Drummond accepted Young's invitation to tour with him in a band whose name would come from Drummond's times with Brown. "We'd be riding in a bus with James and get drunk and we'd call it, `seeing gators.' One guy would call out, 'There goes a flock of 'em, strayin' behind."'
Young and the Stray Gators hit sixty-five cities in three months, beginning January 5, 1973, playing all big halls with capacities between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand, and the tour hit Young hard. He looked disheveled throughout: he was criticized for doing too short a show (the average was an hour and a quarter) and he had just completed a film, journey Through the Past, that would fail to secure a distribution deal and would account for his least successful album ever. "There was so much pressure on him," says Drummond. "It was just him in front of the mike." On the last four dates, Crosby and Nash showed up to help.
From there talk began again about a CSNY reunion. The four wound up in Lahaina, on the island of Maui in Hawaii, worked up some new songs, and the scene then shifted to Young's ranch, where it crumbled in the fall. Drummond: "I came out in July to do this. We recorded about six songs for a new album." Included were Nash's "Prison Song" and 'And So It Goes," which wound up on his own Wild Tales, and Young's "Human Highway," which was to serve as the album's title. "Then," says Drummond, "we decided to go on the road and get tight. Then we decided against it. Something wasn't right." Nash: "The four of us didn't feel it was solid enough to go out there and represent it as our level of competence." And Crosby: "There was a lot of disagreement about how to go about it. Plus others had commitments they felt were too good to pass up."
Between the ditching of the tour and the rehearsals two months ago at Young's. Crosby, Stills, and Nash did separate tours while Young put together, then dumped, an album called Tonight's the Night.
"It was a flash," says Drummond. "He wanted to use Crazy Horse, he did, and he had an album. It was done live in his studio and it sounded like an old funky club, three in the morning." Elliot Roberts: "It was a drunken rock and roll party album." Crosby: "He wasn't satisfied with it." Came the spring of '74, manager Roberts sprang again. Young, by now a father, was finished with another album, On the Beach, and had a few dozen new songs left over; he agreed to the reunion and offered his ranch, nestled in the redwoods, as rehearsal quarters, six days a week through the month of June.
"Neil played host in the most incredible fashion," says Crosby. "He built this fullsize, forty-foot stage in the middle of a grove of redwoods and right across from his studios so we could record. He put half of us up and fed us all, had two chicks working. And the place, because it's so private and beautiful, was a natural to make us feel great and work hard."
Graham Nash: 'At first I felt apprehensive, but as soon as I heard Stephen play, I knew it was all cool. Stephen's cooled out a lot. Just his sense of control, of space, of leaving room for Neil to play. He's become more aware of the `us' rather than the 'I.' And Neil, because of his achievement on a personal level and because he's feeling comfortable with himself, is able to extend that hospitality to others. Before, he wasn't as open to doing that. He has gotten, from my own viewpoint, to gain a great deal of patience and consideration for other people."
And from his anchor position at bass and from working with Young since Harvest in Nashville, Drummond observes: "Neil's a changed man. He's really one of the boys now, a funky-ass musician."
Exclusive interview with Neil Young, conducted July 22, Civic Center Coliseum, St. Paul, Minnesota:
"Neil, do you think you can find half an hour after the show to talk a bit?"
"Well, I'm taking off right after the show, and it's a twenty-two-hour drive to Denver. You know, I'm not real good at giving interviews. But I'll tell you. I'm having a lot of fun and it's getting better every day."
THREE YEARS AGO, one year after the "last" CSNY show in the summer of 1970, Stephen Stills was thinking of George Harrison's song, "Within You Without You," about spaces between people, and those who hide "behind a wall of illusion." In fact, Stills was one of the people who hid behind illusion walls. He was sitting in the fourteen-room cottage in Surrey that he'd just bought from Ringo Starr for a quartermillion; he had adopted a stiff, squire-ish way of speech: he owned two horses and insisted that the cover photo for his interview depict him atop either Major Change or Crazy Horse, without knowing that the magazine had not considered him for a cover in the first place. Stills copped from a novel to describe his inspiration for his songs. ("Well," he had said in his lazy, slightly pained way, "there are three things men can do with women: Love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature." Lawrence Durrell, writing Justine in 1957, had one of his characters say it first.) And on a mission to establish his own identity as a solo star, Stills would stumble through a tour he now calls "the drunken Memphis Horns tour," each show highlighted by a pounding, raging rendition of his Buffalo Springfield classic, "For What It's Worth," Stills attacking a piano and the audience with a political drift-rap he now admits was a "rant." He drank and ranted, he says, because of fear. "There were pressures on me to prove myself." From where? "The business."
