Fire and Rain (14 page)

Crosby had met Nash when the Hollies made their first trip to Los Angeles in 1966, the same year they cracked the American top 10 with “Bus Stop” and “Stop Stop Stop,” two exceptionally vibrant examples of the Hollies' crisp, ebullient harmonies and hooks—merry-go-round Merseybeat pop. With his Manchester childhood friend Allan Clarke, Nash had put that band together around 1962. Their earliest English hits were white-British-boy covers of R&B songs like “Stay” and “Searchin',” but they soon forged their own identity. Crosby and Nash had been introduced to each other by Cass Elliot, the beloved member of the Mamas and the Papas who'd known Crosby from their days in folk groups.

In different ways, all three felt stymied by the middle of 1968. Stills had tasted success when Buffalo Springfield hit the top 10 with “For What It's Worth,” his eerily calm song about the Sunset Strip “hippie riot” of 1966. But thanks in part to Young, whose thirst for fame never equaled Stills', the Springfield had fallen apart. The previous fall, Crosby had been fired from the Byrds for his motormouth personality and risqué material. Nash, longing to be taken seriously as an artist of the rock era, was encountering resistance to his new songs from the Hollies. Hard as it was to believe, an effervescent new song he'd written about trendy hippies traveling to the Middle East, “Marrakesh Express,” was deemed too experimental.

Stills and Crosby, who hooked up first, were an unlikely duo. Stills' voice was a croon with a twist of leathery raspiness, while Crosby's was nothing but sweet. Stills preferred liquor over Crosby's favorite indulgence, pot. Crosby was brash and unafraid to share his opinions at any moment; Stills tended to simmer and struggle between bouts of self-assurance and self-doubt. Stills was almost tyrannically regimented; Crosby wasn't. But both were unemployed, low on cash, and desperate for a new career break, and their voices proved to be a better blend than anyone would have thought. Depending on the source, all three first sang together at either Joni Mitchell's or Cass Elliot's house, but the vocal blend they achieved was inarguable. “I'd heard that golden sound that me and David and Stephen created, and I wanted it,” Nash recalled. “As a musician I had no choice. I knew what harmony was, and the Springfield and the Byrds were known for their harmonies, but this was different.”

The months that followed—in Los Angeles, London, and Sag Harbor, New York—were ambrosial for them. The songs were pouring out; Stills alone knocked out almost two dozen between the spring and fall of 1968, songs about his former lover Judy Collins like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “So Begins the Task.” With Crosby and Kantner, he wrote “Wooden Ships.” Confident in the sound they created, with three disparate voices that blended in ways that previous harmony groups like the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons hadn't, they'd break into their songs for anyone who'd listen. Nash took the high parts, Stills the low, and Crosby was the warm middle—and each man's voice, unlike harmony groups of the past, was also very distinct in the mix. To better understand record deals, Crosby and Nash took a Manhattan restaurant meeting with Paul Simon, whom Nash had met during his Hollies days. (The Hollies had done a cover of Simon's “I Am a Rock.”) By early 1969, they'd worked out their contractual mess (each was on a different label) and wound up on Atlantic, the Springfield's home; Atlantic head Ahmet Ertegun was a passionate fan of Stills'.

In many ways, Crosby, Stills & Nash was a corporate merger, a business deal. Yet from all accounts, the atmosphere at Wally Heider's studio in Los Angeles, where their first album was constructed, was half work and half bromance. “We were in love with each other,” Nash recalled. “They were funny and world-wise, and I loved them.” Writers like Ellen Sander and
Rolling Stone
's Ben Fong-Torres dropped by and found the three huddled around microphones, ecstatic over the music they were making. Stills was on all burners: In one night, he played the entire backing track to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” then stayed up for days to work on the other songs. Along for the ride was Dallas Taylor. Although only twenty-one, Taylor, whose face was squashed beneath a bowl-shaped haircut, had met Crosby, Stills & Nash by way of their friend John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful. Taylor and Stills had gotten off to a rocky start: Stills didn't pay Taylor for an early session, leading Taylor to file a complaint with the musicians' union. But he and Stills had nonetheless clicked as musicians; Taylor was like Stills' sidekick younger brother, and he wound up playing all the drum parts of their first album.

