Unshackled from Buffalo Springfield, Young sought to distance himself from the hectic Hollywood music scene he’d helped expand. He signed a solo deal with Warner/Reprise Records and used the advance money to buy a house in Topanga Canyon, a bucolic artist enclave and hippie hangout just outside Los Angeles. He also met and married Susan Acevedo, an earthy, no-nonsense woman eight years his senior who ran a local diner called the Canyon Kitchen.
As much as it was his intention to “get out to the sticks and just relax,” as he told Rolling Stone, Young quickly began work on his first solo album. Jack Nitzsche, whose production and arranging skills served Young so well near the end of the Springfield era, helped him painstakingly create the lush, layered soundscapes of “The Old Laughing Lady” and “I’ve Loved Her So Long.”
Another long-term collaborator soon entered the mix: producer David Briggs, who first met Young in 1968 when he saw the scraggly guitarist hitchhiking on the side of the road and offered him a ride. A wildman denizen of Topanga and staff producer for Bill Cosby’s Tetragrammatron label, Briggs had his own ideas about how to produce rock ’n’ roll records. But the loose, spontaneous style he would develop with Young as years progressed is not in evidence on Neil Young. Instead, the basic tracks—featuring Springfield bassist Jim Messina and George Grantham, the drummer from Messina’s new band, Poco—were recorded in standard fashion in several L.A. studios, with strings, keyboards, and Young’s vocals added later.
U.K., 1968. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
California, 1969.
Toronto, Ontario, 1969. Courtesy John Einarson
Young would come to characterize his solo debut as “overdub city.”
Each side of the LP begins tentatively, with an instrumental track: side one with “The Emperor of Wyoming,” a polite, Western-inflected number, and side two with Nitzsche’s moody composition “String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill.” Some classic numbers emerge along the way, however, including “The Loner”—a bit of self-mythologizing on Young’s part, perhaps, as it concerns a menacing (but emotionally vulnerable) figure who is “the unforeseen danger, the keeper of the keys to the locks.” “The Old Laughing Lady” is given both grandeur and grit by Nitzsche’s use of strings complemented by the middle section’s haunting tribal chant, courtesy of a chorus of female singers that included Merry Clayton and Nitzsche’s wife, Gracia. Perhaps Briggs’ most substantial contribution to the proceedings is Young’s electric guitar tone on “The Loner” and “I’ve Been Waiting for You.” It’s fat, frenzied, and fuzzed out—a hint of the souped-up sonics to come.
When the album was released, it made minimal impact, hampered in part by a cover that didn’t include Young’s name. There was only a painting—and a slightly creepy one at that—of Young’s visage, with hills and a fiery sunset in the background, plus upside-down skyscrapers surreally reflected in his clothes. It was painted by Topanga artist Ronald Diehl, a friend of Acevedo’s.
More significantly, the sound of the music was off, too, since it had been run through an experimental mastering process without Young’s consent. A second pressing of the disc eliminated the sonic flaws and included Young’s name on the cover. Still, Young himself took responsibility for the album’s overly cautious approach. “If I had left it alone at an earlier stage, it would have been better,” he told Jimmy McDonough. “Like a lot of that Buffalo Springfield stuff—I went on working and fucked it up. I don’t do that anymore. Thank God I got that out of my system at an early age.”
Soon enough, Young would find the band he needed to create music that was ragged, yes, but undeniably right. In fact, he’d found it already.
Sometime in the hazy days of the Springfield’s rise to fame, Young met the Rockets and jammed at the group’s Laurel Canyon “headquarters.”
Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina had relocated to California from the East and formed the vocal group Danny and the Memories. They recorded a single that went nowhere before moving to San Francisco and picking up instruments—guitar, bass, and drums, respectively. They recorded another single, this time as the psychedelic Psyrcle, but failed to break through once again. Back in L.A., they joined with violinist Bobby Notkoff and guitarist Leon Whitsell—later adding his brother George, another guitarist—and formed the Rockets.
Young heard the band’s 1968 self-titled debut album and agreed to sit in when the Rockets played the Whisky. For the occasion, he broke out his new guitar—a sonically unwieldy 1953 Gibson Les Paul that had previously belonged to Jim Messina. It had been daubed with black paint and christened Old Black. Matched with a vintage Fender Deluxe amplifier, the guitar would inspire Young to create some of the most exciting electric music of his career. And so would the Rockets. “They were real primitive, but they had a lot of soul,” he told PBS’s American Masters.
INTO THE BLACK
Neil Young’s Favorite Guitar
JIM MESSINA, NEIL YOUNG’S BANDMATE in Buffalo Springfield, owned a black-painted 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop that he found, in the words of Young biographer Jimmy McDonough, “uncontrollable”—and therefore perfect for Young. “I liked the way it looked, but it was just terrible,” Messina, who traded the guitar to Young for one of his Gretsch models, told McDonough. “It sounded like hell. Neil loved it.”
He still does.
Old Black, as the instrument came to be known, has been Young’s primary electric guitar since he played it on an album by Elyse Weinberg, a musical colleague from Toronto. He then unleashed it on his self-titled solo debut and, to better effect, on its successor, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It’s the guitar with which he gets the “big, distorted mess” of a sound he favors, especially when playing with Crazy Horse. Young has noted, though, that “occasionally other things come out of it, a lot of clear things” as well.
