I fell into a kind of hurricane . . . where drugs and alcohol were part of everyday life.
—Véronique Sanson
The wedding had just taken place on March 14, 1973, at Artington House in Guildford, and the bride went into the bathroom with her sister. “She and I were standing by the window,” the bride recalled, “and she said to me, ‘Vero, the car is outside. You could break the window and get away.’ ” The bride hesitated for a few seconds, mulling it over. “I’ll get divorced later,” she told her sister. “We’re here now.”
The reluctant bride was twenty-three-year-old Véronique Sanson; her husband was Stephen Stills. “To be honest, I think I got married out of politeness,” she would confess. “I was already saying to myself, ‘I’m not sure I can live with this man.’ But I didn’t want to upset my parents or his parents. That sounds very cold, but it’s the truth.”
Engaged to the singer Michel Berger when she met Stills in March 1972, she had abandoned her comfortable life in France. “Stephen has fantastic charisma,” she admitted. “When he sang and played, I immediately fell under his spell.” But she soon realized that loving Stills meant dealing with his excessive habits: “It was like a minefield, because of drugs and alcohol. My body wasn’t strong enough to live like that.”
Sanson’s courtship coincided with her elevation to stardom. Her song “Amoureuse” became a huge hit in her homeland and was widely covered in an English translation (most famously by Kiki Dee). Stills made sure that, wherever they were living, Sanson had a piano at her disposal; he advised her about recording facilities and producers and would later lend her his band for live shows and studio sessions. But whenever Sanson was among Stills and his musical friends, “I never dared play ‘The Artist,’ ” she said. “Steve wouldn’t suggest it, either. I was always just his wife, not a musician who was well known in her own country. I always said to myself, ‘One day . . .’ ”
At the end of May 1973, Stills and his new wife flew to Hawaii to meet up with David Crosby and Graham Nash. “I decided to take my boat to Lahaina on Maui for some diving,” Crosby said, “and Graham decided to come along. When Stephen heard, he thought, ‘Why should they have all the fun?’ and so he came out to join us.” Enter Neil Young, who rented a beach house at Mala Wharf. Between there and the Mayan, CSNY achieved an easy rapport that they had never quite found at home. “Before we knew it,” Crosby remembered, “we were all hanging out on my boat, diving, getting really healthy, and having a swell time. After a while the guitars came out and we found ourselves playing and singing each other’s songs. And that’s where it began to take off.” This idyllic vision of brotherhood was captured in a photo taken toward the end of their stay—four beatific beach bums, glazed and mellow. Nash envisaged this as the cover of a CSNY reunion album, which would take its name from a Neil Young composition: Human Highway. Only in retrospect would a key line from the song seem prophetic: “I got lost on the human highway.”
Another reading of this tale would surface decades later, in Jimmy McDonough’s originally authorized, then unauthorized, biography of Neil Young, Shakey. In this alternate narrative, the entire Hawaii trip was staged by Crosby and Nash to wean Stephen Stills off cocaine, and thereby would demonstrate to Young that CSN were capable of participating in a reunion. Linked to this version was the death of Young’s roadie Bruce Berry, a heroin addict whose body was found in early June. McDonough suggested that Berry had arrived in Hawaii with cocaine for one of the musicians, been sent home to California, and then OD’d. In his autobiography, Nash blurred the tale by relating that straight after the group portrait of CSNY was taken, “some business, some cocaine thing, went down, and suddenly we weren’t talking to each other.” As he added, “I’m still not quite sure what happened—and I’m not sure if anyone exactly knows.” So CSNY bonded in paradise, and cocaine shaped and capsized their reunion. With these musicians, at this point in history, both extremes were within reach at the same moment, without anyone present having a sober recollection of what had happened.
There was certainly optimism in the air when CSNY regrouped in California. David Geffen and Elliot Roberts announced an imminent stadium tour—six to ten concerts across America that summer, followed by indoor venues in the winter. Neil Young, usually the most fainthearted participant in any CSNY reunion, was sufficiently enthused in mid-July 1973 to sketch out, on the back of an envelope, his vision of how the band might structure their shows. He envisaged the band playing three sets—electric, acoustic, electric—with soloists taking their turn in the middle of the show. Each concert would be bookended by “Carry On”; “Lookout Joe,” “New Mama,” and “Last Dance” would be retrieved from his recent solo tour; Stills’s Manassas showcase “The Treasure” would be added to the group’s collective repertoire; and the band would also perform the long-lost “Curious Joe” (described as “a bad Crosby song” by one of the few who ever heard it). CSNY would also delve into the distant past by reviving the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” and Buffalo Springfield’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Woman.”
“I’ll do anything I can to make it easy,” Stephen Stills pledged that month. “I don’t want to be the pusher this time—I’m looking to somebody else for the energy.” But CSNY had never operated in the studio or on the road without Stills being the driving force, regardless of whether or not his colleagues responded to his efforts. Young opened his ranch to the band for extended rehearsals, which resulted in a series of semiprofessional recording sessions—documents of work in progress rather than attempts at studio masters. Each member of CSN had set aside material for this overdue reunion, and Young had earmarked “New Mama” and “Human Highway.” “It would have been our best album,” Nash remarked on numerous occasions.
What’s apparent from this distance is that the much-vaunted Human Highway album never came close to being made. Recordings did eventually surface from the ranch, thanks to an indiscreet radio station, but with a single exception, they were not ready for release. The one genuine survivor from these impromptu sessions—“It was so obviously a keeper,” Joel Bernstein noted—was Stills’s “See the Changes.” “Stephen has always been adept at writing melodies that turn into great Crosby, Stills and Nash records,” Bernstein said, and the ranch recording of the song had that elusive feel—campfire at twilight (or Canyon pool in mid-afternoon)—that was the hallmark of CSN.
“See the Changes” featured a rhythm section that seemed to have been assembled by committee: percussionist Joe Lala from Manassas; bassist Tim Drummond from Young’s tour band; and drummer Russ Kunkel from sessions with Crosby and Nash. They were also heard on “Little Blind Fish,” a playful piece of improvisation that afforded each member of CSNY a vocal cameo. The only other song to reach tape during these rehearsals was Nash’s “Prison Song,” influenced by his father’s experience in the 1950s and by a letter he’d received from a kid in a Texas jail, who was facing a lengthy sentence for possessing a single marijuana joint.
