Wild Tales (28 page)

In
“I Used to Be a King,” King Midas (in reverse) was the king I used to be, where everything he touches is supposed to turn to gold but doesn’t. Yeah, I know, it’s somewhat self-pitying, but that’s where I was at. At least three songs came out of the breakup blues.

There was really no place for me to settle in at that point. During the
Déjà Vu
sessions I’d lived variously at the Chateau Marmont and the Caravan Lodge Motel, and before that at Joni’s in Laurel Canyon. A battalion of workers overseen by
Leo Makota and
Harry Harris were still in the throes of tearing my house in the Haight apart. But with few viable options, I moved in, living in a sleeping bag on one of the floors. I also needed wheels, a way to get around. The whole time I was with Joan, I never had a car. She was my full-time ride in LA. So Croz and I went to a Mercedes showroom in San Francisco, where I had my eye on a posh new model, the 6.3 liter.

David walked around a blue one on display while I looked over an identical car in maroon. Two scruffy long-haired hippies ogling a gleaming Mercedes—you gotta know the salesman wasn’t particularly thrilled. The vibe I was getting from him was: Don’t even
touch
that fucking car. So I walked right over to this pencil dick and said, “I think my friend is buying the blue one—and you can wrap this baby up for me right now.”

David was feeling better; he was ready to rock. The music and the
Mayan
had literally saved his life. I wanted to rush right into the studio and start cutting a Crosby-Nash album. It’s not that we decided we could do without Neil and Stephen. From the get-go, we designed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to be a mothership, where we could all come together, make music that would keep the ship afloat, and then branch out and play with anyone we wanted. To this day, we operate much the same way. So we knew that we didn’t have to ask Stephen and Neil if we could make a record. Besides, Stephen was in England recording a solo album, and Neil was recording tracks for
After the Gold Rush.
Frankly, I was glad the two of them weren’t around. I’d just been through a couple of weeks of binge drinking and a seven-week sail with David. I didn’t care
much about Stephen and Neil at that point. Croz and I were both in great shape, tan and trim, clear-eyed, all those good things. We were closer than ever. We had the songs, as well as the love and trust of each other. Working together just made good sense.

Before we could get started, however,
Déjà Vu
was released on March 23, 1970, although “released” is a bit of an understatement. It exploded out of the box, with two million advance orders. Promoters immediately jumped on the CSNY bandwagon. A tour was proposed that was every bit as immense as the market for the LP seemed to be. We’d be performing at arenas, with huge advances. And we’d be self-contained, not leaving anything to chance, which meant carrying our own PA system, speakers, monitors, microphones, the works. It was ambitious as hell, and wildly lucrative. All four of us were ready to rock.

Stephen came back from England, ostensibly to sing on
After the Gold Rush
, but also to edge back into the fold. Living abroad had done a real number on him. He’d jammed with
Jimi Hendrix and
Eric Clapton. He’d played on Ringo’s single “It Don’t Come Easy.” And he’d done twenty-five sessions in twenty-seven days, working on his own album, on which he played an incredible variety of instruments. So his ego was the size of Uranus—and, no, the pun is not unintentional. He was also pushing the limits of cocaine madness.

Driving to rehearsal one afternoon, he was distracted by the sight of a cop in his rearview mirror and veered into a parked car, fracturing his wrist. So, suddenly, the tour was on hiatus while Stephen took most of April off to recuperate in Hawaii.

Then, in May, a real-life drama threw us a wild curve. I can’t remember where I was when I first heard about the students shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio, but I know damn well where Neil and David were. They’d been hanging out together in a cabin in Pescadero, in Northern California, that was owned by
Steve Cohen, the guy who did our lights. The two of them went out for a drive through Butano Canyon, smoking a fat one and grooving
on the redwood trees. In the meantime, Steve Cohen had been to the market for groceries and came back waving a magazine with
John Filo’s legendary image of the girl kneeling over the body of a dead fellow student. Croz looked at it with mounting dread before handing the magazine to Neil, who grabbed a guitar, walked out into the woods, and came back a half hour later with a stunning new song, “Ohio.” He didn’t modify or polish it. The final song was what came right out of him. Croz immediately called me and said, “We need to be in the studio right now.”

“What is this all about?” I asked him.

“It’s a song we’ve got to cut immediately,” he insisted. “Round up the guys and book us into Record Plant. Neil and I will get down there right away.”

The next night CSNY were in Studio Three, with
Bill Halverson poised at the controls. We cut “Ohio” very quickly but also needed something appropriate for the B-side. Eventually, we decided on “Find the Cost of Freedom.” Recording it was an amazing moment in our career. We sat on four chairs facing each other in a square, doubled the voices, and had a master track finished in less than a half hour.

Coincidentally,
Ahmet Ertegun happened to be in Los Angeles. He was in the studio that night right after we’d finished recording, and understood what we were doing as soon as he heard playback.

“Listen, man, we want it out now,” we told him. “This is too big a deal. The country has started shooting its own children. Things have spun out of control.”

“But you’ve got ‘Teach Your Children’ going to number one,” he said.

“Pull it!” I told him.

He was incredulous. “Graham, you’re going to have a
number one hit
!”

“I don’t care. Pull it.”

Very few record guys would have honored that request. But Ahmet was an extraordinary cat. He took the tape with him, caught
the red-eye back to New York, and personally pushed it through the machinery, getting it out in two weeks’ time. The single went out with a cover of the Bill of Rights (an unused mockup had four bullet holes through it).

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.”

N
OR 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.