Wild Tales (23 page)

One morning in March, while we were still working on the first CSN album, Joan and I went to breakfast at Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard. We’d parked the car down the street, and on the way back we passed a small antiques store that drew our attention. In the window was a vase that took her fancy, clear glass with little enamel flowers on it. Joan rarely bought anything for herself. It just wasn’t her style to blow money on something frivolous, but this time I suggested she treat herself. “Go on,” I said. “How much can it be? It’s not Gallé or Steuben, it can’t cost thousands of dollars.” In fact, it was pretty cheap, between eighty and a hundred dollars, so Joan bought it and took it home.

It was one of those gray cloudy days in Los Angeles that foreshadows the spring. When we got back and put our stuff down, I said, “I’ll light a fire”—she had an open fireplace with a stash of wood in the back—“why don’t you put some flowers in that vase you just bought. It’ll look beautiful. It’s kind of a bleak day. It’ll bring some more color into the room.” Then I stopped. I thought: Whoa! That’s a delicious moment. How many couples have been there: You light a fire, I’ll cook dinner. I thought that in the ordinariness of the moment there might be a profoundly simple statement. So Joni went out into the garden to gather ferns and leaves and a couple flowers to put in the vase. That meant she wasn’t at the piano—but I was! And within the hour, the song “Our House” was finished.

I turned the second verse—
Come to me and rest your head for just five minutes, everything is done
—from an English phrase that signals the dishes are washed, the washing’s been taken in, the chores are done. It was that simple. We all have a song—the first time you ever kissed someone, the first time you got laid in the back of a car—so the instant you hear it, it takes you
right back
to the moment in a very real way, the same way that a smell or taste reminds you of someone. I think that’s why “Our House” was such a popular song, because we’ve all been there, all felt that tug. And the refrain summed up exactly where I was at.

M
IDWAY THROUGH THE
sessions, we realized it was time to start thinking about an album cover. I’d known
Henry Diltz since 1967, when he photographed the Hollies in New York City, so we enlisted him to take his best shot. Not some slick paste-up job or psychedelic mumbo jumbo. We wanted him to capture us in a natural setting, to convey the intimacy of the group and the music we’d made. On a recent walk through the neighborhood with Henry, we’d spotted an abandoned house on the corner of Palm Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard that had exactly the right feel. It was a funky joint with a beat-up old couch out front. This was promising. He rounded up the guys and we sat on the couch. Easy as that; everyone happy. When we got the proof sheets back the next day, one image was obviously
the
shot. Only problem was, we were sitting out of order: Nash, Stills & Crosby. So we went back there the next
day to reshoot the picture … and the house was gone. It had been bulldozed into the back lot. Screw it, we decided to use the picture anyway. So Crosby’s name was above my head and a lot of people wound up thinking I was Croz.

When CSN got back to the studio, there wasn’t a whole lot left to do on the album, so we relaxed our no-visitors policy a little. One night, just after we’d recorded the “Suite,” Ahmet brought
Phil Spector in to hear us. Very spooky guy, didn’t say a word to anyone, but his eyes darted everywhere, observing everything, taking it all in. Another night, Ahmet came in with Garth Hudson, who loved what we were doing. He definitely picked up on the vibe in that place. Recording with David and Stephen had such a different feel. Even though I’d enjoyed making records with the Hollies, we’d done it for so long that it had lost its excitement. With Stephen and David it was a brand-new sound, with songs that meant something, songs we thought could change people’s lives, songs that could break hearts, get people thinking about shit, such as “Long Time Gone.” David had written it the night
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. He was too disturbed, couldn’t sleep, anguished by the senseless tragedy, and scribbled throughout the early hours of dawn.

As a lyric, “Long Time Gone” rolled right off the tongue, but our tongues were tied when it came time to record it. We tried it over and over and couldn’t get the track. You know what
the track
is when you hear it, but it wasn’t happening for us. Who knows why. We’d worked all night on it, never coming close to anything that satisfied. Frustration started to cloud our objectivity. About three
o’clock in the morning, Stephen said, “Hey, why don’t you guys get a burger and go home?” So we did … no use beating a dead horse.

