Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  "I flat loved it," says Crosby, "and I found all the weirdos who would come out just to see me. I found out that there is a group that likes my songs."

  Earlier on the tour, Crosby has given the impression that he was an elitist about his music; that he considers some of the newer forces in rock-the noisier, splashier, bi sexier acts-to be something less than valid. In St. Paul, Crosby seeks to clarify: "I've learned that it's different audiences out there. It is not the same people who go to a Uriah Heep concert as go to a Bob Dylan concert. I tell you what's been happening. There has been a change in the scene and it's mostly because we copped out, in a sense, in doing what we're supposed to do. Us and Dylan and, in a sense, Joni and James and other people who are word/music people. There was a hiatus there. The whole community of people who write word music, the descendants of Dylan and the Beatles and folk music. We are not supposed to lead any segment of the population but I think we're supposed to reflect it and respond to it. But I think that segment hasn't been reflected musically in a long time and to that extent we just haven't been pulling our weight. Those people just didn't have concerts to go to until Dylan went out. That was the icebreaker. I bet him being out and us going out, you'll see a couple of other people try to get back out, too. Something's going on that I think is really good."

  So Crosby won't dismiss even the crappiest music as crap. As he sees it: "We're back to `Wooly Bully' and `Tambourine Man' again. Two to one, 'Wooly Bully' outsold `Tambourine Man,' and that's an important fact. Remember where that bell curve is. You got to know that the world's not like you.

  "I have no quibble with that. I'm glad all those people have any music at all that they like; I'd rather have them listening to even music that I don't think is music than going out and street-fighting or laying around taking Quaaludes. If it's a party for them, good. I want everybody to have a party."

  THE PIANO IS JUST BEING TICKLED TO DEATH; Out Comes "It Had to Be You." Hanging over the bar area is a TV, tuned to the All-Star Game. Summertime in Denver, at the Hampshire House tavern, and Graham Nash is on his third Coke. He looks around. "Isn't this fuckin' bizarre," he says, soft and hoarsely. The observation is more in wonderment than in amusement.

  Outside the hotel, he'd responded to a "how are you" with a "lousy." With the group's strategically relaxed schedule-roughly two days off for every concert-Nash is finding himself bored and depressed on this, the evening of his arrival.

  We decide to have a drink. I ask him to paint a portrait of himself over the past few years since 19 70. He proceeds to draw a surprisingly blue picture of the spoils of success and the elusiveness of inner harmony.

  "When CSNY decided that emotionally it couldn't make it as a band, that we couldn't stand each other for more than the three hours it took to play together, I retreated. First I toured with David 'cause I still had that energy. Then I turned 30 and I took acid on my birthday at Vanessi's [an Italian restaurant in the San Francisco North Beach area]. I went to mix my and David's album and I was trying to mix `Where Will I Be,' which is musically very spacey and difficult to get on top of when you'rewell, you just get side-tripped. `What's on track two? Wow, what a cowbell!' But I decided that I finally really needed to find out who the fuck I was, what was important to me in terms of how much I could put up with to be able to live with myself. So I took a couple of years where I didn't do too much except finish my house [a Victorian in the Haight-Ashbury], write several songs, and just stay away.

  "What did you have to put up with in order to live with yourself?"

  "There's a certain thing that goes on, you face a certain situation and you deal with it one way. But if that situation means that whoever you went through the scene with doesn't grow from that situation, you bullshit yourself. Like if someone pulls a trip and you let it go, you're not helping either yourself or the other person, and I decided I was going to try and be as honest as I could in my relationships. I changed dramatically as a person because I was always very easygoing and outward, and I'm not easygoing now....

  'And before, when I got depressed, I could always go to someone's room and yuk it up, just fake my way out of it. But I can't do that anymore. And girlfriends come up and hug me and I feel ...I don't know. I don't feel anything. And I'm trying to figure out whether I've thought myself into a paralysis of feeling.

  "There's something in me that automatically makes me do the positive thing in any given situation. It's because I've trained myself that way. The bad feeling is wondering whether I really mean it or whether I'm just on automatic pilot."

