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A Brief History of Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Sometimes Young)
In theory, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were perhaps one of the best million-dollar rock-’n’-roll ideas on paper ever, and during their all-too-brief original run together, they certainly made that amount of money many, many times over. But in reality, the supergroup that was being heralded as the “American Beatles” at the time (by legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, among others) was probably doomed from the very start.
As a trio, Crosby, Stills, and Nash already had a winning formula with their trademark three-part vocal harmonies and upgraded, mostly acoustic-based model of the folk-rock prototype popularized by such mid-sixties groups as the Mamas and Papas. They also had a multiplatinum smash debut album to back it up.
But when it came time to take the show on the road, they realized they would need a more ballsy rock guitarist to shake things up a bit onstage, provide “heavy rock cred,” and otherwise add a much-needed extra edge to the mellower songs of their platinum-selling debut. After considering a variety of choices to fill the empty slot—ranging from Steve Winwood (who was already doing his own version of the supergroup thing with Eric Clapton in Blind Faith) to Jimi Hendrix (if one could even imagine that)—the name no one dared speak finally came up.
It’s not totally clear who it was that first suggested Neil Young join the band. Conflicting reports over the years have credited everyone from Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun to Elliot Roberts to Stephen Stills. The financial advantages to both Ertegun and Roberts would certainly seem obvious—the resulting album sales produced by such a union had to have Ertegun seeing dollar signs, and Roberts likewise stood to gain monetarily as the manager for both acts.
If Stills had any hand in the decision, the motivations become much less clear however. Stills and Young’s musical chemistry had certainly yielded its own considerable brand of musical fireworks within the Buffalo Springfield, especially onstage. But that same volatility and explosiveness had also bled over into their personal relationship in the band, greatly affecting how they functioned (or didn’t) as a working unit. Stills and Young remained friends in spite of all this, of course. But it was no secret that their musical clashes were near legendary and that their shared experience in Buffalo Springfield had also ended rather badly.
Single “double-A side” release of CSN&Y’s “Déjà Vu” and “Our House.”
Even more curious, though, was that Stills had to know that bringing Neil Young onboard would pose a serious threat to his leadership position in the band, which up to that point he had unquestionably controlled.
For their debut album, Stills had produced practically everything on it. He had also written many of the album’s key songs (including its signature tune, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”), and played most of the instruments on the lion’s share of the tracks as well.
David Crosby and Graham Nash’s musical contributions to the record were largely limited to providing a few songs in addition to the harmonies that made the group an instant sensation. But by all accounts, CSN was primarily Stills’s baby.
Regardless of whose idea it was to recruit Neil Young, the task of actually extending the invite ended up falling to his old friend and Buffalo Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills. Initially, both Crosby and Nash balked at the idea of having Young join the group at all. Even after they became convinced that he might provide the necessary spark they needed onstage, Crosby and Nash still saw Young’s role as more that of a hired sideman playing lead guitar, rather than as a full member.
Meanwhile, Stills managed to sell Young on the idea with the promise of picking up their explosive onstage guitar duels right where they had left them off with Buffalo Springfield. The main sticking points left in the negotiations were over Young’s role with the group—which both Young and manager Elliot Roberts insisted would be all or nothing. Either Young was in as a full one-fourth member in the partnership or he was out. He also insisted that he be able to continue his solo career and his partnership with his new band, Crazy Horse.
In the end, he got his way on both of these crucial points.
By the Time We Got to Woodstock
Among Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s earliest live performances were appearances at 1969’s two biggest rock festivals, the legendary Woodstock gathering in upstate New York during the summer and later that year at the infamous Altamont disaster in Northern California.
One of the crazier stories about Woodstock happened when Young found himself stranded at an airport with Jimi Hendrix after a helicopter scheduled to transport them to the site failed to show up. As the story goes, high-powered showbiz lawyer Melvin Belli (who would later also play a key role in organizing the Altamont debacle) ended up stealing a pickup truck and driving Young and Hendrix to the concert.
Once Young actually arrived, he would also prove to be a thorn in the side of the camera crews filming the concert for what would eventually become the most famous documentary film of a rock concert ever made.
For CSN&Y’s set, Young refused to be filmed and even went so far as to threaten any camera people who tried. Stills could have probably warned the filmmakers of Young’s aversion to televised concerts, having been a firsthand witness to Young no-showing Buffalo Springfield appearances both on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Either way, Young was not seen during the CSNY set in the original Woodstock film released by Warner Brothers the following year (there have since been subsequently updated versions where he can be seen if one looks hard enough).