No sooner had the band cohered than—as Stills recalled— “one day we stopped playing.” “There was a lot of disagreement about how to go about it,” Crosby noted. Nash remembered: “It wasn’t as exciting as we wanted.” In Tim Drummond’s recollection, “We decided against it. Something wasn’t right.” Joel Bernstein’s memory was that Young greeted CSN one day with the message: “I’m just too tired.” “He had gone through this ordeal on the road earlier in the year,” Bernstein explained, “and he had been ill. But it’s possible that Neil had just got tired of CSN. They could never believe that Neil would want to play with anyone else, because to them, working with him was so good that nothing else could beat it. But for Neil . . . well, first of all, it wasn’t his band. And then there was always the issue that before long he would be having a major head-to-head with Stephen. So, Neil wanted out—and then it seemed to CSN that no sooner had he quit than he was back in the studio with his own people. I imagine they were very pissed at him.”
Young’s producer David Briggs recalled an unannounced knock at his door: “I opened it and there was Neil. He said, ‘Hey, I was just on my way to a CSNY session and I just don’t feel like going there. Let’s go make some rock and roll.’ So, we packed our bags and came to LA and wound up with the Tonight’s the Night album.”
If Geffen had never mooted the possibility of a reunion, no one’s reputation would have suffered. Instead, everyone was free to speculate and exaggerate. One anonymous Atlantic Records employee claimed: “The four of them could not even agree on one song to play, not one.” When your own record company was spreading damaging rumors, you were in trouble.
More pertinent was Joel Bernstein’s observation: “If you save your best songs for the band, but then record them with someone else, how can you still say you’re a functioning band?” As Graham Nash explained, “When we first got together, the idea was that the group would be our highest means of expression.” Like Crosby and Stills, he had reserved material for CSNY, only to discover that CSNY were incapable of staying together long enough to record it. “Those songs were just cramming up my head,” he recalled. As Stephen Stills concluded, “We all got disgusted and made our own solo albums.” As they did, it was their supposedly exhausted colleague who gained the upper hand.
Graham doesn’t like the style of my solo stuff—he thinks it’s too loud and too lush. But then I think his album drags.
—Stephen Stills, April 1974
After the multifaceted panache of Stephen Stills Manassas, Down the Road was a supreme disappointment. As Chris Hillman put it, with a touch of understatement, “It really wasn’t very good.” Manassas continued to function after the CSNY rehearsals collapsed, but the band had lost its pulse. Dallas Taylor was struggling with heroin addiction, while Fuzzy Samuel drifted in and out of the lineup. Stills was aware that his reputation was under threat: “I know I’ve blown my music and offended my friends because I was crazy behind coke,” he admitted, “but I’m not like that anymore.” To underline the point, he recorded two of the songs he’d been saving for CSNY, “First Things First” and “As I Come of Age,” enlisting vocal support from Crosby and Nash. Simultaneously, Nash worked off his dissatisfaction in his basement studio, where he assembled his own solo record, Wild Tales. As Joel Bernstein’s remarkable cover photo revealed, the mod matinee idol of Swinging London now resembled an Old Testament prophet, raging against the emptiness of modern life, and the music was every bit as stark.
At SIR in Hollywood, Young assembled a small group of musicians in late August 1973 to stage an Irish wake for lost friends. Night after night, they waited until they were perfectly pitched between inebriated freedom and total oblivion and then performed the same set of songs—brutal, passionate laments for Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, celebrations of nihilism and despair, chronicles of drug deals and psychological violence. In its original form, always mourned by producer David Briggs, Tonight’s the Night was a collage of musical extremism and drunken dialogue. But having exorcised his emotions and his songs, Young filed the tape away, convinced that it would be impossible to release.
No sooner had he completed the record than a rumor spread that Young was dead, victim of a drug overdose. Nobody who had heard Tonight’s the Night would have doubted the tale for a second. Indeed, Reprise Records began work on an obituary before they thought to ask the artist himself if he was still alive.
To confirm his existence, Young headlined three nights of shows in September 1973 at the newly opened Roxy Theatre in Hollywood (then co-owned by David Geffen). Graham Nash stood in as his support act at short notice, previewing Wild Tales. Anyone seeking nostalgia was sadly disappointed, as Young reeled off his Tonight’s the Night song cycle in the guise of a wasted huckster shepherding tourists to Miami Beach—musically exhilarating but deeply disorientating for those still searching for the creator of Harvest. “There was this deathly silence when Neil’s shows emptied out,” David Crosby reported. “Apparently, people were in a state of complete shock—they didn’t believe what they’d just seen and heard.” Similar reactions occurred when Young carried an extended version of this show into Canada, the UK, and back across the States, leaving listeners stunned or audibly frustrated by his refusal to supply comforting nostalgia. Young was becoming as willful and as driven as Miles Davis, and like his former support act, he had chosen to pursue creative satisfaction at any cost.
Before he headed north, Young had turned up at Winterland in San Francisco on October 4, 1973, for one of the final Manassas shows. Midway through the program, when fans expected a Stills solo set, they were amazed to see CSN take the stage for a slightly shambolic quartet of songs. Predictable mayhem ensued when a shaggy Neil Young wandered out to join them. “It’s been a long time since this happened,” Nash crowed. “I quit!” Young shouted with a broad smile on his face.
CSNY proceeded to deliver five unreleased songs, three by Young and two by Nash, most of which Stephen Stills didn’t appear to recognize. “I’m sorry I don’t know the words,” he mumbled after Young sang “Roll Another Number for the Road.” The irony of using CSNY to perform a song that satirized the myth of Woodstock can’t have escaped its composer. Stills did claim a verse of “Human Highway” but bore a look of profound confusion during “New Mama” and greeted Nash’s announcement of “And So It Goes” plaintively: “By the end of the song, I might learn it.” After more orderly versions of “Long Time Gone” and “Change Partners,” Crosby, Nash, and Young vanished into the wings, leaving Stills and Manassas to follow the main event. “I knew then and there that Manassas was over,” Chris Hillman recollected.
Two nights later, Crosby showed up in Long Beach for the next Manassas show. There were calls throughout his duo set with Stills for Neil Young to appear. “He ain’t here,” Stills growled. “And if you want your money back, you can have it.” The following day, it was back to Winterland, where Stills announced: “I conned ’em into it again.” But this was only a partial reunion: to the inevitable call of “Where’s Neil?” Stills replied, “On the farm.” (Crosby offered a better response to the same question: “He’s standing right next to you.”) CSN briefly managed to revive the spirit of their original union and delivered one of their finest-ever live performances. Though absent in body, Young was still represented in the setlist, as Stills announced “a new song that was written by the snake himself” and gave “Human Highway” a fresh melodic setting. When Manassas returned to the stage, Stills yelled out, “To me, this band is home”; but less than a week later, the tour ended, and—without any official announcement—Manassas slipped gently away.
