Fire and Rain (26 page)

Although the audience didn't pick up on it, the group began acting out its internal psychodrama onstage. Using his crutches, Stills pretended to conduct the band like an orchestra and in general hammed it up, much to the increasing annoyance of his bandmates. “He was milking it for all it was worth,” said Nash. “He was being a jerk.” Of the four of them, it was Stills who snagged the lion's share of songs during the electric set—four out of nine—due, he said, to Samuels being more familiar with Stills' tunes.

Stills' stage moves were partly an extension of his take-charge manner and military-academy year. (“He approached life in a military, organized way,” recalled Diltz, who went to see the movie
Patton
with Stills during their trip to Hawaii.) But Stills, who'd seen his domination of the group diminish during the
Déjà vu
sessions, was now struggling to regain control of the band in any way he could. Young wasn't happy Reeves had been sacked and replaced with one of Stills' cohorts; it meant Young, who liked to be in charge himself, was put in a position of playing with Stills' choice of rhythm section, not his own. As the electric set carried on, Young—who only contributed one song, “Southern Man”—quietly stewed. Finally, he had had enough. As Stills sat down at the organ to begin “Long Time Gone,” Young unplugged his guitar—which had been having hookup problems anyway—threw it down, and stalked off.

“Where's Neil?” Crosby asked openly. “He . . . ran?” Crosby sounded genuinely surprised, as if Young's unpredictability hadn't fully dawned
on him. Nash told the crowd they were dealing with badly functioning guitars and that a fix was on the way.

But Young didn't return. The trio, with Samuels and Taylor gamely backing them, made it through the song. When it ended, Nash said a quick, “Thank you—good night,” and the show abruptly ended.

Immediately after, Taylor received a call to come up to Young's hotel room. Crosby and Nash, already there, told Taylor in the bluntest terms they'd had enough of Stills. He was too crazy and domineering, and they'd decided to return to Los Angeles and scrap the tour, or maybe fire him and tour without him. Was Taylor with them or with Stills?

Taylor was stunned: He thought the show had been patchy but not terrible, and he'd been surprised when Young stormed off. Since Taylor considered Stills his friend, he told them he was staying with Stills. As they threatened, Crosby, Nash, and Young flew back to Los Angeles the next day, while Stills, unaware of their action, went onward to the next date, in Chicago, only hearing the show was canceled when he arrived at the venue for a soundcheck. “Crosby was furious at me, and Neil was disgusted,” Stills recalled. “They wanted to fire me because
I
probably barely knew the songs.” After fully realizing what had happened, Stills, with Taylor and Samuels, also returned to California. On the way, Taylor told him to screw the others; they'd form a group of their own. One show into their tour, CSNY had evaporated.

Three days later, on May 15, the four of them reunited, not onstage but at the Lookout Management office on La Cienega Boulevard. Roberts and Geffen laid it on the line. The tour was a big, potentially profitable one. The band was receiving an unusually high $25,000 per show. If the tour was canceled, promoters wouldn't be happy; in fact, they'd probably sue.

Atlantic had already begun preparing a press release that denied the group was disbanding. Word of the canceled Chicago show was jeopardizing ticket sales for concerts already announced; hearing the band was falling apart, fans were wary of forking over cash for shows that might not take place. The cancellations, the statement said with a degree of truth, were attributed to “knee and wrist injuries sustained by Stills and recurrence of throat problems by Graham Nash.” The press release also disclosed for the first time publicly that Reeves was gone.

The meeting was a sobering experience, with grievances aired all around. “We never ran anything by our managers,” Nash said. “They had to clean up the mess. But we had to face the consequences. It was a lot of money. We had to make sure the promoters weren't hurt. And the threat of lawsuits probably woke us up a little.” Whether the group would actually be sued or whether the threat was a savvy management tactic to get them back together, the end result was that the four agreed to regroup and resume their tour.

Not every conflict had been resolved. That morning, Dallas Taylor had received a call from his friend and producer Paul Rothchild, who'd worked on Doors and early Crosby, Stills & Nash sessions. Rothschild asked Taylor if he was okay. Taylor didn't know what he meant. Hadn't Taylor heard or read he'd been sacked? Taylor jumped in his Ferrari and drove over to the Lookout office just as the combination group therapy session and tongue-lashing was winding down. None of them looked at him, and he knew right then it was over: Young had issued an ultimatum that Taylor, whose drumming he'd never been especially fond of, had to be replaced.

Although Taylor had never caused the band the type of consternation Reeves had, Nash felt Taylor had deluded himself into thinking he was a more integral part of the band than he was. “Because Dallas had been Stephen's hang buddy during the first record, Dallas began to think it should have been CSNY
T
,” Nash recalled. “He wanted more presence
and more money. It took us a little bit of explaining that he was never going to be one of us. He was a great drummer, but in CSNY there was nobody else as far as I was concerned.” Taylor admitted there was disagreement over whether he should be paid as a sideman or full-time band member or whether he'd receive points on
Déjà vu
, which would represent a substantial windfall.