At the infamous Altamont festival that took place in Northern California later that year, a combination of typically poor organization, ego, and possibly drugs resulted in what had to be the rather bizarre sight of CSNY making their way to the stage by coming through the crowd in a pickup truck. With Crosby and Stills shouting “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young comin’ through” from the back of the truck, one can picture this in retrospect as an almost comedic moment.
Altamont has, of course, long been synonymous with the death of the sixties rock-’n’-roll counterculture—a day surrounded in darkness and what the hippies of the day would probably call all-around “bad vibes.” As famously captured on film in the brilliant documentary Gimme Shelter, the free concert once envisioned as a sort of “Woodstock West” and as the triumphant climax of the Rolling Stones’ reconquering of America in 1969, instead became the scene of everything from Jefferson Airplane member Marty Balin being assaulted onstage by Hells Angels while performing, to the murder of an audience member as the Stones looked on powerlessly.
Festival stories aside, CSN&Y did gain a well-earned reputation as a formidable live concert act during those early shows in 1969–70.
The four principal players were rounded out onstage by bassist Greg Reeves and drummer Dallas Taylor. Reeves came onboard at the recommendation of Neil Young’s former Mynah Birds bandmate Rick James, after former Buffalo Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer was briefly tried out and subsequently turned away. Reeves, who besides being a wildly talented musician also had a bit of a reputation for such strange behavior as dressing up in voodoo gear, became a particular favorite of Young’s. The young former Motown session bassist even ended up contributing to Young’s third solo album, After the Gold Rush. However, Young was far less impressed with Taylor, often complaining that the drummer couldn’t play his songs. According to most accounts, Taylor’s short tenure in the band was eventually cut short due to drug problems, although his uneasy relationship with Young might have also played a role.
At their concerts, CSN&Y soon became known for the crowd-pleasing tactic of splitting the shows down the middle with an acoustic set favoring the mellower folk-rock harmonies of CSN’s debut, and an often blistering electric set spotlighting the lead guitar duels between Stills and Young—which had become just as ferocious as Stills promised Young they would.
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young performing live in Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1973.
Photo by Mary Andrews
Still, internal dissension was already mounting, and when it was time to record the first album featuring all four members of rock’s most celebrated supergroup, these tensions would become even more readily apparent.
Throwing Shadows on Our Eyes
When CSN&Y began the sessions for the album that would become Déjà Vu at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco, the schism within the band was palpable.
On the one hand, Young was by now predictably asserting more control over the band that had once been ruled with an iron hand in the studio by Stephen Stills.
But there were also other factors threatening to unravel the already loose threads tying CSN&Y together. Several of the romantic relationships within the band members personal lives were simultaneously ending (Stills’s with Judy Collins, Nash’s with Joni Mitchell, and Crosby’s with Christine Hinton—who had died in a head-on car accident).
Meanwhile, the ego problems were being further compounded by increasingly heavy drug use within the CSNY camp (as well as the inevitable paranoia that goes along with it), and by Crosby and Stills in particular. Casualties like roadie Bruce Berry were still a few years off, but the cracks were already showing.
For his part, Young recorded the basic tracks for his two major contributions to the Déjà Vu album—“Helpless” (a leftover from his sessions with Crazy Horse) and the “Country Girl” suite—mostly by himself. He also oversaw the studio overdubs (which included the harmonies committed to tape by the other members). Young did, however, participate in the full-band recordings of Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair” (the second of his two songs paying homage to Robert F. Kennedy, following “Long Time Gone” from CSN’s debut album) and a full-on electric cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.”
When the album was finally released in March 1970, it became an immediate hit, shipping two million copies and topping the Billboard album chart. Even so, the division between two distinct camps—“CS&N” on the one hand and “Y” on the other—was becoming an increasingly pronounced one—particularly when Young publicly complained about the final mix of the album in the rock press (which Nash took particular offense to).
In the end, Déjà Vu would not only prove to be the definitive (if slightly flawed in some eyes) CSN&Y album—it would also be the only studio album released by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young for nearly two decades.
CSN&Y did take the Déjà Vu album out on the road during the spring and summer of 1970, however, complete with a new rhythm section. Crosby fired bassist Greg Reeves over musical disagreements (these may have also been related to Reeves’s overall spaced-out personality), and drummer Dallas Taylor was likewise shown the door after his drug habit became a liability. Reeves and Taylor were replaced by Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels, a bassist who had worked with Stills, and former Turtles drummer Johnny Barbata.
Original movie poster for the Ted Mann production Celebration at Big Sur, featuring folk-rock icons CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and John Sebastian.