The group the Beatles didn't want was all anyone heard about in and around Laurel Canyon. Waiting for his friend James Taylor to mend from his motorcycle accident, Danny Kortchmar began hearing the whispers about Crosby, Stills & Nash. “That was the most happening thing in Los Angeles,” he recalled. “That was all anyone talked about.” Months before meeting Taylor, drummer Russ Kunkel was in the Canyon living room of his friend Gary Burden when Crosby and Nash stopped by with a test pressing of the record. Joints were lit and the LP was put on Burden's stereo. “When I heard
that,
I knew, ‘Okay, this is huge,'” Kunkel recalled. “There was never anything like it. It was completely unique.”

Released in late May 1969,
Crosby, Stills & Nash
had its dark undercurrents: Stills' songs about his painful breakup with Collins, “You Don't Have to Cry” and “Helplessly Hoping,” and Crosby's Bobby Kennedy-inspired “Long Time Gone,” its harmonies groping for a way
out of the darkness. But it was also a sunnier record than anything any of them had made before, and the joy that went into its creation was heard in every rapturous harmony or crystalline guitar. In July, the album peaked at number 6 on the charts and remained there for a total of forty weeks.

Although their personalities were volatile from the start, the group immediately messed with its own chemistry. Realizing they had to flesh out their band in order to play their songs onstage, they could have opted for a session musician who'd toil away in the background. Instead, they began asking their well-known musician friends—Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, even, according to Taylor, Harrison—to join. Everyone turned them down. With a tour in the making, Ertegun suggested Young.

Stills knew all about Young, of course. They'd been born the same year, 1945, but in different countries—Young kicked around Canada for all his youth—and had first met in Ontario in 1965 when Young's band, the Squires, wound up on the same bill as the Company, an offshoot of the Au Go Go Singers. They'd bonded from the start and eventually crossed paths again, far more fatefully, a year later. Young and Bruce Palmer, his scarecrow-like bass-playing friend, had driven to Los Angeles in Young's hearse. By happenstance, Furay and Stills saw the car, Stills remembered his eccentric friend Young with the funeral-mobile, and the result was Buffalo Springfield.

Given the way the two of them had butted guitars and heads in the Springfield, Stills was resistant at first to Ertegun's idea. “I went, ‘Why would we
do
that?'” he recalled. “‘You know him—he has control issues. He'll tell you himself.' As a trio we worked pretty well.” But Ertegun insisted, and the deal was sealed after Nash met Young over breakfast in New York and was sold on his humor and sensibility. According to Taylor, “Stephen asked me one night, ‘What do you think of Neil maybe joining the band again?' And I said, ‘Isn't that the reason Buffalo Springfield
broke up? You never got along?' And he said, ‘Yeah, it'll be different now.' Famous last words.”

Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash did share one common bond: a manager. A Brooklyn hippie who'd relocated to California, Elliot Roberts, born Elliot Rabinowitz, was by then managing both acts with his partner, a tough, forever-hustling former William Morris agent named David Geffen. Everyone knew Young's first album, 1969's lushly produced
Neil Young,
sold poorly next to
Crosby, Stills & Nash
. “That was not lost on Elliot and Neil,” said Stone. “I'm not sure Neil wanted to do it, but he clearly saw it as an opportunity to raise the profile of his solo career.” Soon enough, Young was in the band, playing guitar alongside Stills at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in August 1969 as their peers stood behind them and watched approvingly. “Neil saw himself with a solo career even before CSNY,” Crosby reflected. “CSNY was a vehicle to establish himself.”

Back home, the same people who'd heard so much in advance about the new trio were left pondering the idea of Stills and Young working together again. “I was surprised,” recalled Nurit Wilde, a photographer who'd known both men during the Springfield days. “I thought, ‘I wonder how
that
will go?'”

