Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  In the crowd, Casale saw a familiar face: Jeffrey Miller, a new transfer from Michigan State University. As part of his work-study scholarship, Casale had been awarded a summer campus job, helping out incoming students with paperwork and class signups. There, Casale had met Miller along with Allison Krause, a friendly, dark-haired nineteen-year-old freshman from Maryland.

  For Casale and others around him, the next twenty-five minutes were a blur one moment, a slow-motion nightmare the next. First came the soldiers and the Jeeps, then the tear gas and the sight of bayonets on rifles. Then yelling, followed by tear-gas canisters being lobbed back at soldiers by a few students. Then the Guard, who, after pushing forward, appeared to head back toward the Commons. Then the seventy gas-masked soldiers in the G Troop of the 107th Calvary stopping, turning around, squatting, and pointing their bayoneted rifles.

  At that point, Casale began running up the hill and to the right of Prentice Hall, on the apex of a hill; since the Guard had sealed off the front of the campus, it seemed the only way out. Then he and everyone around him headed back down the hill toward the student parking lot. At one point, Casale looked back in the direction of the Guard, now on a ridge. From where he stood near the parking lot, the formation was a frightening sight—and doubly so when it looked to be preparing to lock and load. He couldn’t imagine the guns were loaded; he assumed, if anything, they’d use their bayonets.

  As Casale began running toward the parking lot, a rapid succession of what seemed like firecracker pops rang out: One after another, then multiples.

  At that point, the screaming began. The bullets had flown over the heads of Casale and those in his vicinity, but they’d clearly landed somewhere. He turned to his left and, about forty feet away, saw a body slumped on the ground. At first, he didn’t know who it was, but then he looked around and recognized someone—Miller, whom Casale identified from the clothing he had on at the rally. Shot in the mouth, he lay on his stomach, blood pouring out on the roadway. Soon enough, Casale realized the other body was Allison Krause.

  None of it made it any sense or could be processed; mostly Casale felt as if he were going to throw up. Professors trying to mediate between students and soldiers told everyone to sit down, so Casale slumped down on the grass on the hill. Around him, people wept; others were practically shell-shocked. Eventually, the students were shepherded off campus through a corridor of soldiers. Walking home to Water Street, Casale and the other students were taunted by frat boys on the front porches of their fraternity houses. Once home, he turned on the TV and radio to find out what had happened; to his shock, initial reports claimed the students had attacked soldiers. Casale learned that two other students, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer, were also dead.

  The school was shut down, Casale’s graduation ceremony postponed.

  Even when it was rescheduled, Casale wasn’t allowed to attend because of his connection to SDS, and a plan to transfer to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor fell through when his scholarship was revoked for similar reasons. With the help of a sympathetic professor, he landed a job back on the Kent State campus that fall, where he met another fellow student, Mark Mothersbaugh. Both agreed that nothing—from the hippie culture to the government—seemed to be working anymore. Society was no longer evolving; it was, they thought, devolving into chaos and numskulledness.

  Since Casale didn’t have the guts to join the Weathermen, the best retort he could conceive was music. He’d never been a fan of softer bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, what he called “taffy” music. But with Mothersbaugh’s brother Bob, he and Mothersbaugh eventually began pounding out rudimentary blues—“devolved” music for a devolving country and era. Different times called for a different, more discordant soundtrack. Eventually, they called themselves Devo.

  At their concerts, Crosby and Nash always addressed the crowds more than Stills and Young combined. Without any prompting, they’d explain what mood they were in or why they were choosing to sing a particular song; maybe they’d crack a barbed joke at the expense of the Byrds or the Hollies (neither of whom were faring as well without Crosby and Nash) or make a reference only one or the other would understand. They were determined to engage, a tradition Nash continued in Denver. “If you knew what happened to us in the last two days,” he told the audience, “you wouldn’t believe it.”

  The mishaps and bad omens actually dated back at least a month. With the CSNY tour looming, Stills had flown back into Los Angeles from London on April 14. After running his own show for nearly two months, he wasn’t eager to return to California and the people who’d made him a star, but obligations were obligations. Driving back to Laurel Canyon from the airport, Stills glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a squad car. The moment was unintentionally comical, as if he was parroting the words to Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair (“It increases my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a po-lice car” indeed). Whether out of paranoia or carelessness, Stills skidded into a parked car. When the patrolman approached his vehicle, Stills was holding his left hand in pain; somehow, his hand had slipped off the wheel and bashed into something inside the car. Stills wound up with a ticket and a fractured left hand, right beneath his fingers.

