My! How you've ... grown!

Author: Robert Sandall
Journal: Q Magazine
Date: May 1992

 

On the physique front alone, Crosby, Stills & Nash have paid top whack for the years of drug abuse, gunplay and prison visits but their singing voices have survived unimpaired.

"The amazing thing is that we can still get together at all, man," they tell Robert Sandall

IF YOU can remember the '60s, dribbles the old hippy proverb you weren't really there. As if illustrate the truth of this venerable saying, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash have embarked on a lively exchange of views as to when and where they formed the group which, approximately 24 years later, still bears their names. "I swear I can remember it," goes Stills, in a loud growl. "Well, he's obviously hallucinating," Crosby snorts. "The fact was that we were a little higher than he was at the time, David," Nash the peace-maker adds, patiently. But this is too much for Crosby. "No way man!" he explodes, four times. "Oh you're so wrong!"

While Stills starts to draw a rough plan of Mama Cass's house, marking with crosses the points around the dining table where he believes the three first sang as one, Crosby brightly airs his conviction that it all happened over in another part of Laurel Canyon, in Joni Mitchell's house. The drawing finished - "and that's the swimming pool, right there" - Stills pushes it triumphantly in the direction of Crosby's ample midriff. Nash takes a look. Recognition dawns, or something. "Was there a tree there where David had that great picture taken with Clapton and Joni?" he asks. Frowns abound.

One thing that Crosby, Stills & Nash haven't forgotten, thank goodness, is how to sing. On the morning after the second of two sold out "acoustic" shows at the Hammersmith Odeon - their first British dates for nine years - the grizzled trio are in justifiably buoyant mood. The audiences were ecstatic, the celebs were out in force (CSN's guest list included Dustin Hoffman, Bob Hoskins, Terry Gilliam, Dave Gilmour and Boy George) and today's broadsheet reviews are uniformly appreciative. Twenty years of well publicised quarrels, glamour-shredding diets and disabling addictions - which culminated in Crosby spending all of '86 inside Texas State Penitentiary for cocaine possession and toting a gun in a bar - have done little to diminish the power and accuracy of those three-part harmony vocals. "By rights I shouldn't have any voice left at all," Crosby remarks cheerfully. "And the situation was worse than you think, man, because the way I was taking those drugs was by smoking them. There's obviously somebody upstairs who must like me."

Unfortunately, that caring cosmic personage appears to have mislaid his copy of Crosby, Stills & Nash's lyric sheet. Last night's concert ground to an unscheduled halt in the middle of Nash's pianistic solo rendering of Cathedral (from 1977's CSN album). "I came to a brick wall. I just didn't know what song I was playing," Nash explains, without a trace of embarrassment. "We hadn't seen each other for four months before we came over here and we hadn't played Cathedral for about 15 years. We have to live on the edge like that, to keep things fresh and interesting, but last night I forgot the words . . . so I stopped."

"I loved it when you forgot the words man," Crosby cackles, a shade unreasonably since neither he nor Stills was able to answer Nash's calls for assistance. "That made me feel soooo good!"

By their own reckoning, Crosby, Stills & Nash are now back in pretty sound working order. Since Crosby's emergence from rehab and the slammer in 1987 they've been "real busy". Two group albums, 1988's American Dream with Neil Young, and Live It Up from 1990, have appeared, to mild acclaim in America and instant oblivion here. In 1989 Crosby put out another unremembered solo album, Oh Yes I Can. The following year, CSN played a record (for them) 118 dates in 176 days across North America. Last year they performed to 400,000 people in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco as part of a memorial concert for the promoter, Bill Graham.

What they clearly haven't done though, yet, is to build significantly on the glory days of their first two albums. The Hammersmith shows, featuring a set list that seldom strayed beyond the 1970s, were unashamedly nostalgic. Crosby and Nash rabbit away about needing a band for this, a bass player for that. But Stephen Stills, a rather staid-looking besuited character who talks less but says more than the other two, owns up. "I just want to please the folks, you know. In an acoustic show some of the new material, either by virtue of how it's written or how it's arranged doesn't come off as good as the old stuff. Maybe it isn't as good."

TOGETHER AND APART, CSN qualify as possibly the greatest underachievers of their generation. In 1969, the gentle strums and barbershop disciplines of their debut defined the lovey-dovey Woodstock ethos and inaugurated what became known as soft rock. Then, less than a year later the angrier sounding Deja Vu heralded the temporary breakup of a partnership which, despite reconvening in a series of different permutations for upwards of twenty albums, has never quite commanded the world's attention in the same way since.

And they don't care. "We didn't come to succeed, man," Crosby protests. "We came to play music. People now have a hit that big, they're gonna work it like a businessman on Wall Street. They're gonna do exactly what the management and the agent say to maximise that success. We didn't treat it the way people do now."

As a first step in this oblique career strategy, in early 1968, Crosby, Stills & Nash decided not to form a group. "We'd all had bad experiences in our previous bands," Nash explains. "David had been chucked out of The Byrds, same with Stephen in Buffalo Springfield. And I'd just walked out of The Hollies. Theirs was to be rock musical equivalent of an open relationship, with plenty of opportunities for solo adventures, "which is why we used our own names. Every time we go off to do our individual projects they say we broke up; then when we get together again it's a reunion! And that's all hog-wash."

