Authors: Graham Nash
“Ah, the fuzz, the feds, I can smell them,” Croz said. “They must be here to bust me. Maybe I should leave my bag in the trunk. There’s a lot of stuff in it.”
We both laughed, writing it off to paranoia. So we parked and climbed onto the boat. Simultaneously, a US Customs agent came
up the steps from the main cabin and pointed a gun at us. “Stop right there. You’re under arrest.”
Apparently, someone aboard the
Mayan
had been smoking dope. A person in the next boat had smelled it and called law enforcement. So big deal, they’d found a couple of roaches on the boat, but we hadn’t been there in a week or so. The cop didn’t want to hear it. He was only interested in making a bust. The way I saw it, he had no right to do that and I gave him an earful, a real bunch of shit. In my English way, I said, “This is not good manners. Why are you treating my friend like this?” I grew outraged at the way he treated Croz like a criminal. In retrospect, he
was
a criminal, but the way it went down wasn’t right—and I said so. Why
I
didn’t get arrested, I have no idea. But they took David off the boat in handcuffs.
Incredibly, they didn’t find David’s stash in the shoulder bag. He just casually hung it over a chair and everyone forgot about searching it. Lucky thing, too, because inside the bag was plenty of incriminating evidence. In any case,
Elliot Roberts was called and Croz was bailed out, costing him a cool twenty-five grand to a lawyer to avoid a jail sentence.
But the allure of drugs was beginning to take its toll. When Croz and I did our acoustic gig at
Carnegie Hall, an incident with dope cost us a powerful ally. For some reason, David didn’t want to travel with his stash. Instead, he had given an envelope filled with dope to Reine Stewart, one of the wonderful, beautiful naked women who were always around David. Croz learned that
David Geffen was on his way to New York and insisted that Geffen bring it with him before we did the show. Geffen, of course, refused. He didn’t do that kind of shit, it was the last thing in the world he’d be involved with. Croz went ballistic. He told Geffen that if he didn’t bring the grass to New York, we weren’t going on that night, so begrudgingly Geffen relented. He put the envelope in his briefcase, got stopped at LAX, the envelope was found, and Geffen was promptly arrested and taken to jail. On Yom Kippur, of all nights. Even with that,
Geffen managed to make bail and get to New York in time for our concert. He actually showed up at our hotel before we went on, at which point Croz demanded the dope. Geffen couldn’t believe his ears. “I was arrested and put in jail!” he explained, completely exasperated. “I don’t have it.” Croz was apoplectic. “I’m gonna fucking kill you!” he screamed. It was a standoff, but Geffen eventually had the last word. He figured that handling us was a nightmare and promptly ditched us and all his other rock ’n’ roll clients, dissolving his management business.
I once again realized the power of drugs and excess.
Another potent drug was CSNY, one whose habit I just couldn’t kick. No matter how much bullshit had gone down between us, making music with that gang was too much of a temptation to resist. So when a tour was proposed for the summer of 1974, I was in. We all were, and then some.
The idea was
Bill Graham’s. He’d already put out feelers to national promoters and convinced Elliot that we could fill arenas and stadiums—about thirty-five of them, in fact—the first tour ever of that magnitude. Nothing under twenty thousand seats, with many topping fifty and eighty thousand strong, and one, the Ontario Motor Speedway, in California, clocking in at two hundred thousand. The Beatles had played Shea Stadium and the Stones had done some isolated big dates, but at that point it was unheard of that a rock band could put that many people in a facility to hear music, night after night, for two and a half months.
Things hadn’t ended great between us in Hawaii, but—
so what
? We’d make it work. We knew there was a lot of money to be made. We hadn’t been out on the road for a while and all of us had expensive lifestyles. The financial incentive was definitely there. And, in that respect, I have to say we sold out. Generally, we liked to play small venues, where you could see the audience’s eyes, gauge their body language to know if they were connecting with you. But that’s too difficult with fifty thousand people. So we did it for the money.
Everything was going to be first-class. Travel was in private
planes, helicopters, and limousines with police escorts. Hand-embroidered pillowcases in every hotel with Joni’s drawing of the four of us silk-screened in five colors on the front. That same logo was burned into teak plates that we used at all the shows. We stayed in huge suites at the best hotels, with the most amazing food every night: sushi, champagne, lobster, caviar, all endless. We had our own guy who supplied each of us with a gram of coke every day. Once, I called my friend Mac and asked, “What happens if you swallow an entire gram, because I think I just took the coke capsule along with my vitamins?” He said, “Don’t worry, just watch TV. You’ll be fine.” Incredible decadence.