Stills would always believe that Atlantic Records had deliberately underpromoted the Manassas records, in case solo success forestalled a lucrative CSNY reunion. After Nash’s Wild Tales was released in January 1974, its creator reached the same conclusion. The album peaked at number 34 in the US and failed to yield a hit single. “I have it on very good authority that Wild Tales was buried,” Nash said later. “No promotion.” But the simple truth was that Wild Tales was not a commercial record. It bore a sonic resemblance to Neil Young’s Harvest, but with a ragged, enervated air closer in spirit to Young’s contemporary work. Raw, deeply personal, and often affecting (never more so than on Nash’s collaboration with Joni Mitchell, “Another Sleep Song”), it was anything but easy listening and, therefore, not what a mass audience wanted from the creator of “Teach Your Children” and “Our House.”
As Wild Tales was released, Ahmet Ertegun flew to California for one-on-one meetings with CSN. He listened politely to their latest compositions and then suggested equally politely that it might be time for them to swallow their pride and reunite. Meanwhile, Elliot Roberts went to Neil Young and—as legend has it—told him that CSNY were “all just pissing in the wind.” Together the good cop–bad cop offensive from Ertegun and Roberts began to take effect.
Individually, all four of the quartet had realized that they were increasingly at odds with their audiences. Stephen Stills was talking openly about quitting the business and becoming an actor, or a novelist, or maybe a film director. As Joe Lala recalled, “Stephen was complaining about being in a rut. He was trying too hard and felt stale.” David Crosby was upset to see “all those people turning out for the heavy metal and glitter stuff, the ambisexual shock rock.” But perhaps the power of the CSNY name and myth could conquer the effects of age and waning careers. “I think we’re all older and more mature now,” Stills said cautiously. “I think we could handle it.”
My new band is a dictatorship—I like that. My experience with democracy in rock and roll is that it is a total failure.
—Stephen Stills, February 1974
In January and February 1974, Bob Dylan and the Band performed to sold-out arenas across North America—Dylan’s first run of concerts in almost eight years. It was also the most lucrative tour ever staged at that point, the forty concerts in forty-three days grossing more than five million dollars. It has been estimated that more than twelve million applications were received for the five hundred thousand tickets on sale.
The promoter of that tour, Bill Graham, was the obvious choice when David Geffen and Elliot Roberts mapped out a plan to reunite CSNY and surpass Dylan. He was one of the few industry professionals to whom musicians listened with respect, having proved his pedigree on the San Francisco concert scene since the mid-1960s. Graham, Geffen, and Roberts fashioned a schedule whereby CSNY could play a dozen shows in North American sports stadiums, averaging fifty thousand fans a night, and play to more people than Dylan had achieved in six weeks.
The band’s experience at Balboa Stadium in December 1969 had convinced them that huge outdoor shows did not suit their music. Even large indoor arenas precluded personal communication with an audience and damaged their fragile harmony sound. But those issues had to be weighed against the mind-boggling quantities of cash that a CSNY stadium tour could generate. As Stephen Stills admitted, “There are these bagsful of money across the street, and all we have to do is go over and pick them up.” In retrospect, both David Crosby and Graham Nash would blame Stills and Neil Young for taking them down the stadium route: “Stephen and Neil like to play big places for the sake of big,” Crosby would claim. “And they like big bucks.” But Crosby and Nash had an equal power of veto, and they chose not to employ it. “We’ve got to play blimp hangars,” Crosby explained. “If we played the kind of places I’d like—say, a nice ten-thousand-seater—we’d have to play for days and days to take care of the ticket demand.”
Whatever their motivations, by early March 1974 all four musicians had agreed to a reunion. Stephen Stills broke the news from the stage of Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, where CSNY had played their debut show less than five years earlier. Backstage, he boasted: “It’s going to out-gross the Dylan tour. In fact, it already has”—although not a single ticket had gone on sale. Beyond his customary swagger, however, Stills spoke like a man who had been hurt too often to expect a happy ending: “If it doesn’t happen, it’ll be because everybody has grown too far apart. We’ll see.” Then he sighed resignedly and let his cynicism show: “Everybody will have a new ‘I’ve been there’ patch for their Levi jackets,” as if CSNY were just another rite of passage for the rock generation. Nor could he ignore the human dynamics: “The hardest part is going to be for everyone to remember how to sit and take orders. And me too.”
Graham Nash was no more starry-eyed. He could act like a PR man for a sentence at a time: “Something happens when the four of us get together, some special sort of chemistry.” But then reality and experience intruded, as he lamented the “bullshit” he’d endured from his CSNY buddies: “Sometimes people aren’t who you expect them to be. You expect people to be trustworthy and they turn out not to be.” Then he tried to turn that around: “So what if friends are assholes some of the time? Aren’t we all? Before, in the group, it used to get serious and we’d get real crazy about it and not communicate. We’re growing up, I think. At last!” And he laid out a rationale for the reunion that was deeply idealistic but betrayed his distance from teenage culture: “I see a giant hole everywhere. I find very little of that special magic in the music. The indefinable something that was there around ’sixty-nine/’seventy, the Woodstock period. We’re going to bring that feeling back. There’s good music around, but I haven’t, for a long time, seen people get off the way they did when CSNY really hit.”
But Woodstock was almost five years in the past, and “the indefinable something” of its culture had vanished. As Paul Kantner said in March 1974, “The youth movement died at Kent State, and there’s nowhere for it to go. There’s just no possible way of dealing with those forces. It’s like trying to play poker with a dead man. You’re dealing cards and he doesn’t pick them up.” The “dead man” was Richard Nixon, by now mired in the Watergate scandal that was, one by one, picking off his closest aides and edging ever nearer to incriminating the man in the Oval Office. Watergate was becoming a rallying point for investigative journalists, and for political opponents keen to contrast themselves to the gray, jowly mask of the Republican president. But for teenage America, Watergate wasn’t a matter of party affiliation. It suggested nihilism as the only rational response to an establishment inextricably bound up with corruption and greed. The scandal didn’t bring young people together; it merely alienated them from the system and all its alternatives.
