Crosby, Stills and Nash were one of the biggest rock attractions
of the late Sixties: stars of the Woodstock Festival, and at the centre of the West Coast
cult of the singer-songwriter. After many years apart, during which David Crosby served a
one-year jail term for drug offences, they are currently on tour. When they first formed
in 1968, they came from other bands: Crosby [now 52] from the Byrds, Stephen Stills [47]
from Buffalo Springfield and Manchester-born Graham Nash [47] from the Hollies. Their hits
included "Our House", recently recycled as a building-society TV jingle.
STEPHEN STILLS: I met David before I met Graham. I was in a band
called Buffalo Springfield and David was still in the Byrds. He came to see us and I was
on stage playing a guitar duet with Neil Young. David would watch us and then come up to
the band and say I was too good for them I and they should get rid of me!
David and I had been spending quite a few months together, basically as
friends. We'd learned a couple of songs together. Cass Elliot knew Graham very well and
introduced David to him. Then David and I went to the Whiskey A Go-Go in Sunset Strip [Los
Angeles] to see the Hollies doing a benefit showcase. We saw Graham Nash and we were
thinking whether we should steal him. I thought he was fantastic, but Jesus, that band was
so good, I thought they're never going to want to part with Nash. David said, "Oh
yeah? Rumour has it ..." So I said, "Let's just go and ask him," and we did
and discovered he was ready to move on. We first sang together over at Cass's house in her
dining room, looking out at the pool.
I come across as the quiet one on stage, because my parade ground voice
somehow doesn't lend itself to comedy - the other two, like, quip ! jokes and banter on
stage - so I just shut up or else I screw up. It's one of the greatest tragedies in my
life - I'd like to be like David. He's one of the funniest people I've met.
People say we're like the elements and that I'm fire. David is water
and Graham is earth. I have a hot temper and I flare up pretty quickly (not as much as I
used to) which is why I guess I have the distinction of being the trouble-maker in the
band.
We've all been through some pretty tough times together but we've stuck
by each other. like family. When I got divorced from my first wife, I was trying to pour
myself into a bottle of bourbon. They tried to stop me doing that. At least I knew they
cared at a time when I felt no one else did. When David was in prison for a year in Texas
for drugs, no one else around me was allowed to say a thing about it. I guess I was being
protective. He and I talked about his addiction one time when he got to feeling really
down on stage and just walked off. I found him laid on the couch, and I was so pissed off
and he knew it. We talked and he came back on stage. But I always knew David would make it
and if anyone asked me, I said, "David will be fine," but with a look which
said, "Don't ask another thing because you're just a bloody gossip." I didn't
visit him in prison. He didn't want us to. But we wrote letters.
We've sort of grown up together and it's natural that we've changed.
We've mellowed out a lot. Graham used to be very manipulative and play fool games which
always blew up in his face. David is happier and his voice is back and so is his wisdom.
We're brutally honest with each other. Unfortunately. In the past it's torn us apart, but
you've got to understand we're brutal people. Ask any one of us a question and you're
going to get an answer you may not like. And that's hard, to be with people like that a
lot of the time. It sort of wakes you up.
DAVID CROSBY: My friend Chris Hillman in the Byrds said, "Man,
you have just got to come and hear this band, they're fantastic; they're called Buffalo
Springfield," so he took me down to the Whiskey A Go-Go, on Sunset Strip - one of the
places where it was all happening. They were really excellent, and Stephen had this
wonderful duet going on between him and Neil Young.
After I'd known Stephen for a while, Cass Elliot brought Graham over to
my house and told me: "He's a boyfriend of mine." She was a very subtle mind and
an incredibly funny woman. She's one of the people we miss a lot. Me and Nash think we
first all sang together at Joni Mitchell's house, in her living room. We sang a song of
Stephen's called "In the Morning When You Rise". I don't know what the other
guys felt, but I thought, "I know what I'm doing for the next few years. "
Buffalo Springfield had disintegrated under Stephen's nose and Graham was still with the
Hollies but was thinking of leaving. They wanted to do an album of Dylan covers. His songs
were being turned down by the band, so he was getting very frustrated. None of us felt
we'd done our best work yet We were still hungry. When we heard Graham, we could tell he
was one of the best harmony singers alive. He's also a really nice human being.
