiders (especially Americans). But Stephen Stills and Neil Young had never performed on a British stage, and they craved the respect of their peers and mentors. For Stills in particular, there was the knowledge that CSNY were debuting at the venue where Cream had played their last concert—an event captured in all its excessive glory on celluloid. He dreamed of generating the same reaction from the notoriously hard to please London public, and being treated as an equal by the Beatles, the Stones, Clapton, Winwood, and the rest. CSNY would be facing an audience who scarcely knew about Woodstock, had probably never heard of Altamont, wasn’t affected by Vietnam, and hadn’t taken to Buffalo Springfield. The nearer the London show came, the greater the psychological burden heaped on Stephen Stills’s head.
The band gathered in London a full week before the January 6 show—with the exception of Greg Reeves, who kept missing his plane. In a sign of the times, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Dallas Taylor shared one flight; Young and Joni Mitchell another. But they gathered happily enough in a rented suite of five apartments over shops in Kensington High Street. The pop press was eager to meet them, even though photographs weren’t allowed: “We’re a six-man band,” Crosby explained, “and Greg ain’t here yet.” The former Byrd was lauded as the group’s official spokesman, and he proceeded to pontificate on politics, civil war, and revolution. He even laid out a plan of action for any activists attempting to overthrow the American government: “I know how it can be done. All you have to do is take the major cities and blow their bridges, cut off their water supply, and shut down their electricity. Inside three days, you’ll have millions of starving people in the biggest traffic jam in history. Everything will be crippled.”
When Stephen Stills managed to force his way in front of the microphone, he disclaimed any power or responsibility: “Don’t build me up into a pop star. I’m no different from you or anybody else. It’s just that, because I’m a musician, I can put music to people’s thoughts.” But his humility ended there. He was soon boasting about his rebel status: “I stood up in front of a lot of people during the Vietnam Moratorium in San Francisco recently and read a poem. So, if there’s a list, I’m on it.”
Neil Young remained almost unknown in Britain, where his two solo albums had only just been released. “I’ve reached just about the perfect state,” he explained. “I’m part of the group, which I can really dig, and I can also express myself as an individual through my own things. And I need very badly to make my own music, partly because it boosts my ego to the required dimension.” Graham Nash restricted himself to platitudes about how wonderful his life was, in every way, and kept a wary eye on Joni Mitchell, in case she revealed any clues about how she viewed their future.
On New Year’s Eve, the Californian contingent was invited to a party at Ringo Starr’s mansion above Hampstead Heath. This was what Stills had been waiting for: to be in the company of three of the Beatles and their wives (only the Lennons were absent), among dozens of celebrities from the worlds of music and film. Most of those he met assured him that, yes, of course, they were coming to the Albert Hall show, and so the pressure increased. CSNY fell into cabs around dawn, heavily the worse for wear. A couple of days later, Stills bought Ringo a thank-you present (vintage brass candlesticks) at the antiques market in Chelsea; he also picked up a gift for Crosby (a ship’s bell for the Mayan). Perhaps it was a gesture of peace: pop writer Penny Valentine, who had visited Moscow Road in 1968, pronounced that CSN were just the same as before, “apart from occasional verbal battles between David and Stephen.”
The focus returned to the Albert Hall show. “That was the first time we’ve ever really been affected by nerves,” Stills admitted. “We felt somehow as if we were on trial, as if they’d come to judge us rather than to enjoy our music.” He had failed to take account of the fact that British audiences had always been notoriously quiet by comparison with their American counterparts—waiting to be impressed and restrained in how they showed their appreciation. It didn’t help that as Stills looked out from the stage, he could see familiar (and famous) faces peeking out from the boxes that ringed Albert Hall—or that Paul McCartney left his seat early in the show, apparently never to return. (He had decided to join the masses in the cheap seats at the top of the building.) Stills’s ordeal continued: “There was all this bad tension, and we just couldn’t make it go away. It was distressing that we let it affect us so much. To be honest, I felt terrible—like an insect being dissected under a microscope.”
