by David Browne
Onstage at Denver, Crosby had introduced Taylor, as he often did, as “our permanent drummer.” But the meeting exposed the wobbliness of those words. Taylor and Stills had bonded from the earliest days of the band, but business had cleft them apart. “I never dreamed Stephen would throw me under the bus,” Taylor said. “I showed my loyalty to him, but that pissed off Neil. He didn’t want that camaraderie against him. I thought Stephen was my advocate. But everybody folded at that time.” When Atlantic finally issued its press release, the statement now read that both Reeves and Taylor were out of the band; no replacements were mentioned. The tour would resume at the Boston Garden on May 29, roughly two weeks later.
In case anyone needed a reminder of their responsibilities, Déjà vu became the number 1 album in the country the day after the meeting, displacing Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. The album was released to reviews both glowing (“there’s no group in the country making better music than this,” raved the Chicago Tribune, while the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn dubbed it “easily the best rock album of the new year”) and skeptical (“a lightweight collection of medium-pretty tunes, adequately performed by talented people,” said the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone dubbed it “too sweet, too soothing, too perfect and too good to be true”). Nonetheless, Déjà vu began sailing out of stores, particularly in colleges: At the stores at the University of Boulder and the Madison branch of the University of Wisconsin, it leapfrogged over Abbey Road and Bridge Over Troubled Water to become their top seller. The fact that the names “Dallas Taylor & Greg Reeves” were embossed in gold on the cover was now a haunting memento of what had been.
Inconceivably, it was happening again, a mere ten days after Kent State.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, campuses either shut down or exploded. Students occupied buildings: one hundred at the University of Connecticut, protesting a no-amnesty policy toward any demonstrators, and another large group at Loyola in New Orleans. Twenty students at Eastern Michigan University were tossed in jail after pelting police. A bronze statue on the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan wound up with a gaping hole when a makeshift bomb went off. In an unintentionally comic sidebar to events of the moment, even the music business was rattled. “Youth Unrest Cuts Disk Sales,” reported Billboard, with one store owner grousing that students were so busy giving money to “defense funds” that they didn’t have money left to buy LPs. At least, some said with relief, students weren’t trashing record stores.
Like many campuses around the country, Jackson State College—a primarily African American school in the southwest section of Jackson, Mississippi—was a jumble of panic, fear, and indignation after the massacre in Ohio. On Wednesday, May 13, students took over a construction site, setting a dump truck on fire. A fire truck dispatched to the scene was hit with rocks and bottles, resulting in the inevitable aftermath—police and National Guard called in to restore order on and around the campus.
What happened next depended on who told the story. According to police, a sniper on the fourth floor of Alexander Hall, the women’s dormitory, began firing at them. The students in and around the hall denied any such thing—if anything, they said, police had mistaken the sound of smashed bottles for gunfire. Whatever the cause—and no sniper was ever found—police opened fire at the building shortly after midnight on Friday, May 15.
Again, reports varied: Seven seconds of shots? Twenty-five? Nine students wounded? Eleven? Fifteen? Yet no one could argue with the number of bullet holes counted in the dorm—250—or the smell of fresh blood on the first floor, or with the grimmest results of all: two black students dead from gunshots. Philip Lafayette Gibbs, a junior studying pre-law and father of a baby about to turn eleven months, was the first casualty. James Earl Green wasn’t even a student at Jackson State: A seventeen-year-old senior at the local high school, he was on his way home from a part-time job at the Rag-a-Bag grocery store, where he worked to help his widowed mother support her four children. Like those at Kent Sate, they were victims not of politics but of timing. Gibbs’ membership in the Committee of Social Concern at a nearby Methodist Church was the closest either man came to activism.