What about the pressures of the old days and the ego fights?
"I know it's good copy," he says, "but I really don't think it's anybody's business. Because a lot of it had to do with all those things-musicianship, the ego that it takes to step out onstage and say, 'Look at me, mama,' which is Lenny Bruce's line, which just hits it right on the head. You have to be one to know one. And I might say something about somebody in our little, in our... family... that they might be offended to see in print, so....
"I missed 'em, you know. I missed Graham telling me when to stop and what was too much and I missed David's vocals and I missed Neil's collaboration on the sound of the records. I missed playing guitar with him, 'cause we really back each other up."
In March 1973 Stills married Veronique Sanson, the popular French singer, in London; they are now the parents of a boy named Christopher.
"So Neil and I, both of us, had babies, and that puts us in a place where we can really relate to each other. Some of the kid stuff we used to pull goes away. Just taking things the wrong way, not using your head about relationships with people."
Stephen Stills says he's grown up. Talking politics-he's a voracious reader and has Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago on the road with him-he concludes: "I could be totally full of shit, but at this point in my life, I don't care."
"Why do you say at this point in your life?"
'At this point in life? I really don't give a shit if Rolling Stone thinks I'm stupid, jive, horrible."
"But why are you thinking that at this particular point of your life?"
"Because I've grown to the age where I can apply my own intellect to the situations I'm in and remain true to what occurs to me as a human being existing on this planet. Whereas at age 2 3 that was not true. There's a lot of creative thinking that goes on at that age, but you get surrounded by the kind of experience that I've had...I mean, man is the sum total of his experience. And you can only apologize for so much. I mean, hey, what did we all do, what the fuck were we all doing? David with the Byrds, and me and Neil with the Springfield, we were all trying to...I mean, Neil's got that beautiful song, 'Don't Be Denied.' It says, 'Pretty soon, matter of fact, played guitar. Used to sit on the back porch and think about being stars....' And that's about as far as it goes."
We are in a Sportscoach camper van, on the way home to San Francisco after the first show at the Oakland Coliseum.
"People who play music or attack their art form in one way and then find themselves in a position of obtaining popularity and find that it means something entirely different to everyone else and trying to strike the balance.. .or in a lot of cases just totally reject what the fuck everybody else thinks.. .1 mean, you could spend three months with me and maybe you'd get the idea of what it is. I mean, look how longI don't mean to compare myself-but look how long it took everyone to understand Picasso. Look how lon
g it takes people to understand artists, period... and I don't think there's a musician who has gotten popular support that hasn't been through the same thing. An artist cannot often be responsible for the effect his art has on his audience, be it a painter, sculptor, musician, actor, whatever. He just can't. If he gets hung up with that, he's going to lose it because he's gotta keep working at his shit. I mean there's that time when it's going down: It's now, not yesterday, not tomorrow. And what you play or how you sing right now is how you sing right now, and the only thing that lasts are the songs."
Stephen Stills will be 30 next January. From observation, he seems to be consciously reining in his take-charge ways of the past-the product, he says, of some military schooling in his background. The maturity-or simple awareness of what's needed to keep this show on the road-is obvious onstage. He is relaxed and lets the others have their ways; given his moments on electric guitar or acoustic or banjo, he sings and stings with his instruments, picking out some neat blues figures on the banjo. Vocally, he exercises two fine voices: the alcoholic scowl for his Texas-based blues and the frankly middle-of-the-road, sloping croon that gets me thinking, from a distance, how, in physical comparison with his coworkers, Stills comes across like a Bing Crosby in a hockey jersey-especially when he's got on pressed slacks and straw beach shoes to boot.