Little of that sense of scrutiny was apparent to the audience, who heard CSN make their customary tentative start to the “Suite” and then soar. The crowd’s first exposure to “Teach Your Children” was so rapturous that the local reps of Atlantic Records must already have been scheduling it as a single. Neil Young’s arrival was greeted with just as much approval, and the acoustic set built until Stills received an ecstatic reception for “Black Queen.” Only then, when he embarked on his parochial rant during “For What It’s Worth,” spouting rhetoric that was foreign to a British audience, did people’s attention start to slip.
With the onset of electricity, CSNY began their regular battle with their instruments, which stubbornly refused to stay in tune. Between the interruptions, their first group rendition of Young’s “The Loner” was a highlight before “Down by the River” overcame any last British reserve. Still, when they returned for an encore, Graham Nash felt he needed to administer a mild admonishment: “We play better if you clap better.”
As the audience filed out, there was no hint of disillusion or letdown. Fans had loved the music, the raps, the humor, the off-the-cuff fragments of songs thrown in along the way (such as Nash and Crosby breaking into a chorus of “Happiness Runs,” which Nash had helped Donovan to record two years earlier). Fellow musicians were more critical. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant complained that “Down by the River” “typified in my eyes just how boring a twelve-bar blues can be if you play it for twenty minutes” and comparing CSNY unfavorably to Crazy Horse, whom he had seen in the States a few months earlier.
It was the infamous British media that delivered the most crushing blows. Most national newspapers were not yet in the habit of wasting their column inches on something as trivial as a pop concert, but the London Evening Standard declared that the show had run the gamut “from dullness to dire drabness” and was “extravagantly boring.” The following week’s music papers carped about the endless tuning and David Crosby’s inability to stop talking—one critic calculating that music only constituted about 60 percent of the show. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch claimed to have dozed off during the performance; Disc said that CSNY pursued “individual ego trips” rather than audience communication. Reviewers from London’s two most prestigious Sunday newspapers reflected the polarized response to the show. Derek Jewell (Sunday Times) reckoned that CSNY “represent the summit at which the best rock music has arrived”; Tony Palmer (The Observer) reported that “They mumbled inaudible jokes to themselves about themselves and fell about the stage in hysterical laughter . . . It was like being at a party where everybody knew everybody except you.” Indeed, the show led Palmer to question what rock was for: “Is it just a crashing, witless bore? [CSNY] suggested it might well be just that.” This sense of dissatisfaction poisoned the air.
The original proposal for a monthlong European tour had been whittled down until only two other dates remained, in Stockholm and Copenhagen. CSNY were neither the first nor the last American entertainers to discover that if they craved applause and adulation in Europe, England (and especially London) was not the place to look. The Danish show began on a high, and simply built from there, until Stills and Young played out a delicious musical conversation, subtle and acutely interactive, on “Down by the River.” CSNY could leave Europe with deafening applause ringing in their ears—except that Stephen Stills chose not to go home.
If anything should ever happen, I reckon Britain would be the only safe, sane place in the world.
—Stephen Stills, February 1970
Proof of CSN’s impact on the American music industry was provided in January 1970, when the nominees for the annual Grammy Awards were announced. Crosby, Stills & Nash was one of five records proposed as Album of the Year, ranged against the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the Fifth Dimension’s Age of Aquarius. Most of those contenders also lined up against CSN in the category for Best Contemporary Duo or Vocal Group Performance, while the trio were also nominated for Best New Artist alongside Chicago, Led Zeppelin, long forgotten art-pop group the Neon Philharmonic, and the even more ephemeral singer Oliver. At the gala ceremony in March, CSN lost out to Blood, Sweat & Tears in one category and the Fifth Dimension (of “Up, Up and Away” fame) in another, but were duly anointed the Best New Artist of the year. None of the trio bothered to collect their award.