The next day, Nixon kept a low profile, only issuing a bland statement: “In the shadow of these troubled days, this tragedy makes it urgent that every American personally undertake greater efforts toward understanding, restraint, and compassion.” Not surprisingly, the comment did little to help people understand deaths that made even less sense than those at Kent State. “I think it was just a massacre,” one student told a reporter. “I think it was preplanned. They came up there with the idea of killing.” A token get-together at the White House with Nixon, his staff, and six Kent State students had done little to change those perceptions.
On May 26, Vice President Spiro Agnew, never known for subtlety, nuance, or love of hippies, sent a memo to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic affairs advisor, about the national outbreak of antiwar protests. “We have had enough maudlin sympathy for lawbreakers emanating from other areas of government,” he wrote. “ . . . In my judgment, nothing makes the average American any angrier than to see the pained, selfrighteous expressions of a[n Edwin] Muskie or a [Charles] Percy as they attach like leeches to the nearest Negro funeral procession...The polls show that the people are with [Nixon] and not with the whiners in the Senate and in the liberal community.” Although he’d sounded a conciliatory note in his post-Jackson State comment, Nixon took a different stance in his office, away from prying eyes. After reading the memo, he jotted “E—I agree.” It was time for law and order, and even though his popularity was waning, he pinned his hopes on his fellow Americans agreeing with him.
The sun was breaking through the clouds and drenching the redwoods when the groceries arrived. Shortly after the band meeting in Los Angeles, Crosby and Young, whose bond was becoming especially unbreakable, left town for Northern California. After stopping at Crosby’s home, they piled into Young’s car, toked up. and took the drive to their road manager Leo Makota’s home in Pescadero, south of San Francisco. Surrounded by trees, the house on that May 19 morning couldn’t have been a more ideal retreat from the craziness of the L.A. scene and CSNY turmoil. Young was also having difficulties with his wife Susan, with whom he was living at their home in Topanga. “The falling-apart stuff always involved Stills,” Crosby said. “Neil and I stayed friends the whole time.”
The new issue of Life magazine, dated May 15, spilled out onto the breakfast table along with the food. “Tragedy at Kent,” announced the cover line, over a photo of students leaning over the body of another. The eleven pages that followed constituted the first, most extensive, and most unnerving look the public received of the shootings: gas-masked Guardsmen aiming to fire, a distraught girl kneeling beside Jeffrey Miller’s lifeless, jacketed body. Young looked away. He turned back and looked again. As Crosby watched, he walked over, grabbed a nearby guitar, and began writing a song. In fifteen minutes, out came an irate chant he simply called “Ohio“; Crosby worked on a harmony part while Young was writing.
Since Crosby and Young were due back in Los Angeles soon to begin rehearsals for the resuscitated tour, Crosby called Nash at home that night. Crosby rarely wavered in his role as the most excitable member the band, but this time he was noticeably charged. “You won’t believe this fucking song Neil’s written,” he told Nash, before ordering him to book time in the studio as soon as possible. The fact that Young had written a topical song—an extremely rare occurrence, especially next to Crosby’s and Stills’ work—was doubly shocking. Business obligations were pulling them inexorably back together, but so were the times.
Luckily for them, a new drummer was already in hand. Another visitor to Makota’s home during Crosby and Young’s trip was Johnny Barbata, the lanky, shaggy-haired twenty-five-year-old former drummer for the Turtles. Makota knew Barbata socially; he was dating the sister of one of Barbata’s friends. Hanging out with Crosby and Y
oung, Barbata heard them discussing Taylor’s firing, and soon enough Makota suggested Barbata step in. Since Barbata was a firm drummer who already knew most of the members of the band, the solution was easy and logical.
On May 20, the day after Young had written “Ohio,” he, Crosby, and Barbata were all back in Los Angeles, with orders to meet at a massive soundstage at the Warner Brothers studio lot to begin rehearsing with the new rhythm section of Barbata and Samuels. They’d be playing on the same stage where They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—a drama about a Prohibition-era dance rivalry in which contestants hoofed until they dropped, in some cases dead—had been filmed the year before. The band found dark humor in the leftover sign from the production that hung over the stage: “How Long Will They Last?” Tempting fate, they posed for pictures beneath it.
