Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  “Stills stood straight up,” said Drummond. “I thought he was gonna have a heart seizure. He told us to ask for more. When I threw that number out there, man, I got ’em all dancin’. Neil said, ‘Well, that sounds about right.’” Drummond shook hands with his bandmates and promptly left the room as Elliot sputtered objections. Drummond didn’t get exactly the figure he proposed, but things would never be quite right between Stills and the bass player again. “We were like water and oil,” said Drummond. “We just didn’t mix.”

  Rehearsals were held at Young’s ranch on an outdoor redwood stage he’d had erected for the occasion. CSN came to Y. “That’s the amazing thing about the hold that Neil has on these guys,” said Nash associate Mac Holbert. “If Neil said, ‘Hey, how about rehearsing down at the ranch,’ that wasn’t a suggestion, that was the way it was gonna be. They never stood up against Neil. Because they were always afraid if they said no, Neil would go away.” “It was amazing,” said Drummond. “Anytime they wanted to do something they’d go, ‘Is that okay, Neil?’ They always ran it by him first.”

  During preparations for the tour, Young had a blood sample drawn, which triggered an epileptic seizure, his first in several years. Mazzeo recalls Young being distraught over “the lack of ability to control the blood coming out of his arm. Because he couldn’t stop the blood from flowing out of his veins, he went into a seizure.” *

  The event left Young badly shaken. “I think he felt devastated,” said Nash. “I think he realized there was something beyond his control—which, in Neil’s language, is a complete no-no.” For a brief moment, Nash saw a very different Young. “It shocked me for one very simple reason: My friend was human. This man, who I’d come to love and respect, had complete control of his scene on a thousand levels, from who’s digging up the potatoes on the back forty to who’s puttin’ his new studio together—all of a sudden he was very vulnerable, and frankly it scared the fuck outta me.”

  Attempts were made to reach Carrie, who was off in Hawaii running a day-care center with a couple of friends. Her reaction wasn’t exactly sympathetic. ” I wouldn’t put it past Neil to fake seizures,” she said.

  Most observers sensed that Young was deeply morose over his crumbling relationship, but there was little communication to others about the situation. He spent most of the subsequent tour hiding behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, prompting the nickname “Flyface.”

  “Neil never shows ya a hell of a lot of what’s bothering him—or what’s not,” said Crosby. “Neil doesn’t bring that shit to work. I’m a very external guy—when I came to work blown out, I’d sit on the floor and cry. In all the time I’ve known Neil, I’ve never seen him cry once. He doesn’t run that stuff out front. You have to pry it out of him, and even then it doesn’t come out very much.”

  Well, y’know, my policy was to just try to keep a straight face while I was doin’ all that shit. I didn’t want to bum everybody else out with how I felt—although they could probably feel it anyway. During the ’74 tour rehearsals, I was really bummed. But that was just a few months—eighteen months or something—of being bummed, and then I was out of it, basically.

  I was just sad. It wasn’t so awful—we were playing music every day and practicing and getting ready to go on the road—going swimming every day, getting exercise, hanging out around the pool with the guys and talking about what we were gonna do. It was hard because of the emotions—but everybody else was tryin’ real hard to make it happen.

  —Did the return seizure make you more cautious in life? Well, it just made me a lot more cautious about having my blood taken—there’s no reason for that to happen. But it happened.

  —Was that a hard period for you to live through?

  Oh, yeah, that was a bad period for me … but creatively, that was a great period. No doubt.

  In the third week of June, Young taped a number of his new songs, including acoustic-guitar and bass versions (with Drummond) of some of the Hawaii material. Two songs would see release the following year on Zuma, with the low-key “Pardon My Heart” getting Crazy Horse vocal overdubs, while the lighter “Through My Sails” got the CSN treatment. Talk of recording a new CSNY album before the tour was bandied about. Elliot Mazer recorded one inconsequential ditty, “Little Blind Fish,” CSNY’s first and only stab at writing as a quartet, but the projected album never materialized, and a presumptuous, shameless greatest-hits rip-off package entitled So Far was released instead. The only thing new about the package was Joni Mitchell’s cover—a pentel-marker portrait of CSNY that would serve as a logo for the tour.