Courtesy of Noah Fleisher/Heritage Auctions
A live double album from the tour, 4-Way Street, was released the following year. Young’s contributions to the acoustic side of the original album include solo versions of “On the Way Home,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” But the electric set found on the second disc is where his fans will find the album’s most significant fireworks.
These include the first appearance on a CSN&Y album of “Ohio,” Young’s blistering indictment of the killings of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen during a Vietnam War protest in May 1970. The song had previously been issued as a single earlier that year, peaking at #14 on the Billboard singles chart. But the studio version wouldn’t appear on a CSN&Y album until So Far, the greatest hits collection hastily assembled by Atlantic in 1974 after CSN&Y failed to produce a new album to promote their huge stadium tour that same year.
The electric side of 4-Way Street also marks the first appearance on record of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” which is turned into a nearly fifteen-minute guitar extravaganza between Young and Stills here. The song as heard on 4-Way Street bears little resemblance to the studio version that later turned up on Young’s third solo album, After the Gold Rush.
By the time 4-Way Street finally made it to CD release in the nineties, the inevitable “bonus tracks” also included a Young medley of “The Loner,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Down by the River.”
Now My Name Is on the Line
For the next several years, Young remained a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young officially, but the relationship by and large existed in name only as Young devoted more and more of his creative energies to solo endeavors—which were by now beginning to catch fire commercially as well.
In 1972, he released Harvest, which became a smash hit, hitting #1 on Billboard, spawning the hit single “Heart of Gold,” and going on to become the best-selling album of 1972. Harvest remains the best-selling album of Neil Young’s career to date. Crosby, Stills, and Nash all contribute to the album at various points, mostly adding vocal harmonies. By this time, it had been two years since Déjà Vu, and the pressure to record a follow-up was mounting. There had also been some rumblings about a new tour.
In May and June 1973, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young convened in Hawaii to begin recording songs for a new album with the working title Human Highway, taken from a new Neil Young song of the same name. Stills’s cocaine and alcohol abuse was becoming more of a concern by this time, particularly to Young (who refused to be around Stills when he was under the influence). The trip to the Hawaii locale had been intended as much as an effort to bring Stills under control as it was to record a new album.
Regardless, the sessions eventually ended up back at Young’s Broken Arrow ranch in California, where even so, little progress toward an album was made. In Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey, one of the biggest problems described about the sessions was getting all four members into the studio at the same time. Stills preferred to work late into the night and sleep most of the day, while Crosby and Nash preferred an earlier schedule so they could watch the televised drama of the Watergate hearings as it unfolded before a national viewing audience.
Although a few songs, including Young’s “Human Highway” and “Sailboat Song,” as well as Nash’s “Prison Song” and Stills’s “See the Changes,” were recorded, the sessions proved to be a bust.
In his typical fashion, when the CSN&Y sessions weren’t happening quickly enough for him, Young’s attention soon turned back toward making another solo album—this time inspired by the drug-related deaths of CSN&Y roadie Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten. The “rock-’n’-roll” record Young had in mind would eventually be released in 1975 as his dark masterpiece Tonight’s the Night.
Winding Paths Through Tables and Glass
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s 1974 “reunion” tour of America was at the time designed to be the biggest ever by a rock-’n’-roll band and the first to be played almost exclusively in outdoor sports stadiums.
Regardless of the fact that they had not released a new studio album since 1970, and despite the live 4-Way Street album receiving mixed reviews (which still didn’t stop it from becoming a platinum-selling chart-topper), demand was as high as ever for a new CSN&Y tour.
Even so, it had to take more than a few people by surprise when Young actually signed on for the trek. Booked by legendary concert promoter Bill Graham (who was fresh off of the success of booking Bob Dylan’s 1974 comeback tour with the Band), the CSN&Y stadium tour was supposed to the biggest traveling rock-’n’-roll juggernaut ever. Yet the problems that had plagued Young’s recent sold-out tour of American concert arenas behind the megahit album Harvest had to remain at least somewhat fresh in his own mind.
In that situation, he had still been somewhat in control—even to the point of eventually shelving the crowd-pleasing Harvest set lists in favor of the much rawer new songs that eventually surfaced on Time Fades Away. Dealing with the all-out craziness of a CSN&Y stadium tour, however, would take such seemingly trivial artistic concerns to an entirely new and unprecedented level.
For starters, there was no new album. Atlantic Records’ solution to that problem was to release So Far, a hastily put-together greatest hits collection made up of material drawn from Déjà Vu and CSN’s debut, as well as songs like Young’s “Ohio” (making its first appearance on a CSN&Y album in the original studio version).
