The audacious stunt did not provoke the heartwarming response intended. “Neil was just in shock. He laughed, then he was mad. He thought it was obscene what I had done—jeopardizing his son’s security. I was being a jerk, no question about it. It was a silly thing to do. Truth was, if I’d been arrested, the kid would’ve been taken away. Neil didn’t come to the room that night. He stayed away … we left the next day without sayin’ goodbye.”
Things got even worse in Niagara Falls, New York. After a gig at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, Young’s entourage was crossing the border back to the States, heading for the last U.S. tour date in New York, when Pearl was searched. Snodgress had some contraband, which she claims was stuck in her purse by Neil’s brother, Bob, without her knowledge, and the group was detained. The matter was later taken care of, but it didn’t bring the couple any closer. The next day Young and company disappeared, ditching Carrie and her friend. “They left us,” said Snodgress. “They’d all gotten on the airplane and left us.”
The show at Roosevelt Raceway on September 8, 1974, brought the tour to a bombastic end, with a mariachi band in the food tent and a billboard issuing personal thanks from Bill Graham to each member of CSNY; tour accountant Bob Hurwitz would later discover that both items had been billed to the group. As CSNY departed the stage, they were served with a summons for a botched show in the Los Angeles area. The lawsuit “ended up costing each guy a hundred thousand dollars,” said Hurwitz. “It didn’t end on a happy note.” But the final bummer was yet to come: one last show at Wembley Stadium in England on September 14.
The flight overseas was a bumpy one. According to Mac Holbert, Stills got into a terrible row with his then-wife, French pop singer Véronique Sanson, attracting the attention of one of the pilots. “He wrestles Stephen down, then Stephen goes and gets a piece of paper and starts scribbling away,” said Holbert, who managed to read the document. “He was apologizing to the pilot—how he was a military man himself and had gone overboard. He signed it ‘Stephen Stills, U.S. Marine Corps.’”
The show at Wembley was abysmal. Bad chemicals, Joni Mitchell said, contributed to the mess. “Everybody was heavy into the cocaine trip, and the stuff that was copped had to be cut with borax. People were shovelin’ it in, shovelin’ it in, and you couldn’t get high off it. Before we went on everybody had nosebleeds.” The concert was videotaped for possible release, but when the quartet saw it the next day, they were mortified. “Fuckin’ horrible,” said Nash. “I pride myself on bein’ a reasonable musician—I have never sung so out of tune. It was awful. We were just bad.”
The Doom Tour was over. While it had been the highest-grossing tour in history up to that point, CSNY would have a few questions for the tour accountant once the smoke cleared. “I went up to David’s and sat down with Graham, David and Neil, and the first words out of their mouths were ‘How much did Bill Graham make?’” said Hurwitz, who had no good news for the musicians.
“I think we earned about eleven million dollars on that tour, and we each came out with just over three hundred thousand—but we have a great pillowcase,” said Nash. “It was insane. I have never really wanted to investigate what happened there, because it was such a pile of shit. I think we were totally taken advantage of and I’m amazed to this day that Elliot didn’t take more control over it.”
But Elliot Roberts had his own problems. During the tour he’d developed a nervous tic that sent him to a doctor who told him the only thing he was suffering from was stress. “Everything was too successful. I’m unhappy and I’m losin’ my fuckin’ mind and I’m gettin’ tics and shit. All this shit’s going on and my life’s miserable. Going from phone call to phone call, tour to tour to tour, problems to problems to problems—and I’ve got no life. I was much more successful than I ever wanted to be.” Except for Young and Joni Mitchell, Roberts got rid of all his clients.
“He let it all go,” said Leslie Morris. “He let the Eagles go. I had to tell America to go … he wouldn’t work for them. He let Jackson Browne go—I mean, Jackson got very upset with Elliot and finally left.” David Geffen would sell Asylum Records at the height of its success, and Geffen-Roberts Management would dissolve in 1976. It was the end of an era. “Everyone thought it was a family and they all worked towards that,” said Morris. “That’s why I was completely devastated. When he sold Asylum, I was like ‘How can you do that? That was our family.’” But Geffen had bigger things on his mind. He wanted to conquer Hollywood. “Why did it all fall apart? Because Geffen wanted to be chairman of the board at Warner Communications,” said Morris. “He wanted success. He wanted to win. And he did win.” Geffen, Young and Roberts would meet again in a few years, though the reunion would be less than jubilant.
