by Graham Nash
Needless to say, I’m goddamn proud of that record. It was us at our best, as troubadours carrying the news, being town criers, saying, “It’s twelve o’clock and all is not well.”
NOR WAS ALL WELL within our own little circle. The feeling between us after Déjà Vu wasn’t exactly what I’d call lovey-dovey. We had a really meaty tour that was set to roll out in May 1970, but there was all kinds of friction brewing within the group.
Our bass player, Greg Reeves, had been leaning on us heavily to give him a solo spot in the show so he could showcase a number of songs that he’d written. I was completely opposed on many levels. Mainly, I thought Greg’s songs just weren’t good enough. It had taken me fifteen years as a writer to reach the point where my stuff really shone. CSNY agreed to sing any song if it was great, but not just because our bass player demanded it. And then there was his attitude: Greg refused to take no for an answer. He got weird about it, bent out of shape. So a few days before our first gig in Denver, we decided it was time to part ways with Greg. As luck would have it, Stephen had worked in London with a Jamaican cat named Fuzzy Samuels, who flew to LA, stepped right into Greg’s role, and learned our entire set in no time.
But Stephen and Neil weren’t helping matters much. They were slipping into a phase I called “Stephen and Neil: the Dark Side,” and it was affecting the equanimity of the group. Neil was growing pissed at Stephen’s overindulgence with cocaine. Things boiled over during our opening gig in Denver. Stephen had hurt his leg riding a horse in San Diego and hobbled onstage using crutches and a cane. Personally, I thought he was a little over the top, because he hadn’t been that badly injured. And Neil concluded he was doing it for sympathy rather than need. We played a couple of songs at soundcheck and they were fucking horrible. David and I were hoarse from back-to-back rehearsals. Stephen had done too much coke and was fucking up, so Neil put his guitar down and left the stage. During the show itself, things got worse. The electric part of our set was ragged as hell. And Stephen was showboating, making it seem like a Stephen Stills concert, with David, Neil, and me as his backup. He was just dominating us—or at least trying to. He was so overbearing. And Dallas’s drumming fed right into it. Toward the end of the concert, Neil walked off in the middle of a song and refused to come back for the encore.
“I’ve had it with Dallas,” he said backstage after the gig. “He’s fucking up my songs on purpose. Either he goes—or I go.”
Neil’s sense of rhythm is incredibly simple, but Dallas wasn’t that kind of a drummer. He often played fills, which were distracting. Neil absolutely hated them. Plus, Dallas was Stephen’s guy. They hung together, did drugs together, got up at four in the morning to go into the studio together. When Neil looked at Dallas he saw Stephen as well, and a double dose at this point was lethal medicine.
Things reached a head the next day in Chicago. Once again, we did a soundcheck that was just awful. Afterward, David, Neil, and I huddled and agreed we couldn’t go on like this.
Neil said, “Not only do I not like Dallas—and he’s gone, that’s for fucking sure—but I don’t like Stephen right now, either. I can’t play with him when he’s this out of it.”
Neil and Stephen are both great musicians, but when Stephen’s out of it he’s not the great musician he should be. Neil wasn’t taking that many drugs. He liked to snort occasionally and smoke a nice joint, but by no stretch of the imagination could you have called him out of it. So after soundcheck, the three of us fired Dallas, called off the tour, and left Chicago on the first plane out. We didn’t even tell Stephen, who had wandered off by himself. He came back for the show—and there’s no fucking show! We were gone.
We were completely pissed at him, and he wasn’t in any kind of state to hear that. What can you do with someone who’s blasted out of his skull? You can’t start discussing details with him. Meanwhile, we weren’t relating to each other on a rational level. There was too much head butting and dick measuring, too many strong individuals insisting they were right. All those dates and commitments—it never made any difference to us. We lost a fortune by blowing off a $7 million tour. Elliot and Geffen had to fix it with the promoters by rebooking the tour, but they couldn’t fix our internal struggles.
