Fire and Rain (41 page)

Stills was immediately intrigued. As soon as she left the studio that day, he stayed behind and wrote and recorded a song about her, “Cherokee.” Set to Jones' churning organ, it had the feel of an after-hours confessional in a smoke-drenched bar. (To lend the song an exotic twang, Stills rented an electric sitar to play on it.) He then invited her to be part of a backup choir he'd assembled for “Love the One You're With,” which he'd begun recording in London and was now finishing up in Los Angeles. The track had been transformed from a solo guitar workout to a pulsating groove with congas and steel drums. At the late June session,
Coolidge found herself gathered around a microphone with Crosby, her sister Priscilla Jones, the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian, and another new acquaintance, Graham Nash.

Like Stills, Nash was struck by Coolidge's voice and looks—so much so that he asked her to accompany him to the CSNY show at the Los Angeles Forum the following night, June 25. Since he was staying at Stills' house in Laurel Canyon, Nash gave Coolidge Stills' number and told her to call him to make arrangements. “And then,” Coolidge recalled, “all the nonsense began.”

According to Coolidge, Stills answered when she phoned the next day and told her that Nash said he'd made a mistake and couldn't take her after all—but that he, Stills, would love to drive her to the show instead. Unaware of the band's complex dynamics and only interested in seeing them perform, Coolidge said yes, and Stills picked her up at her home on Wilshire. Backstage at the show, the once-friendly Nash barely looked at her.

Stills and Coolidge began seeing each other soon after. Stills' passion was instantaneous. In quick order, he wrote and recorded another song, “Sit Yourself Down,” that captured the conflicting sides of his personality, his internal conflict between taking stock and pushing himself. The ruminative lyrics talked about aging, maturing, slowing down, and buying land. The music, particularly its fervent chorus propelled by his galloping piano, a choir (again with Coolidge), and a lead guitar line that kept tugging at the melody, was anything but calm. Stills was so optimistic about his and Coolidge's budding relationship that in the song he envisioned the two of them living “on a patch of ground” later in life.

Coolidge wasn't so sure. When she met Stills, she was still recovering from her first encounter with hard-core show business insanity. The spring 1970 Joe Cocker tour was, in her words, a dose of the new brand of “rock and roll university, really tough.” Every night, she'd watch as the seemingly fragile Cocker tossed down whatever pills or drugs anyone
handed him as he walked onstage. She'd witnessed Cocker's band members scoring heroin at a seedy farm. Cocaine was everywhere. Walking into the lobby of one hotel, she saw half the tour members, musicians and crew alike, lining up to get shots for venereal disease. Even scarier was Cocker's drummer, Jim Gordon, whom Coolidge had dated before the tour. Watching TV one night in a hotel room, Gordon—a boyishly handsome and kinetic drummer—said he needed to talk to her outside. As soon as they stepped into the hallway, Gordon punched her so hard she fell unconscious to the floor. Later, Keltner saw a huge black shiner on her face but didn't ask what happened.
³

Stills was nowhere near as explosive as Gordon, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia after murdering his mother with repeated blows of a hammer. But Stills was intense in his own way: He liked to race horses at local tracks to clear his head, he indulged more than Coolidge could tolerate, and he would spend long hours, often midnight to dawn, in studios, working on his music. (At three o'clock one morning, he called a sleeping Johnny Barbata and asked him to come down, but Nash advised the drummer to pass, given how many hours Barbata would inevitably end up spending with Stills.) Almost from the start, the CSNY universe itself was too much for Coolidge. One night at Stills' house, she cooked him, Crosby, and Nash a dinner of beans and cornbread. Feeling sleepy afterward, Crosby accused her of dosing the food with acid—when, in fact, he was merely sleepy from eating so many beans. “Graham was the most elegant human being,” she recalled. “The other two were pretty wacky.”

In the aftermath of the Cocker tour, Coolidge needed a more stable, even-keeled force around her. The soap-opera element kicked in when she discovered what had happened the night of the CSNY show: Nash told her Stills had purposefully made up that story in order to escort
her himself. At this point, Nash made his own growing feelings about Coolidge known to her. “I talked to Rita about it and she said, ‘I feel the same way,'” Nash recalled. “And I said, ‘There's nothing we can do. I'm not touching you or kissing you or fucking—I'm not doing
anything
until we go to Stephen.'” Nash wound up writing a song, “Better Days,” with the situation in mind: “Though you're where you want to be, you're not where you belong,” he sang. “That was Rita,” he said. “She was with Stephen but didn't want to be there. She wanted to be with me.”

Deciding it was best to tell Stills to his face about this realignment, Nash and Coolidge drove to Stills' house to personally deliver the news of their burgeoning relationship. Sitting poolside, a stunned and humiliated Stills spit at Nash (but missed). Nash moved out of Stills' home and into a room at the Chateau Marmont. “Girls fell quite naturally in love or in lust with Graham,” said Crosby. “He had that lovely British accent and was a good lover and a gentleman.” Coolidge melted whenever Nash would call her “luv” with his British accent. The Coolidge triangle was far from the principal cause of any intra-band breakdown; fractures in the band had been building for months. But after the poolside conversation, Stills refused to speak to Nash, and the increasingly delicate thread that held them together finally snapped.

His pride publicly wounded, Stills drowned his sorrows in whatever way he could, one result being his drug bust in San Diego. (The charges were eventually reduced to a misdemeanor and a fine.) By the middle of September, tiring of what he called “the incestuous California scene,” he rented a Lear Jet and flew to Colorado for a few weeks. Judy Collins had introduced him to the state during their relationship, and Stills rented a cabin, joined by Diltz, bass player Fuzzy Samuels, and his personal assistant Dan Campbell. With his solo album nearly complete, he buried his sorrows in work, planning sessions for another record and writing and jamming on songs in the house. “When you're sitting there dealing
with all these feelings, it's, ‘Oh, poor me,'” he recalled. “All this stuff is coming out.”