The single issue that could unite American youth in outrage had been the Vietnam War, and that had faded from the national consciousness. Onstage in New York, on January 23, 1973, Neil Young had been handed a note that read, “The war is over.” It wasn’t, as the inhabitants of Southeast Asia could confirm; but on that day the Paris Peace Accord was signed, the United States slowly began to disentangle itself from its most disastrous overseas venture. Once young men were no longer threatened with the draft, most could afford to ignore geopolitics. Instead, they focused on the struggle to get a job, as a global energy crisis triggered a recession throughout the capitalist West, and cultural depression stalked the world’s wealthiest nations.
That aura of despair also lingered over the members of CSNY. Graham Nash had endured emotional extremes with Amy Gossage and, by his own telling, “went through two years of total depression” after the lukewarm reception of Wild Tales. But his psychological pain was more deep-seated than that, as he revealed to Ben Fong-Torres that summer: “All my aware life, from age sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, I’ve been an object. A fucking object. That’s why I try very hard to be as unrecognizable as possible.” Not even a lover’s embrace could lift his mood. “I don’t know, I don’t feel anything,” he admitted.
Neil Young and Carrie Snodgress were still together, and their son, Zeke, was almost eighteen months old. But their suspicions about his development were confirmed when doctors diagnosed him with cerebral palsy. Their anxiety over the future of their child ate away at a relationship that was already beginning to decay from within.
Stephen Stills and Véronique Sanson had also endured a traumatic introduction to parenthood. Three days after their son, Christopher, was born in April 1974, doctors said he was suffering from cholera and toxicosis, and the parents were warned that he wasn’t expected to live through the night. He recovered, but Sanson still felt unable to settle into her marriage. Her initial thrill at living in the Rocky Mountains had dissipated into boredom: “Our house was so isolated. You needed a snow plow, because you couldn’t get up there by car. What I didn’t know was that, at ten thousand feet, the snow season lasts for seven months. It was terrible. One day the temperature was minus forty-five, and if you opened the window, everything frosted up in three seconds. And just that snow everywhere, that incredible whiteness—it became very draining after a while.”
She also felt completely isolated. “I was fed up with his world revolving around drugs and alcohol. The thing was with Steve, when he said, ‘Bye, see you later,’ he often wouldn’t come back for three days. Mostly he’d come home in an appalling state. So, I was waiting to leave until the right moment came.”
We can’t go out and do “Southern Man” for eighteen minutes, or “Our House” again. We’ve got to go out and say something we mean now.
—Graham Nash, April 1974
Throughout 1973, a comedy troupe assembled by National Lampoon magazine staged a theater show entitled Lemmings. Act 2 was entirely devoted to the comic rock opera that gave the evening its name, as the assembled cast offered a wicked satire of the Woodstock Nation. In prime position, singing “Woodshuck” (aka “Lemmings Lament”), were none other than Freud, Marx, Engels, and Jung, a thinly disguised parody of another legendary quartet. “We are lemmings, we are crazies,” the ensemble sang with strained harmonies, before a Crosby-style scat vocal and a mock–Neil Young guitar solo made the objects of their sarcasm unmistakable.
A couple of years later, the Lampoon team concocted another demolition of Young’s image, with the double bill of “History of Neil Young” and “Southern California Brings Me Down.” “Could he have been a drug abuser?” the stoned narrator asked—and National Lampoon had not even heard the then-unreleased Tonight’s the Night album.
The artist almost seemed to demand an apocalyptic interpretation of his state of mind, by the studied anti-commercialism of his actions. Rather than forget his traumatic 1973 US tour, Young chose to commemorate it with a live album, Time Fades Away. It was comprised purely of unreleased material; or, as Nick Kent proclaimed in NME, “murky, sloppy attempts at rock and roll, built around tiresome chord progressions and obscure nonsense lyrics.” Kent concluded: “Neil Young has now got nothing to say for himself.” This wasn’t an isolated verdict: several reviewers named it as the worst album of 1973, and the Arizona Republic declared: “At a party, someone sounding like Young and trying to sing would be laughed at.” An anonymous record executive extended the theme: “Neil’s getting to be a fat cat. He doesn’t have to try, so he isn’t. His boredom is killing us.”
These might have been career-ending reviews, but Young dauntlessly pursued his own creative agenda. In spring 1974, he recorded On the Beach, which would attract an equally vitriolic response when it was released during the CSNY tour. Few recognized at the time that, rather than betraying his lack of inspiration, Young was actually reinventing his aesthetic principles—the confessional spirit of his earlier songs mutating into a coruscating analysis of his psyche, the scene around him, and his adopted homeland. Both Nash and Crosby guested on the album, but neither of them seemed to comprehend the depth of Young’s achievements during this period; indeed, Crosby would famously try to persuade Young not to play “your dark stuff,” little realizing that darkness was where Young shone most brightly.
None of CSNY was at a commercial peak in spring 1974; but together the band still amounted to an event. Once the tour was announced, ticket sales were phenomenal, and the schedule now stretched from July into September. The one area it ignored, ironically, was Southern California, where what was proposed as the biggest single-day gathering in the state’s history—a star-laden bill at the Ontario Motor Speedway, outside Los Angeles—was postponed twice before being abandoned. As the promoters claimed, there were vast logistical problems attached to the venue; but more damaging was the fact that only about 25 percent of the available tickets had been sold. Elsewhere across North America, potential receipts for the tour promised to top $10 million (thereby doubling the Dylan tour value). Spectacular support bills were arranged, with headline acts such as the Band and the Beach Boys prepared to forget their pride for a suitable share of the gate. (At the event, CSNY kept their distance from their peers on tour, never deigning to guest with them onstage or suggest any collaboration.)
All four men were adamant that the tour should not just celebrate the past, although that was what the majority of audience members might be expecting. “There’s plenty of new songs too,” Stills explained as rehearsals began. “We’ve all been writing a lot, especially Neil.” But Stills and Nash had already recorded much of the material they had prepared for the abortive reunion the previous year. David Crosby had held his songs back, but they were few in number and—like much of his material—intensely personal in theme and style. Neil Young appeared to have struck an endlessly refilled seam of fresh material, even after recording three solo albums in eighteen months. But he had a very precise, and blinkered, view of what CSNY were, and what they did best. “I remember CSNY as a great acoustic thing, sitting around somewhere without the crowd,” he would recall. When they worked with Neil Young, CSN relished the frenetic energy he brought to their electric sets. But in Young’s eyes, electricity was always more powerful in the hands of Crazy Horse.