But I mean, if Dylan hadn't shown up at the hotel after the concert and spirited Stills away with a guitar, I might have spent three months with Stills all in one night. At three in the morning, we were heading into the second hour of this beery rap, Stills offering his thoughts on Gulag and Russian history, on the history of art and his own recent tries at painting; on how he wanted to find a publisher to do a Stephen Stills songbook in the fashion of an old hymn book.
The next afternoon-late the next afternoon-getting ready to leave for Denver, Stills tries to keep his eyes open long enough to look into mine, forms a smile, then laughs: "Bob sang all these great new songs and then he turned the guitar over to me and asked me to sing him a new one, and I was so wasted I couldn't remember the words!" Stills is genuinely amused. "Hey, all that stuff last night. I hope you disregard it."
As he says, Stills doesn't have to apologize his entire past away; he can, in fact, be forever proud of much of it. Neither do audiences-the minority that have minded when Stills lost either his voice or his head-have to forgive. Still, today he does find it easier to admit or at least rationalize mistakes.
"When I did 'For What It's Worth' and did the rant and all that, you point out what an incredible bust it was for me. It was really dumb. But the last generation, that's what they wanted to hear and, of course, being an entertainer, I was behind it.
`And I'll blow records sometimes," he says, "'cause I get so far into getting it recorded, and some of the mixes are so difficult, I'll get too hung up and blow the performance of the gig. But, you know, I'm learning."
In the studio, Stills used to be the seldom-disputed captain. He clearly and cleanly dominated the first album, producing, mixing, arranging, and dubbing in most of the instrumentation (guitars, organ and bass) on the ten tracks.
Stills won't talk about the stories of battles over Dejd Vu; he thinks ahead to the next CSNY album, to be done after the tour. "That's going to be a whole different kind of thing to deal with," he says. "It'll be give and take and getting a consortium of opinion. The erroneous assumption is that we are gonna hassle about it, and nobody's into that anymore."
Michael John Bowen breaks into a conversation Stills is having just before the show in Vancouver. "They're reworking the first set," his manager tells him. "Graham wants you. They want to put `Cut My Hair' into it." Stills: "Okay, all right. We can do that instead of `Black Queen."' Bowen: "But Graham says `Black Queen' follows `Cowgirl' nicely." Stills excuses himself. The impression is that he'll go along with whatever anyone wants.
"Maturity," Crosby is saying, "has lessened the pressure between us. I'm knocked out with how good partners we're being and how hard everyone's trying."
But doesn't stepping back and holding tongues approach a kind of dishonesty? Crosby says he's talking musically: "You'll hear us playing along and we're playing to a place where we're storming and somebody, without even looking, will come to a peak." Crosby, in his hotel room, mimes a lead guitarist creating a storm-"and everybody goes fwhooop! and drops way back, and one guitar will come out speaking right out of it, just clear. Now that's leaving room for people, and that happens when you're gettin' to be a band."
When I first enter his suite at the St. Paul Hilton, Crosby, dressed down to just shorts, is near to attacking his vanity mirror. He is five months into kung fu-that's maybe two months past the cut-off point for most faddists-and finds time to work out every day.
I tell him how much fun I had the night before, and how Stills and Dylan stayed up to at least 5 A.M.
"I don't do that anymore," he says, like a kid who's had a pleasant bad habit forcibly changed. "It just doesn't pay off. It's mostly my throat. If I don't get enough sleep, I get a cold and blow it, and 18,000, 40,000, even 60,000 people don't get a righteous count. It sounds corny but it's true." He also wants to trim himself down (he's now a "bear-shaped" 155 pounds) before it gets too late. But most important: "When you're physically active, your mind feels better, you think more clearly, and you're less likely to be irritable." Crosby says he's begun to control his temper, blamed for numerous Byrd flaps and untold problems within CSNY.