  The quartet would play thirty-one concerts in twenty-four cities in a little over two months, mostly in outdoor stadiums before crowds that averaged fifty thousand. Various other superstars filled out the bill: Joni Mitchell, Santana, the Band and the Beach Boys. Although there had been stadium shows and festivals before, this was the biggest tour attempted in rock thus far, and what is most remembered is not the music, but the greed. As Stills told Cameron Crowe in an oft-repeated quote, “We did one for the art and the music, one for the chicks. This one’s for the cash.”

  Nash and Crosby were less callous. “The Doom Tour,” Crosby would call it, while Nash would voice his displeasure years later in “Take the Money and Run.” “I feel strongly that the ’74 tour was pressure from management for us to get out there and for it to be a big scene,” said Nash. It suddenly became a much bigger scene when Bill Graham entered the picture. All previous tours had been handled through Geffen-Roberts, but at the last minute tour manager Leo Makota was axed and this one was farmed out to Graham. “Me and David wanted Leo, Neil and Stephen wanted Bill Graham,” said Nash. “I made a great mistake at that meeting—I had taken a quaalude ’cause I’d been up all night, so I was persona non grata at this meeting and it was decided Bill Graham would do it. It cost us a fortune. A fortune.”

  Hey—Bill Graham made out fine on the tour because he put the fuckin’ tour together. If he made a lotta money from us, he deserved to. CSNY had managers and hangers-on and agents—no wonder nobody made any fuckin’ money. I made enough money. I felt we did fine on that tour. I don’t even know how much money I made. I got ripped off, maybe I didn’t—I don’t care. I don’t know much about the financial side of my CSNY days. I really didn’t pay any attention. I always had enough goin’ by myself. I knew whatever I did with them, I’d probably end up makin’ less than I did by myself anyway, so it didn’t bother me.

  I really loved Bill. He was really good to us—really good to Pegi and I—he did a wonderful job with the Bridge shows and all that stuff. I loved him the way I love Elliot. I always thought if Elliot died, I would go to Bill. Where else could I go? I could talk to Bill … I could tell him what I wanted to do. He’d listen to me. A manager is someone who can listen—if I talked to him he would come back with an opinion, I’d tell him my opinion, he’d yell and scream. I could understand that.

  Why did Elliot Roberts hand the tour over to Graham? Exhaustion. “Elliot started wearin’ pajamas to work,” said roadie Willie B. Hinds. “He went through this whole period of being very down. He got sick of it. Sick of musicians.”

  “Elliot said yes because Elliot had had it,” said Leslie Morris. “Elliot was burnt, man. He didn’t wanna do the work—so Bill Graham charged him to book the tour and charged them for the set and charged them for everything … it was a lavish tour. It was decadent.”

  “You’d go into your room and there would be pillowcases with the Joni Mitchell logo silkscreened on them,” recalls Mac Holbert. “You’d go have dinner backstage and there would be plates that would have the logo stamped into them. There’d be a room in every hotel that would have shrimp cocktail, snacks and booze. This one guy who would pass out these horse capsules of coke…. We had limos waiting twenty-four hours a day and no one ever needed ’em. An awful lot of money was being wasted.” And lots of money was being made, but little would end up going to the actual artists involved. “I remember ever
y night when the show was over, all the managers would head to the office and pick up their cut,” said Holbert. “It was like clockwork.”

  Complicating matters was the fact that most of CSNY were in a world of their own. “Anybody tell you how I went on that tour?” asks Crosby. “There were two very pretty girls with stunning figures on tour with me. So I was majoring in excess at the time. I didn’t care that people were rippin’ me off for millions of dollars.” “He was paranoid all the time,” said roadie Guillermo Giachetti. “Crosby was the king of the hippies, but he had a .45 in his backpack every time he went onstage. What was he gonna do—whip it out and start shooting people?”

  The devil’s dandruff was fueling much of the insanity. “Cocaine replaced marijuana,” said Mazzeo. “Used to sit around and pass a joint. Later on people tried to sit around, pass a vial. You can’t do that. It’s not a social drug, it’s a private drug.” Despite Young’s admission of cocaine excess, few saw him as a serious abuser. “We all did our share of stuff, but Neil didn’t like it,” said Carrie Snodgress. “He’d feel bad morally, bad emotionally. They’d do a night of cocaine, and that would be it for Neil for months.”