The Doom Tour would prompt Crosby and Nash to head off on their own (Roberts said they were let go with the rest of the acts; Nash insists he and Crosby fired Roberts). “After that experience, Graham and I never wanted to see Stephen or Elliot—or, for that matter, Neil—or anybody else from that scene ever again,” said Crosby. “In particular, I never wanted to see Stephen again. He was … ‘crazy’ is too nice a word. It sucked.”
In December 1974, attempts were made at another CSNY album. A session at the Record Plant in Sausalito came crashing to a halt when producers Ron and Howie Albert eavesdropped on a band meeting in the recording booth. “They turned up the studio monitors so we could hear what they were sayin’,” said Drummond. “And the first thing Stephen Stills wanted to know was ‘What are you payin’ Drummond?’ Neil said, ‘I pay him what he’s worth.’ I said, ‘Turn that shit off!’” That was it for Young. “Neil fucking flipped,” recalls Nash, who said Young then “vamoosed with a capital ‘V.’” Around this time, Stills would get into a fight with Nash over a harmony part, then take a razor to Nash’s master of “Wind on the Water.” Stills “slashed it to pieces,” said Nash. “I had him thrown out of my fucking house bodily.”
Stills was left to tour on his own. In a bizarre turn, he tried to replicate Young’s scene from the CSNY tour, even hiring Mazzeo and traveling in the GMC “Mobile-Obil.” But there would be no Never-ending Novel on this tour, because Stills morphed offstage into Sergeant Rock. Mac Holbert recalls walking into Stephen’s home before the tour to find the musician decked out in full military regalia. “Look—the old uniform still fits,” he annouced proudly.
According to Mazzeo, Stills spent much of the tour reminiscing about his tours of duty in Vietnam. Mazzeo pointed out to Stills that he had been in Buffalo Springfield at the time, but this minor discrepancy didn’t faze him. His past was full of secret government missions and clandestine communications with the Pentagon. Stills got so deranged that Mac Holbert quit and went home. “Everybody was just amped out on fuckin’ cocaine,” said Mazzeo. “Just too many drugs … just too weird. And I had to keep listening to Stephen’s Vietnam stories.” When the tour was over, Stills offered everybody a two-week trip to Hawaii. Mazzeo, never one to turn down anything free, was so fed up he just flew back to the ranch.
Immediately after the CSNY tour, Young bought Wembley, a 1934 Rolls-Royce “named after the stadium that paid for it,” said Mazzeo, adding that it was the car salesman’s spiel that inspired the next move. “The guy said it was the finest motorcar in the world, that we could drive across the Sahara Desert in it if we wanted to. We decided to drive across the Sahara, but start in Amsterdam and work our way down.”
Young, Sandy Mazzeo and David Cline—now joined by Graham Nash, Joel Bernstein and Leslie Morris—headed to Rotterdam by air ferry. Their last stop in England had been a carnival in Brighton-by-the-Sea, and by the time they arrived in Europe, the longhairs were looking pretty disreputable. “We had on big English overcoats that we had bought in secondhand stores, and we had won a bunch of paper leis at the carnival and weird straw hats with loud bands,” recalls Mazzeo. “It’s rainin’ like hell, we’re tryin’ to run and we had carnival junk all over us. This Dutch customs guy with this blue uniform and
white gloves puts his white glove out and goes, ‘STOP.’”
The customs agent informed them that, as foreigners, they could not enter the country unless they presented plane tickets out. Leslie Morris, who had a huge stack of unused tickets from the tour, immediately whipped them out of a briefcase. Then the agent told them they couldn’t enter unless each passenger was carrying at least $300. Nash, who was planning on buying some prints, pulled out a big pile of money. It must have been a surreal sight: a scruffy bunch of hippies in paper leis standing in the rain, holding out their booty for some incredulous official.
“All of a sudden we had about thirty thousand pounds in front of this guy, and he’s looking at this stack of tickets and all this English and American money,” said Mazzeo. “And just at that time the bull nose of the airplane opens up and this ramp comes down—and backwards in the rain comes Wembley. He looks at the car and looks at us and said, ‘Is that your car?’ And we go, ‘Yeah! We’re gonna drive it across the Sahara Desert!’”
