Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  In many ways, Crosby, Stills & Nash was a corporate merger, a business deal. Yet from all accounts, the atmosphere at Wally Heider’s studio in Los Angeles, where their first album was constructed, was half work and half bromance. “We were in love with each other,” Nash recalled. “They were funny and world-wise, and I loved them.” Writers like Ellen Sander and Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres dropped by and found the three huddled around microphones, ecstatic over the music they were making. Stills was on all burners: In one night, he played the entire backing track to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” then stayed up for days to work on the other songs. Along for the ride was Dallas Taylor. Although only twenty-one, Taylor, whose face was squashed beneath a bowl-shaped haircut, had met Crosby, Stills & Nash by way of their friend John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful. Taylor and Stills had gotten off to a rocky start: Stills didn’t pay Taylor for an early session, leading Taylor to file a complaint with the musicians’ union. But he and Stills had nonetheless clicked as musicians; Taylor was like Stills’ sidekick younger brother, and he wound up playing all the drum parts of their first album.

  The group the Beatles didn’t want was all anyone heard about in and around Laurel Canyon. Waiting for his friend James Taylor to mend from his motorcycle accident, Danny Kortchmar began hearing the whispers about Crosby, Stills & Nash. “That was the most happening thing in Los Angeles,” he recalled. “That was all anyone talked about.” Months before meeting Taylor, drummer Russ Kunkel was in the Canyon living room of his friend Gary Burden when Crosby and Nash stopped by with a test pressing of the record. Joints were lit and the LP was put on Burden’s stereo. “When I heard that, I knew, ‘Okay, this is huge,’” Kunkel recalled. “There was never anything like it. It was completely unique.”

  Released in late May 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash had its dark undercurrents: Stills’ songs about his painful breakup with Collins, “You Don’t Have to Cry” and “Helplessly Hoping,” and Crosby’s Bobby Kennedy-inspired “Long Time Gone,” its harmonies groping for a way out of the darkness. But it was also a sunnier record than anything any of them had made before, and the joy that went into its creation was heard in every rapturous harmony or crystalline guitar. In July, the album peaked at number 6 on the charts and remained there for a total of forty weeks.

  Although their personalities were volatile from the start, the group immediately messed with its own chemistry. Realizing they had to flesh out their band in order to play their songs onstage, they could have opted for a session musician who’d toil away in the background. Instead, they began asking their well-known musician friends—Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, even, according to Taylor, Harrison—to join. Everyone turned them down. With a tour in the making, Ertegun suggested Young.

  Stills knew all about Young, of course. They’d been born the same year, 1945, but in different countries—Young kicked around Canada for all his youth—and had first met in Ontario in 1965 when Young’s band, the Squires, wound up on the same bill as the Company, an offshoot of the Au Go Go Singers. They’d bonded from the start and eventually crossed paths again, far more fatefully, a year later. Young and Bruce Palmer, his scarecrow-like bass-playing friend, had driven to Los Angeles in Young’s hearse. By happenstance, Furay and Stills saw the car, Stills remembered his eccentric friend Young with the funeral-mobile, and the result was Buffalo Springfield.

  Given the way the two of them had butted guitars and heads in the Springfield, Stills was resistant at first to Ertegun’s idea. “I went, ‘Why would we do that?’” he recalled. “‘You know him—he has control issues. He’ll tell you himself.’ As a trio we worked pretty well.” But Ertegun insisted, and the deal was sealed after Nash met Young over breakfast in New York and was sold on his humor and sensibility. According to Taylor, “Stephen asked me one night, ‘What do you think of Neil maybe joining the band again?’ And I said, ‘Isn’t that the reason Buffalo Springfield broke up? You never got along?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it’ll be different now.’ Famous last words.”

  Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash did share one common bond: a manager. A Brooklyn hippie who’d relocated to California, Elliot Roberts, born Elliot Rabinowitz, was by then managing both acts with his partner, a tough, forever-hustling former William Morris agent named David Geffen. Everyone knew Young’s first album, 1969’s lushly produced Neil Young, sold poorly next to Crosby, Stills & Nash. “That was not lost on Elliot and Neil,” said Stone. “I’m not sure Neil wanted to do it, but he clearly saw it as an opportunity to raise the profile of his solo career.” Soon enough, Young was in the band, playing guitar alongside Stills at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in August 1969 as their peers stood behind them and watched approvingly. “Neil saw himself with a solo career even before CSNY,” Crosby reflected. “CSNY was a vehicle to establish himself.”