At London’s luxurious Dorchester Hotel, Stephen Stills felt alienated not only from the band he had helped to create, but also from its sense of brotherhood. He was not prone to laying bare his feelings to strangers, but English pop journalist Penny Valentine was charming and empathic enough to loosen his guard. Talking to her in February, he signaled that, for him at least, the dream was over. Whenever he talked about the unit, he always called it Crosby, Stills & Nash, as if that was both the core and the key, and Neil Young an entirely separate issue. And CSN, he confessed, might be all but dead. “It started out as a really beautiful idea,” he said wistfully. “We were full of enthusiasm and ideals. Now a lot of that feeling has gone between us.” He turned to Valentine: “You know, you even noticed how we’d changed to each other since the last time.” That, he explained, was why he was still in England. “The feeling there doesn’t escape me—I’m too much of a realist. By the time we’d finished those last concerts, we needed a vacation from each other.”
He was not quite prepared to sign a death certificate: “When I go back to America, maybe that feeling of us all liking each other a lot will return, and we’ll go on working together.” But he began to speak of the band in the past tense, as if writing an obituary: “We did what we set out to do. We said we weren’t going to set the world on fire, but we were going to make fine music—which is exactly what we did. But things are in a limbo state at the moment.”
Trying to explain exactly what had happened, he kept harking back to the Albert Hall show, that sensation of being judged and found wanting. But there was a deeper problem: CSN had been his group on the first album, and now it was slipping out of his hands. “I’m so tired,” he confessed, “of trying to manipulate all those forces within the band.” At no point did he stop to think: perhaps those forces didn’t want to be manipulated?
Stills already owned a home in Los Angeles and a cabin in the Rocky Mountains. Now he was imagining a house in England as well. “I don’t think there’s anything more I really need—except maybe someone to share them with,” he said poignantly.
For a sense of release, Stills turned back to his salvation: music. He booked a month at Island Studios, which occupied a former church in West London, and sent out the call for Dallas Taylor and Bill Halverson. The engineer was swift to respond, but the drummer took his time. So, Stills pursued two paths simultaneously—recording as a one-man band and recruiting local musicians. From a club outfit named One, he stole bass player Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuel, who led him to drummer Conrad Isidore, and suddenly he had a functioning band. At another venue, he bumped into a contingent from Apple Records, including Ringo Starr, whom he immediately asked to join the sessions. Starr introduced him to keyboardist Billy Preston, who updated an old Mae West line: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” “Do you mind if I steal that?” Stills asked, and then went away to write a song combining the catchphrase with a keyboard riff he’d invented during his “Woodstock” session with Jimi Hendrix.
Ringo invited Stills to Abbey Road, where he was attempting to record his own first solo single. As Stills recalled, “Ringo came in with this little song—that is, he sat down and played eight bars, and said, ‘That’s it.’ So, we all made suggestions”—“all,” in this instance, including George Harrison who ultimately composed the bulk of the song. But Stills was there both in February and again in March as “It Don’t Come Easy” came together and stayed around to make a more substantial contribution to Doris Troy’s Apple album.
When they joined forces at Island Studios, Stills and Starr struck up an immediate musical rapport. The drummer was resolute, reliable, kept impeccable time, and was accustomed from his apprenticeship with the Beatles to absolute efficiency in the studio. In a couple of days, they completed a set of rhythm tracks that Stills would still be utilizing five years later. “I wanted him to play on all the tracks,” Stills confessed, “but he thought people would think he had joined my band.”