The music was another thing altogether. We’d perform our preshow ritual: snort a line and hit the stage. Sometimes we were great, other times we weren’t. There were a couple nights we were ragged, out of tune, lethargic. None of us was really on top of his game. There was just too much cocaine around. I don’t think that when you’re smoking the amount of dope and snorting the amount of coke that we did—and staying up to all hours of the night—that it’s possible to be on top of your game. We were out there, constantly stoned—
constantly
—and glad of it. It was madness. We were so incredibly loud that it was difficult to keep pitch. (I’m sure we did major damage to our hearing on that tour.) The monitors weren’t great. And it’s hard to sing “Guinevere” to tens of thousands of people.
We knew how to shift onto automatic pilot, and there was a certain amount of that taking place. Onstage, Neil stood to one side, Stephen to the other, with Croz and me in the middle, all those hardcore egos colliding like nuclear fusion, but as soon as the lights hit and Stephen kicked off the riff to
“Love the One You’re With,” our opening number, all that flew out the window. It didn’t matter how much you despised the guy who didn’t want to be part of the band or another guy who is so out of it that it’s hard to bring him back. The moment the music started and the lights hit us, everything was okay.
Despite all the craziness, our shows were often incredible: four- or five-hour extravaganzas that didn’t end until well after midnight. Joni was part of the festivities, not our opening act—she was too big for that, but she alternated with Jesse Colin Young, the
Beach Boys, even the Band occasionally. It was a different combination every night. You’d never know who was going to shine. As far as CSNY went, we all wanted our songs in there, so there was plenty of group and solo stuff. Neil would blow the crowd away with “Pushed It Over the End.” He was telling the tale, and he was an angry motherfucker, really emotional and extra-powerful. David performed “The Lee Shore” and a new song called
“Time After Time,” during which Stephen would wander out to sing with him, holding his newborn son, Christopher, then do “Word Games,” a killer of a tune. I’d do the
“Prison Song,” sometimes “Chicago” or “Our House.” We’d do whatever we felt like on whichever night. I once played a new song that I’d just written for my girlfriend Calli and had to teach the guys the chords, live, right there onstage.
We were good at making everything appear seamless. Onstage, our image was the Four Musketeers. Still, we each had our individual personas. I’m the guy who tries to keep us all together, careful not to isolate any of the parts. Neil needed no hand-holding, he took care of himself. He knew how to do it. But Neil usually followed his muse. If the music wasn’t good he checked out early, and you’d feel the hole where his energy should have been. Crosby was also pretty strong on that tour, so I didn’t have to worry about giving him a boost. Stephen was my main concern. If Neil was the added fuel that made the locomotive go faster and blow more steam, Stephen was still the driving force in the band. And if he was failing, then we were failing. It all had to do with his delicate approach. He tended to overblow when he got insecure or when he was out of it, in which case the subtleties—those fabulous Stillsian subtleties—would not show up in his touch. So you had to mother Stephen onstage for him to play at his best. During a song, I usually
walked over to encourage him, smiling even when he, or any of us, made a mistake. It was important, if that happened, that we laughed and said, “Fuck it. Next song. Who cares? Carry on.”
If you looked behind the scenes, there were cracks in the facade. Neil was up to his old isolationist tricks, being in the band, but not a part of the band. He kept his distance every chance he got. He’d turn up for soundchecks but disappear until showtime. He didn’t hang, even at some of the ridiculous parties after the concerts. And he showed up for the gigs in mirrored shades. The rest of us usually traveled together, but Neil had his own Winnebago with Carrie and their son, Zeke, a symbol of independence, which had everything but a no-trespassing sign on the door.
Crosby was engaged in his own sexual divertissement. He took two beautiful young women on tour with him:
Nancy Brown, a stunning young girl from Great Falls, Montana, and Goldie Locks, from Mill Valley, not as pretty as Nancy but, shall we say, way more adventurous. Those ladies totally took care of David all through that tour. Crosby had
incredible
sexual energy. It got to be such a routine scene in his room. I’d stop by with someone and go, “Aw, fuck, he’s getting blown again. Oh, dear, let’s give him a minute.”