Young opened his ranch as a CSNY base camp in June 1974, a month ahead of the first show in Seattle. As Crosby recalled, “He built this full-size, forty-foot stage in the middle of a grove of redwoods, right across from his studios, so we could record.” He and Nash drove in each day, while Stills stayed at Young’s house, and “two chicks,” as Crosby put it, helped Carrie Snodgress feed the band and crew. Nash admitted to being “apprehensive” about the relationship between Young and Stills until “we picked up our electric guitars and Stephen and Neil took a solo and looked each other in the eyes. If those two people get along, me and David are cool.” Stills was ecstatic: “We haven’t done the old tunes in years, man. It’s almost like playing them for the first time.”
The rehearsal stage was only a few yards from Young’s home studio. In mid-June, he began to lay down a batch of demos—gentle, melodic, reflective, and light on the angst and trauma that was shaping his contemporary solo material. He cut several of them solo, or with stray members of the tour band: the lullaby “Barefoot Floors,” “Homefires,” “Love Art Blues,” and “Love Is a Rose.” With Crosby and Nash, he refined an acoustic arrangement of “New Mama.” And on three tunes, including a reprise of “Love Art Blues” and the slender “Hawaiian Sunrise,” he employed CSN’s vocal harmonies in their natural state. All of their frail but tender humanity was apparent when Young eventually released the third CSNY collaboration from these sessions: “Sailboat Song” (aka “Through My Sails”). “When you hear how beautiful that track is,” Joel Bernstein said, “you just feel so frustrated that they couldn’t do that more often.” Graham Nash’s “Fieldworker,” dedicated to the plight of migrant farmhands, was the only song written by CSN to be attempted in the studio. “They weren’t trying to make an album,” Bernstein recalled, “just hearing songs back to see how they sounded.”
The balance of material reinforced Young’s suspicion about the creative weight that he was being asked to carry. In “The Old Homestead,” which he wrote in 1974 but didn’t release for another six years, Young worked through the ambiguity he felt about being required to step back inside CSNY. “He still feels the pull,” the song ended, half in longing, half regret. Yet in an unguarded moment with Jimmy McDonough, Young laid bare his dissatisfaction with CSN: “That tour was disappointing to me. I think CSN really blew it. Last time I played with ’em had been two or three years before that. They hadn’t made an album, and they didn’t have any new songs. What were they doing? How could they just stop like that?” The answer was simple: CSN had been waiting for Neil Young. It was he, after all, who had pulled out of the reunion sessions the previous year, forcing his colleagues to record without him if they ever wanted to see their songs released. But his comments revealed a gulf in understanding between the original trio and their maverick partner. Once CSN started working with Young, they assumed that CSNY was now the ultimate—the creative—priority. Young, meanwhile, took CSN at their original word: that they could work in whatever combination suited them at the time. In his mind, there was no reason CSN couldn’t have made an album without him (and he was right). To which they would have countered: why make a CSN record when it could have been CSNY?
His jibe about their lack of material wasn’t accurate, or fair, but it was understandable from a man for whom creativity was now as natural as eating or sleeping. Since the completion of Déjà Vu, Stephen Stills had issued five records, with songs still to spare; his output was the numerical equal of Young’s. Graham Nash had two solo albums and a collaboration with David Crosby to his credit; Crosby, always the least prolific of the quartet, had completed one solo project of his own, plus collaborations with Paul Kantner and the Byrds. What was undeniably true, however, was that all three members of CSN had been revising or repeating their old creative moves; Young had set out on a course that they barely understood and had no way of matching. That is not to criticize the quality of CSN’s individual work through the first half of the ’70s; merely to note that Young changed profoundly, while they didn’t. They were now four individuals, with little pretense of being a band. Once, Stephen Stills had been the unchallenged creative force within the quartet; now only Neil Young had the power to force his vision onto theirs.
Nothing exemplified that shift in influence better than “Pushed It Over the End” (or “Citizen Kane Junior Blues,” as Young first announced the song at an unannounced cameo after a Ry Cooder gig in May 1974). It was a clumsy, raw-yet-compelling collage of musical fragments, and the same adjectives applied to the narrative, which touched on the brief terrorist career of kidnapping victim Patty Hearst, the rise of feminism, and Young’s growing misgivings about his relationship with Carrie Snodgress. Translating it into a vehicle for CSNY was as much of a stretch as Stills persuading the band to tackle one of his excursions into Latin soul, or Crosby to drag Stills and Young into a wordless harmony chorale. But through willpower on his side, and willingness on theirs, Young coaxed CSN into creating arguably the most thrilling series of performances heard on the two-month tour. A full set of such experiments would have lived up to Nash’s pre-tour demand for “something we mean now.” Instead, CSN chose to rely on perhaps the only menu that a stadium crowd could appreciate: nostalgia.
The first ten shows were like, “What song do you wanna do?” “I don’t know. What do you wanna do?” “Who’s got the list?” “What list? We don’t use a list.”
—Stephen Stills
From the ranch, where they emerged with an estimated six hours of material at their command (approximately 20 percent of which was new), CSNY headed north to Seattle, and one of the few indoor shows on their summer schedule. At precisely 9:00 p.m. on July 9, 1974, Russ Kunkel, Joe Lala, and Tim Drummond set up a Latin rhythm, the audience joined in, and even before Stephen Stills kicked into a superb “Love the One You’re With,” the evening was on fire. At 1:30 a.m. the following morning, the band were still onstage, as Graham Nash croaked his way through “Chicago” and David Crosby rasped out a harmony. “Seattle was really good,” Crosby explained. “The feeling in the band is better than I’ve ever seen it, even better than it was when we started the first time.” Across forty songs and nearly four hours of music, nobody’s ego needed to be squashed, no one’s excesses required toning down. Instead, CSNY indulged themselves in a feast of togetherness, tinged with self-doubt. (“How are we doing?” Stills asked nervously, three songs in. “We can’t tell.”)
If the initial burst of excitement died down during the hourlong opening set, the audience was roused to fresh heights of hysteria when CSN embarked on their familiar, perilous journey through the “Suite.” Outdoors, the acoustic sets would often be lost in the wind; by comparison, even a basketball arena in Seattle felt like a backroom. By the time they’d each unveiled new songs and played every possible combination of three- or four-part harmony, ninety minutes had passed—virtually a show in itself. The Seattle crowd hushed themselves as Nash performed the delicate “Another Sleep Song” alone, squealed with delight as Crosby played Joni Mitchell’s “For Free,” and laughed along as Neil Young introduced what seemed to be a comedy number, “Long May You Run.” Then there was another brief pause before the electric music resumed, and the band set out on its homeward run, stuffed with new material from Stills and Young. Crosby scorched his voice with an incoherent rant on “Long Time Gone” before Young delivered a searing double play of “Revolution Blues” and “Pushed It Over the End.” As the long night neared its climax, CSNY burst into “Carry On,” jamming with far more purpose and control than they had in 1970. “That was an amazing show,” Nash said afterward. “We put everything into it.”