How it would go became evident soon enough. In the fall and early winter of 1969, work shifted from Los Angeles to San Francisco for the making of their first album as a quartet. On paper, the scenario looked promising. They'd be cutting tracks at Wally Heider's studio, favored by their friends in the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Crosby had already relocated to the Bay Area, and Stills, Nash, and Young would be living a five-minute walk away at the Caravan Lodge Motel in the seamy Tenderloin district. Each arrived with a satchel of new or half-completed songs.

On the first album, Stills had been very much in charge, playing most of the guitars and all the bass and organ and shaping the textures and contours of the music. Sometimes the only ones in the studio with him were Dallas Taylor and engineer Bill Halverson. Barely a year later, their lives had taken so many different turns it was sometimes hard to think straight. Stills was no longer the dominant force in the band. After Young had joined, CSNY had also added a bass player, Greg Reeves, a sixteen-year-old recommended by Young's friend Rick James. (Young and James had, strangely enough, played together in the short-lived Mynah Birds in Detroit.) “Stephen had previously done whatever he wanted,” said Ron Stone. “All of a sudden, Stephen's space was invaded.” Stills grew frustrated when his bandmates began writing songs in the studio, wasting time and money. “
Déjà vu
was very miserable,” Stills recalled. “It was bedlam, everybody doing whatever they wanted.”

Young's formidable gifts—the Canadian high-lonesome spookiness in his voice, the penetrating sting of his electric guitar leads, and the unassuming poetic flow of his lyrics—were clear, but so were his aloofness and inability to commit to the others. Young first cut “Helpless” with Crazy Horse, the band he was now working with on his own music, but when it didn't sound right, he tried it again, with Crosby, Stills & Nash. This time, thanks to Crosby-arranged harmonies that rose behind Young from a muted murmur to a vocal blanket, it clicked. Other times, like on the near-symphonic three-part suite “Country Girl,” he worked on his own terms, venturing by himself to a studio in Los Angeles to overdub a massive pipe organ. “Neil pretty much did his stuff on his own and brought it finished to us and said, ‘You want to put some vocals on this?'” Crosby recalled. To Nash's annoyance, Young didn't play on his two contributions, “Our House” and “Teach Your Children”—songs Nash was confident would be the hit singles the group would need to continue. “I knew what a hit was,” Nash recalled. “We wanted to
sell
this bloody thing. Neil was being a little
weird and selfish.” (Young also had a pair of bush babies—tiny, nightvision monkeys—running around his hotel room, which enhanced the craziness.)

Given the limitations of the twenty-minutes-a-side LP format, they'd be lucky to land two songs apiece on the album, so they argued over who placed more material (and received more royalties) on the record. “Everyone was powerless watching this freight train of resentment and anger and ‘I want more of my songs on the record,'” Taylor said. “The whole vibe from the first album was gone.” Among the casualties—songs recorded or attempted—were Young's “Sea of Madness” and a multitude of Stills numbers. Whenever they seemed to be on a roll, someone from management would come by the studio with a contract to sign, leading to someone or another in the band being unhappy and the mood being wrecked for days. To everyone's surprise, the normally reserved Nash broke down in tears one night at the studio. They had something special, he told them, but they were messing it up, bad. “We were in a different space,” Nash recalled. “The bloom had gone off the rose. We'd been together for a while and the novelty had worn off a little.”

Drugs, never in short supply to begin with since the days they'd jokingly dubbed themselves the Frozen Noses, were omnipresent. “By the time we got to
Déjà vu
and we'd snorted eighty pounds of cocaine, things were a little different,” Nash remembered. The drugs helped fuel their creativity—or so they thought—and made it possible to keep working in the studio day after day. But it also fueled the insanity. One night, Nash stayed until three in the morning to finish a final mix of one of his songs. When he returned later that day, he replayed the tape and found it didn't sound anything like he remembered. At first, he thought he was losing his mind—
why does it sound like this?
He learned Stills had stayed even later and remixed it without telling him.