Old Black has a well-worn exterior and a strip of exposed wood along the backside. Like the rest of Young’s instrumental arsenal, it has been highly customized. A sensitive, semi-humbucking Firebird pickup was installed in the bridge position circa 1973, with the original P-90 neck pickup covered by a metal P-90 cover that’s more common to Gibson ES-330 models. A small toggle switch that sits between the guitar’s volume and tone knobs allows Young to bypass the usual capacitors and potentiometers and instead send the signal directly to his amplifier—or, more accurately, to the Whizzer, a self-invented device that controls the flow of sound to Young’s assortment of amps.
Old Black also has a wealth of metal hardware, including Schaller M-6 tuning keys, a metal truss rod plate, a more secure set of knobs for the guitar strap, an aluminum pick guard on the front, and an aluminum access plate on the back that allows Young—or his longtime guitar tech Larry Cragg—to adjust the guitar’s intonation. Young also uses a Bigsby V-7 vibrato “whammy bar” tailpiece, an old-fashioned accessory that he considers more flexible and “expressive” than more contemporary models.
Young almost always lays Old Black across his shoulder with a strap—made by Souldier and later attached to a wider Levi’s fabric—with embroidered images of peace symbols and doves.
Gibson’s custom department made a small number of Old Black reissues for Yamano Music, the company’s distributor in Japan, circa 2003. They all quickly sold and have since demanded five-figure (or higher) prices on the collector’s market. 
Old Black, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, New Orleans, May 3, 2009. © Doug Allsop
Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere compilation double LP.
After inviting Whitten, Talbot, and Molina to jam at his house in Topanga, Young sensed the moment was there to be captured and booked studio time immediately. As a consequence, the Rockets were history. The new band was called Crazy Horse.
“I think I went in there and I asked those three guys to play with me as Crazy Horse,” Young recalled in the film Year of the Horse. “And I thought the Rockets could go on, too. But the truth is, I probably did steal them away from the other band, which was a good band. But only because what we did, we went somewhere. What they were doing, it didn’t go anywhere at that time, so this thing moved, this thing took off, and the other thing didn’t. But the other thing could have gone on, I guess. That’s the hardest part, is the guilt of the trail of destruction that I’ve left behind me.”
CSNY with drummer Dallas Taylor and bassist Greg Reeves, July 14, 1969. © Henry Diltz/Corbis
Wherever the Rockets might have gone, it seems unlikely that the band could have reached, on its own, the heights to which Young took Crazy Horse on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Recorded quickly with the band playing live and loud in the studio (although the vocals were still overdubbed), it’s the antithesis of Young’s debut album. Among the songs are several of his most enduring classics: “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Down by the River,” all of which were written in a single day while Young was sick with the flu and a high fever. In the liner notes to Decade, Young said he wrote “Cinnamon Girl” “for a city girl on a peeling pavement coming at me, thru Phil Ochs’ eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife.”
No doubt.
The title track reflects Young’s desire to escape the empty hustle of the L.A. scene, while two songs, “Round & Round” and “Running Dry,” pay their respects to two bands—the Springfield and the Rockets, respectively—that died in part because of his actions.
“River” and “Cowgirl,” the album’s true showcase numbers, unwind into extended jams, allowing Young to fly high and far on Old Black, safe in the knowledge that he is tethered to the earth by the Horse’s leaden, locked-in groove. And it’s not just his playing that’s improved here. Bolstered by the vocal harmonies of the Horse, he sings with heretofore unheard confidence. “There’s a chemistry when I play with [Crazy Horse] that frees me to go places I don’t go with anybody else,” Young told American Masters. “It’s just a matter of choosing the ride.”
With the Horse in full gallop, Young’s next move proved nothing short of astonishing. He set the band aside and agreed to work again with his chief Springfield antagonist, Stephen Stills. This time, though, it would be in the context of the most popular band in the land: the newly constituted Crosby, Stills & Nash.
In the wake of the Springfield’s demise, Stills had taken up with former Byrd David Crosby, who had been cast out of that band over creative and personal differences, and Graham Nash of the Hollies, who felt the staid English group was holding him back creatively. Brought together by Crosby’s then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell and musical matchmaker Mama Cass Elliot (although that tale, like Young and Stills’ cute meet on Sunset Boulevard, has its own variations), the trio instantly recognized its potential and joined forces. Their album Crosby, Stills & Nash was a smash hit out of the gate. But the idea of touring presented a problem: Stills had played most of the instruments in the recording studio; in concert, they’d need a band.
France, 1970.
Germany, 1972.
Both courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
With the Horse in full gallop, Young’s next move proved nothing short of astonishing. He set the band aside and agreed to work again with his chief Springfield antagonist, Stephen Stills.
Despite their fractious past, Stills wanted Neil Young for the job. As offered, it was something less than a full partnership. Young rejected that proposal and had manager Elliot Roberts inform CSN that if he were to join, they’d have to add a Y to the group name.
Choosing to remember the good times, Young claimed that reuniting with Stills was a major factor in his decision to join the group. But he also acknowledged that the job put him in the catbird seat: There was much to gain and little to lose in joining a group already on top. Young told
Rolling Stone:
I knew it would be fun. I didn’t have to be out front. I could lay back. It didn’t have to be me all the time. They were a big group and it was easy for me. I could still work double time with Crazy Horse. With CSNY, I was basically just an instrumentalist that sang a couple of songs with them. It was easy. And the music was great. CSNY, I think, has always been a lot bigger thing to everybody else than it is to us. People always refer to me as Neil Young of CSNY, right? It’s not my main trip. It’s something that I do every once in a while. I’ve constantly been working on my own trip all along.