They got in touch, all three agree, after The Hollies played the Whiskey A Go Go club in Los Angeles in February 1968. Crosby and Stills had already started an informal collaboration which both felt needed a high harmony. ("So we said, Let's steal that guy!") Nash meanwhile was finding it difficult to get The Hollies interested in songs like Marrakesh Express, which espoused the hippy cause. Each, according to Crosby, was "a second guitarist and harmony vocalist who was trying to find enough space to get our tunes played somewhere." Later that summer, after a jam session in somebody or other's Hollywood home, that space was created.

It took Crosby, Stills and Nash about a year to come up with their debut album which instantly made them into heroes of the happy-hippy hour. "When we first came out, it was Marshall time," Nash remembers. "It was Jimi, Free, Cream, loud rock'n'roll; whereas our music had this fresh, sunny vibe which cut right through."

Their second gig was at a large open-air festival in upstate New York where, despite - or perhaps because of - declaring themselves to be scared shitless", Crosby, Stills & Nash seemed to embody the shambling idealism of Woodstock better than anybody. Their songs struck all the right attitudes: vulnerability, paranoia, youthful, self-righteousness and misty-eyed lust jostled for position in Almost Cut My Hair, Teach Your Children and Guinevere. All those interested in the impending apocalypse warmed to that great escapist anthem of the period, Wooden Ships.

Already though, instability loomed, most prominently in the form of their occasional fourth member. "Neil Young has never played a team sport in his life " says Nash. Stills, who served alongside Young in Buffalo Springfield, describes him as "like the one element in the chemistry experiment which blows up the whole lab." There were other more literal chemical changes too. "We were very young, and very high, " Crosby reports. "None of us knew how to handle the instant success. We had a lot of money and a lot of ego."

Added to this combustible mixture was a series of badly busted personal relationships: Stills's break up with the folk singer Judy Collins (once in happier days, the subject of Suite: Judy Blue Eyes), Graham Nash's falling out with Joni Mitchell and, worst of all, Crosby's tragic loss of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, killed in a car crash in San Francisco.

"When we did the first CSN record, we were very much in love with each other and each other's music," says Nash. "By the time of Deja Vu, that had all turned to shit. We'd had it, and it shows in the music. It was more raw, more down. Neil was taking his tracks down to his own studio and mixing them separately. It was getting to be like an album by four strangers. There was one point three quarters of the way through Deja Vu when we were just niggling at each other's consciousnesses so much I called a meeting at the studio and actually started crying. That was the all-time low point for me because I knew we were blowing it and I thought, If I can't keep this together, no one can."

By the end of the first month of the new decade, it was clear that no one could. First off was Stills, who stayed in the UK after a European tour and started hanging out with Jimi Hendrix. The recorded results of the collaboration are about to be released; most of what the pair did together, however, must remain a hazy memory. "We would just get in a limo and drive all over London, take over every club in town. Hendrix taught me that you'd got to get switched on and stay switched on till you dropped." Crosby, who seems to recall one such four-and-a-half-hour improvisation, vaguely corroborates this.

By the middle of 1971, Crosby, Nash and Young had released one solo album each; Stills had put out two. But these independent activities didn't make work on joint projects any easier. Deja Vu had taken 800 hours to record. Much of what was attempted immediately after it served mainly to fuel arguments, like the track Guardian Angel which eventually appeared on the Stills-Young album Long May You Run, in 1976. "Stephen had drunk a bottle of bourbon too many in my basement studio" Nash recalls, to broad agreement, "and he wanted me to sing a minor progression through a major chord change. Now I know I'm good, and I knew that couldn't be done. So then Stephen made some nasty comments and I said, "Hey, get the fuck out of my house!"

While Stills mumbles a belated apology, Crosby freely admits that "we butt heads constantly" but bridles at supplying more details of inter-group conflict: "It's none of your fucking business, man, frankly, and it's not the central issue."

The central issue finally forced its way back to the top of the agenda in 1977 when the three of them joined forces once more to record CSN. Like most of their combined efforts in the wake of Deja Vu, this pleasant collection sold more than a million in the States but failed to set many hearts on fire outside it. And by the time they got around to releasing their next band opus, 1983's Daylight Again, Crosby's escalating drugs-and-firearms problems seemed at least as interesting as the music.

"Most people thought I was going to die, man," Crosby laughs. "I was close to the end of my long downhill slide. I wasn't there. They were carrying me." "For David," says Nash, settling into earnest mode, "going to jail for a year was the best thing that ever happened to him. It took something as drastic as a year in solitary confinement to make him go, Hey, I could have had a V8!"

"Listen, man," says Crosby, "the amazing thing is that we can still get together at all, man. There's only us, the Grateful Dead and the Stones that are left of those '60s bands. There are so many ways you can lose your mind, even your life, in this business when you start doing it for the wrong reasons: for chicks, fame, money, drugs, the front page of Rolling Stone; all wrong, all peripheral. But that's happened to almost everybody in almost every band in history."

"Celebrity's a fiendish beastie," concludes Stills soberly, "and at least we didn't sue each other."