Barbata knew he’d have to win over Stills, who was notoriously fussy about rhythm sections. He also well knew his and Samuels’ roles—lay low and take orders—after hearing about the troubles with Taylor and Reeves. “We already knew up front what our place was,” he said, “and that was fine with me.” As soon as he arrived, Barbata began throwing around a football with Stills, and overall, the drummer sensed a more relaxed vibe. “They seemed excited,” Barbata recalled. “They were insecure about the whole breakup and they wanted to get it right.” For all his bluster, Stills could be easily wounded and sensitive. On the plane from Chicago to Los Angeles after the Denver debacle, he appeared visibly shaken that his band—the one that had finally made him a star after so many years striving for that level of recognition—could be finished.
At the soundstage over the next few days, everyone worked hard to play nice. Diltz stopped by on the afternoon of May 21; as he snapped away, the band traded grins while rehearsing, and Stills and Young huddled together in conversation. Laura Nyro, the alternately earthy and flighty New York singer, songwriter, and pianist (and Geffen client), visited, and she, Crosby, Nash, and Stills gathered around a piano, harmonizing on her song “Eli’s Coming.” The mood was convivial and nonconfrontational; the fact that Elliot Roberts was on the set, keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings, also helped.
That same night, Bill Halverson was at the Record Plant studio, setting up to resume work on Stills’ album, when he received a call. The entire band, not just Stills, would be arriving shortly to record a new song—Young’s “Ohio.” (“Neil needed us back,” Stills cracked.) Although Halverson had been an eyewitness to tension in San Francisco six months before, the four men who strode into the Record Plant and set up in a crammed corner of the studio exuded a more unified front. Stills thought the song needed another verse and had conflicting thoughts about the massacre. “I thought, there has to be more to this,” he recalled. “I’m sure a lot of the guys in that platoon were told they didn’t have live rounds. Some part of me went, ‘Guys just don’t do that—that’s too much like the Germans. We’re more honorable than firing into unarmed civilians.’”
Paul and Linda McCartney contemplate life in semi-exile on their farm outside Campbeltown, Scotland, January 1970. (Evening Standard/Getty Images)
Ringo and Maureen Starr at London’s Heathrow Airport during the promotion for The Magic Christian that same month. (Popperfoto/ Getty Images)
George Harrison and assorted Hare Krishna friends, early March. (Hulton-Deutsch /Corbis)
James Taylor backstage at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where he played regularly throughout 1970 as the cult for Sweet Baby James grew. (Max B. Miller/Getty Images)
New York City police cart away the remains of Weathermen member Diana Oughton, March 10, four days after the group’s Greenwich Village brownstone (in background) exploded. (Bettmann/Corbis)
John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and their newly shorn hair, London, February 9, two days after introducing their revamped look to the world during a television interview. (AP Images)
Beatle fans gather outside Apple headquarters in London, April 10, after McCartney’s surprise announcement hits the press. (AP Images)
In Honolulu, Richard Nixon welcomes back Apollo 13 crew members Jack Swigert, Fred Haise, and Jim Lovell, April 18. Five days earlier, an exploding oxygen tank had crippled the flight’s mission—and, in many ways, NASA itself. (JP Laffont/Sygma/ Corbis)
Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon onstage at the KB Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 28, during one of the only seven concerts they gave in 1970 to promote Bridge Over Troubled Water. (Jan Persson/Getty Images)
Students from New York’s Convent of the Sacred Heart celebrate the first Earth Day by scrubbing grubby Union Square, April 22. (AP Images)
Fans flock to New York’s Fillmore East to snatch up tickets to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s week-long stint, late May. (© 1970 Amalie R. Rothschild)
Neil Young, Graham Nash, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills onstage at the Fillmore East, June 3. (© 1970 Amalie R. Rothschild)