His refusal to commit 100 percent to the band gave Young an inordinate amount of power, and he had no misgivings about wielding it. At the freshly minted supergroup’s second gig, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, Young refused to allow filmmakers to document his portion of the performance. As a result, only CSN are seen in the resulting movie. Young told Mojo:
I didn’t allow myself to be filmed because I didn’t want [the cameramen] on the stage. Because we were playing music. I thought, if they were going to film they’d have to stay off the stage—get away, don’t be in my way, I don’t want to see your cameras, I don’t want to see you. I’m still very much the same way. I really didn’t see what television and films had to do with making music. To me it was a distraction—because music is something that you listen to, not that you look at. You’re there, you’re playing and you’re trying to get lost in the music, and there’s this dickhead with a camera right in your face. So the only way to make sure that that wouldn’t happen is tell them that I wouldn’t be in the film, so there was no sense in filming me—avoid me, stay away from my area. And it worked.
As the band’s popularity grew, so did the quartet’s individual egos. As vocalists, CSN (and sometimes Y) were capable of tight and gorgeous harmonies. As instrumentalists, Stills and Young’s guitar duels—whether born of camaraderie or competition—became the stuff of legend. But inevitably, it all went to their heads, as did, in the case of Crosby and Stills in particular, copious amounts of cocaine and other drugs. “The reaction to CSNY was ridiculous,” Young told American Masters. “It was so over the top, and then we all became distracted by that. We were just showy. And it was because we had no idea what we were doing. It’s not because there was anything wrong with anybody in the band. It’s just that what we were confronted with . . . changed us. The crowd, the adulation, the roaring sound. It changed us.”
The group also angered Young by signing on for glitzy showbiz gigs, such as two appearances on TV’s This Is Tom Jones. Young, after all, once left Buffalo Springfield temporarily because he didn’t want to appear on the far more legit Tonight Show. On the second Jones show, the ultraswanky host even joined the band to sing, “Long Time Gone.” Neil reluctantly showed up for the TV appearances.
Through all the ego trips, arguments, and temporary breakups—as well as more serious matters, such as the death of Crosby’s girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in an auto accident—the band did manage to record the album Déjà Vu. Predictably, it was a torturous experience. “I remember one session towards the end of the Déjà Vu record where we were arguing,” Nash told American Masters. “There were too many drugs involved. Stephen was staying up all night trying to write and trying to create. And there was one point towards the end there where I started crying and I said . . . that we’re blowing this.”
Artist: Peter Pontiac (www.peterpontiac.com)
CSNY, Woodstock Music & Art Fair, Yasgur’s Farm, White Lake, New York, August 17, 1969. Photo by Barry Z Levine/Getty Images
CSNY rehearses “Down by the River” for the premiere episode of ABC’s Music Scene, Los Angeles, September 22, 1969. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“Young guys, big egos,” Crosby concurred. “Lots of money. Very easy, very unstable, very easy for us to come unglued at any point. ‘Well, I don’t need that sonofabitch.’ . . . In my case, hard drugs were damaging me enormously at that point and made it difficult for me to do a good job or be a good brother to my brothers.”
As for Young, he remained reticent throughout the sessions, hoarding songs for his future solo releases.
He also chafed at the method of recording, which emphasized overdubbed perfection over the live, on-the-fly method he now preferred. Young told Rolling Stone:
The band sessions on that record were
“Helpless,” “Woodstock” and “Almost Cut My Hair.” That was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. All the other ones were combinations, records that were more done by one person using the other people. “Woodstock” was a great record at first. It was a great live record, man. Everyone played and sang at once, Stephen sang the shit out of it. The track was magic. Then, later on, they were in the studio for a long time and started nitpicking. Sure enough, Stephen erased the vocal and put another one on that wasn’t nearly as incredible. They did a lot of things over again that I thought were more raw and vital sounding. But that’s all personal taste. I’m only saying that because it might be interesting to some people how we put that album together. I’m happy with every one of the things I’ve recorded with them. They turned out really fine. I certainly don’t hold any grudges.
U.K., 1970.
France, 1970.
Germany, 1970.
Japan, 1970.
All courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Portugal, 1970.
The Netherlands, 1970.
Spain, 1970.
Germany, 1970.
Spain, 1970.
Backed with “Helpless,” France, 1970.
Japan, 1970.
All courtesy Robert Ferreira
The Netherlands, 1970.
Japan, 1970.
Young’s contributions were the exquisite “Helpless,” his loving tribute to Omemee, the “town in North Ontario” where he most enjoyed growing up; and “Country Girl (I Think You’re Pretty)”—a suite of songs that, despite Young’s claims of satisfaction, suffered a bad case of “overdub city.”
Divisiveness often threatened to swallow CSNY whole, but Young tried to separate the creative friction from outright hostility. “Everyone always concentrates on this whole thing that we fight all the time among each other,” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s a load of shit. They don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. It’s all rumors. When the four of us are together it’s real intense. When you’re dealing with any four totally different people who all have ideas on how to do one thing, it gets steamy. And we love it, man. We’re having a great time.”