In Amsterdam the travelers stayed at the Memphis Hotel. Leslie Morris—who had just left her gig with Elliot Roberts after a blowout at Wembley—recalls it as a morose time, with everyone upset over crumbling relationships, bands and jobs. “It was a pretty shaky time for everyone. Neil was miserable.”
The relationship with Carrie had Young twisting in the wind. “When he was in Europe she wouldn’t speak to him,” said Morris. “It was endless.” At one point after he had tried to call Carrie and had gotten blown off by one of her girlfriends, Young sat down at the Underwood and, under the heading “Chaptro Agresso,” pounded out the lyrics to a song called “Vacancy” that nailed the weirdness Snodgress had surrounded herself with. “I look in your eyes and I don’t know what’s there / You poison me with that long vacant stare / You dress like her and she talks with your words / You frown at me and you smile at her.”
Beneath the lyrics came a cryptic aside from Dirigible Dan: “The person … (your name) who this little ditty was written for is not all bad. I have felt and scene [sic] the love she has four [sic] many people including me. But lately all I get is bad vibes.” Leslie Morris recalls reading the “Vacancy” lyrics, which Young had pinned on the wall of his hotel room. “It was just full of anger and dark, dark—so dark that it scared me.”
Morris, Nash and his girlfriend headed back to the States, leaving the intrepid quartet of Mazzeo, Cline, Bernstein and Young to head off to the Sahara on their own. They didn’t get far. Wembley—with a top speed of only thirty-five miles per hour—blew up in Belgium.
What happened next was typically bizarre, and it all had to do with a dream Young had weeks before, during the tour. As Mazzeo remembers, Neil told him, “Wow, it was really weird—I had this dream that the tour was over and the three of us were in some foreign country, Belgium or something, and we were at the Hilton Hotel and we had jobs parking cars. It was great, because nobody knew who I was.” Little did Mazzeo know that Young’s dream would nearly come true after Wembley fell apart in Belgium.
“There’s steam comin’ out the top, oil leaking out the bottom, and we start pushin’ Wembley up this driveway around in front of this hotel. Neil goes, ‘Look! You remember back on the tour? It’s the Brussels Hilton Hotel—my dream! My dream!’ We go, ‘Oh NO!’
“So we check in, get this big suite—we’re still kinda funky, traveling incognito—and the manager opens it up and shows us the chocolates, the flowers and champagne. He’s goin’ through this whole routine and there’s this girl holdin’ this big bouquet. Neil takes him aside and goes, ‘Listen … we’re gonna be here for a while. Our car blew up and we gotta get it repaired—y’know, we’re on our way to the Sahara Desert, as soon as we get it repaired we’re outta here—but we could be here for a week or two. While we’re here, we’d really like to get jobs working for ya parking cars.’
“And the guy kinda looked at us, like doubled-checked our credit cards to see if they were real—he had a hard time comprehending that the three of us wanted to go down and work full eight-hour shifts in the basement of his hotel parking cars. And Neil’s goin’, ‘Listen, we’ll do the best job anyone’s ever done. I mean, we’ll park your cars better than anyone’s ever parked your cars before. We won’t be late, we’ll be good workers. You just have to give us these jobs.’ The guy finally conveyed to us that we had to have Belgian work permits, so we weren’t able to park cars—but we did try.”
After a few days in Belgium, the trio decided to fly to Torremolinos, Spain, while the car was in the shop. Agonizing over his relationship, Young changed his mind at the very last minute and hopped on a plane bound for California instead. “We had our tickets, the baggage was on and everything,” said Cline. “He got on one plane, we got on another.” Young was determined to give it one last shot with Carrie. “This is the only time I can go back,” he told Cline. ” ’Cause there may not be anything to go back to later.”
“After the CSNY tour, we were gonna try to put it back together again,” said Snodgress, but ghosts of the past hung over the couple. “We’d have these meals of silence in front of the fire. Neil was very distant, very removed.” Snodgress no longer felt welcome around many of Young’s cronies. “Graham and David would come to visit—I’d see them comin’ down the road, and they would go to the studio and Neil would go to the studio … Nobody would come visit. There was just this ambience that I was this bad girl.”
In early November 1974, Young went to Quadrafonic, Elliot Mazer’s studio in Nashville, to begin the sessions for what was to be his next album, Homegrown. The bleak title of one of the first songs attempted to set the tone for much of what was to come: “Frozen Man.”
