Fire and Rain (42 page)

Struggling to find his identity after the problems with CSNY and Hinton's death, Crosby would later describe himself during this time as “not a happy camper.” But to some, he'd never seemed more content—as one friend put it, ”making the best music of his life and getting laid every night,” thanks to whatever girl happened to be on the boat with him at night after the hours in the studio. Everyone got high, made music, and slept with whomever they wanted. The proudly esoteric tracks Crosby was cutting would be released by a major label, Atlantic, without any qualms. It was easy, seductively so, to imagine it would all last forever.

During this time, word leaked out that Crosby, Nash, and Young—no Stills inserted between them—would be releasing a single together. The song, “Music Is Love,” had its origins in an August Hollywood jam in which Crosby began strumming and singing what he called “silly stuff” and Young and Nash spontaneously joined in. After Nash and Young borrowed the tape and overdubbed additional instruments, “Music Is Love” wound up on Crosby's album. Its creation affirmed the way in which he, Nash, and Young had grown closer in the aftermath of the group's collapse.
Nash and Young dropped by the sessions for Crosby's album; Young and Garcia traded solos on one take of “Cowboy Movie.”

Young's hesitation toward a full-time commitment to CSNY gnawed at Nash (but not Crosby), but neither Nash nor Crosby felt as threatened by Young as Stills did. They couldn't help but admire his uncompromising approach to his music and presentation. (“As of this writing, Neil's about to okay the test pressing. Again,” sighed a Reprise Records ad in September for Young's nearly complete
After the Gold Rush
.)

Starting with Crosby, the CSNY breakdown also played itself out geographically. During the summer, Young had bought a 140-acre ranch south of San Francisco. (His first wife, Susan, would file for divorce from him in October.) Even earlier, Nash had purchased a four-story Victorian townhouse on West Buena Vista Street in Haight-Ashbury, on the edge of Buena Park. Like Crosby, he'd grown weary of Los Angeles and envisioned himself relocating to Northern California with Mitchell. Now, that romance over, Nash decided to make the move himself. “I thought, ‘Fuck, I've got a house in San Francisco, I'd better go and live there,'” he recalled. With its front-door pillars and balcony, the structure felt regal even before Nash moved in, yet he enhanced it further, installing a skylight and a bath that led into a stream with goldfish on the fourth floor. Although the three weren't within quick driving distance of each other, they were still in the same Northern California vicinity.

Since all four had songs that hadn't made it onto
Déjà vu
, the logical response was to make records of their own, whether Ahmet Ertegun, David Geffen, or Elliot Roberts liked it or not. “It was never up to management or Atlantic,” Crosby said. “It was up to us.” On September 7, Young became the first to release his own music that year. Recorded on and off over the previous year,
After the Gold Rush
reflected his time with Crosby, Stills, and Nash: It was more focused on acoustic songs and relatively pared-down arrangements than either of its predecessors,
Neil Young
and
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
. It even
included a few tracks, “Southern Man” and “Tell Me Why,” he'd performed with them that summer.

After the Gold Rush
presented Young as both balladeer, on “Birds” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and rocker, notably the whirlwind that was “When You Dance I Can Really Love,” with Jack Nitzsche wildly pounding piano keys. Even throwaways like “Till the Morning Comes” (with Stills chiming in on harmony) and “Cripple Creek Ferry” felt meaty. With its preorders of four hundred thousand copies, the album was clearly a breakout, breakthrough piece of music—definitive proof that Young didn't need the other three and their mania for anything other than a larger bank account.

Although everyone expected Young to work on his own (“All of us knew we were going to do solo records, Neil above everybody,” said Crosby), Nash's decision to go that route was the most telling. It was ironic that the band member who had worked hardest to preserve the group should be the one who helped fracture it, thanks to his affair with Coolidge. But in the end, the chaos on which CSNY thrived had finally unnerved even Nash. “You can only stand so much psychodrama in your life,” he recalled. “I needed a break from them.”

Like Crosby, he'd accumulated a batch of songs over the year and now had the luxury of time and money to commit them to tape. Over the course of several months starting in September, he casually began cutting them with a loose-knit ensemble of players he'd worked with all year, except Stills: Barbata, bassist Fuzzy Samuels, and now Coolidge, who came up from her home in Los Angeles and stayed with Nash while he recorded at the same Heider studio where Crosby was settling in.

As he'd shown when writing “Chicago” six months earlier, Nash had a tendency to relay his feelings about his musical partners or lovers in song rather than conversation. (In that way, Nash could simultaneously play the roles of good and bad cop.)
Songs for Beginners
, the album that began taking shape, continued that bent. With Coolidge supplying a fireplace-warm
vocal harmony, he recorded “Simple Man,” his song to Mitchell, as well as another on the same topic, “I Used to Be a King.” (“In my bed, late at night, I miss you,” he sang.) He chastised his fellow superstars in “There's Only One” (“Can we say it's cool/From a heated pool”) and recorded “Better Days,” the song inspired by Coolidge and Stills' relationship. The sessions were easygoing, the songs charmingly melodic and gentle, and Young and Crosby joined in now and then—both played on “I Used to Be a King.” “Being with Graham was as easy as breathing,” recalled Coolidge. “We just went in and did it, no pressure, no drugs and alcohol. That was fairly unique in those days.”