Young shuttled back and forth between CSNY and Crazy Horse, recording a batch of songs intended for his next album, After the Gold Rush. The title and the inspiration for some of the songs was a script written by actor and Topanga resident Dean Stockwell. Young told Mojo:
It was all about the day of the great earthquake in Topanga Canyon when a great wave of water flooded the place. It was a pretty “off-the-wall” concept, they tried to get some money from Universal Pictures. But that fell through because it was too much of an art project. I think, had it been made it would stand as a contemporary to Easy Rider and it would have had a similar effect. The script itself was full of imagery, “change.” . . . It was very unique actually. I really wish that movie had been made, because it could have really defined an important moment in the culture.
On tour, the Horse was joined by Jack Nitzsche on piano and played some torrid concerts, including two in New York that would eventually see the light of day as Live at the Fillmore East March 6 & 7, 1970. The shows represent the original Crazy Horse at its creative peak.
But it was short-lived. Danny Whitten had begun using heroin, and his ability to play—and indeed, to even maintain—atrophied quickly. When Whitten nodded off onstage, Young became resolved; as soon as the tour ended, he fired the band.
After scrapping most of the earlier sessions with Crazy Horse, Young began the Gold Rush album again, this time recording in the basement of his house in Topanga. Along for the ride this time were Ralph Molina, CSNY bassist Greg Reeves, and Nils Lofgren, a seventeen-year-old guitarist from Washington, D.C., whom Young had taken under his wing. The songs were cut live, including the vocals, giving Young the sense of immediacy and spontaneity he’d always craved. As if to up the ante, Young asked Lofgren to play piano on the album—something Lofgren didn’t know how to do.
London, January 1970. Photo by Dick Barnatt/Redferns/Getty Images
California, 1970.
New York, 1970.
With Crazy Horse, California, March 1970.© Robert Altman/Retna Ltd.
Four Strong Winds
CSNY THEN, Now & FOREVER
• David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash were happy enough after recording the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album, released May 1969. But as the group prepared to perform live, it was clear that another musician was needed to deliver a fuller sound and to free up Stills—who had been dubbed Captain Manyhands for his prodigious work on the album—on the stage. “Stephen was the only lead guitar player,” Nash recalled. “He needed someone to play off, and it wasn’t me and David. We’re fine musicians, but we’re rhythm guitar players. He needed another solo axe to play off, to converse with. He needed sparking by someone else who he could say, ‘Well, fuck you, listen to this’ and drive each other to new heights. And he had just spent the previous six years playing against Neil in the Springfield.”
• CSN first considered inviting Mark Naftalin of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Steve Winwood, late of Traffic and at the time headed into Blind Faith. Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun suggested Young to Stills, who initially rejected the idea, still smarting from Young’s decision to bail on Buffalo Springfield just before its appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show. Stills eventually changed his mind, but Crosby and Nash had to be convinced. “I wanted to find out who this was,” said Nash, who met with Young over breakfast at a diner on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1969. “I had great respect for him as a writer and musician. But I didn’t know who he was. After that breakfast, I’d have given him my firstborn. . . . He had such an incredible outlook on music, an incredible outlook in life. He was funny as fuck. And he picked up the check—not necessarily in that order.”
• Buffalo Springfield cohort Bruce Palmer was CSNY’s bassist briefly in the spring of 1969. After reported ego clashes, he was replaced by Motown session man Greg Reeves, who played on the Temptations’ Grammy Award–winning “Cloud Nine” and was recommended by Young’s former Mynah Birds bandmate Rick James.
• CSNY’s second concert was in the wee hours of August 17, 1969, at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—where Young was the only musician to refuse the film crew permission to shoot him. “I was there, but I wasn’t really into it,” Young later explained. Crosby remembered the night as “kind of nerve-wracking for us. It was only our second show. Everybody we knew or cared about in the music industry was there. They were heroes to us—The Band and Hendrix and the Who. . . . They were all standing behind us in a circle, like, ‘OK, you’re the new kids on the block. Show us.’” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead remembered that the quartet’s potential spoke louder than its actual performance. “I was a little disappointed,” he said. “They were new to the stage, at that point still mostly a studio band, and they weren’t as tight as they got to be in the years since.”
• CSNY also performed at the Altamont festival in December 1969 but avoided the controversies of other bands that played at the violence-plagued event.
• Young was only a part-time presence in the studio while recording 1970’s Déjà Vu, the quartet’s debut album. He recorded the basic tracks for “Helpless,” which he’d also tried out with Crazy Horse, and the “Country Girl” suite on his own and simply had his partners add their vocals to the tapes—although he did perform Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair” and the Joni Mitchell cover “Woodstock” live in the studio.
• Despite his reputation as a rocker and his fierce electric guitar duels with Stills, Young’s contributions to CSNY over the years have been, on balance, surprisingly mellow. “You have a point there when relating it to Déjà Vu, American Dream, and Looking Forward,” Young acknowledged. A notable exception is the fierce “Ohio,” which protested the shooting of four students during a demonstration on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio. Young wrote the song immediately upon hearing the news, and the group recorded it less than two weeks later. It was out the following month, peaking at No. 14 on the Billboard charts. “It’s very personal with Neil,” Crosby explained to PBS’s American Masters. “He’s not very political in the sense of politics. He doesn’t like ’em. . . . But if you show him a picture of that girl kneeling over that kid in a pool of blood at Kent State, then he writes ‘Ohio.’ . . . He was pissed. And sad.”
• Crosby, Stills, and Nash all contributed backing vocals on Young’s smash 1972 album Harvest. CSNY considered touring again that year, but it never materialized.
• CSNY did some recording in Hawaii and California during 1973 for an album tentatively titled Human Highway that never saw the light of day. Songs included Stills’ “See the Changes,” Nash’s “Prison Song,” Young’s “Sailboat Song,” and the proposed title track.