When we came back the next day, Stephen said to David, “Want to hear your song, man?”

In the hours after Croz and I had left the studio, he, with
Dallas Taylor on drums, had created the entire track. It had an incredible arrangement—dark, moody, ethereal, sonically beautiful. There was space in it, a lot of space for David to sing his ass off, space for the vocals to come in on the choruses. The track was
right there
, it spoke for itself. And Stephen earned a new nickname: Captain Manyhands.

It was easier with “Lady of the Island.” That was a three-track record on an eight-track tape that we got on one take. Me singing and playing guitar, with Crosby sitting right next to me, blending in that beautiful cellolike fugue. We also got a gorgeous take of
“Guinevere,” which is a motherfucker to sing. Years later, it was catnip for a cat like
Miles Davis. He was working on
Bitches Brew
at the time and bumped into Crosby in the Village. “Hey Dave,” he said, “I recorded that tune of yours, ‘Guinevere.’ Want to hear it?” Miles had his arm around a tall leggy blonde he wanted to screw, so all three of them went back to his apartment to hear “Guinevere.” Miles put on the song, a twenty-minute version that riffed in myriad cosmic directions, and went into the bedroom with the blonde, leaving David there to smoke it and listen to the track. A half hour later, Miles emerged from the bedroom rendezvous. “So, Dave, what do you think?” Crosby threw him one of his trademark glares. “Well, Miles, you can use the tune, but you have to take my name off of it.” Miles was crestfallen. “You don’t like it?” he asked. Crosby refused to temper his opinion, even for royalty like Miles Davis. “No, man—no. I don’t like it at all.”

About ten years later, I was at an after-party event for the Grammys at Mr. Chow in LA and saw Miles come in with Cicely Tyson. He caught my eye and started waving insistently at me. I looked over my shoulder, certain he must be gesturing to somebody else.
“No, no, c’mere, man,” he insisted. When I got within earshot, he leaned close and asked in his low, gravelly voice, “Crosby still pissed at me?”

I said, “You mean about ‘Guinevere’?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “He still pissed?”

“I don’t think so, Miles. He was either too high or he wasn’t in the right mood to hear your take on it. He probably expected the chords to be the same as his, but I don’t think he’s pissed at you one bit.”

Miles pondered this with Socratic intensity. “Okay. Tell David hello. Tell him I hope he’s not still pissed.”

In any case, we put the finishing touches on the album, delivered it to Ahmet at the beginning of April, and reveled in his reaction to it, which was sincere and emotional. He was genuinely delighted, even a bit overwhelmed. He recognized right away that we had made a stunning piece of music. It was
exactly
the album we wanted to make, no second guesses, no regrets.
We
knew! Everything we wanted to say was on that tape. And we were pretty full of ourselves for pulling it off.

Over the next couple weeks, we took our acoustic guitars everywhere, went to visit friends, our musical peers, and sang the entire album live for them, start to finish. We covered the entire Laurel Canyon circuit:
Cass Elliot, Peter
Tork, Peter Fonda,
Elliot Roberts,
Paul Rothchild, Jennifer Warnes, Barry McGuire, they all got a private performance. We gave them what we called an ear fuck: put one of them in the middle of us and sang in their ear, which never failed to blow their minds because the music was great, it was something brand-new. The feedback we got was pretty spectacular. They were stunned at how beautiful we sounded. So we knew—we knew we had something special.

The weight was off our shoulders, but I missed the studio. It was, in many ways, where I felt most at home. So for a few weeks I went to observe at A&M while Joan finished work on
Clouds.
After one session with Paul Rothchild, she too decided that she didn’t
need a producer. Sound familiar? History may not repeat itself, but it does echo. It was fun watching her do her thing without having to worry about the critical consequences. Joan was a happy girl in the studio, and extremely capable. She knew exactly what to do, how she wanted to sound. There was always a fully formed arrangement in her head, a perfect structure for each song, a suitable accompaniment, when other voices should come in—which were all hers, of course—and how to shape each song so that its essence was preserved. Recording is, for the most part, a solitary endeavor, and Joan enjoyed that. She had the same attitude as CSN: “Stay out of my way, I know what I’m doing.” And for Joni, it never failed to pay off.