The absentee band member was never far from Nash's thoughts. In “Wounded Bird,” he addressed Stills directly, advising him to “take to heel or tame the horse/The choice is still your own.” The song had been inspired by Stills' breakup with Judy Collins, yet it also echoed the events of the summer, especially lines like “Humble pie is always hard to swallow with your pride.” This time, though, he didn't have to worry about a reaction, since his partner was over six thousand miles away. No one was sure when they'd see him next.

Days at Brookfield House in Surrey were rarely as ordinary or surreal as they were on October 22. In the morning, geese honked by the side of the pond, and an eccentric gardener named John made the rounds. On the front lawn, Stills tossed around a football with a visitor who'd just arrived from the States, comanager Elliot Roberts. At the breakfast table inside, talking and rolling joints, were Crosby and, of all people, Stills' one-time rival, Nash.

A few weeks earlier, following his Colorado detour, Stills had moved into Starr's Tudor home, which he'd begun renting in the spring. Against the advice of the band's other manager, David Geffen, Stills opted to
stop renting and instead buy the house for 90,000 British pounds. (To Stills' surprise and annoyance, Allen Klein, representing Starr, unexpectedly raised by the price by 10,000 pounds at the closing.) Now Brookfield House was all his: the wandering swans, the orange grove, the separate movie theater, the doorways built so long ago that it was easy to bump one's head walking into a room.

Although Nash remained in love with Coolidge, he and Stills had mended their broken fences once more. Nash, who always worked the hardest to keep the band on an even keel, had heard the stories about Stills' excesses and decided to fly to London to see for himself. “We were very concerned,” Nash said. “Everyone knew where this Stephen Stills story was headed. It wasn't as if
we
were clean, smoking dope and snorting. But we had it more under control than Stephen did.”

Over breakfast, Crosby, Nash, and Henry Diltz, who'd joined Stills as houseguest, talked more immediate concerns, namely politics back home. Two weeks earlier, the Yippies in New York had received a tape featuring the voice of Bernardine Dohrn; on it, the cofounder of the Weather Underground announced “a fall offensive of youth resistance that will spread from Santa Barbara to Boston.” Two days later, the group, most on the lam following the March brownstone incineration, followed through on the threat: Explosive devices went off at an ROTC building at the University of Washington and an armory in, as promised, Santa Barbara. At a press conference, attorney general John Mitchell, hardly sympathetic to antiwar protesters to begin with, snapped, “They're psychotic and out to destroy our institutions.”

In tandem with an increasing number on the left, Crosby actually agreed with Mitchell for probably the first and last time in his life. Although he'd long been a vocal critic of the government, Nixon, and the Warren Commission's report on John Kennedy's assassination, Crosby was disturbed by the Weathermen. Their actions, he explained over breakfast in Stills' house, would be little more than an excuse for Nixon
to declare a police state in America. “It would be instant war on us all,” he told Nash and Diltz, adding the Weathermen were “fools.” “Setting off bombs in office buildings was stupid,” he recalled later. “All you do by going that route is become more suppressive.”

The bombs had kept going off, not always by way of Weathermen associates. On the night of August 23, a stolen white Ford Falcon pulled up in front of a research building on the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus. At 3:40 A.M., an anonymous caller told police, “Hey, pig, there's a bomb on the university campus. Clear the building.” Two minutes later, the truck—loaded with fertilizer, dynamite, and fuel oil—erupted into a fireball, uprooting trees and smashing windows in nearby buildings. Although the intended target was the Army Mathematics Research Center on the upper floors of the six-story building, the victim turned out to be a thirty-three-year-old research assistant (and father of three), then working in the physics department on the first floor. A manhunt ensued for the four men believed responsible, none associated with the Weathermen or other fringe groups. All were eventually tracked down and arrested, although it would take seven years.

In Tulsa, a district judge was injured when a bomb went off in his station wagon. Firebombs crashed into police headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. From those and other bombings, forty people were dead, almost four hundred injured.

For Richard Nixon, all of these jarring detonations and mayhem were, in a twisted way, good news. Even before Kent State, his approval ratings had been down, mirroring the plunge in the Dow that spring. As fall approached, inflation was still on the rise, and early polls taking the public's temperature on a potential 1972 presidential race between him and Democratic Senator Edwin Muskie of Massachusetts placed them neck and neck.

Then came the Weathermen, college demonstrations, and a general public that disliked the war but disdained scruffy campus protesters even
more. (A post-Kent State clash in downtown New York, during which hard hats attacked antiwar activists, was a particularly telling sign for the administration.) Unnerved by the bombings—and comments like Dohrn's about how her group was “everywhere”—the public was happy to let the so-called Establishment put its fist down, and the administration was more than eager to exploit the law-and-order atmosphere. That fall, Agnew talked up violence and government intervention in speeches, and FBI head J. Edgar Hoover warned of “dissident elements” who “strive violently to destroy our current way of life.” In an attempt to rebrand Nixon as a sympathetic figure, handlers made sure that unruly demonstrators interrupting him at rallies received ample media attention. Even one of Nixon's gaffes—declaring Charles Manson guilty of murder before his trial had even begun—worked in his favor: Of
course
Manson did it, most people thought, especially once they saw courtroom photos of the ultimate deranged hippie. (Of course, they were right in that regard: Manson and his cohorts would be found guilty of first-degree murder.) By the fall, Nixon's ratings had risen once again, and a November poll placed him eight points ahead of Muskie.