We all live in Los Angeles, within three miles of each other. Me and
Nash are in the Valley and the Stephen is in Beverly Hills. We like not to spend all our
time together - we have our own families and friends. I enjoy diving and sailing and
Stephen likes golf and he's also a great cook. Graham is a world authority on photography.
It's the same professionally - when we got together we said we were going to follow our
solo careers as well and work with other groups. But whenever we've gone and done
something else, people have said, "Oh they've split up", and when we've come
back they've screamed, "Oh, reunion!"
We disagree a lot, but we've gotten much better at how to do it over
the last few years. Graham is often the mediator, but roles shift. One guy will be the
fulcrum and another guy will be next time. Stephen has a fiery personality. It shows in
his guitar-playing. But he's smarter about himself these days. He can be quite eloquent
but somehow that doesn't work on stage, like it does when it's one to one, and we just
crack up. Having spent so long together we can see the changes in each other, and Graham
has gone through the least radical change. He's just kept growing and had a steady climb.
Stephen is a lot calmer now, much easier to deal with not so bull-headed as he used to be.
When I was severely addicted to cocaine and heroin, both guys were very
supportive and tried to help me through it. They stayed very good friends throughout what
must have been a hell of time for them as well. They did tell me the truth and what they
thought. I'd been doing drugs for a very long time, about 10 years. It got really bad in
the early Eighties, and by 1985 I was in prison on drug charges. I went cold turkey in
prison and didn't want them to visit. Texas maximum security prison is not a pleasant
place. They wrote to me though, real nice letters. I suppose they've seen me go through
some pretty radical changes, from what they thought must have been a nice guy to a
complete vegetable - an isolated, alcoholic drug addict. They've stuck by me.
GRAHAM NASH: Cass Elliot was the first to bring us all together
because she was friends with David and Stephen. I think she knew before any of us what we
would sound like if we sang together. I met David a year before I met Stephen. I'd visited
Cass in Los Angeles in 1967 and she took me over to see David. The first time I saw him he
was flat on his back on a couch rolling the biggest joint I've seen anyone roll in the
world. His first words were, "Here smoke this." I think I had seen him
previously when he came over with the Byrds to Britain and some weird promoter had been
saying they were the American Beatles. They never stood a chance.
Then Cass took me to a party where the Monkees were, I think it was
Davy Jones's house, and I opened the door and there's this maniac at the piano, pounding
the shit out of it doing this boogie-woogie kind of thing. Cass said, "This is the
guy I want you to meet, this is Stephen," and we kind of hit it off. The Hollies were
playing a gig in Los Angeles in early '68 and Dave and Stephen were both there, and I
remember sitting with them both in the back of Stephen's Bentley while they made plans to
steal me from the Hollies.
I think one thing we have recognized is our own failures and frailties
as human beings and instinctively we know when someone needs to talk and needs a friend. I
remember one particular day, I was feeling pretty down and my wife Susan was very sick,
and Stephen made this entire lamb dinner and brought it over to my house, and said,
"Listen, the last thing you need to worry about is dinner"; he had brought
cutlery and plates and everything. We're like family, but we don't hang out together all
the time like buddies or anything. We've found it's not healthy to spend all our time with
each other professionally. We like to have our own lives.
Over the years we've changed, and what we've learned to do in the last
year is strip away everything that isn't important, like the Eskimo sculptor who when
asked "How do you make a rock look like a walrus?" answers "You just take
the rock and cut away everything that doesn't look like a walrus." We've done the
same, and on stage we've just left naked songs to exist on their own, without lights and
all that stuff. The most important thing in our relationship is the music. No question.
We've been sidetracked by people going on about how we fight and all that stuff. But it's
meaningless the important thing is the music. Like Stephen says, it's the testimony to our
friendship, patience and prudence.
HOW WE MET