  Back home, the same people who’d heard so much in advance about the new trio were left pondering the idea of Stills and Young working together again. “I was surprised,” recalled Nurit Wilde, a photographer who’d known both men during the Springfield days. “I thought, ‘I wonder how that will go?’”

  How it would go became evident soon enough. In the fall and early winter of 1969, work shifted from Los Angeles to San Francisco for the making of their first album as a quartet. On paper, the scenario looked promising. They’d be cutting tracks at Wally Heider’s studio, favored by their friends in the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Crosby had already relocated to the Bay Area, and Stills, Nash, and Young would be living a five-minute walk away at the Caravan Lodge Motel in the seamy Tenderloin district. Each arrived with a satchel of new or half-completed songs.

  On the first album, Stills had been very much in charge, playing most of the guitars and all the bass and organ and shaping the textures and contours of the music. Sometimes the only ones in the studio with him were Dallas Taylor and engineer Bill Halverson. Barely a year later, their lives had taken so many different turns it was sometimes hard to think straight. Stills was no longer the dominant force in the band. After Young had joined, CSNY had also added a bass player, Greg Reeves, a sixteen-year-old recommended by Young’s friend Rick James. (Young and James had, strangely enough, played together in the short-lived Mynah Birds in Detroit.) “Stephen had previously done whatever he wanted,” said Ron Stone. “All of a sudden, Stephen’s space was invaded.” Stills grew frustrated when his bandmates began writing songs in the studio, wasting time and money. “Déjà vu was very miserable,” Stills recalled. “It was bedlam, everybody doing whatever they wanted.”

  Young’s formidable gifts—the Canadian high-lonesome spookiness in his voice, the penetrating sting of his electric guitar leads, and the unassuming poetic flow of his lyrics—were clear, but so were his aloofness and inability to commit to the others. Young first cut “Helpless” with Crazy Horse, the band he was now working with on his own music, but when it didn’t sound right, he tried it again, with Crosby, Stills & Nash. This time, thanks to Crosby-arranged harmonies that rose behind Young from a muted murmur to a vocal blanket, it clicked. Other times, like on the near-symphonic three-part suite “Country Girl,” he worked on his own terms, venturing by himself to a studio in Los Angeles to overdub a massive pipe organ. “Neil pretty much did his stuff on his own and brought it finished to us and said, ‘You want to put some vocals on this?’” Crosby recalled. To Nash’s annoyance, Young didn’t play on his two contributions, “Our House” and “Teach Your Children”—songs Nash was confident would be the hit singles the group would need to continue. “I knew what a hit was,” Nash recalled. “We wanted to sell this bloody thing. Neil was being a little weird and selfish.” (Young also had a pair of bush babies—tiny, nightvision monkeys—running around his hotel room, which enhanced the craziness.)

  Given the limitations of the twenty-minutes-a-side LP format, they’d be lucky to land two songs apiece on the album, so they argued over who placed more material (and received more royalties) on the record. “Everyone was powerless wa
tching this freight train of resentment and anger and ‘I want more of my songs on the record,’” Taylor said. “The whole vibe from the first album was gone.” Among the casualties—songs recorded or attempted—were Young’s “Sea of Madness” and a multitude of Stills numbers. Whenever they seemed to be on a roll, someone from management would come by the studio with a contract to sign, leading to someone or another in the band being unhappy and the mood being wrecked for days. To everyone’s surprise, the normally reserved Nash broke down in tears one night at the studio. They had something special, he told them, but they were messing it up, bad. “We were in a different space,” Nash recalled. “The bloom had gone off the rose. We’d been together for a while and the novelty had worn off a little.”