  To everyone’s aggravation, the CSNY tour was postponed for a month to allow Stills several weeks to heal. Embarrassed to tell his friends how he’d hurt himself, Stills called photographer and friend Henry Diltz two days later: “Hey, man, you wanna go to Hawaii with me?” By the next day, both were in a beach house on the North Shore, owned by a friend of Diltz’s. There, they drank, played pool at the local pool hall, and gossiped about Crosby, Nash, and Young. Stills, who could only move two fingers on his hand thanks to his cast, periodically checked in with management from a pay phone at the pool hall. Girls came in and out of the house on the beach. (Coincidentally, Diltz was reading Groupie, a trashy cult novel called “a sex-rock odyssey.”) “My fingers hurt so bad, it’s got me grinnin,’” Stills wrote in a new song, “Singin’ Call,” whose chorus, tellingly, went, “Help me now, I got to slow down.”

  But there wasn’t much time for slowing down, and no one was particularly interested in doing it anyway. On April 29, his injury healed, Stills returned to Los Angeles. The new starting date for the tour was May 12, in Denver, which left precious little time to rehearse thoroughly, something Stills always goaded the others into doing. If that weren’t trying enough, other, more personal complications arose. Just a few weeks before, Nash had been in he and Mitchell’s shared home on Lookout Mountain Avenue when a telegram arrived from Mitchell, then vacationing in Greece: “If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers,” it read. The relationship, which had been teetering on collapse for months, was over. Although it wasn’t a complete surprise—Nash had felt distance between them when Mitchell had visited him and Crosby during the boat trip the month before—the delivery was still devastating. In an unnerving coincidence, Déjà vu, complete with Nash’s ode to their life together, “Our House,” had just been released.

  The calamities—creative, emotional, and physical—kept coming. No sooner had he repaired his hand than Stills had a skiing accident, tearing a knee ligament. Greg Reeves’ mental state also had to be dealt with. When he’d first hooked up with the band barely a year before, Reeves was shy and unassuming, as well as a fluid, sublime bass player. But something had gone awry. When he appeared at Young’s home studio in Topanga for the After the Gold Rush sessions, he was, well, a different shade. “Greg would show up with a yellow-painted face, like pigmented or something,” guitarist and keyboardist Nils Lofgren, also playing on the album, recalled. “David Briggs [Young’s coproducer] would say, ‘Yeah, Greg’s an Indian.’ As far as I could tell, he had African-American blood in him.” When CSNY would arrive at airports, Reeves would act anxious around security and mutter, “Don’t search my bags—I’ve got my medicine in there.” As his bosses stood around waiting impatiently, airport officials would search Reeves’ bags a
nd find beads, bits of fur, and rabbit entrails—Reeves, it turned out, truly did think he was a witch doctor. When he began lobbying to sing his own songs during CSNY sets, his tenure in the band finally ended. “We said, ‘We’re sorry, but this is insane,’” Nash recalled. “‘Just keep it all to your fucking self—just play bass.’” Reeves was promptly fired. “Things just started happening,” Dallas Taylor recalled. “It was like someone was putting a jinx on us, one thing after another.”

  With only two days before the first show, Stills suggested a replacement. While recording at Island Studios in London, he’d met Calvin Samuels, a Caribbean-born bass player nicknamed “Fuzzy” for the way he played his instrument through a fuzz box. Homeless at the time—and often sleeping on a couch at the studio—the easygoing, gap-toothed Samuels had played in ska and reggae bands like the Equals. When he heard one of his friends was jamming with Stills, Samuels came down to watch, saw no one was playing bass, and sat in. “I heard Stephen kicked out a lot of people,” Samuels recalled. “Obviously he heard something he liked. I didn’t get thrown out of the room.”