  Once a thin man with a shaggy haircut and a neat goatee to dramatize a rectangular face, Graham Nash is now a thin man with a less-controlled look about the head and beard. He wears black high-top gym shoes, patched jeans, and two shirts, one gray, one army tan, all four sleeves rolled up.

  'All my aware life," he is saying. "from age 16, 17, 18, I've been an object. A fucking object. That's why I try very hard to be as unrecognizable as possible." A reporter is by no means an analyst, although by the nature of the work, one learns to peel a head through questions. I offer a phrase I've heard from friends who've been in thera- py-"self-love. "

  "Yeah," says Graham. "I've got to try and see the good things that I am. David is doing numbers on me every day, 'cause he sees me sinking and sinking. He was driving the car today-and he asked how I was. And I said, 'I don't know; I'm just glad that we're getting off onstage.' And he said, 'Feeling a bit shaky, hey?' And I said yeah. And he turned around-which for David is very unheard of-and he said, 'You should look at the good things that you are instead of the bullshit.' And he turned back and continued driving.. .and I knew he sincerely meant it. David said, 'Look, you very rarely lie to others and you're as honest as you can be,' but that's not special or 'good' to me. I think consideration of others, general well-being and things like that are normal."

  Earlier, Nash had depicted himself as a misanthrope. I venture, now, that he must find most "normal" people less than "good."

  "I see mirrors," he says. "I see a reflection in everybody; I see somebody fuck up and I get mad and see me fucking up and it's so unlike me. I was always the other way, saying, 'No, come on, it's better than that.' I was always where David is now and David used to be where I am."

  Nash looks up from his fourth Coke. "That's strange, I just realized that."

  That evening David is at the wheel again, on the way with Stills and Nash to the Clapton concert. Stills is a friend of Clapton's from the days of Buffalo Springfield and Cream. When Stills lived in London, the two had gotten together numerous times to talk, jam, and record. Stills credits Clapton with teaching him "fluidity-in that style of real nicely constructed blues guitar." He is thinking of a jam tonight, but his head is still feeling the effects of his audience with Dylan.

  "I don't know if I could play tonight, even if he asked me," he says in the car. "Usually it's the other way-I have to twist his arm to play with me." Crosby advises: "Well, there'll be other times." He doesn't turn his head.

  At the concert Stills will stay on the sidelines, watching the show from a seat onstage. Nash, meantime, stays away from the action, standing at the rear of the auditorium building.

  Graham Nash's melancholy may be at least partly the product of rejection. All four members of the group have suffered declining album sales on their own (with Young the slowest to fall), but none ever failed to reach the charts-until this spring and Nash's Wild Tales.

  "I was a little disappointed in the response," he says. It's an understatement. He continues: "It almost feels to me like no one heard it and that hurts for any artist trying to communicate. I haven't even asked about the sales." In contrast, he claims his first solo, Songs for Beginners, hit the Top Ten, and the Nash/Crosby album reached Number Two.

  The first album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, has now reached 2.1 million units in sales; the first CSNY album [Dejd Vu] has sold 2.5 million, and 4 Way Street, the double live set, sold 900,000. Stills' two solo albums went 800,000 and
600,000, respectively; the first Manassas product, a double album, sold over 400,000 and Down the Road, with Manassas, is near 300,000.

  Neil Young, whose pre-CSNY album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, sold 1.3 million, hit two highs after joining the group: After the Gold Rush (1.8 million) and Harvest (2 million). Journey Through the Past, the soundtrack to his largely unseen film, was a relative bomb at 300,000, and Time Fades Away, from the Stray Gators tour, is at 480,000. Crosby's one solo, according to Crosby himself, sold near 500,000.

  In the last year, then, no single member-C, S, N, or Y-approached the royalty riches of the old days. Still the group fends off the offensive notion that they might be doing this for the money.

  "I think that assumption is very easy to come to," says Stills, who before the tour joked to one reporter: "The last time it was for the music, the art and the chicks; this time it's for the cash!"