Having visited Starr’s London house on New Year’s, Stills was now given a guided tour of his Surrey estate by his wife Maureen. The Starr residence in Elstead boasted fourteen rooms, stables, a sauna, a wine cellar, several duck ponds, a river, and almost twenty acres of land. The property had been renovated by actor Peter Sellers, who sold it to the Beatle in 1969. But Starr was now focused on his mansion in the city, and Stills offered to take the country estate off his hands. They came to a deal whereby he would rent the house and grounds until later in the year, by which time another stash of royalties would allow him to complete the £90,000 purchase. “I always wanted to spend some time in England,” Stills explained. “Ringo’s house is a really good investment.” David Geffen advised him against sinking his money into property overseas, but Stills ignored him: “It’s so beautiful. I’m going to spend many quiet summers there.” To celebrate his arrival, and commemorate its previous owner, he engraved his favorite lyrics from the Beatles’ song “Within You Without You” onto a stone wall. “Living in Britain was my salvation,” he would reflect later. “That’s when my creativity in songwriting exploded.”
His solo project expanded at breathtaking speed, as Stills continued to write and record. He was also adapting himself to his adopted home. “I loved getting off the bus and going out,” he recalled. “I had to follow fifty cabs to learn the roads, but eventually I learned how to drive around the city.” Through jamming and networking, he secured a place at the heart of London’s session community and realized that he could construct a fantasy band out of any musicians in town. “The thing I learned about playing with Eric Clapton and all the great British blues guys is that there’s a courtliness, a kind of manners involved in jamming,” he reflected. “I wouldn’t trade that, period, for the world. The issue for me wasn’t so much fitting in, or being a chameleon, as simple good manners, which can be a problem when you’re going out and getting hammered, and end up looking like a jerk. I realize now that I was simply being shy, and trying to overcome it in a haphazard, clumsy kind of way.”
For all his self-deprecation, Stills became the only person ever to recruit Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix for the same album. With Clapton, he prepared one of his electric Delta blues tunes, “Go Back Home,” left a hole in the arrangement for his guest to fill, and then insisted on using the guitarist’s first take, against his protestations. Clapton added an equally fiery solo to “Fishes and Scorpions,” before alcohol took control. Stills remembered jamming the ’50s rock and roll hit “Tequila” for about an hour, until he slumped into a heap and Clapton vanished. When Stills came round, he cut the definitive take of “Black Queen” and gave credit on the album to his chosen brand of gold-label liquor. “It hurts my throat to sing like that,” he confessed.
Jimi Hendrix flew to London in March 1970 and inevitably ended up at Island Studios. There he renewed a relationship that, as Stills recalled, had grown out of mutual affection and understanding: “Jimi gravitated to me and my friend Glenn Campbell, because we were Southern guys who really understood black people. He would come knocking on the door and just sit down to get away from the madness. We’d go out to clubs and say, ‘Is the rhythm section any good? Decent? Okay, let’s take it.’ We did that particularly on the East Coast, down in New Jersey and up in New Hampshire, and then a couple of nights in London, too, at the Speakeasy and Ronnie Scott’s. I wish we’d had tape machines at some of our club shows, because they were marvelous.” The tapes were rolling at Island, as Hendrix added a solo to “Love the One You’re With” (which Stills later wiped). He also helped Stills to arrange two autobiographical tunes, “Old Times Good Times” and “White Nigger,” named after “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer’s essay about hipster rebels who exist outside bourgeois convention. Hendrix clearly didn’t find the song or the sentiment offensive, as he overdubbed a series of guitar parts; but when Stills finally issued the track, in 2012, he stripped off the vocal and gave it the euphemistic title “No-Name Jam.”
By the time he returned to America in April 1970, Stills had accumulated around a dozen songs in varying stages of completion and anticipated adding a black vocal chorus and a brass section. He imagined that he might be able to release a solo album by midsummer, after which he would return to Britain. “I’ve considered calling the album Stephen Stills Retires,” he confessed before he left England. “I might just stop for a while after the tour because I’m really pooped”—a tour that would reassemble the troubled band he had sought to escape three months earlier.