As Carrie told it, Young finally came out and asked her to leave the ranch for good, giving her an acoustic guitar that he’d composed some of the Harvest material on—“something for Zeke to remember his dad,” he told her. She went to stay in nearby Butano Canyon in a house shared by soundman Tim Mulligan and his girlfriend, Gigi. Snodgress said she was “literally gone from the ranch twenty-four hours” when tragedy struck. Carrie’s father called to inform her that her mother was dead, an apparent suicide.
When Young arrived at the house to console Snodgress, he found she already had a visitor—Captain Crunch. “The minute Neil walked in I started to go across to him,” said Snodgress. “I saw him look—and I looked, and it just felt everything in my life was just passing in front of my eyes.” Crunch would appear everywhere, even at Carolyn’s memorial in Chicago. “This horrible person,” said Snodgress. “Can you believe he kept showing up in those places?”
Carrie made plans to return home. “Neil took me to the airport, he was bein’ so sweet and supportive—until we walked to the gate and I’m about to get on that plane. He said, ‘Anything you need, just call for it. But I want you to know it’s all over, Carrie. For real. It’s all over.’”
Snodgress arrived in Chicago to a surreal, nightmarish scene. “See, my mother gassed herself in the garage. She was so drunk … and my dad had picked her up and brought her into the living room…. He literally sat for three hours holding her and talkin’ with her and then he called the police.
“Well, the police—because she wasn’t in the garage, where he said she was supposed to be—when my dad called me, he said, ‘You better come home, you and [brother] Johnny, because the police suspect me of foul play’—because she’d been moved. We got home the next morning and the police were questioning my father, and we sat with the police and backed dad up, tellin’ ’em she’d been an alcoholic for a long time and had threatened suicide since I was a child.
“As a matter of fact, the death report didn’t even say carbonmonoxide poisoning—there wasn’t enough to poison a mouse. It was just that she was so full of booze, she was a wet brain. The coroner said everything was about to go, kidneys, liver. So she died a natural death. That’s what I figure.
“Oh God, that time was so crazy. I got Zeke out of there because it was so nuts. My dad could
n’t sleep—one of the regulars at the bar was a pharmacist. He said, ‘If you need sleeping pills or the kids need anything’—thinkin’ we were a normal family that might just need a couple of Valiums. Well, the boys ordered quaaludes—the drink and the combination—oh boy, it was a mess…. It was like a movie that I was producing at one point, but the studio took over.”
Young arrived with Mazzeo and, surprisingly, Rassy in tow. A wake was held at Carolyn’s last hangout—Hackney’s Bar—and Young played a few numbers on a Martin guitar he borrowed from Mazzeo. In the back of the funeral book, Young scrawled a little tribute to Carolyn. “She had this saying when she had a couple of drinks—‘Shit, Mary, I can’t dance,’” recalled Carrie. “And that’s what he wrote. It was such an appropriate eulogy.”
After a few drinks, Rassy started in with her own theories on Carolyn’s death, and Neil hustled her out the door. Back at the hotel, Mazzeo noticed that a dazed Young had returned empty-handed. “I go, ‘Where’s my guitar?’ Neil goes, ‘Oh fuck, it was so weird I just left it.’”
Probably in an effort to keep his sanity, Young booked time at Chess Studios to record with a reconstituted version of Crazy Horse. Nothing came of the sessions. Young soon left Chicago, and Carrie, behind. “I was in the next room the last night they were together at the hotel,” said Elliot Mazer. “All I remember is waking up after all this racket and noise in the room next door. Ben, Neil and I got into one of Neil’s big old Cadillacs and drove down to Nashville. I knew there had been a total break.”
In Nashville, Young resumed his sessions at Quadrafonic, and on December 2, 1974, came the ultimate ballad of failed romance: “Separate Ways.” The song begins in the middle of a doomy chord; Tim Mulligan lunged for the record button just as Young and the band dove into the song. Levon Helm rattles out a slow counterpoint as Ben Keith spins up a stark, bird-on-the-wire steel solo that has to be one of the lonesomest sounds ever recorded. “I won’t apologize / The light shone from in your eyes / It isn’t gone / And it will soon come back again,” sings Young, sounding dead. This was powerful, painfully sad stuff, and it was goodbye.
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