That effort took its toll. Within the first twenty minutes, Nash had begun to growl and scream rather than sing, struggling to be heard over his colleagues’ overamplified guitars. The louder he rasped, the more erratic his harmonies became. By the close Stills was also wailing way off-key. “They often had no floor wedges in front of them,” Joel Bernstein recalled. “The monitors were all off at the side, so the band couldn’t hear anything.” One of the patterns for the tour was set: coke-ravaged tonsils, strained voices, erratic harmonies. Any or all of Nash, Stills, and Young might drift out of tune, leaving only Crosby reliable in front of a microphone. But not in Vancouver, second stop of the tour, where he was effectively silenced by the previous night’s excesses in Seattle. His voice returned, but the longer the tour progressed, the more it lost its mellow purr, as if his throat was gradually becoming coated in steel wool.
Three shows in, CSNY arrived outdoors, facing seventy thousand fans at the Oakland Coliseum. Now the problem wasn’t the voices, but the crowd—heat-baked, distracted, playful, and only vaguely in tune with the band. Even the “Suite,” which could unite any audience in the world, was lost in a melee of complaints when kids at the front decided to stand up, blocking the view of the multitudes beyond. Amid the chaos, Neil Young had the courage and the nerve to sing the eight-minute “Ambulance Blues”—and the charisma to seize the audience’s attention.
Almost every show had its moments of communion and bliss—a delicate “Simple Man” in Kansas City, the mass singalong of “Sugar Mountain” in Denver, a deliciously down-home “The Losing End” in Boston. All the way, Neil Young kept slipping fresh material into the set, and pulled it off; while CSN increasingly relied on the songs that they already knew their audience loved as the best way of calming the multitudes.
For anyone studying the band’s precarious internal balance, perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the shows was their generosity of spirit. In 1970, when careers seemed to be at stake, every show seemed like a competition for the fans’ attention. Four years later, with fifty thousand or more people every night paying ten dollars apiece to be in CSNY’s company, their status was assured. If they weren’t the biggest band in the world—the Rolling Stones could have outgrossed them if they’d tried, and probably Led Zeppelin, too—they were the highest paid. So, they could afford to lend each other their talents, to add an unrehearsed harmony, throw in some unexpected piano licks, or maybe bow out during someone else’s solo spot to enhance their moment, rather than steal it. “The acoustic set was always spontaneous,” Stills explained, “and it worked nicely with everybody slipping in little harmonies. I was the one that instigated that ‘Don’t light me’ business. You’d go out and sing on someone’s tune, and they’d bring the spotlights up. But I had them stop that.” Lack of ego could be its own reward, the way they’d once imagined that ego would be.
On this tour, ego was satisfied in other ways—by the size of the crowds, the lure of the record-breaking gross, and the excess that surrounded the entire adventure. At its most mundane, the scale of CSNY’s reunion could be calculated in numbers—the eighty or more crew and assistants (with varying skill sets) who accompanied them, the double-stage setup that allowed one team to be preparing the next show while the last was still in progress, the state-of-the-art amplification, even the quarter of a million dollars spent on Astroturf to protect the sports grounds from damage. Some of the budget was spent on vanity—the fifty thousand LP-sized CSNY Frisbees manufactured when the tour was announced, the bed linen branded with a CSNY logo designed by Joni Mitchell, the cooks and bartenders primed to cater to the musicians’ culinary whims. There was a vast management structure to support: not just the headline promoters of the tour, but the local representatives of each venue, and the individual aides that each of the principals required—tour managers, financial managers, guitar techs, and assistants whose job was to respond instantly to every rock-star need, from a fresh supply of cocaine to a room upgrade at three in the morning. Wives and official girlfriends flitted in and out of the ensemble, replaced when necessary by the groupies who inevitably haunted the backstage area at every venue.
Cocaine, alongside various other mood enhancers and stabilizers, was written discreetly into the deal at each venue, available freely at the back of the stage for those regular moments when one or all of the band needed to be refueled. At least one of the three shows at the Landover Capital Centre, just southeast of the nation’s seat of government, was marred by the installation of an onstage bar. Intended for the amusement of Stephen Stills, it was inevitably sampled by the entire band, even those who didn’t usually drink to excess. The music that night was rather less coherent than usual. There was nothing strange about drink, drugs, or even groupies being available on demand at mid-1970s rock concerts; what was different about CSNY in 1974 was the professional—indeed, industrial—method with which all these desires (and many more) were fulfilled. But sometimes, even the most hedonistic musicians wanted nothing more than to make music. A reporter backstage at one of the Oakland gigs overheard Stephen Stills being approached by a polite teenage fan: “Can I stay with you tonight—please, please?” But Stills already had a date across town, onstage at a Jerry Garcia gig. “Can I go jam first?” he asked the girl.
Onstage, CSNY bonded as never before, with a display of mutual congratulation and support often lacking in the past. First time around, Neil Young had been the mysterious outsider, an add-on to the chart-busting trio. In 1974, he was integral to almost every song, adding vocals, guitar, or piano to songs that had once been CSN territory, such as the “Suite.” Offstage, however, Young separated himself from the rest of the band, traveling in a mobile home with his young son and a couple of trusted friends. This helped to maintain his sanity on the road but reinforced the impression that there were three together—and then there was one.
There’s no chance of this thing turning sour.
—David Crosby, July 1974
It seems like it’s a little bit too good to be true.
—David Crosby, August 1974
We seem to have a two-month half-life, and then it blows.
—David Crosby, September 1974
On what was, give or take a week, the fifth anniversary of Woodstock, CSNY performed at the Atlantic City Race Track. Like Woodstock, the event turned into an ordeal by summer storms, which drenched the three thousand or so fans who camped out to secure places in front of the stage. Their reward the following afternoon was to see Santana in an insistent drizzle, which soon became a downpour. The audience improvised canopies to protect themselves, as the weather set in and CSNY took the stage. Several thousand left early; several thousand more scaled the fences and gained access for free. But the hard-core fans kept station in front of the stage. “By the time we came on, they were soaked to the skin,” David Crosby said, “but they stayed for another four hours and sang along on all the songs. Man, that really moved me. I almost cried.”