• CSNY’s 1974 jaunt was the first stadium trek ever by a rock band. The quartet recorded following the tour, including songs such as “Long May You Run,” “The End,” “Traces,” “Love Art Blues,” “Pushed It Over the End,” and “Homeward through the Haze” before Young ankled the scene. “He came into the studio and said, ‘Great, out of sight. I’ll be back tomorrow night’ and never showed again,” Crosby recalled.
• Young and Stills recruited Crosby and Nash to sing on several songs for their 1976 album, Long May You Run. Their vocals were subsequently yanked from finished recording.
• CSNY let bygones be bygones on July 13, 1985, when the band played together in public for the first time in ten years at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia. Monitor problems plagued the set, which included “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “Daylight Again”/“Find the Cost of Freedom.” Young, with the International Harvesters, and CSN each performed their own sets earlier in the day.
• CSNY’s second studio album, 1988’s American Dream, was the result of Young’s promise to Crosby that he’d do anything Crosby wished if he would clean up the debilitating drug habit that helped land him in a Texas prison earlier in the decade. “And one of the things I wanted was to record with all the guys again,” Crosby said. The group did not tour to support the album, however, due to Stills’ substance abuse issues. “I don’t see us working together until everybody is as strong as they can be,” Nash said at the time. “I don’t want anyone looking at CSN&Y and saying, ‘Look at those four old guys.’”
• Young was lured back into the CSNY fold in 1999, when he and Stills were working on a Buffalo Springfield box set and Stills played him some songs that CSN was working on in Los Angeles. Young was particularly impressed that the three had left their longtime label, Atlantic Records, and were financing what became Looking Forward themselves. He presented the others with a group of songs he had recorded for his own album, Silver & Gold, and told them to “take the best ones you think you can do the best job on.”
• Young’s reaction to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was the impetus behind CSNY’s 2002 tour. “We got a call from Neil who was talking about that maybe it’s a good time to go out and play some music for the folks,” Nash said. “It seemed to make sense to us. It was a little earlier than we had kind of planned in our lives but, y’know . . . so what? We’re just reflecting the time, like we’ve always done.”
• A CSNY tour was already in motion for 2006 when Young recorded his Grammy Award–nominated album of “metal folk protest music,” Living with War, and asked the group to make it the focal point of the shows. “I just said to the other guys, ‘Listen, this [music] is all I can do. I can’t mix this up with anything else,’” Young said. “For us to water it down and sprinkle in our old romantic ballads to try and soften it . . . I said, ‘There’s no reason to soften it. We should just treat it like journalism and go for it and try to do this.’” His bandmates were wholeheartedly behind the idea. “We saw an opportunity to do what it is we do best,” Nash explained, “which is communicate ideas with people, communicate different points of view, communicate subjects that maybe other people don’t want to talk about. Obviously Neil could’ve done [the tour] on his own and created a certain buzz, but it’s a different buzz with CSNY. I think we just took advantage of the situation. What happens is if we have a bunch of songs we want to sing, that’s an excuse to tour.”
• Young called the audience-polarizing Freedom of Speech Tour, which was documented on the 2008 CSNY/Déjà Vu film and live album, “the most nerve-wracking tour I’ve ever done.” Nash said it was “the first tour I was on with bomb-sniffing dogs and FBI agents at the gigs.”
• At this juncture, Young is considered the leader of CSNY, what Crosby calls the “benevolent dictator” who determines when and how the group works together. “Neil always has a lot of ideas, and they’re usually very good, and I’ll follow anybody who has a good idea,” Nash added. Young himself rejects the leadership mantle, however. “I don’t want that responsibility,” he said.
CSNY Carry On European Tour, Falkonercentret, Copenhagen, Denmark, January 16, 1970.Photo by Jan Persson/Redferns/Getty Images
Germany, 1969. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
This group is like juggling four bottles of nitroglycerin.
—David Crosby
Yeah—if you drop one, everything goes up in smoke.
—Graham Nash
We knew who we were. We knew nobody in the world was doing what we were doing. No one had four guys writing those kind of songs that were also that good as musicians, all at the same time. There was nobody like us. So we were a little punkish about it. We thought we were kings of the world, so it was exciting to us.
—Graham Nash
A large part of our job is to just make you boogie, to be a party, but another part of it is to be the troubadour, the town crier—“It’s 11:30 and all’s well!” or “It’s 12 o’clock and there’s a chimpanzee loose in the White House and things aren’t too good!” That’s part of our job, has been for thousands of years.
—David Crosby
I don’t like to compare us to other bands. We are who we are. When I play in this band, it’s a special thing. It goes back to our roots; we’ve been friends for a long time, Stephen and I, and then the other guys. When they got together with Stephen, and I came and joined them, we already had our history. We already had roots in playing together and developing our music styles and learning how to play guitars together, Stephen and I.
—Neil Young
Our chemistry is really deep respect. We do best when it’s the two of us, especially on electric [guitar]. With the Horse he plays differently ’cause he’s by himself. When he plays with me, he’s really after a balance. It takes us a few rehearsals to get back to our thing, but when we start playing together it’s just as cool as when I played with Jimi [Hendrix] and Eric [Clapton] and every other great guy.
—Stephen Stills
We’re more than friends. We’re brothers. And, unfortunately, brothers fight occasionally. But it’s been [more than] 30 years; something’s going on.