I chose not to go on the sailing trip that made David and Graham so close, as Captain Crosby would not acknowledge that I actually knew how to sail. Suffice to say, on each of those trips one of the crewmen ended up taking Crosby by the hair and banging him against the mainmast.
—Stephen Stills
“From the moment I climbed into an eight-and-a-half-foot dinghy in 1952,” David Crosby explained more than sixty years later, “I knew instinctively what to do and sensed I had done it before. I’m a natural sailor.” Behind the wheel of the Mayan, he could escape the everyday realities of stardom and bereavement, and the ego sparring of CSNY. The boat was its own self-sufficient world, which demanded the utmost respect from its crew, but repaid the responsibility with an almost spiritual sense of purpose.
Given a space in his working schedule by Stephen Stills’s exile in London, David Crosby set out to bring the Mayan from its base in Fort Lauderdale through the Panama Canal to California, where he intended to scatter Christine Hinton’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean. It was anything but a solitary task. “The cabin below can sleep eight, but six people is more ideal,” he explained, “four to keep watch and take turns manning the sails, and two who can alternate cooking and cleaning.” His first recruit for a voyage of 4,500 miles was an Englishman who had scarcely ever set foot in a boat: Graham Nash. “Other people would fly out and join us for a few days at a time,” Nash said. “I had to learn navigation in a hurry. But that was a lot of fun, steering out there with just you and the stars and a compass to guide you. [It] gives you a whole new perspective on life, when you don’t see land for days on end.” As Crosby recalled, “By the time we got to San Diego, [Nash] was standing three-hour wheel watches, dependably.”
Nash explained, “The atmosphere aboard the Mayan is serene. It’s not a cocktail party boat. There’s no television, and the sea air is not good for electronics, so we don’t even have a stereo onboard.” Some of that serenity was provided by their sailing mates—old friends of Crosby’s from his pre-fame days, roadies from the CSNY crew, even fellow singer-songwriter Ronee Blakley. They phoned her when they reached the Bahamas, because they were short on cash. She collected $5,000 from the CSNY coffers—and then had to play a gig at Carnegie Hall. Unwilling to leave the bills unsupervised backstage, she stuffed them into her underwear for the evening, before hightailing it to the airport for the flight to Nassau. “We had a ball,” she remembered. “I even sang on deck in a satin gown.” But David Crosby’s most enduring memory of her presence was that she arrived with a typewriter, which mysteriously vanished overboard after the Mayan’s captain found her constant clattering too distracting.
That was a petty annoyance compared to the emotional turmoil brought aboard by Joni Mitchell. Being closeted on a boat illuminated all the fractures in her relationship with Graham Nash. He recalled in his autobiography that, almost as soon as she joined the vessel, she denounced her lover as “a woman-hater.” (This was only a few weeks after she had written him the most tender of tributes, “My Old Man.”) His anecdote prompted some of the most vitriolic passages in Mitchell’s interviews with her biographer, David Yaffe. By her account, the voyage (which, for her, lasted only a few days) was physical and psychological torture, typical of her dealings with Nash, Crosby, and indeed the entire male songwriting community of California. She claimed that she and Nash had already split before she joined ship; Nash remembered that they had merely been undergoing a period of strain. Whatever the truth, Mitchell left the Mayan in Panama, flew home to California, and began to plan an epic adventure of her own, to a Greek island.
With its emotional crises, seafaring dramas, and sensory highs, Nash’s journey proved to be creatively stimulating. (“The Mayan has been a deep muse,” Crosby would reflect later.) He began writing “Wind on the Water” after his first sighting of a blue whale, while the aftermath of Mitchell’s chaotic sojourn on the boat provoked “Man in the Mirror,” a return to the self-searching imagery of the Hollies’ “Clown.”