  Ron Stone of Lookout Management, along with Stills’ friend and assistant Dan Campbell, were dispatched to London to hunt down Samuels and fly him back to L.A. to replace Reeves. Given that Samuels often slept on the streets, it wasn’t easy finding “a bass player named Fuzzy,” as Stills described him, but somehow they did. According to Stone, a visa for Samuels was obtained at the last minute, although Samuels claimed he was turned down for a visa and had to sneak aboard a States-bound plane by confusing the attendants. Either way, he arrived in Los Angeles and was immediately driven to a rehearsal space to meet the band and audition, all in the same day. A bemused Young introduced himself, saying he wanted to meet the crazy character who’d flown all the way from London for a chance to play with them.

  With his black bowler hat, black suit, and roller-skating shoes stripped of wheels, Samuels more than fit the wacky-character mold. He’d barely made the acquaintance of the others (or learned their repertoire) when, two days later, he was hustled aboard a plane for Denver with the rest of the band. It was madness, but by then, madness was becoming CSNY’s normal.

  “We’re real loose,” Young told the crowd after he came onstage in Denver and joined the trio. “This is the way it is in our living room.” Nash chimed in on the same subject, with far more bluntness, but in his lilting British accent: “We decided we weren’t going to rehearse too much.”

  At times it showed. The trio seemed shaky and under-rehearsed on the second song, “Teach Your Children,” during which Stills flubbed a guitar solo and Crosby joked, “I swallowed my gum.” At one point, Crosby introduced Stills’ solo spot in the set while his bandmate was still in his dressing room, not emerging for a mysterious five minutes.

  None of it mattered to the ten thousand who’d gathered in the arena and shouted “Right on, right on!” at the start and finish of every song. “Well, it sure is groovy that all you folks could come out tonight,” Young aw-shucked, eliciting a loud “Outta sight!” from the audience. With Stills at the piano, they did a lovely version of “Helpless,” and the Crosby and Nash harmonies snugly wrapped around Young’s “Tell Me Why,” another new, unreleased song. Crosby hushed the crowd with a quietly intense version of “Everybody’s Been Burned,” a song from the Byrds days, and Stills, alone at the piano, debuted “We Are Not Helpless,” inspired by Fail Safe, the nuclear-war novel, and casually told the crowd he was recording his own album.

  After a break, they returned for the electric set. With Stills on crutches and Samuels still stunned at the sight of more people than he’d ever beheld in an audience, the performance was bound to be peculiar. As usual, Crosby yapped the most, asking about a group of war protesters the band had passed on the way to the venue and mischievously playing the opening twelve-string riff to “Mr. Tambourine Man” to kill time while the band laboriously tuned up. Nash introduced the first performance of “Chicago,” a song written a mere two weeks before, after CSNY had been invited to play at a benefit for the Chicago Seven. When Stills and Young declined, Nash wrote an impassioned plea for them to “please come to Chicago just to sing.” Nash hadn’t yet told Young and Stills that his lyrics were directed pointedly at them.

  Matters quickly deteriorated onstage. Their lack of rehearsal time and Samuels’ unfamiliarity with the songs were apparent in slack versions of “Pre-Road Downs” from Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Carry On,” and a new Young song cut without them for After the Gold Rush, “Southern Man.” (“A song is a song,” Samuels recalled. “I bluffed it. I fumbled my way through. You do what you have to do.”) Crosby and Young complained openly about the sound system during the acoustic set, when loud popping disrupted the music, and the P.A. only grew worse with amplification.

  Although the audience didn’t pick up on it, the group began acting out its internal psychodrama onstage. Using his crutches, Stills pretended to conduct the band like an orchestra and in general hammed it up, much to the increasing annoyance of his bandmates. “He was milking it for all it was worth,” said Nash. “He was being a jerk.” Of the four of them, it was Stills who snagged the lion’s share of songs during the electric set—four out of nine—due, he said, to Samuels being more familiar with Stills’ tunes.