Fortunately, though, the old hits were good enough for audiences, and in this case, CSN&Y’s near four-year absence from the concert stage had not only made the hearts of the fans grow fonder, but had also increased their legend.
The so-called Doom Tour began on July 9, 1974, with a four-hour, forty-song marathon set in Seattle.
The Neil Young fans in attendance that night particularly got their money’s worth with a set list heavy on Young songs including, “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Long May You Run,” “A Man Needs a Maid,” “Don’t Be Denied,” and rarities like “Revolution Blues” (from Young’s 1974 On the Beach album) and the unreleased “Love Art Blues.”
For the remainder of the tour, however, things didn’t go nearly as well.
Concert poster for the Oakland stop of CSN&Y’s 1974 reunion “Doom Tour.” The shows were plagued by numerous problems but established the early precedent for subsequent superstar rock stadium tours.
Courtesy of Noah Fleisher/Heritage Auctions
For one thing, the blowout in Seattle had the unfortunate side-effect of resulting in a few blown-out voices amongst the principal performers. As the ambitiously booked stadium tour rolled on, there were also logistical problems. Although the biggest superstar rock-’n’-roll stadium tours today are all run like a finely tuned machine, it was still a very new game back in 1974. Compounding such now mundane tour issues as routing and catering was the fact that even as late as 1974, the sixties hippie mentality of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll still ruled the day.
To the credit of Bill Graham’s organization, the sound system was still always top-notch, even if the star attractions weren’t always in the best of shape or otherwise at the top of their own collective game.
In addition to having blown-out voices, the usual rock-’n’-roll excesses of the day also took an unfortunate, if all too predictable toll on some of the shows. Drugs were in abundant supply, and David Crosby has since been quoted as saying he did the entire tour with a beautiful woman (or more likely, a willing groupie) hanging off each of his arms.
And, of course, there were those legendary CSN&Y egos.
Bill Graham has recounted some hilarious but revealing stories such as how the Persian Rug had to be placed “just so” on the stage each night, as well as nightly battles over the order of each of the individual CSN&Y solo turns (Young always went on last, presumably because no one wanted to follow his set).
The personal divide between Young and his bandmates was also more pronounced than ever, with Young traveling separately from the rest of his bandmates as well as largely steering clear of the prevailing “sex, drugs, and rock-’n’-roll” party atmosphere once the show was over.
Amazingly, following all the madness surrounding the infamous reunion Doom Tour, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young still managed to record several new songs for a possible new album, including Young’s “Long May You Run” and “Love Art Blues.” However, once again Young himself brought an end to any possibility of a new CSN&Y record by simply walking away from the sessions without notice, as in the past leaving the others in the lurch.
A significant number of the shows from the 1974 Doom Tour were also recorded for a projected live album, which nonetheless failed to materialize after a general consensus was reached that what they had captured on tape just wasn’t up to muster. However, in recent interviews Graham Nash has indicated a live document of the Doom Tour may just surface yet.
We’ve Been Through Some Things Together
The stars for another potential Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion album wouldn’t properly realign themselves again until 1976, when Neil Young and Stephen Stills made what would turn out to be a one-shot album together as the Stills-Young Band.
What had begun as an informal project overseen by producer/engineer Tom Dowd soon blossomed into the album that would become Long May You Run, named for a Neil Young song dating back to at least 1974, and quite possibly further back than that.
The sessions for the Stills-Young Band album would nonetheless see long-standing tensions between Young and Stills resurface—mostly over their individual working habits (at one point, Young even called in Ahmet Ertegun to talk to Stills about this, and Stills’s very next solo album ended up being released on Columbia rather than on his long-standing label Atlantic Records).
Sheet music for CSN&Y’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” During their appearance at the historic 1969 rock festival, Neil Young refused to be filmed for the proposed movie documenting the event.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Despite this, there was eventually talk of the Stills-Young project morphing into a full-on CSN&Y reunion album.
Dropping their own recording project at the time, Crosby and Nash dutifully flew to Miami to add backing vocals to the album—only to have them subsequently wiped from the masters (presumably by, you guessed it, none other than Neil Young himself). Not surprisingly, Crosby and Nash weren’t at all happy with this turn of events and said as much in an interview later published by Crawdaddy! magazine.
The Stills-Young Band ended up doing a brief tour together, which was just as suddenly cut short when Young abruptly pulled out—redirecting his separately driven tour bus away from the next stop in Atlanta and instead toward Nashville, Tennessee.
Stills played out the remaining shows—at least the ones that weren’t cancelled altogether—as a solo act.