Back in LA, we immediately began rehearsals with a new drummer, Johnny Barbata, who’d played with the Turtles and had been at my London apartment when I’d played Sgt. Pepper’s for them. He fit right in. We set up in a sound stage on the Warner Bros. studio lot where they’d recently filmed They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, about marathon dancers. I remember looking at the sign over the stage door that said HOW LONG WILL THEY LAST? and thinking, “How appropriate.” The way things were in LA, you could never predict who might turn up. In the middle of one of our songs, the stage door slid open and Bill Cosby came in with a bullwhip. He started cracking it around us, shouting, “C’mon, you fuckers, get to work!” Ke-raaaack! “Get rehearsing!” Ke-raaaack! And Laura Nyro showed up to check us out. In many ways, she reminded me of Joni. There was a piano on the stage, and when she started playing “Eli’s Coming,” you just shut the hell up and experienced it for what it was.
Somehow, we regrouped in June for a five-night stand at the Fillmore East in New York City. Stephen was in better shape, though no less humble. This time, we were prepared to go on. We were well rehearsed, getting along reasonably well, and writing new material that really cooked. Neil, especially, was in top form. A few weeks earlier, when I hadn’t been feeling as charitable toward him, he’d cornered me and said, “Hey, Willy, listen to this, man.” Old man lying by the side of the road / with the lorries rolling by … On top of that, he’d also just written the incendiary “Southern Man.” Holy shit, I thought, what a prodigious talent. Songs like those are the very essence of who Neil Young is.
I had put the finishing touches on “Simple Man” and decided to preview it at the Fillmore on opening night. Before we went on, word came backstage that Joni was in the audience. Obviously she had good seats, close to the front, which made it that much more emotional for me. It was hard to get really personal when I knew she was sitting right there. I can still remember playing the song that night, walking onstage in a dark-green velvet vest with a carnation in the buttonhole. I was feeling entirely exposed, even though no one in the auditorium knew that Joni and I had broken up. While I’d never gotten the chance to talk to Joan about it, the song allowed me to say what was in my heart.
We also performed “Man in the Mirror,” which I had written on the Mayan as we sailed past Cuba; acoustic versions of Neil’s “Down by the River” and “Cinnamon Girl”; Stephen’s Buffalo Springfield standout “Bluebird” as well as his new songs, “Black Queen” and “Love the One You’re With”; and, of course, “Ohio,” which had just hit the airwaves. An interesting moment for both the audience and me was my rendition of “King Midas in Reverse,” which was the only time I’d ever attempted a Hollies song in a CSNY concert.
During the Wednesday night show, word drifted back that Dylan was in the audience—which is when things began to get dicey. I did my solo, then Croz and Neil did theirs. But because Bob was there, Stephen did three solos, and that pissed us all off, me in particular. I confronted him as he came off the stage. “We’re supposed to be in a fucking band,” I said. “We all have plenty of songs we want to sing. C’mon, man, what the fuck!” The whole time I was giving Stephen a piece of my mind, he was standing there with a can of Budweiser in his hand, getting angrier and angrier because I was busting his balls. As I talked, he stood there, crushing the can of beer, which foamed all over his hand and onto the floor of our dressing room.
Somehow things cooled down a bit and we played the rest of the show, but afterward the audience refused to leave. We’d delivered, and they wanted more. It was crazy, they just kept cheering in their seats. So we hit the dressing room, relaxing and smoking dope. Roughly twenty minutes later, they were still there, going crazy, which is when Bill Graham slipped a note under our door. It
said: “Your audience awaits you.” We’d done our three-hour show, with two or three encores. We had very little left in the tank.
“We’re not coming out, no matter how much you pay us,” Neil told Bill. The next thing we knew, a hundred-dollar bill came sliding under the door. As soon as Neil saw that, he shouted, “Not enough!” Seven more hundred-dollar bills came sliding through at regular intervals. We were all laughing our asses off about it. Neil scooped those bills up and we went out to do another encore.
On the way to the stage, I had to talk Neil out of throwing the money into the audience. I knew if he did it, it would start a riot. I reminded him of how the first night I came to New York, someone had been murdered on the subway for a quarter. “You throw hundred-dollar bills out there—man, we’re dead!”
