Fire and Rain (25 page)

As Casale began running toward the parking lot, a rapid succession of what seemed like firecracker pops rang out: One after another, then multiples.

At that point, the screaming began. The bullets had flown over the heads of Casale and those in his vicinity, but they'd clearly landed somewhere. He turned to his left and, about forty feet away, saw a body slumped on the ground. At first, he didn't know who it was, but then he looked around and recognized someone—Miller, whom Casale identified from the clothing he had on at the rally. Shot in the mouth, he lay on his stomach, blood pouring out on the roadway. Soon enough, Casale realized the other body was Allison Krause.

None of it made it any sense or could be processed; mostly Casale felt as if he were going to throw up. Professors trying to mediate between students and soldiers told everyone to sit down, so Casale slumped down on the grass on the hill. Around him, people wept; others were practically shell-shocked. Eventually, the students were shepherded off campus through a corridor of soldiers. Walking home to Water Street, Casale and the other students were taunted by frat boys on the front porches of their fraternity houses. Once home, he turned on the TV and radio to find out what had happened; to his shock, initial reports claimed the students had attacked soldiers. Casale learned that two other students, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer, were also dead.

The school was shut down, Casale's graduation ceremony postponed.

Even when it was rescheduled, Casale wasn't allowed to attend because of his connection to SDS, and a plan to transfer to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor fell through when his scholarship was revoked for similar reasons. With the help of a sympathetic professor, he landed a job back on the Kent State campus that fall, where he met another fellow student, Mark Mothersbaugh. Both agreed that nothing—from the hippie culture to the government—seemed to be working anymore. Society was no longer evolving; it was, they thought, devolving into chaos and numskulledness.

Since Casale didn't have the guts to join the Weathermen, the best retort he could conceive was music. He'd never been a fan of softer bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, what he called “taffy” music. But with Mothersbaugh's brother Bob, he and Mothersbaugh eventually began pounding out rudimentary blues—“devolved” music for a devolving country and era. Different times called for a different, more discordant soundtrack. Eventually, they called themselves Devo.

At their concerts, Crosby and Nash always addressed the crowds more than Stills and Young combined. Without any prompting, they'd explain what mood they were in or why they were choosing to sing a particular song; maybe they'd crack a barbed joke at the expense of the Byrds or the Hollies (neither of whom were faring as well without Crosby and Nash) or make a reference only one or the other would understand. They were determined to engage, a tradition Nash continued in Denver. “If you knew what happened to us in the last two days,” he told the audience, “you wouldn't believe it.”

The mishaps and bad omens actually dated back at least a month. With the CSNY tour looming, Stills had flown back into Los Angeles from London on April 14. After running his own show for nearly two
months, he wasn't eager to return to California and the people who'd made him a star, but obligations were obligations. Driving back to Laurel Canyon from the airport, Stills glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a squad car. The moment was unintentionally comical, as if he was parroting the words to Crosby's “Almost Cut My Hair (“It increases my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a
po-
lice car” indeed). Whether out of paranoia or carelessness, Stills skidded into a parked car. When the patrolman approached his vehicle, Stills was holding his left hand in pain; somehow, his hand had slipped off the wheel and bashed into something inside the car. Stills wound up with a ticket and a fractured left hand, right beneath his fingers.

To everyone's aggravation, the CSNY tour was postponed for a month to allow Stills several weeks to heal. Embarrassed to tell his friends how he'd hurt himself, Stills called photographer and friend Henry Diltz two days later: “Hey, man, you wanna go to Hawaii with me?” By the next day, both were in a beach house on the North Shore, owned by a friend of Diltz's. There, they drank, played pool at the local pool hall, and gossiped about Crosby, Nash, and Young. Stills, who could only move two fingers on his hand thanks to his cast, periodically checked in with management from a pay phone at the pool hall. Girls came in and out of the house on the beach. (Coincidentally, Diltz was reading
Groupie,
a trashy cult novel called “a sex-rock odyssey.”) “My fingers hurt so bad, it's got me grinnin,'” Stills wrote in a new song, “Singin' Call,” whose chorus, tellingly, went, “Help me now, I got to slow down.”

But there wasn't much time for slowing down, and no one was particularly interested in doing it anyway. On April 29, his injury healed, Stills returned to Los Angeles. The new starting date for the tour was May 12, in Denver, which left precious little time to rehearse thoroughly, something Stills always goaded the others into doing. If that weren't trying enough, other, more personal complications arose. Just a few weeks before, Nash had been in he and Mitchell's shared home on Lookout
Mountain Avenue when a telegram arrived from Mitchell, then vacationing in Greece: “If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers,” it read. The relationship, which had been teetering on collapse for months, was over. Although it wasn't a complete surprise—Nash had felt distance between them when Mitchell had visited him and Crosby during the boat trip the month before—the delivery was still devastating. In an unnerving coincidence,
Déjà vu
, complete with Nash's ode to their life together, “Our House,” had just been released.