  Drugs, never in short supply to begin with since the days they’d jokingly dubbed themselves the Frozen Noses, were omnipresent. “By the time we got to Déjà vu and we’d snorted eighty pounds of cocaine, things were a little different,” Nash remembered. The drugs helped fuel their creativity—or so they thought—and made it possible to keep working in the studio day after day. But it also fueled the insanity. One night, Nash stayed until three in the morning to finish a final mix of one of his songs. When he returned later that day, he replayed the tape and found it didn’t sound anything like he remembered. At first, he thought he was losing his mind—why does it sound like this? He learned Stills had stayed even later and remixed it without telling him.

  Nash himself wasn’t immune to pickiness. He was so unhappy with the last note on “Our House” that Halverson had to fly down to L.A. and find a Steinway piano to re-record that one concluding, sustained piano note. “They were second-guessing themselves,” Halverson said. “They had so much to live up to. It was, ‘Now what do we do?’” After a bunch of other distractions, like the midwinter European tour that had taken them to London’s Royal Albert Hall and Scandinavia, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and now Young completed the album by the end of January. The most important year of their careers had just begun, and already they were weary of one another.

  Crosby didn’t know what was more surreal: the daytime darkness or the elephant bustling down the street. Was he that high? At that moment, all he knew was that he and Nash had set sail from Florida on Crosby’s boat, the Mayan, sometime in February. They’d just anchored in the seaport town of Salina Cruz, on the southwestern coast of Mexico. Otherwise, nothing about that moment made any sense.

  The last few months had been rough ones for Crosby. In October 1969, just before the Déjà vu sessions had commenced, his girlfriend, Christine Gail Hinton, had been killed in a car accident near their recently purchased home in Novato. As she was taking their pet cats to the vet, one leapt onto her lap, causing her to swerve into an oncoming bus. “We were at the pool in David’s house and she brings out three joints and says, ‘I’m going to take the cats to the vet, so smoke these,’” Nash recalled. “I never saw her again.” Given the carefree, responsibility-free life adventures he’d had before, Crosby wasn’t remotely prepared to deal with the loss. The man who was so often the band’s cheerleader was now reduced to sobbing on the floor of Heider’s studio. A metal Halliburton case stashed away in the Novato home held his only remaining mementos of their relationship—photos and embroidered shirts Hinton had made for him. At the Déjà vu photo shoot, Gundelfinger noticed Crosby wasn’t the same jubilant self he’d once been: “You could see he was carrying around a lot of pain.”

  After the Royal Albert Hall show, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tour of Europe played two more shows, in Copenhagen and Stockholm, before it wrapped up. (Road manager Leo Makota later told author Dave Zimmer the band donated its unused drugs to American draft dodgers in Denmark.) With his obligations temporarily fulfilled, Crosby asked Nash to join him on a boat ride. Even though he’d never been on a ship before, Nash liked the idea; Crosby had been an avid sailor since his teen years, after all. Nash assumed they’d be taking a quick day trip to the Catalina Islands from Los Angeles. Not quite, Crosby told him: He’d decided to fulfill his dream of burying Hinton at sea by depositing her ashes in San Francisco Bay, near the Golden Gate Bridge. The Mayan, the fifty-foot schooner he’d bought after leaving the Byrds, would take him there. Since it was docked in Florida, they’d fly down and then sail from there to San Francisco.

  Nash hesitated, then agreed. At first shocked by and angry over Hinton’s death, Crosby was now being confronted by the reality of her absence. During a getaway trip to London after the accident, Nash noticed Crosby sitting beneath an exit sign in a hotel (“I knew what he was thinking,” Nash said, implying suicide). Nash decided it was best to keep a close eye on his relatively new friend. With only a few others joining them on and off—Makota, fledgling actress and singer Ronee Blakely, and Bobby Ingram, one of Crosby’s folk-circuit buddies—they set sail in mid February, far from the music business and the bad aftertaste of the stressful Déjà vu sessions.

  In many ways, the trip fulfilled its mission. During the six-week ride, they ate, drank, sang, toked up, and played music; Nash began working on a new song, “Wind on the Water,” after seeing enormous, house-size whales swim past them. Sure, Crosby threw Blakely’s typewriter overboard when her clickety-clacking began to drive him insane. “In a fit of irritation, I tossed it,” Crosby recalled. “I regretted it later.” But with only a ship-to-shore radio aboard to communicate with those on land, the trip took them away from it all.