Chaos takes center stage at the “Bach to Rock” festival in Mountaindale, New York, July 11, one of many unsuccessful attempts throughout the year to duplicate Woodstock. (Garth Eliassen/Getty Images)
Stephen Stills and Neil Young backstage in Minneapolis, July 9, the final stop on CSNY’s last tour for four years. (Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery)
David Crosby poses with pillow flag gun and illegal substance in his hotel room prior to CSNY’s July 9 Minneapolis show. (Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery)
George Harrison and Phil Spector (with Allen Klein associate Pete Bennett, left) listening to a master of Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, October 31. To everyone’s surprise, it would become the most commercially successful of all the year’s Beatle solo albums. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Poster for Two-Lane Blacktop, James Taylor’s film debut, shot that summer with co-stars Warren Oates, Laurie Bird, and Dennis Wilson. (Everett Collection)
Keeping the dream alive at the Summer Festival for Peace at Shea Stadium, New York, August 6. The same crowd would be far less enthusiastic about Paul Simon’s first post-S&G performance that day. (Marty Lederhandler/ AP Images)
Art Garfunkel, Jack Nicholson, and Candice Bergen on the Vancouver set of Carnal Knowledge, Garfunkel’s second Mike Nichols film and the one intended to transform him into a matinee idol. (The Kobal Collection)
John, Yoko and British anti-war leader Michael X auction off the Lennons’ cut hair (and a pair of Muhammad Ali’s bloodied boxing shorts) at one of the Lennons’ many media events throughout 1970. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Paul and Linda McCartney with baby Mary and Heather out on the town in New York, October 8. (James Garrett/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
James Taylor keeps tabs on Joni Mitchell and her fans, backstage at the first Greenpeace benefit, October 16. (© Alan Katowitz 2011, all rights reserved)
But since they’d been rehearsing the song all day at the soundstage, the recording was remarkably efficient. In two takes with no overdubbing, they had a finished track; even Crosby’s improvised finale, pained screams of “Four, how many more,” was live. The recording, particularly the interplay between Young’s twisty opening guitar figure and Stills’ coiled-up leads, had a crackling energy and group dynamic rarely heard on Déjà vu. When it was done, they gathered around four microphones and recorded a B-side, Stills’ “Find the Cost of Freedom,” written but rejected for the Easy Rider soundtrack. In contrast to “Ohio,” “Find the Cost of Freedom” was quiet, almost elegiac: a simple, dramatic showcase for their voices and Stills’ acoustic lead. Young had the A-side, with Stills’ song on the flip, but for once the old Springfield wars failed to materialize. “They were on a musical mission to get this done and out,” Halverson recalled. “It was, ‘We’ve got to get on the same page and make this right.’”
The tape was flown to Atlantic’s offices in New York. For financial rather than political reasons, some at the company weren’t thrilled: The label was in the midst of pressing up 45s of “Teach Your Children,” the next single from Déjà vu. But “Ohio” felt like the right mo
ve at the right moment.
The afternoon following the session, Crosby, Nash, and Young went to their friend Alan Pariser’s house in Hollywood. Pariser, who managed bands like Delaney and Bonnie and was a well-known scene-maker, had massive speakers in his living room, and CSNY would often light up joints and listen to their new music there. Another guest at Pariser’s home that evening, Albert Grossman, wound up in a heated discussion with Crosby about politics in music. The times were so combustible that the man who had signed Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary had mixed feelings about releasing a song about Kent State. In a remarkably fast turnaround, “Ohio” was on the radio days later, even before it was in stores.
In the meantime, the rehearsing continued on the Warner backlot. One day, a girl walked onto the soundstage, and Crosby grabbed her and planted a kiss on her. When Barbata asked who she was, Crosby said he didn’t know; it was just someone hanging around. They were still a band and still rock stars, and their tour would finally resume in a little less than a week.