The calamities—creative, emotional, and physical—kept coming. No sooner had he repaired his hand than Stills had a skiing accident, tearing a knee ligament. Greg Reeves' mental state also had to be dealt with. When he'd first hooked up with the band barely a year before, Reeves was shy and unassuming, as well as a fluid, sublime bass player. But something had gone awry. When he appeared at Young's home studio in Topanga for the
After the Gold Rush
sessions, he was, well, a different shade. “Greg would show up with a yellow-painted face, like pigmented or something,” guitarist and keyboardist Nils Lofgren, also playing on the album, recalled. “David Briggs [Young's coproducer] would say, ‘Yeah, Greg's an Indian.' As far as I could tell, he had African-American blood in him.” When CSNY would arrive at airports, Reeves would act anxious around security and mutter, “Don't search my bags—I've got my medicine in there.” As his bosses stood around waiting impatiently, airport officials would search Reeves' bags and find beads, bits of fur, and rabbit entrails—Reeves, it turned out, truly
did
think he was a witch doctor. When he began lobbying to sing his own songs during CSNY sets, his tenure in the band finally ended. “We said, ‘We're sorry, but this is insane,'” Nash recalled. “‘Just keep it all to your fucking self—just play bass.'” Reeves was promptly fired. “Things just started happening,” Dallas Taylor recalled. “It was like someone was putting a jinx on us, one thing after another.”

With only two days before the first show, Stills suggested a replacement.
While recording at Island Studios in London, he'd met Calvin Samuels, a Caribbean-born bass player nicknamed “Fuzzy” for the way he played his instrument through a fuzz box. Homeless at the time—and often sleeping on a couch at the studio—the easygoing, gap-toothed Samuels had played in ska and reggae bands like the Equals. When he heard one of his friends was jamming with Stills, Samuels came down to watch, saw no one was playing bass, and sat in. “I heard Stephen kicked out a lot of people,” Samuels recalled. “Obviously he heard something he liked. I didn't get thrown out of the room.”

Ron Stone of Lookout Management, along with Stills' friend and assistant Dan Campbell, were dispatched to London to hunt down Samuels and fly him back to L.A. to replace Reeves. Given that Samuels often slept on the streets, it wasn't easy finding “a bass player named Fuzzy,” as Stills described him, but somehow they did. According to Stone, a visa for Samuels was obtained at the last minute, although Samuels claimed he was turned down for a visa and had to sneak aboard a States-bound plane by confusing the attendants. Either way, he arrived in Los Angeles and was immediately driven to a rehearsal space to meet the band and audition, all in the same day. A bemused Young introduced himself, saying he wanted to meet the crazy character who'd flown all the way from London for a chance to play with them.

With his black bowler hat, black suit, and roller-skating shoes stripped of wheels, Samuels more than fit the wacky-character mold. He'd barely made the acquaintance of the others (or learned their repertoire) when, two days later, he was hustled aboard a plane for Denver with the rest of the band. It was madness, but by then, madness was becoming CSNY's normal.

“We're real loose,” Young told the crowd after he came onstage in Denver and joined the trio. “This is the way it is in our living room.” Nash
chimed in on the same subject, with far more bluntness, but in his lilting British accent: “We decided we weren't going to rehearse too much.”

At times it showed. The trio seemed shaky and under-rehearsed on the second song, “Teach Your Children,” during which Stills flubbed a guitar solo and Crosby joked, “I swallowed my gum.” At one point, Crosby introduced Stills' solo spot in the set while his bandmate was still in his dressing room, not emerging for a mysterious five minutes.

None of it mattered to the ten thousand who'd gathered in the arena and shouted “Right on, right
on!”
at the start and finish of every song. “Well, it sure is groovy that all you folks could come out tonight,” Young aw-shucked, eliciting a loud “Outta sight!” from the audience. With Stills at the piano, they did a lovely version of “Helpless,” and the Crosby and Nash harmonies snugly wrapped around Young's “Tell Me Why,” another new, unreleased song. Crosby hushed the crowd with a quietly intense version of “Everybody's Been Burned,” a song from the Byrds days, and Stills, alone at the piano, debuted “We Are Not Helpless,” inspired by
Fail Safe
, the nuclear-war novel, and casually told the crowd he was recording his own album.

After a break, they returned for the electric set. With Stills on crutches and Samuels still stunned at the sight of more people than he'd ever beheld in an audience, the performance was bound to be peculiar. As usual, Crosby yapped the most, asking about a group of war protesters the band had passed on the way to the venue and mischievously playing the opening twelve-string riff to “Mr. Tambourine Man” to kill time while the band laboriously tuned up. Nash introduced the first performance of “Chicago,” a song written a mere two weeks before, after CSNY had been invited to play at a benefit for the Chicago Seven. When Stills and Young declined, Nash wrote an impassioned plea for them to “please come to Chicago just to sing.” Nash hadn't yet told Young and Stills that his lyrics were directed pointedly at them.

Matters quickly deteriorated onstage. Their lack of rehearsal time and
Samuels' unfamiliarity with the songs were apparent in slack versions of “Pre-Road Downs” from
Crosby, Stills & Nash
, “Carry On,” and a new Young song cut without them for
After the Gold Rush
, “Southern Man.” (“A song is a song,” Samuels recalled. “I bluffed it. I fumbled my way through. You do what you have to do.”) Crosby and Young complained openly about the sound system during the acoustic set, when loud popping disrupted the music, and the P.A. only grew worse with amplification.