—Graham Nash
There’s a lot of unfinished business. I don’t think we really reached our potential, and so we have a lot of things to show and a lot of things to do. This is why it’s so exciting. I mean, this band can sing like the Byrds and jam like the Dead . . . and hopefully we can get the audience turned on to what we’re doing and have it just be a music thing.
—Neil Young
The reason I play with CSN is because . . . I don’t have to sing every song, because I like playing with them. I like being with guys I’ve known for [so many] years that have gone through so much with me. It’s a rewarding experience. It’s fun to look around and see those guys.
—Neil Young
California, 1969.
Some of the ridiculous little kid games we used to play with each other . . . were really ridiculous and just beyond belief.
—Stephen Stills
Stephen plays a great guitar. I know how to support his guitar playing. I have no problem finding things that will make him sound better just by finding certain little things underneath it that support it. And when I feel like playing lead, he can support me. That’s the way we’ve always done it. Sometimes we both play lead at the same time. I mean, this band can space out for 45 minutes.
—Neil Young
U.K., 1970. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Oh, man, we loved him. We loved Buffalo Springfield; that was one of the inspirational bands we tried to copy. I love Neil Young and Crazy Horse and even with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, all the stuff they did. He’s one of our favorite writers and musicians, and he’s just an unbelievable influence to me, inspirational. He’s lasted all these years and keeps changing and going forth, then he’ll do his old tunes just like he used to and they’re still great. He’s just saying what he feels, that’s all. He’s like a rock god.
—Gary Rossington, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Test pressing of After the Gold Rush. Note the Columbia logo. Test-pressing labels with logos of record companies other than those of the artists reportedly were not uncommon. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Early After the Gold Rush sleeve that was printed in the wrong color, 1970.Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Recent reissue of the 1970 TWENSerie After the Gold Rush picture disc originally issued in West Germany, 1970.Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
SOUTHERN MAN
Neil Young’s “feud” with Lynyrd Skynyrd
WITH 1974’S “SWEET HOME ALABAMA,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant threw down a gauntlet between his band—and indeed, all of Southern rock—and Neil Young. And he didn’t mean to.
The course of events that led to the non-feud between Young and Skynyrd is easy enough to trace. Young voiced critical sentiments about historical Southern racism in songs such as “Southern Man” and “Alabama.” Van Zant, meanwhile, took a bit of contemporary umbrage over his perspective. “I hope Neil Young will remember,” he responded in his own song, “a Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
“Yeah, I did attack him in [‘Sweet Home Alabama’],” Van Zant told one interviewer. He told another that “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two. We’re Southern rebels, but more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong.”
Former Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle explained, “‘Sweet Home Alabama’ was Ronnie Van Zant saying, ‘Don’t blame me for something that happened generations back.’ He was saying, ‘Look, man, don’t blame the Southern man now for stuff that happened a long time ago, that our great-grandfathers did. We might not have those attitudes.’”
More recently, Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny, who sings in his stead in Skynyrd these days, confirmed that “My brother loved Neil Young. The whole ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ thing was just a fun kind of song, putting a pun up at Neil Young as far as not being Southern, [but] being Canadian.” And guitarist Gary Rossington added, “We love Neil Young. We weren’t really trying to cut him down. We were just cutting him down since he cut Alabama, and we loved Alabama.”
The Young–Skynyrd “battle” came to take on a certain mythic proportion. VH1 named it one of the Top 40 Celebrity Feuds. Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood, meanwhile, turned it into the insightful “Ronnie and Neil” from 2002’s Southern Rock Opera.
“Neil is amazing, wonderful . . . a superstar,” said Van Zant, who was photographed many times wearing a Neil Young t-shirt—including on the original cover of Skynyrd’s 1977 Street Survivors. “I showed the verse to [former Skynyrd guitarist] Ed King and asked him what Neil might think. Ed said he’d dig it. He’d be laughing at it.” And, in fact, Young did, telling Q, “Oh, they didn’t really put me down! But then again, maybe they did! But not in a way that matters. Shit, I think ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is a great song.”
Ronnie Van Zant wearing Tonight’s the Night t-shirt, 1977.
Photo by Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images
Young also told Rolling Stone, “I’d rather play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ than ‘Southern Man’ anytime. I first heard it and really liked the way they played their guitars. Then I heard my own name in it and thought, ‘Now this is pretty great.’”
The true relationship between Young and Skynyrd took a deeper turn when Young passed a tape of three songs—“Powderfinger,” “Sedan Delivery,” and “Captain Kennedy”—through archivist Joel Bernstein to then-music journalist Cameron Crowe. He, in turn, gave it to Van Zant to consider the songs for Street Survivors. The songs didn’t fit on that album, but Van Zant was reportedly interested in recording “Powderfinger” at a later date.
And then, of course, came the plane crash that took the lives of Van Zant and two other band members on October 20, 1977, and there were no later dates. Young paid his own tribute on November 12 at a benefit concert in Miami, when he played a rare rendition of “Alabama” and changed the chorus lyrics to “sweet home Alabama.”
A posthumous Van Zant legend has the singer buried in a Neil Young t-shirt, which Rossington believes is true. “He used to always wear that shirt on stage,” the guitarist recalled. “It was a Neil Young shirt we got one night we were gonna play with him. Unfortunately, he canceled and somehow didn’t make it to the show, but we got the t-shirt for that gig so [Van Zant] wore it a lot. I think he was buried in that, yeah.” 