On September 18, two days after the giraffe-enhanced photo shoot, more troubling news arrived. A call to the cabin delivered the news that Jimi Hendrix had been found dead in a hotel room in the Notting Hill section of London after choking on his own vomit. Stills was devastated and angry. “I cried and drank,” he recalled. A friend awoke the next morning to find Stills cleaning out marmalade jars so he could have additional glasses to imbibe some more.

The two men had made tentative plans to record an album together, perhaps even form a band. Now those plans, like those with Coolidge, were history. It was time to flee. The hell with all of them.

He couldn't tell if he was crazy, extremely high, or some combination of both. In the aftermath of Christine Hinton's death, sometimes it was hard to tell. Whatever the reason, Crosby felt her presence all around him late one September evening. Standing before a microphone in an echo chamber at Wally Heider's studio in San Francisco, Crosby told engineer Stephen Barncard to roll tape, then began singing a cappella—no words, just a full-throated blend of melody and moan. Then he sang another part, then another, ending up with six voices, each echoed back onto itself for a woebegone, eerie mass of twelve wailing Crosbys. A Grand Canyon of pain, the performance was a belated musical eulogy to her; fittingly, he called it “I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here.”

To the consternation of friends and past lovers, little about Crosby's world had ever been conventional; everyone still talked about the nonstop parade of nude swimmers in his pool at his previous home in Laurel Canyon. But Crosby's life now took on something actually resembling a routine. After Hinton's fatal accident, he'd sold his house in Novato,
where the
Déjà vu
cover had been shot; the place evoked too many painful memories. (Briefly, he'd lost the Halliburton case that contained some of her clothes, but after word of its disappearance or possible theft went out, it turned up amidst the Jefferson Airplane's gear.) His home became the
Mayan
, now docked in Sausalito after he and Nash had sailed it back home from Florida. Crosby lived, ate, and slept on it, often well into the afternoon.

Around seven each night, he'd drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to Heider's. Music would be his escape and salvation. In the same room where the torturous
Déjà vu
sessions had taken place a year before, Crosby began making the first record under his own name. Much like his lifestyle, it wouldn't be traditional in any form. To indulge his every whim, he booked Studio C for himself for months and put out an open call to whichever musician friends were around. For support, Jerry Garcia, Crosby's brother in outlier music, stopped by almost every night. Other members of the Dead, including Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart, visited, along with his friends from the Airplane like Paul Kantner and Grace Slick. The jam sessions and creative pokings-about, augmented by Crosby's ever-present stash, would last for hours. “Jerry and I were both pushing-the-envelope kind of people,” Crosby said. “We liked doing things that other people thought were weird. They brought out an encouragement of ‘there are no rules.'”

The intermingling of musicians produced the strangest yet most gorgeous music of Crosby's career. In hazy-day soundscapes like “Tamalpais High (at About 3)” and “Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves),” harmonies and instruments bobbed and drifted, like waves lapping onto a shore and receding. Instead of singing words, Crosby—joined by Nash on the latter—sang wordless phrases rooted in the jazz records of his youth. “Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves)” was a particularly pastoral chorale—music basking in its own stoned-out bliss—yet it also bristled; by the end, Crosby began fervently
scatting around his own one-man chorus, and Jorma Kaukonen and Garcia yanked sharp, shrieking notes out of their guitars. The song heaved and lurched until, suddenly, it ended. Even songs centered around Crosby's voice and acoustic guitar were hardly campfire-sing-along material. “Traction in the Rain,” inspired by the jealous looks Crosby received one day while walking through a park with Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Fariña, had a glistening, benumbed calmness. “Where Will I Be,” cut at the sessions but held for a later album, was a statement of personal confusion, spaced-out and rhythmless—Crosby's comment on how both his band and his lover were part of his past, leaving him alone and directionless.

Much as Nash turned the group's interactions into fodder for new material, Crosby put CSNY's shambolic summer to song. With Garcia, Lesh, and Hart, he began rehearsing a new song, “Cowboy Movie.” Driven by the brusque strums of Crosby's electric twelve-string, the song was rough and savage, Garcia playing with a piercing, angry tone rare for him. The lyrics, an Old West tale set to music, told the saga of an “Indian girl” who comes between a gang of outlaws, sowing the seeds of their destruction. The four principal characters were a “weird” cowboy named Harold, a wild-eyed gunslinger called Eli (“young and mean, and from the South”), a “Duke” good with dynamite, and the youngest, Billy; the girl, whom Harold doesn't trust from the outset, is called Raven. After both become taken with Raven, Eli and the Duke “get down to it”; Eli pulls a gun, and in the end everyone's dead except Harold. With each verse, Crosby's voice sounded raspier and more pent-up, as if he'd been smoking all night and decided to record anyway. Anyone who knew anything about the band's recent falling-out knew the characters' real names. Coolidge, for one, was not amused. “If that's the way David saw it, he has a right to think that,” she recalled. “David just thought I was the Devil.”

For Crosby, the recording of his album, which stretched out into the
late fall, embodied the new rock and roll: music without parameters, concrete personnel, and in some cases anything approaching a standard rock and roll rhythm. His art would now fully become an extension of his personal life. “The Byrds, the Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield were very formulaic groups,” Crosby recalled. “Good bands, but in a form. Kantner and I were on a quest. We were rule-breaking guys who wanted to see more interaction between bands, more cross-pollination.” Kantner was using the same revolving-cast approach on his first record outside the Airplane,
Blows Against the Empire
; Crosby popped up on many songs on that one as well.