Onstage at Denver, Crosby had introduced Taylor, as he often did, as “our permanent drummer.” But the meeting exposed the wobbliness of those words. Taylor and Stills had bonded from the earliest days of the band, but business had cleft them apart. “I never dreamed Stephen would throw me under the bus,” Taylor said. “I showed my loyalty to him, but that pissed off Neil. He didn't want that camaraderie against him. I thought Stephen was my advocate. But everybody folded at that time.” When Atlantic finally issued its press release, the statement now read that both Reeves and Taylor were out of the band; no replacements were mentioned. The tour would resume at the Boston Garden on May 29, roughly two weeks later.

In case anyone needed a reminder of their responsibilities,
Déjà vu
became the number 1 album in the country the day after the meeting, displacing Simon and Garfunkel's
Bridge Over Troubled Water
. The album was released to reviews both glowing (“there's no group in the country making better music than this,” raved the
Chicago Tribune
, while the
Los Angeles Times'
Robert Hilburn dubbed it “easily the best rock album of the new year”) and skeptical (“a lightweight collection of medium-pretty tunes, adequately performed by talented people,” said the
Washington Post
, and
Rolling Stone
dubbed it “too sweet, too soothing, too perfect and too good to be true”). Nonetheless,
Déjà vu
began sailing out of stores, particularly in colleges: At the stores at the University of Boulder and the Madison branch of the University of Wisconsin, it leapfrogged over
Abbey Road
and
Bridge Over Troubled Water
to become their top seller. The fact that the names “Dallas Taylor
& Greg Reeves” were embossed in gold on the cover was now a haunting memento of what had been.

Inconceivably, it was happening again, a mere ten days after Kent State.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, campuses either shut down or exploded. Students occupied buildings: one hundred at the University of Connecticut, protesting a no-amnesty policy toward any demonstrators, and another large group at Loyola in New Orleans. Twenty students at Eastern Michigan University were tossed in jail after pelting police. A bronze statue on the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan wound up with a gaping hole when a makeshift bomb went off. In an unintentionally comic sidebar to events of the moment, even the music business was rattled. “Youth Unrest Cuts Disk Sales,” reported
Billboard
, with one store owner grousing that students were so busy giving money to “defense funds” that they didn't have money left to buy LPs. At least, some said with relief, students weren't trashing record stores.

Like many campuses around the country, Jackson State College—a primarily African American school in the southwest section of Jackson, Mississippi—was a jumble of panic, fear, and indignation after the massacre in Ohio. On Wednesday, May 13, students took over a construction site, setting a dump truck on fire. A fire truck dispatched to the scene was hit with rocks and bottles, resulting in the inevitable aftermath—police and National Guard called in to restore order on and around the campus.

What happened next depended on who told the story. According to police, a sniper on the fourth floor of Alexander Hall, the women's dormitory, began firing at them. The students in and around the hall denied any such thing—if anything, they said, police had mistaken the
sound of smashed bottles for gunfire. Whatever the cause—and no sniper was ever found—police opened fire at the building shortly after midnight on Friday, May 15.

Again, reports varied: Seven seconds of shots? Twenty-five? Nine students wounded? Eleven? Fifteen? Yet no one could argue with the number of bullet holes counted in the dorm—250—or the smell of fresh blood on the first floor, or with the grimmest results of all: two black students dead from gunshots. Philip Lafayette Gibbs, a junior studying pre-law and father of a baby about to turn eleven months, was the first casualty. James Earl Green wasn't even a student at Jackson State: A seventeen-year-old senior at the local high school, he was on his way home from a part-time job at the Rag-a-Bag grocery store, where he worked to help his widowed mother support her four children. Like those at Kent Sate, they were victims not of politics but of timing. Gibbs' membership in the Committee of Social Concern at a nearby Methodist Church was the closest either man came to activism.

The next day, Nixon kept a low profile, only issuing a bland statement: “In the shadow of these troubled days, this tragedy makes it urgent that every American personally undertake greater efforts toward understanding, restraint, and compassion.” Not surprisingly, the comment did little to help people understand deaths that made even less sense than those at Kent State. “I think it was just a massacre,” one student told a reporter. “I think it was preplanned. They came up there with the idea of killing.” A token get-together at the White House with Nixon, his staff, and six Kent State students had done little to change those perceptions.

On May 26, Vice President Spiro Agnew, never known for subtlety, nuance, or love of hippies, sent a memo to John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic affairs advisor, about the national outbreak of antiwar protests. “We have had enough maudlin sympathy for lawbreakers emanating from other areas of government,” he wrote. “ . . . In my judgment, nothing
makes the average American any angrier than to see the pained, selfrighteous expressions of a[n Edwin] Muskie or a [Charles] Percy as they attach like leeches to the nearest Negro funeral procession...The polls show that the people are with [Nixon] and not with the whiners in the Senate and in the liberal community.” Although he'd sounded a conciliatory note in his post-Jackson State comment, Nixon took a different stance in his office, away from prying eyes. After reading the memo, he jotted “E—I agree.” It was time for law and order, and even though his popularity was waning, he pinned his hopes on his fellow Americans agreeing with him.