"There was a time," he says, "when I would stop that song last night ['Guinnevere'] and call that audience a bunch of inconsiderate, stupid assholes-the three- or four-hundred Quaalude freaks in front, I mean." [In Vancouver, Crosby had left Joni Mitchell's "For Free" unfinished after several attempts to quiet the crowd failed. The audience, festival-seated and jammed in like what Crosby called "vertical sardines," were being hooted by people in the back to sit down. It happens everywhere.] `Anyway," says Crosby, "at least I've escaped some of that. Life knocks corners off of everybody, you just go along bouncing down the street, you know."
But Crosby, not long ago, worried about the apocalypse and wrote a song about escaping, by wooden ships, with a few friends, to some island where their common values would create an unimpeachable little utopia. For almost two years after CSNY, he was determined at least to locate and buy an island for himself. Instead, as he puts it, "I settled for a home in suburbia." He bought a house in Mill Valley a year ago. He is content to sail off once in a while in his boat, the Mayan, to Hawaii or to Tahiti. And he no longer has doomsday on his mind. "That lurks a bit further away than before," he allows.
"But you gotta admit," he says, "we all did feel apocalyptic at one point, didn't we?" Jackson Browne didn't, I say.
Crosby smiles and nods. "That's true. Jackson-well, there he is, `Everyman.' He really said it. He made me sit down and think. He wrote it for me, I guess. [Crosby sang harmony on the track, in fact.] He stopped me cold in my tracks. He nailed a certain thing in me, that escapist thing, and he called on something in me that's very strong, that I really believe in-and that's human possibility. I have a basic faith in the tran scendence of the human spirit over everything. The present condition is not encouraging, but I believe in the human potential to an astounding-almost religious degree, and he called on me hard."
At any rate, Crosby's got fewer stress marks these days. "Watergate [which he and Stills follow avidly, the way some pop stars follow NBA finals] has made the people more aware of what government is, and that's enormously encouraging. I think things are pretty healthy now."
And, of course, there's an effect on Crosby, the writer of "Long Time Gone" and `Almost Cut My Hair."
"There's a lot less hollowness," he says, "a lot less loneliness. I've had an old lady for two, three years, and a wider circle of friends that includes a lot of people who have nothing to do with music-boat people. And it helps balance. Music itself is wonderful but the business needs a little balance from the outside world. It's a very good real world: They're a
bunch of realistic people, and living on boats, sailing long distances, is very real. The ocean doesn't know who you are and doesn't care. I know it's helped me, given me a different perspective. When I was with the Byrds and living in L.A., I thought that was everything that was happening in the world. But there's stuff happening out there that has nothing to do with music, concerts, money and show biz."
Early this year, Graham Nash ascribed CSNY's inability to regroup to "stupid, infantile ego problems." In Denver, Nash is more specific: "It was between me and Stephen and it was over a lady. That's why we broke up that first time."
Crosby agrees with Nash's earlier description. "Ego being out of balance with intelligent cooperation makes you impossible to work with," he says, "and some of us were more guilty than others and it's nobody's business which ones they are." What about persistent stories about Stills and Young and their fights? "Oh, no," says Crosby. "It's not that simple. We're all four guilty as shit." Crosby laughs at the past. "The reasons...I could come back and forth with reasons all day, but it would sound like two high school kids arguing in homeroom about who did what to who first. I don't remember all that and I don't want to; that's like holding grudges. The basic thing is we all had to get to a point where we wanted to play with each other, where we felt like, `Outtasight, I want to be in a band now, I want to play and sing harmony with those guys."'
So Stills and Young didn't want to be with each other, or with Nash and Crosby, when they did their own tours?
"No," says Crosby. They were looking for "self-expression."
Crosby himself went out looking for his own audience-or, more accurately, "Elliot insisted I do it. He said it'd change how I felt about myself. It did. It gave me much more confidence."
First, he coupled with Nash for a month-long acoustic tour in the fall of 1971, after the first attempted CSNY regrouping fell through. They toured again a year later, and, last fall, after another reunion dissolved, each took off for short tours through Eastern college towns, doing a half-dozen shows each.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 28