Almost every outdoor show on the tour turned into an endurance test, which was why many of the audience were as well fueled as the band. In some cases, their consumption became perilous, not least in Cleveland, where—another Woodstock throwback—announcers warned about the “little blue pills” in circulation. That was where a twenty-three-year-old man broke his back when he decided he could fly and threw himself twenty-five feet off a ledge into the netting that was designed to protect home plate. It broke under the strain, and he plummeted into the stands. That same night, someone let off a skyrocket during the show, and a fire broke out in the crowd. Back at Atlantic City, a navy sonar technician died from a drug overdose (although his friends claimed that he’d been hit by lightning). In Tempe, the mid-July Arizona heat was so intense that the audience didn’t respond to the electric sets because it required too much energy to dance. Fans in Norfolk were kept sane and safe during a heat wave by firemen regularly hosing them down. Throughout the tour, as Chicago Tribune reviewer Lynn Van Matre complained, “After four hours of music it’s hard to think of anything much except how numb your tail’s getting. Some of the crowd fidgeted, a few started trickling out.”
For the most part, the band were secluded from these inconveniences; their biggest hassle was a set of malfunctioning monitors—or, in New York, Neil Young’s mobile home running out of gas midway across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. But there was one event that pierced their armor. On the morning of July 29, waking up after a show at the Houston University Stadium, they heard the news from London that their friend and mentor Cass Elliot had died from heart failure in London, at just thirty-two. Russ Kunkel, the tour’s drummer, was married to Cass’s sister, Leah, so he booked an emergency flight home to Martha’s Vineyard to be at her side, before returning the next day for the show in Dallas. “We were all heartbroken,” Graham Nash recalled. “Without Cass, none of this would ever have happened.”
Ten days later, the carnival had moved on to Jersey City, where the CSNY show coincided with the long-anticipated resignation of President Nixon. A giant TV screen was set up onstage to carry the speech, followed by a round of fireworks. Elliot Roberts interpreted the event as the culmination of a long relationship between the band and an American generation: “Now that the Nixon regime has come to a halt, and things are more or less out in the open, American youth feel like they’ve come to the end of a very traumatic era. All the riots, picketing, sit-ins, and student demonstrations now appear to have had some positive effect, and songs like ‘Ohio’ and ‘Chicago’—which at the time we thought were just hollow voices on the wind—now take on even more meaning than before.” CSNY opened their show in ebullient spirit, dedicating “Love the One You’re With” to incoming President Gerald Ford. But their voices were rough after a two-night stand in Boston, and the famous harmonies descended into feline screeching. The celebratory audience didn’t help, making so much noise that the band abandoned their acoustic set after five minutes, thereby cutting the show from three hours to two.
Midway through the tour, as the schedule reached New York, Crosby and Nash forced themselves out of bed before the second show at the Nassau Coliseum—an indoor venue that housed Crosby’s favorite shows of the entire trip. They were put in front of a line of journalists at the Plaza Hotel, ostensibly to promote the new CSNY album. This was not a collection of fresh songs or even a hastily assembled souvenir of the first month’s shows. So Far was nothing more enticing than a compilation of the band’s first era, featuring four songs from the 1969 debut and five from Déjà Vu. The only enticements for consumers were a caricature of the band sketched by Joni Mitchell, and the inclusion of both sides of the “Ohio” single. Of the eleven tracks, Neil Young appeared on just four. In the New York Times, Henry Edwards noted sagely that there was no need for CSNY to extend their reunion into the studio “if their public is willing to pay for the same music every three years, as long as it is packaged with a new cover and a new album title.” Apparently, they were, as So Far quickly became the bestselling LP in the US.
Two of the four recipients of this adulation played their part to perfection at the Plaza, Crosby proclaiming that the tour was “the most fun I’ve ever had on a stage in my whole life.” But with fifteen years’ hindsight, Elliot Roberts would recall: “It wasn’t a very pleasant tour. The crew was underpaid. We were all overworked. The expenses were astronomical.” None of those issues (bar the belated discovery that little of the $10 million gross would end up in their pockets) affected the principal players, for whom the crew were merely worker ants. Yet David Crosby would soon come to label the 1974 excursion “The Doom Tour.” Graham Nash remembered it as “a bad experience” because “we had taken away part of our music . . . part of the atmosphere and the ambience, by not being able to make eye contact with our audience.” And as early as 1975, Crosby confessed that they had been burning their audience by playing in stadiums: “You are stealing their money, frankly . . . If big is baseball stadiums, I’ll pass. If that’s the only way CSNY can play, CSNY will never play again.” Even Neil Young, fingered by Crosby as one of the prime movers behind the stadium concept, agreed: “It’s a huge money trip, which was the exact antithesis of what all those people are idealistically trying to see in their heads when they come to see us play.”
There was no single event that transformed the relentlessly positive PR spokesmen of August 1974 into the fearless self-critics of the years ahead. CSNY never dipped beneath a certain standard of professionalism throughout the tour. (The vocal harmonies were another matter: when, forty years later, Graham Nash and Joel Bernstein prepared the CSNY 1974 box set from the tapes recorded in New York, Washington, Chicago, and London, they had to apply subtle pitch correction to individual notes on almost every song.) So, what did happen, beyond the opportunity to escape the melee and apply a cold-eyed stare to two months of artificially stimulated experience? The answer wasn’t so much what took place on the tour, but what came next—and what didn’t.
What’s really horrible is when you think you’ve played a really hot gig, and then you listen to the tapes and it’s just horrible.
The American tour schedule that had begun in Seattle on July 9 ended with the New York area’s largest rock event of the summer, at Roosevelt Raceway on September 8. That final show took place a few hours after it was announced that the archenemy of the counterculture, Richard Nixon, had been granted a pardon by his successor for any crimes and misdemeanors he had committed in office. Nixon was gone, the boys were mostly home from Vietnam, but the Republican Party was still in power, and the war veterans had arrived in the States to find themselves a collective embarrassment—shunned by those who’d opposed the conflict and ignored by supporters of the war because it was obvious that, formal pronouncements to the contrary, the United States had lost.
That same feeling haunted the road. Elliot Roberts and David Geffen were eager to cash in on the financial potential of the CSNY reunion. The focus of this project was the long-delayed concert date in Southern California. In July 1974, fans were invited to put September 21 in their calendars—and then the date was abruptly canceled. The shocked promoters directed press inquiries to the CSNY camp, who were first silent, then enigmatic. But inevitably rumors crept out from those close to the band, claiming that CSNY would not be doing any further concerts after their solitary show in London on September 14. Gone from the schedule was not only Los Angeles, but a series of arena shows later in the year and the promise of an extensive visit to Europe, including some groundbreaking performances behind the Iron Curtain.