Crosby had a female companion onboard, a young San Diego woman named Anita Treash, but as he gazed out at the ocean, his mind ran obsessively to Christine. As he told Ben Fong-Torres a few months later, his writing turned in an endless circle: “The words all come around to ‘Why is it like this?’ They’re good songs. [But] I haven’t sung them to anybody, and I don’t think I’m gonna, ’cos they’re pretty sad and they don’t draw any useful conclusion. I’m waiting until I got something good to sing about, some joy.” For the moment, “Where Will I Be?” and “Whole Cloth” were set aside, and nothing more positive followed them.
Such was CSNY’s commercial profile, and Atlantic Records’ impatience for new product, that the next few years would spark countless rumors about albums that had been recorded or were about to be begun, but that existed only in fantasy. Among them was a collaboration between Crosby and Nash, said to have been taped in three weeks of sessions in April–May 1970. In reality, the pair did not even enter the studio until late June, and that liaison lasted only for two days—abandoned after a distracted Crosby ejected their old friend Cass Elliot from the premises and Nash followed in disgust. All that remained on tape was their attempt to cover Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going,” over which David Geffen added a (deliberately?) tuneless lead vocal.
The song was perfectly suited to their voices, but the choice may well have been symbolic. At the same Grammy Awards ceremony that CSN boycotted, Joni Mitchell was awarded the Best Folk Album prize for her second album, Clouds. She collected the trophy in a long purple gown and then set off for Greece. There, in the hippie commune of Matala on Crete, she struck up a relationship with a man she would celebrate in song, Cary Raditz, and then welcomed the much younger singer-songwriter, James Taylor, who became her partner for the next year. Back at Lookout Mountain Avenue, Graham Nash was acting as handyman, laying down a new kitchen floor, when a telegram arrived from Greece. It read: “If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers.” It was, Nash realized, Mitchell’s “Dear Graham” letter. He sadly gathered his things and left Lookout Mountain behind. The trauma was soon reflected in song. “Simple Man” sounded as if it had been written straight after he slit open the Western Union envelope (“I hear what you’re saying, but you’re spinning my head around”). Equally affecting was “I Used to Be a King.” This sequel to “King Midas in Reverse” drew the curtain on their tempestuous relationship; but like David Crosby’s “Games,” composed under similar stress, it still declared “I love you.”
“Joni and I loved each other deeply,” Nash would reflect. “But in many ways, I never felt worthy. In certain ways, toward the end, I felt like I was holding her back.” In her bitter interviews with David Yaffe, Mitchell would claim—quite inaccurately—that he, and not she, had stepped immediately into a new relationship. More truthful was her comment a few years earlier: “When Graham and I broke up, I was pretty much without friends. My whole family was CSN and all those people. I lost my whole community in the divorce, so to speak.” Like Crosby, however, Nash would not banish Mitchell from his world.
I’m trying to make records that are not necessarily hits, [but] that people will dig to listen to for a long time.
—Neil Young, March 1970
“It’s blowing my mind,” Neil Young admitted when he was asked about his experience on the road with CSNY. “I didn’t think it was gonna be as big as this. Makes a lot of money, and it’s hard to relate to, after what I was doing before.” Two years after leaving Buffalo Springfield, he had become . . . well, if not a superstar, just yet, then at least a celebrity in the world of rock and roll. There was even physical evidence to support his status. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere had been rescued from oblivion and was heading up the album charts. Memphis pop band the Gentrys were picking up airplay with a cover of “Cinnamon Girl,” which sounded strangely as if the Springfield had recorded it during one of Young’s leaves of absence. Within weeks, Young’s own “Cinnamon Girl” would be reissued and join the impostor in the lower half of the Hot 100. But first Young issued a new single, his enervated cover of Don Gibson’s “Oh, Lonesome Me.” “I like that because everybody else seems to hate it so much,” Young confessed.