  Now, riding over the Bay Bridge, he's saying it doesn't matter what he says about the group's being back for the music. "Even if you write it down word for word, if somebody wants to believe it's bullshit, it's still bullshit. I think it has to do with everyone realizing that the service we can do each other was greater than how we were doing by ourselves. And without that, the other considerations never come into play. Of course the money's good. I mean, I can build the kind of studio I want to build and, you know, I ain't got no apologies to make. I don't think we're ripping anybody off. If people weren't interested they wouldn't come. That's the difference between business and art. And we are all four of us very, very dedicated to our art form." And that is word for word.

  Nash reasons it out this way: "It can't be the money or we'd have been playing these last four years and making millions of dollars. When we left it, we were pretty hot. We could've continued for a couple years but we didn't because we couldn't stand each other."

  And if that's not honest enough for you, Crosby weighs in. I had asked him not about money but about the future of CSNY.

  "My guess," he says, "is that we won't stay together. We'll make an album and not stay together. I think the soonest you would see us come together again after we made the album would be the next summer. And even that might be too soon. Why? Because contrary to everybody else, who seem to want to just grind it out by the pound as fast as they humanly can-you know, 'make your hay while you can'-we like to do it when we feel like it, so that it doesn't come out sounding to you like it's been ground out by the pound. So we get together and play when it's exciting to do it-and it isn't exciting to do it all the time."

  S 0 M E W H E R P. I N T H F. MIDDLE of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," on the line, "It's niy heart that's a-sufferin', it's a-dyin'," Stephen Stills trills a stretched-out "heart," turns the word into a one-note blues number, and nineteen thousand people in St. Paul whoop it up. Moments later they rock the coliseum with an ovation that lasts, by my count, a full 170 seconds, during which matches get lit and lifted and firecrackers ignited. An attempt by Nash to speak-he gets out a "Jesus!"-is greeted by another wave of all the rabble a rock and roll crowd can crank up.

  It is two more hours before the concert ends, and the group files past the towel man, down the stairs and back into their dark dressing room. Outside the room in an adjoining, bright white bathroom, Crosby and Nash stop to talk. Crosby is wiping his forehead, keeping the dressing room door closed to outsiders, and talking about the concert.

  "Steve was outrageous," he says. "That was the best response we've ever had to that song." He turns to Nash. "Did we sing the suite or did we sing the suite?" Nash laughs and recalls the ovation. "That was ridiculous. I started laughing! I've never had to stop them before." He turns toward the dressing room, and as Crosby pulls open the door, someone inside-it kinda sounds like that reluctant star-yells out: `A great show!"

  -August 29, 1974

  Rolling Stone

  Elton John:

  THE FOUR-EYED BITCH IS BACK

  ock and roll needs one every year or so: a new star, with a new voice, a new beat, a new look, a new style, a new 'tude-something to recharge the scene.

  In 1970, we got our first glimpse of one of the brightest there'd ever be: Elton John. At the Troubadour in Los Angeles, sitting behind a grand piano, and performing the songs he and his partner, Bernie Taupin, had composed, John had none of the flash and flair he'd display in due time.

  What he had were the songs-mature pop pieces on beds of country and folk. He had a pleasant, powerful delivery. He had wit, a British twist on the kind of between-songs patter we'd enjoyed from James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and their brethren.

  The critics were charmed, and Elton was on his way.

  Flash forward four years. He's a superstar: Extravagant staging, ultra-grand pianos. Outrageous, Disney-on-acid costumes.

  Now, he's about to launch a major tour and, of course, he'll do it in style, on a private jet.

  1974 had begun with the Dylan tour. In spring, I'd hit Vegas to profile Gladys Knight & the Pips. Summertime included the opening stanza of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tour. Winter would bring George Harrison. I had time for a quick jaunt down to L.A. for Elton.

  On another trip to Hollywood that year, I was on Tom Snyder's late-night show, Tomorrow, and he asked why I'd devoted my career to writing about rock and roll. I snapped off a smartass non answer (don't journalists make great interview subjects?), but I had a real answer ready:

  I enjoy learning, and telling success stories-even when, and sometimes especially when, success takes the artist on difficult turns. I like telling what happens when the artist encounters setbacks, misfortune, or outright failure. How he deals with the ups and downs of this high-profile, high-stakes life he's chosen: That's the story I'm looking for.