It would have been easy for the band’s managers to plead ill health or exhaustion, obtain sick notes from friendly doctors, and slip out of CSNY’s commitments that way. The fact that they didn’t reflected their continued hope that the shows would take place after all. But eventually it became known (without ever being officially announced) that “internal problems” had forced the cancellation of all further dates. It was strongly hinted that one particular member of the band—the one, perhaps, who had insisted on keeping himself separate from the rest—had decided that the road had stretched far enough.
There was also, in Stephen Stills’s version of the tour, an anonymous “someone” in the band who had insisted that the trip to London—the one-date European tour—should follow just six days after the last of the American extravaganzas. “We should have had a week over there to relax and get ready,” he complained. “We were dog-tired.” The tension exploded on the flight over, when Stills and his wife had a heated argument. It proved to be so traumatic that it hung over the Wembley show, with the result that Stills delivered the most passionate performance imaginable of “Myth of Sisyphus,” his torch ballad for a “Parisienne.” Earlier, he had walked out to offer a harmony on Crosby’s “Time After Time,” tears in his eyes, clutching his baby son to his breast, sending out a message to one particular spectator.
That morning Stills had burst into Graham Nash’s room at nine, waking him up after two hours’ sleep, pulled back the curtains to reveal blue sky, and burbled like a child on Christmas morning, “Show me a cloud! Show me a cloud!” The curse of oversignificance that had surrounded their only previous London concert in 1970 had returned, and everyone felt it to some degree—none more than Graham Nash, who was rewarded with a standing ovation from seventy-two thousand fans at the end of “Our House.” His three bandmates joined in. Later in the show David Crosby forced Neil Young to recognize a similar roar of approval from the crowd, after a raggedly emotional reading of “Don’t Be Denied.” That sense of intensity, a collective feeling that this gig really mattered, was evident from the start. But it was heightened by the peculiarly British fare available at the rear of the stage, where the cocaine was less than high-grade, throwing the band’s emotional responses out of sync.
David Crosby exuded ecstasy, showing particular affection for his duet partner of 1968 and trying to provoke Stephen Stills into a sense of joy. But Stills was caught in some ghastly no-man’s-land between passion and despair. There was a line in the “Suite”—“remember what we’ve said, and done, and felt about each other”—that almost begged for a moment of mutual affection. But at Wembley, Stills looked across at Crosby and gave a soul-stricken shrug, as if he no longer knew what he felt about anything or anyone. As he ended “Black Queen,” he looked so distraught and disturbed that Crosby had to act as nursemaid to keep him onstage. There were psychodramas playing out everywhere that evening, never more poignantly than when Graham Nash laid his heart bare on a solo rendition of “Another Sleep Song,” and his ex-lover Joni Mitchell slipped onto the stage to vocalize the despair he’d felt when their relationship ended.
Mitchell’s contribution to the night wasn’t always so mellifluous, as she came close to sinking the “Suite” with her haphazard attempts at harmony. But her presence added to the notion that this was a troubled family gathered for one last reunion, uncertain whether this was a moment for anger, affection, or something far more ambiguous.
All this turmoil was played out in front of Stanley Dorfman’s team of BBC cameramen. “There will be no live album,” Elliot Roberts had pledged before the tour began. “It’s not being filmed—we are not going to do any of those trips.” CSNY had supposedly declined a lucrative offer from ABC-TV, because the network was unwilling to give them a “kill clause,” whereby the band could pull out of the deal if their performance wasn’t good enough. But eventually money spoke too loudly, and so a local crew was assigned to capture the show on film. There was only one problem: the technicians had been given no opportunity to plan their shoot—no setlist, and no clues as to where the cameras should be focused for each song. So Joel Bernstein, the official tour photographer, was positioned in the pit with a pair of headphones and a microphone link to the director. “It was my job to tell them what was likely to happen next,” Bernstein recalled. “Obviously I knew the material, so I would say, ‘Okay, there’s a solo coming up in about ten seconds, and it’s probably going to be Neil who takes it,’ and Stanley Dorfman would relay that to the camera crew.”
Unlike the Albert Hall show four years earlier, CSNY left the stage convinced that they had lived up to their reputation and delivered one of their finest shows ever. They were ferried to Quaglino’s restaurant in central London for an end-of-tour celebration, where Stephen Stills and Neil Young took part in a cacophonous jam with Jimmy Page and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin and Rick Danko and Levon Helm from the Band. The next day they gathered one last time at a BBC screening room, where Dorfman showed them a rough mix of some of his Wembley footage. “They were sat there,” remembered Joel Bernstein, “looking at the monitor, and they were really shocked at how bad they sounded—really shocked.” “Graham Nash was almost in tears when he watched the video,” Stills said. “He wanted to crawl under the carpet. He kept saying, ‘What can I do now?’ He was really furious. I told him, ‘C’mon, man. The show’s over. Forget it.’ ” But Stills didn’t argue with Nash’s perception: “We were awful . . . the harmonies were way off—really excruciating. I mean, painful. I just don’t know how we got away with it.” Neil Young concurred: “It is pretty obvious that we were either too high or just no good. I am saying too high.” Only David Crosby was able to maintain some equilibrium in the face of the truth: “Wembley was quite a good concert in the general run of CSNY concerts. It had its faults—there were some harmonies that were horrendous, but that’s bound to happen when you can’t hear what you’re doing.” And he was right: compared to most of the earlier shows on the 1974 tour, Wembley was something of a triumph. The harmonies were wayward, but only in the final stretch; Graham Nash was, as ever, the chief culprit, but only because he couldn’t hear the monitors. Otherwise, under all the stress, individual and collective, it was a remarkable performance. But reviewers didn’t think so, chiding the group’s mutual self-congratulation, their histrionics, their betrayal of the aging process and their hippie philosophy. And neither did the band, despite the fact that they would have been far more mortified if they had witnessed, for example, a film of their chaotic first show at Oakland Coliseum.
After the screening, the principals left in stunned silence. Joel Bernstein shared a car with Stills and Young. “They were both kind of withdrawn,” he said, “not saying a word, and there was this real tension in the car. I can remember looking at them and thinking: ‘Wow, these guys just broke up.’ ”