With the spare instrumentation, the songs were left to stand on their own, and Gold Rush is one of Young’s mellowest and most poetic efforts. Among its highlights are the fragile, futuristic title track; a pair of let-you-down-easy breakup tunes, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “Birds”; “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” a song guaranteed to do just that, as he’d later joke in concert; and a pair of rockers, “When You Dance I Can Really Love” and “Southern Man.” The latter earned Young a musical rebuke from the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, which sang in its hit song “Sweet Home Alabama,” “I hope Mr. Young will remember/A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” To complete the album, Young pulled a pair of tunes from the sessions with the Horse: the pleading “I Believe in You” and a wonderfully self-pitying cover of Don Gibson’s country weeper “Oh Lonesome Me.”
Young told Rolling Stone that he felt Gold Rush “was a strong album. . . . A lot of hard work went into it. . . . After the Gold Rush was the spirit of Topanga Canyon. It seemed like I realized that I’d gotten somewhere.”
When Young returned to CSNY for another tour, turmoil continued to be the order of the day. Bassist Greg Reeves, emboldened perhaps by his extracurricular adventures with Young, wanted to play some of his own songs with CSNY. Crosby fired him on the spot. Reeves was replaced by Stills’ bassist, Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels. After that, drummer Dallas Taylor, who had never been a favorite of Young’s, developed a heroin habit and had to go as well. Johnny Barbata, formerly of the Turtles, stepped in, and the show went on.
A reality check was on the way, however. At Kent State University in Ohio, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a Vietnam protest rally. Crosby showed Young the now-famous photo of a female student sinking to her knees, her arms outstretched over a fallen protester. Young wrote the song “Ohio” within minutes. It was quickly recorded and released as a single in just a few weeks. For reasons ranging from the way the song was recorded—live in the studio with the entire band present—to the way it allowed him to use music as a means of reportage, Young called it “the best record I ever made with CSNY.”
“Ohio” may have given the group a new sense of purpose, but the tour was the same ego-driven mess as the one before. Several dates were recorded for the bloated live album 4 Way Street. Young was represented on the set by acoustic renditions of “On the Way Home,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” plus electric takes on “Southern Man” and “Ohio.” The album was a huge hit, but the squabbling band members went their separate ways when the tour ended. It would be three years before they joined forces again.
Germany, 1975. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Germany promo, 1970. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Germany, 1970. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
GOTTA GET DOWN TO IT
The Making of “Ohio”
ON MAY 4, 1970, U.S. National Guardsmen fatally shot four unarmed students and wounded nine others—not all of whom were part of antiwar protests taking place throughout the first four days of the month on the Kent State University campus in Ohio.
Within weeks, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had a hit song protesting the killings.
David Crosby described the sequence of events in the liner notes to the 1991 Crosby, Stills & Nash box set: “I was with Neil at a friend’s house and handed him Life magazine with the Kent State photos. He was silent for a long time, then picked up his guitar and twenty minutes later had this song. I called Stephen and Graham and we immediately booked a studio [the Record Plant on May 21, 1970]. We gave the master to Ahmet Ertegun, who flew it to New York the next day and it was released within the week.”
The hard-biting lyrics to “Ohio” spend less time on the political tenor of the incident and more asking questions like “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?”
“It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song,” Young said in the liner notes of Decade six years later. “It’s ironic that I capitalized on the death of these American students. Probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning.”
Young called “Ohio” “my best CSNY cut” and recalled that “Crosby cried after his take.” Crosby concurred:
[“Ohio”] was a high point of the band, a major point of validity. There we were, reacting to reality, dealing with it on the highest level we could—relevant, immediate. It named names and pointed the finger. It said “Nixon.” I was so moved by it that I completely lost it at the end of the song, in the recording studio, screaming “. . . Four. . . . Why? . . . How many more?”
“Ohio” was also the first CSNY recording to feature the group’s new rhythm section of bassist Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels and former Turtles drummer John Barbata.
When “Ohio” was released on June 4, 1970, CSNY had already put out its debut album, Déjà Vu, and was watching Nash’s song “Teach Your Children” climb the charts. “We knocked it right off the charts with our own song,” Crosby noted, “and Nash never said one word about it, to his great credit. He knew how important it was that this song be out there.” “Ohio” eventually reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, while “Teach Your Children” peaked at 16. “Ohio” was included on the live 4 Way Street in 1971, but the studio version was never included on an album until 1974’s So Far: The Best of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Photo by Howard Ruffner/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The song has been covered over the years by such artists as the Isley Brothers, Paul Weller, the Black Crowes, Tori Amos, and Gov’t Mule.
Young often grappled with the disparity of a hit song about a tragedy and, for a time, felt the song’s message was compromised by its popularity. But CSNY was able to reclaim the song again during the group’s Freedom of Speech Tour in 2006, a politically polarizing road trek that was spurred by Young’s album Living with War.
Upon the 2008 release of the CSNY/Déjà Vu film documentary of that tour, Young said:
I’ve always kind of left [“Ohio”] be. But in a historical perspective . . . it reacquainted people with what the band really was in the first place, and that, I think, is the purpose [“Ohio”] played in the film. It enabled people to understand we’ve been singing about these types of things for a long time, and what we’re doing right now is really no different than what we were doing then. The real difference is in America, not in the band. 
Italy, 1970. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
U.S., 1970. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
France, 1970. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Australia, 1971. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Japan, 1970. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Returning to California, Young was determined more than ever to remove himself from the public eye. But he didn’t go back to his house in Topanga. Instead, he bought a ranch just south of San Francisco and moved there—without his wife, Susan. Young’s unrelenting work schedule had driven a wedge between them, and she was put off by his massive fame. She filed for divorce in October 1970.