  Crosby and Stills were out the window. Few have pleasant memories of Stills from the tour. “I’ve been the most obnoxious, arrogant superstar to walk the streets of Hollywood … I can be an absolute bastard,” Stills told Cameron Crowe at the time. His repeated clashes with Elliot Roberts had culminated in a fistfight that left him without representation. To replace Elliot, Stills hired a childhood crony named Michael John Bowen, an exmilitary man whose vibe many found decidedly unhippie. “He was like a drill sergeant,” said Mazzeo. “He fortified Stephen’s military fantasies.” Stills’s obsession with all things regimental would earn him the nickname “Sarge.”

  Nash and Bernstein winced during a hotel-room visit from Paul McCartney, when Stills trashed the former Beatle’s trademark instrument. “Y’know, Paul, I love your bass playing,” Joel remembered Stills saying, “but we gotta get you a decent bass. I mean, that fucking Hofner …” Said Nash, “Behind massive amounts of cocaine Stephen will say anything to anyone.”

  Then there was the St. Paul Hilton, where Bob Dylan showed up on July 22. “Dylan comes to the hotel,” said Nash. “Drummond and Stephen commandeer him and won’t let anybody else in the fucking room.” Dylan picked up an acoustic guitar and proceeded to play most of the material from his soon-to-be-recorded masterwork Blood on the Tracks. While Nash stood in the hall eavesdropping. “I’m listening to these songs through the door. I’m fucking dying.” But nothing prepared Nash for the reaction from Stills. The moment Dylan left, said Nash, “Stephen looks at me—and this is a direct quote—he said, ‘He’s no musician.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘He’s a good songwriter … but he’s no musician.’”

  The flipside of all this bravado was a vulnerability that was often painful to witness. Mac Holbert recalled sitting with a wasted, insecure Stills before the tour began in Seattle. “I spent an hour before the show in the bus with him. He was absolutely out of his mind, on the verge of tears he was so nervous. He was absolutely flipped out, not ready to go on. I just talked him through it.”

  In the face of all the overkill, Young’s approach was strictly low-rent. He traveled from gig to gig in a GMC motor home nicknamed “Mobile-Obil.” CSN saw little of Young outside of the actual performances. “He never traveled with us, never hung out with us,” said Nash.

  Along for the ride with Young and Mazzeo was a conscientious new friend who functioned as bus driver and receipt saver, named “Ranger Dave” Cline. Zeke also came along, often accompanied by a mutt of Neil’s named Art. Zeke and Art were quite a duo. Cline recalls the pair roaming through some swanky hotel lobby, Zeke padding along in diapers, blasting Indian music on a little tape machine as Art stopped to whiz on some expensive potted plants. “Art was a great dog,” said Cline. “If the shows were good, Art would howl. Neil would get kinda concerned if Art didn’t howl.” *

  Zeke was a handful at this point. As Mazzeo recalls, “When we first got on the bus, he had been into telling everybody no—all the women—‘No, I don’t wanna do this. No, I don’t wanna do that, NO, NO, NO.’ He starts pullin’ his ‘no’ trip, so we pull the bus over and Neil goes, ’Look—we’re men. It’s okay for men to tell women no—that’s cool. But look around, Zeke—there’s no women on this bus. You don’t say no to a man. If you have to say no, don’t use the word ‘no’—use the word ‘refrain.’” For the rest of the tour, the two-year-old would use it incessantly. Said Mazzeo, “The dog would jump up on Zeke and he’d go, ‘Refrain, Art, refrain.’”

  In Chicago, Mobile-Obil died and Young—scanning the classifieds for a new set of wheels—found Pearl, a $400 black 1954 Cadillac that burned oil by the case. Perched atop the jump seat in the back was an old Underwood typewriter on which guests were invited to share their thoughts. “We always kept paper in it,” said Mazzeo. “Anybody could go sit down, read a paragraph of what somebody had written and then take off from there. It just kept goin’ and goin’.” The Never-ending Novel’s main contributor was Young, writing under the alias “Dirigible Dan.” Pages of Young’s ramblings (including lyrics for such songs as “Daughters,” “Star of Bethlehem” and “Bad News”) exist from this time, many embellished by Mazzeo’s coffee-stain art. “The whole concept was to stay creative, and we did a really good job,” said Mazzeo.