  They couldn’t entirely escape reminders of their lives back home. From Jamaica to the Panama Canal, they were joined by Joni Mitchell. Only twenty-six, Mitchell had by then a lifetime of experience, both personal and musical. When she was a young Canadian named Roberta Anderson, she’d studied art in college in Calgary, after which she’d lived in Toronto and Detroit. In New York, she met her future manager, Elliot Roberts, and, in Florida, her future producer and (briefly) boyfriend, Crosby. Crosby oversaw her first album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968—the same year Judy Collins had a hit with a twinkling, radiofriendly version of Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” By then Mitchell also been through one marriage and had a child she’d given up for adoption. She and Nash had met at a party for the Hollies in Ottawa. Instantly smitten by the woman with the stately cheekbones and penetratingly observed songs, he moved into her home on Lookout Mountain after he’d deserted the Hollies (and divorced his first wife, Rose Eccles) and relocated to Los Angeles.

  By the time of the Déjà vu sessions, Nash and Mitchell were living a hippie-domestic life at Mitchell’s house, a life Nash immortalized in “Our House,” a song on the new album. “Lady of the Island,” from Crosby, Stills & Nash, had also been about Mitchell, and everyone was so nonchalant about the intermingling relationships that Nash and Crosby sang it together in the studio while looking at each other knowingly.

  But when Mitchell hooked up with the Mayan and its crew, her romance with Nash was beginning to fray. Mitchell kept thinking of her grandmother, who wanted to be a dancer but instead had to take care of her children; Mitchell thought Nash would thwart her dreams in the same way. Nash kept insisting that wasn’t the case. “For some reason, she thought my idea of marriage was that she’d stay home cooking,” he recalled, “and there’s no fucking way, knowing Joni’s music and knowing her and loving her like I did, that I would have ever asked her to stray from that beautiful path she was on. But that’s what she thought.” Mitchell flew to meet him, watched the canal open and close, and then returned to Los Angeles. Nash began to feel as if something was coming to an end. Their talk of marriage stalled.

  Meanwhile, the Mayan crew continued on its semi-merry way. When the boat docked at Salina Cruz, Crosby and Ingram went into a bank to exchange some money. In their own country, the sight of two bedraggled, slightly stoned longhairs could lead to wisecracks or, at worst, menacing, I-want-you-dead glares. In the Mexican bank, a security guard took notice of two scraggly hippies and unsnapped the gun from his holster, and Crosby’s American dollars were carefully scrutinized. />
  After the transaction was completed, Crosby stepped outside as afternoon darkness descended and the elephant strolled by. He quickly realized he wasn’t that stoned after all: An eclipse was enveloping the town, and the elephant was part of a parade to promote a local circus. Once he realized he didn’t have to freak out, he laughed. At least it was a moment of welcome relief from the last few emotionally wrenching months.

  While Crosby and Nash were sailing and Young was back in Los Angeles working with Crazy Horse, Stills was, to his relief, thousands of miles away from them all.

  When the others returned to the States after the European tour finished, Stills decided to stay in London a while longer. He now had the time, opportunity, and money to do it. Just before he’d left Los Angeles, he’d been handed a check for over $450,000 for sales of Crosby, Stills & Nash, along with his first American Express card. Between his financial windfall and newfound rock star status, the London nightlife was his for the taking, and Stills hardly shied away.

  At one nightclub, a mutual friend introduced him to Ringo Starr. Before long, Stills was at Starr’s house in Highgate, sipping tea and shooting pool with the Beatle and Klaus Voormann. Starting February 18, he found himself alongside Starr, Harrison, and Voormann as they helped Starr mold the song initially called “You Gotta Pay Your Dues,” eventually renamed “It Don’t Come Easy.” The song would endure many retakes and permutations in the months ahead; parts were recut, horn sections and background singers were added. When it was finally released about a year later, it was a small wonder of a pop single: From Starr’s cymbal-wash intro to the delightfully pushy clatter it became, “It Don’t Come Easy” was a relentless, almost desperate plea for unity and togetherness: “Use a little love, and we will make it work out better,” Starr sang. Beneath all the instrumental parts and overdubs, Stills’ chunky piano could still be heard in the final version.