I don’t know what happened to the eight hundred dollars. Maybe Neil pocketed it. I don’t remember seeing my share of it, anyway. But the audience got their money’s worth, that was for sure.
No doubt about it, we had recovered our form. The band really cooked, we were loose and spontaneous, in exceptional voice, and our audience soaked up as much as they could get. Those audiences really loved what we were doing: not only the music, but our political raps. We were determined to engage our fans in meaningful dialogue from the stage. We railed against the war—all wars—Nixon, police brutality, environmental pollution, racial inequality, overpopulation, and politicians in general. We did a lot of amazing music in that short stretch and decided to release the best of it on a live album, 4 Way Street. We were making an astounding $50,000 a night. Sitting at the top of the charts. Even with all that, we couldn’t save ourselves from self-destruction.
As the dates tumbled on—through Providence, Philadelphia, Detroit, Portland, Oakland, LA, St. Louis, Chicago, and Minneapolis—the delicate CSNY fabric got even more frayed. The electric portions of our show brought out the best and worst in us, particularly when it came to Stephen and Neil. Their old competitive shit started frothing up onstage. The guitar breaks were like duels. Ideally, those guys should have been inspiring each other, picking up on a riff and playing it right back. Instead they were squaring off, trying to show each other up. Stepping all over each other. Afterward, in the dressing room, we’d almost have to separate them before they lunged at each other, ready to draw blood. It was a huge fucking mess.
It didn’t help that we were smoking insane amounts of weed. Fair to say that none of us ever went on without being high and then some. Fuzzy Samuels was so freaked out by the gigs, I heard that he took acid every single day of the tour. And we all had our eyes on our own personal shit. I was gathering songs for an upcoming solo album, David was mixing If I Could Only Remember My Name, Neil the same for After the Gold Rush, with Stephen still working on his eponymous album. It was that last album that eventually sealed our fate.
In July 1970, while I was camped out at the Chateau Marmont, Stephen called and said, “You remember that song of mine, ‘Love the One You’re With,’ that I cut in London? Well, I’ve brought the track back and we’re in Wally Heider’s with it. I need voices for the choruses. Any chance you and David would come down? I’m getting a couple of girls I know to sing, too.”
Considering this was Stephen and it was his first solo record, we were only too happy to oblige. I happen to love that song. Stephen got the title from Billy Preston, who was playing with the Beatles at the time. They were at Stephen’s house in Surrey, hanging with Ringo. Apparently, Stephen spotted some girl and made a comment to Billy about how great she was. Billy responded, “Hey, man, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” To which Stephen replied, “Excuse me, can I borrow a pen?” In any case, we went to Heider’s that night and met the other singers: Rita Coolidge, her sister Priscilla, who was married to Booker T. Jones, and Claudia Lanier, all incredible voices. Needless to say, I flashed heavily on Rita. She was a startlingly gorgeous creature: part Cherokee Indian, part Southern belle with pigtails, lithe body, incredible in jeans, frills, feathers, exotic, the whole package. And a fantastic singer—smoky voice, really distinctive. All of which hit Stephen the same way as me. He was coming on to Rita all session long, but I beat him to the punch. I invited her to go to a concert with me the next day at five o’clock. Unbeknownst to me, Stephen called her to say I couldn’t make it. “Graham’s a little sick today,” he told her, “but I’ll pick you up around three.” So she ended up living with Stephen for a couple weeks.
I felt that Rita wasn’t where she wanted to be, but where she belonged—for the time being. Stephen was an attractive man, musically and physically. Realistically, I understood what was going on. But I didn’t think Rita’s heart was in it 100 percent.
Due to the circumstances, Rita was hanging out with CSNY all the time. I saw a lot of her, and we became very attracted to one another. Very. Now, as an Englishman, I consider myself somewhat of a gentleman. There was no way that I was going to put the move on Rita behind Stephen’s back. But we fell for each other hard; our mutual attraction was almost unbearable. “You know I want to be with you,” I said to Rita, “and I believe you feel the same way. But I can’t even kiss you without dealing with Stephen. He’s my friend and partner—and he’s obviously in love with you.”