  In 1974, Elton John was a raging success. He still is. Along with a Beatle here and a Rolling Stone there, he's done it all, and he remains respected and loved by millions. Firmly ensconced in the pop mainstream, he nonetheless is remembered and regarded as an allstops-out rocker as much as a sensitive balladeer.

  And yet, when I hooked up with him and his entourage, questions had arisen, questions that he would have liked to have swatted away, like so many flying pests.

  Here was a genial artist who probably invented the term, "All Access," for backstage passes; a star who attracted all the media he wanted and deserved. But he had something to hide.

  Just like every single one of us.

  PETER G R E E N B E R G AND HIS two-man film crew had just flown into San Diego from L.A. with the Elton John tour. They had quickly hopped onto the stage of the tense and sweaty Sports Arena to map out their camera position, behind the speaker columns, out of view of both the fifteen thousand-seat audience and the main man onstage. This will be for the Newsweek Broadcasting Service, a division of the magazine, where Greenberg is a reporter; this two-minute number they're working on will go to fifty-five TV stations around the country.

  Standing right next to Greenberg in this tight, frazzled knot of people backstage is Johnny Hyde, the longtime small-town California DJ, now program director of KCRA radio in Sacramento. Like Greenberg, Hyde freelances TV features, and he's here to gather material for a possible piece on the Today show.

  Greenberg is hopping and yelling, and Hyde is barely keeping his doubleknit cool, because here, no more than three minutes before Elton John is due on stage, they are being told that Elton has changed his mind and doesn't want cameras on stage. They can shoot from the audience, and they can shoot only one number: "Burn Down the Mission." And they can have exactly twenty seconds, at the end of the song.

  Greenberg puts on a little show-he is stunned, it seems, dazed, and at a loss. He jumps on Connie Pappas, a partner of Elton's manager John Reid, and publicist Peter Simone, reminding them of their earlier promise-a general one-to let him shoot the show. He shakes a flustered head when Pappas begins to explain just where cameras could be placed. But nothing can change John's apparent orders. Greenberg walks away. The lost and confounded guise has not worked. H
e is left only one alternative.

  "I, I'll steal it," he says, stalking the catacombs backstage, "That's what I'll do."

  The two crews are able to roll their cameras when Elton John appears out of the dressing room, where, from out of a half-dozen huge, white steamer trunks, he has selected tonight's uniform: a violet top hat brimmed with rhinestones, a stone-studded white scarf, a long-waisted topcoat and satin pants with wide chartreuse and violet stripes. Long violet and black feathers jut out of the hat, and Elton's glasses are framed in wispy fur. He stands still, looking a little nervous, surrounded by security guards. His own bodyguard, Jim Morris (the current Mr. America), is clutching the curtain, ready to pull. John Reid, his manager, hustles around with orders for everyone. And Bernie Taupin, lyricist of the Taupin/John team, stands aside-tranquil and tanned from a recent vacation. He and wife Maxine are on board for the first couple of swings of the tour, mostly to watch, listen, and enjoy the limousine rides.

  The audience, responding to the darkened houselights, is already screeching. When they spot this outlandish little mass of flash climbing the stage stairs, they get even crazier, and the noise level is actually accelerated and sustained for a full two minutes while the show begins, sound and fog machines creating the whooshy, spatial opening of "Funeral for a Friend," which gives John a chance to sit studiously at the piano, creating immediately that ironic juxtaposition of nonsense costuming and serious music which helped make him a stage star four years ago, when he first came to the States, to Los Angeles, to play the 3 50-seat Troubadour for a week.

  With the show begun, the camera crews are forced to idle for an hour, to the halfway point of the concert. That's when "Burn Down the Mission" turns up. The crew members sit or pad around backstage, ignoring the unfurling, unrelenting music: "Love Lies Bleeding," "Candle in the Wind," "Grimsby," "Rocket Man," "Take Me to the Pilot," "Bennie and the Jets," "Daniel," "Grey Seal" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road."