Young steadfastly ignored the song when he set out on a brief tour with an expanded Crazy Horse in late February. (Jack Nitzsche was added on piano.) As he admitted, the transition from CSNY to the Horse was not straightforward: “It took me two weeks to calm down enough so I could play with this band, because I was rushing all the time with my guitar, playing too many notes.” He had certainly adjusted his pace for his show in Cincinnati, where he performed the acoustic set as if he were marginally more asleep than awake, abandoning songs after a verse and slowing everything to a near standstill. The electric set was equally awry—off-key, out of kilter—but still somehow thrilling, and throughout, the audience was ecstatic. By the time they reached the Fillmore East ten days later, Young and the Horse were both coherent and electrifying, ending their sets with a version of “Cowgirl in the Sand” that anticipated the next forty years of thrash metal. (Young was supported by the Steve Miller Band and, bizarrely, Miles Davis’s fusion band at their least compromising. As the archive CD of Davis’s set confirmed, many of Young’s audience were baffled by the mercurial genius of modern jazz.)
At the end of March, a reviewer of Young’s show in Santa Monica wrote: “To my mind, he’s the best thing American rock and roll has going for itself at the moment.” By then, Young had all but completed his much awaited third studio record—and dismissed Crazy Horse as his backing band, at least in the studio. (It would be 1975 before he joined them onstage again.) “Neil and Elliot called us in,” bassist Billy Talbot recalled, “and said we weren’t gonna work together for a while.” The problem was Danny Whitten, who had slipped further into heroin addiction: “It was too crazy, with Danny doing his trips.” The first few shows had convinced Young that Whitten was barely holding station onstage. As he would tell the press, “I just got up one morning and decided to do something new.”
In May 1969, at the Cellar Door in Washington, the band’s dressing room had been invaded by a seventeen-year-old guitarist, keyboardist, singer, and songwriter called Nils Lofgren, who was eager for Young to hear his songs. In mid-March 1970, Lofgren was invited to Young’s Topanga Canyon house, with its studio now fully functioning in the basement. “I think he was under pressure from Warner Brothers to release another album,” Lofgren considered. “He just didn’t have any idea what to do.” The teenager watched as Young recorded what was intended as the theme song for the After the Gold Rush movie (soon abandoned as too expensive to film). Young accompanied himself on piano and delivered his ambiguous environmental statement in a voice so cracked and high that it was almost painful to hear. Then the two men cut the more orthodox “Tell Me Why” on acoustic guitars. The next day, Danny Whitten (still coherent behind a vocal mike) and Ralph Molina joined them to add background harmonies, barroom regulars compared to CSN’s choirboys.
Although Billy Talbot’s playing on the tour had been exemplary, Young called in Greg Reeves to jam with Lofgren and Molina. “We just started playing together,” Lofgren said, “and it sounded really nice and relaxed. The following day we just went into the studio and tried it out again, and this time it sounded really terrible; but the next day Neil brought all the equipment up to the house and recorded the whole album in less than a week in his home. He had all these unfinished songs, and they just started getting finished.” Suddenly Young’s repertoire had expanded to include several landmark songs: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” a gift to Graham Nash as his relationship dissolved; “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” an eerie response to CSNY’s London visit in January; “When You Dance, I Can Really Love,” for which he briefly reunited the Horse; and most enduringly, “Southern Man.” This was his first political statement, widely acclaimed as an attack on the racism of America’s Deep South—the same forces of bigotry and repression that had wiped out Fonda and Hopper at the end of Easy Rider. But the song was more subtle (or confused) than that. It switched positions and viewpoints almost from line to line, evoking the legacy of slavery, the evil of the Ku Klux Klan, the South’s century-long plea for renewal after the Civil War and, in the final verse, a white man—then or now?—driven to the point of murder by seeing his woman (wife? sweetheart? daughter?) in the arms of “your black man.” The music screamed rage and revenge, easy answers to hard questions, but the lyrics were infinitely more complex than the song’s audience wanted to understand.