  Stills’ stage moves were partly an extension of his take-charge manner and military-academy year. (“He approached life in a military, organized way,” recalled Diltz, who went to see the movie Patton with Stills during their trip to Hawaii.) But Stills, who’d seen his domination of the group diminish during the Déjà vu sessions, was now struggling to regain control of the band in any way he could. Young wasn’t happy Reeves had been sacked and replaced with one of Stills’ cohorts; it meant Young, who liked to be in charge himself, was put in a position of playing with Stills’ choice of rhythm section, not his own. As the electric set carried on, Young—who only contributed one song, “Southern Man”—quietly stewed. Finally, he had had enough. As Stills sat down at the organ to begin “Long Time Gone,” Young unplugged his guitar—which had been having hookup problems anyway—threw it down, and stalked off.

  “Where’s Neil?” Crosby asked openly. “He . . . ran?” Crosby sounded genuinely surprised, as if Young’s unpredictability hadn’t fully dawned on him. Nash told the crowd they were dealing with badly functioning guitars and that a fix was on the way.

  But Young didn’t return. The trio, with Samuels and Taylor gamely backing them, made it through the song. When it ended, Nash said a quick, “Thank you—good night,” and the show abruptly ended.

  Immediately after, Taylor received a call to come up to Young’s hotel room. Crosby and Nash, already there, told Taylor in the bluntest terms they’d had enough of Stills. He was too crazy and domineering, and they’d decided to return to Los Angeles and scrap the tour, or maybe fire him and tour without him. Was Taylor with them or with Stills?

  Taylor was stunned: He thought the show had been patchy but not terrible, and he’d been surprised when Young stormed off. Since Taylor considered Stills his friend, he told them he was staying with Stills. As they threatened, Crosby, Nash, and Young flew back to Los Angeles the next day, while Stills, unaware of their action, went onward to the next date, in Chicago, only hearing the show was canceled when he arrived at the venue for a soundcheck. “Crosby was furious at me, and Neil was disgusted,” Stills recalled. “They wanted to fire me because I probably barely knew the songs.” After fully realizing what had happened, Stills, with Taylor and Samuels, also returned to California. On the way, Taylor told him to screw the others; they’d form a group of their own. One show into their tour, CSNY had evaporated.

  Three days later, on May 15, the four of them reunited, not onstage but at the Lookout Management office on La Cienega Boulevard. Roberts and Geffen laid it on the line. The tour was a big, potentially profitable one. The band was receiving an unusually high $25,000 per show. If the tour was canceled, promoters wouldn’t be happy; in fact, they
’d probably sue.

  Atlantic had already begun preparing a press release that denied the group was disbanding. Word of the canceled Chicago show was jeopardizing ticket sales for concerts already announced; hearing the band was falling apart, fans were wary of forking over cash for shows that might not take place. The cancellations, the statement said with a degree of truth, were attributed to “knee and wrist injuries sustained by Stills and recurrence of throat problems by Graham Nash.” The press release also disclosed for the first time publicly that Reeves was gone.

  The meeting was a sobering experience, with grievances aired all around. “We never ran anything by our managers,” Nash said. “They had to clean up the mess. But we had to face the consequences. It was a lot of money. We had to make sure the promoters weren’t hurt. And the threat of lawsuits probably woke us up a little.” Whether the group would actually be sued or whether the threat was a savvy management tactic to get them back together, the end result was that the four agreed to regroup and resume their tour.

  Not every conflict had been resolved. That morning, Dallas Taylor had received a call from his friend and producer Paul Rothchild, who’d worked on Doors and early Crosby, Stills & Nash sessions. Rothschild asked Taylor if he was okay. Taylor didn’t know what he meant. Hadn’t Taylor heard or read he’d been sacked? Taylor jumped in his Ferrari and drove over to the Lookout office just as the combination group therapy session and tongue-lashing was winding down. None of them looked at him, and he knew right then it was over: Young had issued an ultimatum that Taylor, whose drumming he’d never been especially fond of, had to be replaced.

  Although Taylor had never caused the band the type of consternation Reeves had, Nash felt Taylor had deluded himself into thinking he was a more integral part of the band than he was. “Because Dallas had been Stephen’s hang buddy during the first record, Dallas began to think it should have been CSNYT,” Nash recalled. “He wanted more presence and more money. It took us a little bit of explaining that he was never going to be one of us. He was a great drummer, but in CSNY there was nobody else as far as I was concerned.” Taylor admitted there was disagreement over whether he should be paid as a sideman or full-time band member or whether he’d receive points on Déjà vu, which would represent a substantial windfall.