Young went on a solo tour that included two sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. While on the road, he saw the film Diary of a Mad Housewife, starring Carrie Snodgress, and, as he’d note in the song “A Man Needs a Maid,” he “fell in love with the actress.” Diary took Snodgress to the peak of her career. She won two Golden Globe Awards for her performance and was nominated for an Academy Award. In a move befitting his status as rock royalty, a smitten Young sent two roadies as emissaries to ask her to call him.
When she did, Young was literally flat on his back. Working on his new property, he’d hurt himself moving a heavy piece of wood. He wound up in a back brace, zoned out on medication. Eventually, he’d require an operation to remove several discs. Still, Young and Snodgress met and quickly fell in love. She moved to the ranch and set about dismantling her career in favor of playing the role of Earth Mother. She became pregnant and even skipped the Academy Awards ceremony. Their son, Zeke, was born in September 1972.
Courtesy Robert Ferreira CSNY compilation, Japan, 1971.
CSNY rehearsal, 1970. © Henry Diltz/Corbis
Back on tour, Young stopped in Nashville for an appearance on TV’s The Johnny Cash Show. While in town, he also booked Quadrafonic Sound Studios to record a raft of new songs. Among the musicians hastily pulled into the sessions were bassist Tim Drummond, a veteran of Conway Twitty’s band as well as James Brown’s; pedal steel player Ben Keith, who logged time with Faron Young and Patsy Cline; and drummer Kenny Buttrey, who had played on several Bob Dylan records. Young dubbed the assemblage the Stray Gators, a term associated with stoned musicians that Drummond had heard on James Brown’s tour bus. But Young’s desire for lots of sonic space on his records rubbed some of the Nashville pros the wrong way, especially Buttrey. “He hires some of the best musicians in the world and has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can,” he said.
Among the songs they laid down were “Old Man,” which Young had written for Louis Avila, the caretaker on his cattle ranch, and “Heart of Gold,” which featured guest appearances by fellow Cash show guests James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. In typical fashion, Young handed Taylor a banjo to play, the first time Taylor had ever touched one.
Broken Arrow Ranch, Redwood City, California, may 27, 1971 © Henry Diltz/Corbis
Young’s tour brought him to London, where Jack Nitzsche aided him in recording two songs: the startlingly honest, if chauvinistic, “A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World” with the London Symphony Orchestra, adding a new, bombastic, and self-important aspect to his music. After that he returned to Nashville for more tracking and also built a makeshift studio in his barn at the ranch, where he recorded “Words,” “Alabama,” and “Are You Ready for the Country?” Another key song in the Young canon, “The Needle and the Damage Done,” written for Danny Whitten and other Young associates sidelined by hard drugs, was recorded live at UCLA’s Royce Hall.
Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
When it was released in February 1972, Harvest was an instant sensation, rising to No. 1 even as “Heart of Gold” topped the singles charts. Young described his Harvest experience to American Masters:
I can’t even remember if I enjoyed it. It was very intense. People saw something in me I didn’t see in me. But how many sensitive songs can you write before you’re just writing a sensitive song and it’s not sensitive ’cause it’s not real? And so you can’t live up to expectations.
The producer of Crazy Horse [David Briggs] felt like that was a sellout record. I did this for everybody else ’cause this is what everybody wanted. The fact is, nobody wanted it. I just did it because I was on tour and I toured and I got to Nashville and I met some people and I went into the studio and recorded the songs I’d done. And then I went home and went into the barn and then I went back to London and recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. And that was Harvest, and I just kept going.
With Nils Lofgren, Tonight’s the Night Tour with the Santa Monica Flyers, London, 1973. © Gijsbert Hanekroot (www.gijsberthanekroot.nl)
Argentina, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Backed with “Sugar Mountain,” Portugal, 1972.
Courtesy Robert Ferreira
France, 1972.
Japan, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
EP featuring “Heart of Gold,” “Handbags and Gladrags” by Rod Stewart, “A Horse with No Name” by Americian [ sic].and “Crazy Mama” by J. J. Cale. No country, circa 1972. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Germany, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Neil Young’s been incredibly influential to me. Growing up, Harvest was one of the first albums that I really was affected by, and his work with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, of course, was just right there in my musical development. He’s just a fantastic guitar player and a great songwriter and singer.
—Geoff Tate, Queensrÿche
Germany, 1972. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Japan, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Japan, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Germany, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Portugal, 1972. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
Japan, 1976. Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen
In fact, fame made Young pull back further than ever. Experimenting with some film equipment he’d bought, Young began working on a loose set of scenes that would become his first filmic adventure, Journey through the Past. “I wanted to express a visual picture of what I was singing about,” he told Rolling Stone. Young filmed documentary footage of himself on tour as well as scenes concocted with some of his oddball neighbors. The process sucked in his CSN partners as well, and no one associated with the film acquitted themselves particularly well.
“It’s hard to say what the movie means,” Young told Rolling Stone. “I think it’s a good film for a first film. I think it’s a really good film. . . . It does lay a lot of shit on people though. It wasn’t made for entertainment. I’ll admit, I made it for myself. Whatever it is, that’s the way I felt. I made it for me. I never even had a script.”
As ever with regard to Neil Young, art imitates life.
Film still, Journey through the Past, 1972. Everett Collection/Rex USA