On April 11, 1969, David, Stephen, and I found ourselves in New York, at
David Geffen’s apartment on Central Park West, ready to review the acetate of our first album. Tommy Dowd had remastered it from a fifteen-inch EQ’ed copy. We hadn’t given Atlantic the master two-track tapes, because we didn’t trust record companies, even with Ahmet involved, to take care of something so precious. And lucky thing, because Dowd had remastered the entire album, which pissed us off righteously. Suddenly, Tom’s fingerprints were all over our record, way too much bass on “Suite,” for instance. It sounded slicker, different from what we’d struggled so hard to do. Bottom line was that it wasn’t what we delivered, and that alone—didn’t matter who did it, could have been Saint Spector himself—was enough to piss us off. We wanted it to represent us, not what Atlantic thought we should be. Croz threatened to break Tommy’s legs if he ever did anything like that again, and we remastered it ourselves at Atlantic Studios.

Afterward, we all went our separate ways. Stephen hightailed it to England for a music special of blues performances, filmed for broadcast and featuring Buddy Miles,
Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Buddy Guy. A music junkie of the first order, Stills couldn’t tear himself away from the scene. David and Christine Hinton made a beeline for Fort Lauderdale, where his boat, the
Mayan
, was anchored.
The
Mayan
was a two-masted Alden schooner built in 1947 that Croz had bought in 1967 with $22,500 borrowed from
Peter Tork. It was where Croz went when he wanted incredible peace, where he could be the master of his own destiny. And I joined Joni for a few of her concerts, at the Philadelphia Academy of Music and the Fillmore East in New York.

On April 30, 1969, we flew to Nashville for Joni and
Bob Dylan’s appearance on
The Johnny Cash Show
on ABC-TV. The night before the show was taped, Johnny and June had a dinner at their house outside the city for every performer on the bill. Just so happened that Bob was a guest. He’d had his motorcycle accident and hadn’t been seen or heard in public for over a year. He was in town, making
Nashville Skyline
, so this was a very big deal.

The dinner was the kind of event I wasn’t used to. It was fancy, affluent, gorgeous plates, gold cutlery, maids and waiters scurrying around. At one point in the evening, Johnny rose, picked up a gold knife, and tapped it against a glass to get everyone’s attention.

“Here at the Cash house we have a tradition that you have to sing for your supper,” he said in that lush, gravelly growl. “So—there are some guitars. Let’s go.”

Nobody moved.

Bob was sitting on the stairs with Sara, and both of them looked uncomfortable. Mickey Newbury, a famous Nashville songwriter, was there; so was Kris Kristofferson, and of course, Joni and me. Everyone stared at those guitars as if they were radioactive. My confidence level was ridiculously high as a result of our recent studio hijinks, so I thought, Fuck it—I’ll get up.

Of course, nobody there knew who Crosby, Stills & Nash were. I doubt anyone knew who I was or that I’d been with the Hollies. I was merely Joan’s boyfriend, along for the ride. So I grabbed a guitar, sat on the stool, and whipped off a version of “Marrakesh Express.”
All abooooard
 … I hit the last chord, knew I’d killed it, put the guitar back on the stand … and walked right into a standing lamp that went crashing to the floor.

That broke the ice! Everyone thought it was funny as shit. So, promptly, I think Kris got up and sang “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Joni played
“Both Sides Now,” and even Bob got up and did “Lay, Lady, Lay,” “Don’t Think Twice,” and a few other songs. His performance that night was overwhelming. Everyone was in tears. This was
Bob Dylan
, for God’s sake. No one had known if he’d ever sing again. It was an incredible moment, especially for me. I revered Bob, but I was pretty confident, too. The
Crosby, Stills & Nash
album was about to be released, and I knew how special it was, even in front of this crowd. “You don’t know it now, but you just wait,” I thought. Yeah, pretty confident—and I had the girl of my dreams with me. What an incredible moment in my life.