I had to do the right thing. So I showed up at Shady Oak with Rita and found Stephen in his studio. “I really like this woman,” I told him. “I think I like her more than you do, and I think she likes me more than she likes you. So having told you this, I’m going to be with her.”
What transpired was one of those moments when no one said a word—and then Stephen spit at me. Although he missed, this was hardly going the way I’d hoped, so I made a beeline for my car. Rita followed closely on my heels. She just grabbed what few clothes she had in a closet and left along with me. That same day, I moved out of the Chateau and into her house in Beachwood Canyon.
Needless to say, Stephen and I didn’t speak for a while. I’m not so sure that he’s forgiven me to this day, even though I tried to handle it the best I could. If someone steals your girl—although to me it didn’t go down that way—you’re bound to hold a monster grudge. I’m sure Stephen has his own version of what went down, but in the end, it put another strain on things between us.
Living with Rita was a sweet little interlude, the perfect antidote to my crazy lifestyle. She was a straight shooter, very quiet, not gregarious at all. She had a very religious upbringing; her father was a preacher and her mother was a community organizer who raised Rita to be a thoughtful, considerate person. Rita understood what had happened to Joni and me. I was still greatly affected by the end of that affair. Rita was incredibly sensitive to my feelings and made things easy for me, especially with the vibe she’d established in the house. We had the upper floor of a two-family structure. Downstairs, her friend Annie shared a flat with two songwriters who were pretty good, so there was a lot of music in that place coming from the top and bottom floors. I was busy writing material for my solo album, Songs for Beginners, and Rita was writing, too; she was always on the piano. That woman could play: She played it way better than I did. In fact, she wrote the famous coda—the piano bit—to the end of “Layla.” Jimmy Gordon got the credit for it, but it was actually all Rita’s.
I wrote a batch of songs at Rita’s house: “Better Days,” for what we experienced during that time, and “Wounded Bird,” which was about the aftermath of Stephen’s relationship with Judy Collins. Another song, “Military Madness,” helped to get a lot of things off my chest. England had been bombed by the Germans, and when I moved to America I realized that the same issues were going on in Vietnam. The battle was raging, and I wanted to say something about the madness of the military agenda waging preemptive war—which is what happened later in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also finished “Chicago,” which stemmed from an incident following the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Chicago Eight had been busted for disrupting the event and desperately needed money for their defense. Hugh Rom
ney, the beat poet and alter ego of Wavy Gravy and my hero, called to ask if CSNY would come to Chicago to raise the funds. David and I wanted to go; Stephen and Neil also wanted to, but had other commitments. As a response, I wrote the song to them, asking, “Won’t you please come to Chicago just to sing?” Later, when I learned that Bobby Seale had been bound and gagged and chained to a chair in the courtroom, once again I was deeply affected. It didn’t matter to me whether he was guilty or not. In my book, you don’t get to call that a fair trial. So I finished that song with a renewed intensity.
I also wrote “Frozen Smiles” for Stephen, because he was too busy listening to people who filled his nose rather than his heart.
The first show Croz and I ever did as a duo was in Detroit in January 1971. Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland had been doing a series of shows called “FTA,” which was nicknamed the “Fuck the Army” shows. Mac Holbert was the tour manager, and he put me in touch with Jane, who recruited me and Croz to get involved. I traveled by train to Detroit and we managed to raise money to help fund the Winter Soldier Investigation. John Kerry, our present secretary of state, had a certain credibility, being a decorated veteran, and he became an eloquent spokesman for the movement.
My song “Oh! Camil” was written for Scott Camil, another spokesman and a highly decorated vet, who had earned two Purple Hearts, a Combat Action Ribbon, two Presidential Unit Citations, a Good Conduct Medal, a National Defense Service Medal, a Vietnam Service Medal with three stars, a Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, a Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm Leaf, and a Vietnam Campaign Medal during two tours in Vietnam with Charlie Company, First Battalion, First Marines, First Marine Division. Another hero of mine.