The same could be said for Neil Young’s attitude to his career, as he and David Briggs pulled these songs into shape as an album, and the CSNY tour loomed. Like Stephen Stills, Young felt as if he could see the end of the road. “I don’t know how much longer I can do it,” he confessed in April. “I just want to do something else. After this next album I don’t know how much longer it’ll be before I put out another one, of any kind, with anyone.” These were not the words of a man itching to be back in the studio with Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
Instead, a different kind of reunion seems to have intrigued him. Since the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, Young and Stills had prospered; likewise, Richie Furay, who formed the breezy country-rock band Poco. But the Springfield’s original rhythm section had struggled. Dewey Martin had been regarded by some as the most disruptive element in a cantankerous band. But it was him who Young and Elliot Roberts contacted in the late spring of 1970, with the suggestion that the original Buffalo Springfield might reunite after the CSNY tour was over. Bruce Palmer was certainly available and willing, and Martin sounded out Richie Furay, who expressed provisional interest. Only one ex-Springfield member seems to have been left in the dark about these nebulous plans: Stephen Stills.
Crosby, Stills and Nash—plus or minus Neil Young—will probably remain the band that asks the question, “What can we do that would be really heavy?” And then answers, “How about something by Joni Mitchell?”
—Langdon Winner, Rolling Stone, April 1970
It was Lenny Bronstein, on WCBR at Brooklyn College, who stole the world exclusive. On March 9, 1970, he secured an advance copy of Déjà Vu and played it nonstop all morning. By the end of the month, it was in the stores, outselling everything on college campuses, on its way to becoming the bestselling album in the nation by early May. By then, “Woodstock” had climbed to number 11 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and “Teach Your Children” was being teed up in its wake.
In early April, headlines around the world proclaimed that the Beatles had broken up. There was now a void in pop culture, and CSNY seemed perfectly poised to fill it. They were, one reviewer insisted, “undoubtedly the most creative working group in the world.” Another raved that Déjà Vu was “the most beautiful record ever produced.” In the LA Times, Robert Hilburn acclaimed it as “easily the best rock album of the new year” and congratulated CSNY (alongside the Band) for outstripping the Beatles “in such areas as creative use of harmony, matching instrumentation with theme and in lyric sophistication.” The addition of Neil Young to the already gifted CSN lineup was universally acclaimed, with many critics noting how skillfully he had managed to squeeze into their tight vocal blend. (He hadn’t, of course; he did not sing a single note of harmony on the album.)
Inevitably, there were those who carped—not least Stephen Stills, who lamented that his relocation to London after the European shows in January meant that he hadn’t been around to supervise the final mix. “I may have coasted a little bit on the production,” he admitted. “A few things got past me that I’ve regretted since.” Stills claimed credit for the cover concept, portraying the six musicians in nineteenth-century costumes, and the tangible finesse of the packaging. The specifics had helped to delay the album by several weeks, as printers struggled to reproduce the band’s demand for lettering embossed in gold leaf, and a surface that would feel like leather. CSNY promised that Déjà Vu would resemble an antiquarian book, not a standard record album.
Rolling Stone magazine was quick to pounce on the pretentiousness of the package. As Langdon Winner complained, “The heralded leather cover turns out to be nothing more than crimpled cardboard.” It was a metaphor, he felt, for the music inside: “It’s still too sweet, too soothing, too perfect and too good to be true.” And as for CSNY themselves, they were roundly attacked in the underground press for the banality and naïvety of their image and their songs. David Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair” became the focus for their insults—it was described as overblown, ridiculous, embarrassing. And as the Woodstock movie and soundtrack were readied for release, Déjà Vu served as a symbol of everything that the festival had claimed to be and failed to achieve. In the East Village Other, Charlie Frick declared that “The album comes on like, ‘Hey gang, wasn’t Woodstock fun!! Peace and love are too much, aren’t they kids!! Let’s have a big hand for peace and love.’ The Woodstock nation’s applause is deafening.” The acclaim seemed certain to continue on April 30, when CSNY were due to resume their touring schedule at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.