Revelations and Rumors Begin to Fly … American Dream
By the time of the massive 1985 Live Aid benefit concert, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s musical and cultural relevance was largely a thing of the past. Even so, big-time rock-’n’-roll reunions seemed to be the order of the day (although in all honesty, that day’s most memorable performance was without a doubt the one turned in by then up-and-coming alt-rock band U2).
Still, Bob Geldof’s benefit concert for African hunger relief had already pulled off the seemingly impossible reunions of bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
With the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young all present and doing their own individual sets earlier that day (Young was doing his country thing with the International Harvesters), the feeling had to be “why the hell not”?
Well, in retrospect, probably because CSN&Y were nowhere near ready to perform before an audience for the first time in over ten years—especially not one this massive (and also taking into account the internationally televised MTV feed).
As it turned out, the long-awaited CSN&Y reunion at Live Aid was a bust that might have been much more spectacular had anyone still cared. Their brief set, which was plagued by sound problems the whole way, included Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and a medley of “Daylight Again” and Stills’s “Find the Cost of Freedom.” The long-awaited CSN&Y reunion that took place at Live Aid—which up to that point had been so anticipated by the sixties generation—is mostly a footnote in rock history now, and is probably best left that way.
But it still wasn’t the end of the line for CSN&Y. Not by a long shot.
The follow-up album to 1970 Déjà Vu finally came eighteen years later in 1988 with American Dream.
This album is largely the result of a promise by Neil Young to David Crosby, who had spent much of the eighties in and out of both jail and rehab as a result of what was by then a severe addiction to crack cocaine.
“Clean up your act,” Young promised his old friend, “and we’ll make another record.” Crosby did. Young delivered.
The album itself is mostly forgettable, but is significant for the fact that the lines of personal and artistic communication had been reopened between Young and CSN—in a re-bonding of kindred musical spirits that would yield considerable dividends roughly ten years down the road.
Whatever one chooses to make of American Dream (and taken on purely artistic merits it’s probably not going to be much), the long-standing logjam between Young and the rest of CSN was finally breached with this album once and for all. Even though Crosby had gotten himself free of drugs, there would still be no tour behind American Dream, as Stephen Stills’s own substance abuse issues had yet to be sorted out.
Good to See You Again
Neil Young next crossed paths with Crosby, Stills, and Nash while working with Stills on the Buffalo Springfield boxed set in 1999. Stills played Young some demos from a then in progress CSN project, and apparently Young was impressed enough to offer up the pick of the litter of the songs he had written for his own solo project at the time, Silver and Gold.
The resulting CSN&Y album, 1999’s Looking Forward, is every bit as forgettable as 1988’s American Dream. But it is once again very significant, because it signaled some intriguing new possibilities for the two long-estranged parties.
Even if CSN&Y could no longer recreate the studio magic they once had, perhaps they could still do so on the concert stage.
This would indeed prove to be the case a few short years later.
Rare single release of CSN&Y non-LP tracks “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom.” The 1970 Kent State shootings prompted a rush release from Atlantic Records of Neil Young’s most famously political song.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Let’s Roll
Both of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s two reunion tours after the dawn of the new millennium came about by most accounts at the behest of Neil Young himself.
The 2002 CSN&Y reunion tour came about as the result of Young’s reaction to the American 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had just recorded the song “Let’s Roll” for his album Are You Passionate? The song had been conceived as a reaction to reading about Todd Beamer, one of the passengers on the planes taken over by terrorists that day, who heroically tried to rally his fellow travelers in an effort to thwart the attack—uttering the now famous words “Let’s roll” in doing so. This apparently struck a deep chord within Young.
The 2002 shows—though ridiculously overpriced—were largely seen as a spectacular return to artistic form by those who attended them—particularly during the extended guitar jams between Stills and Young on songs like Young’s “Goin’ Home.”
Four years later however, Young would take a much different tack for CSN&Y’s Freedom of Speech tour, rallying the troops in CSN&Y for a tour highlighting songs like ‘Let’s Impeach the President” from Living with War, which featured songs far more critical of President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 policies in Iraq.
In these concerts—which are documented on the Shakey Films–produced documentary Déjà Vu Live—the audiences are much more politically polarized than at any other point in CSN&Y’s entire career, very much reflecting the mood of the nation as a whole at the time. The shows themselves, however, found CSN&Y performing with a fire in their collective bellies not seen from the band since 1970.
The most curious thing about the 2002 and 2006 reunion shows, however, remains their high ticket prices, which, topping out at $300-plus in most markets, had to be a factor affecting those who have might otherwise have been the most receptive to the actual message of the incendiary new songs from Young’s Living with War album.