  But however creative Young’s scene was, little of it rubbed off on his musical cohorts. CSNY was divided into four separate camps, down to the roadies. “Guys would say, ‘Hey, man, would you help me with this amp?’ and they’d say, ‘I work for Stephen,’” recalls percussionist Joe Lala. “It was weird.” As Holbert explained, “You got Neil travelin’ on his own, David off with his women, Stephen with his little group. None of ’em are relating to each other at all—there’s no band going on, no common consciousness happening. It was just four individuals that came together every day and played.”

  The first performance of the tour, at the Seattle Center Coliseum on July 9, 1974, set the tone. The quartet did a mammoth three-and-a-half-hour, forty-song show, blowing out their vocal cords in the process. By the next night in Vancouver, their voices were mere rasps. “The sound onstage was ridiculously loud,” said drummer Russ Kunkel. “Graham was the only one who said, ‘Look, we gotta turn down so we can get a level here.’” Problems with the huge, unfamiliar PA system were compounded by a couple of guitarists overzealous in their pursuit of volume. “We couldn’t hear ourselves at all throughout most of that tour,” said Nash, whose trademark harmonies with Crosby would suffer greatly as a result. “It was basically Stephen trying to outdo Neil, and it was just awful. We were just bad.”

  Crosby, Stills and Nash had almost no new material, relying on retreads from the all too recent past. Young, on the other hand, would perform many new songs on the road: “Long May You Run,” “Hawaiian Sunrise,” “Star of Bethlehem,” “Love/Art Blues,” “Pardon My Heart,” “The Old Homestead,” “Homefires” and “Pushed It over the End.”

  A number of the shows were recorded, but Joel Bernstein, who has waded through much of the tapes, said, “Most of the stuff is just trash musically. There’s no dynamic range—everybody’s playing wildly all the time. They’re all singing sharp because they can’t hear themselves.” But the Chicago Stadium tape from August 27 features two powerful performances: “Pushed It Over the End,” whose stop-time weirdness provided the most provocative use ever of CSNY, despite some excessive noodlings from Stills on keyboard; and a brooding “On the Beach,” punctuated by tough blues guitar work from Stills. As out of control as Stephen might’ve been, he was still capable of great moments, like his honky-tonk piano on some of the live versions of “Love/Art Blues.”

  The love/hate relationship between Stills and Young continued as twisted as ever. Snodgress remembers an episode in an instrument store where Stills suddenly became interested in a guitar Young was perusing. “Neil was
playing the guitar, and Stephen came over and took the guitar out of his hands,” she said. Young snatched it back and made an offer below the asking price. Stills immediately offered more. “Stephen had to have the guitar. Neil was sayin’, ‘Fuck you, man—I want the guitar.’” The bidding had reached astronomical figures when Young abruptly backed out. “Next thing I know, Neil said, ‘Fine, man—you buy it.’ He put it back and walked out of the store. The minute Neil walked out, Stephen knew he’d been had. Neil had done it completely on purpose—he had no intention of buying it.”

  I never wanted anything that bad that I was gonna get in a bidding war about it. But I knew that Stills would have to win this kind of a thing—that he would never back off. So I had nothing to lose—I could keep goin’ as high as I wanted, then back off. I went next door and bought another guitar.

  That tour was disappointing to me. I think CSN really blew it. Last time I played with ’em had been two or three years before that. They hadn’t made an album, and they didn’t have any new songs. What were they doing? How could they just stop like that?

  They wanted to put out a live album, and I wouldn’t put it out—because it had all my songs on it. This huge tour and they had no new information. I couldn’t believe that they were finished.

  Carrie would occasionally fly in from Hawaii for a visit, but she and Neil remained at odds. One reunion in the Midwest was particularly unhappy. Carrie, with Zeke in tow, showed up with one of her minions from the ranch, who was seemingly very pregnant. When the trio entered Young’s hotel room, Carrie made a little announcement. “I said, ‘We brought you a present.’ Neil said, ‘You did?’” Carrie’s friend disrobed, revealing that she had been pregnant with a pound of sinsemilla that Carrie had her smuggle aboard the flight out. “I guess I was just trying to show him what my true worth was—‘Show me one other person who can get you a fucking pound of sinsemilla in Ohio.’”