It was a wild, profligate, orgiastic, self-indulgent couple months, loaded with crazy scenes and often wonderful music. On that tour, Neil Young hit a patch of brilliance in his songwriting:
“Don’t Be Denied,”
“On the Beach,” “Hawaiian Sunrise,” he brought all of them to the act, great, great songs, and we did our best to play them all brilliantly, too. Stephen had moments when no one could touch him, not Clapton or Bloomfield or Beck or Santana or anyone in that league. And we all sang our hearts out, the CSNY magic. Those were the highlights that I try to hang on to. Some nights after the show, we celebrated our triumphs. We’d have great parties with strange people all taking the weirdest drugs and eating the best food—all paid for by us, of course. Other nights, the excess would overwhelm. Tensions between us crept up all the time. The petty bickering was
so damn debilitating. The ups and downs, the highs and lows, were emotionally unrelenting. For obvious reasons, Crosby took to calling it the Doom Tour.
There were other symptoms that contributed to that name. In Houston, Texas, during a rare day off, I was chatting on the balcony of our hotel with
Russ Kunkel, our drummer. We went into the living room of my suite to catch the evening news—Walter Cronkite said: “Singer Mama Cass dies in London.” Holy shit! We’d lost Cass. I never saw that one coming. Nor had Russ, who was married to Cass’s sister, Leah. It was shocking to both of us—and to learn of it that way was devastating. We were all heartbroken. Words cannot describe it. She’d meant so much to me. I loved that woman in ways I never fully understood or expressed. It seemed unbelievable that she was gone.
Cass’s career had been on an upswing of late. She’d had a big hit with “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and was in the midst of headlining a week of sold-out shows at the London Palladium. We were thrilled for her. She was finally getting to do what she’d always wanted: be a cabaret-type star. She had
made
it, at last. But after one show, she went back to
Keith Moon’s apartment and died. The official story was that she had eaten a sandwich and choked during the night, but that was the same official story we got about Jimi, so it was probably drugs. Ironic that she had been the first to turn me on, and I know there were times she’d done heroin with Crosby. But last I heard, she was doing fine. I’d been pulling for her, my longtime muse.
Afterward, Russ and I went back out on the balcony to commiserate about Cass’s death and one of those incredible things that always comes up in my life happened: A giant butterfly flew slowly by. A butterfly, Cass’s favorite image. Russ and I both whispered, “Cass!” Spooky how those things occur.
And sometimes our political past caught up with us. No doubt CSNY was branded a political band. We were flamethrowers in the best democratic sense. We’d always intended to be in front
of audiences, speaking our minds. We wanted our songs to make people think, and over the years we’d given fans a whole smorgasbord of them:
“For What It’s Worth,”
“Long Time Gone,”
“Chicago,”
“Military Madness,”
“Immigration Man,”
“Ohio,” and “Teach Your Children” to a certain extent. All four of us followed the
Watergate hearings like a soap opera, outraged that the administration’s leaders were lying to the American people and screwing with the Constitution. I think that everybody knew Nixon was somehow involved. And, of course, the famous eighteen-minute gap on the Oval Office tapes—we knew it was a lie, just another cover-up. In response, I wrote
“Grave Concern,” in which during the guitar break were overdubs of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Nixon saying: “I don’t recall.” “I don’t remember.” “I wasn’t even there.” “I’m not a crook.”
We’d already fired up the cannons when we went out on tour. As Dylan said, “The battle outside was ragin’.” Everyone knew what was going on. So on the evening of August 8, 1974, we were laying it on thick at the Roosevelt Raceway, where fifty or sixty thousand people had come to hear us sing. We’d heard rumblings that Nixon was on the verge of resigning. We had a television backstage so we could watch the proceedings. The four of us were huddled around that set during intermission, when we learned that he had resigned. I went onstage and delivered the news. “Guess what, folks? He’s gone!” We didn’t have to say who. Everybody knew. Huge cheers erupted through the crowd.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own.
No more. Justice—finally!—and vindication. Time to celebrate. It’s the essence of who we are as a band. We didn’t let this shit go by. We had to say something.