Arguably the first, most successful, influential—and
combustible—American rock supergroup, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, surpassed even the expectations raised by their
experiences in their prior bands, with their self-titled LP released at the end
of May 1969.
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash—refugees
from, respectively, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies—brought
complementary strengths that meshed beautifully in these 10 songs that
immediately became staples of AM and FM radio: social commentary and moody
introspective pieces (Crosby), broad-ranging musical skills and a feel for
country-music textures (Stills) and melodic pop (Nash).
The Atlantic Records
release included two Top 40 singles, “Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue
Eyes”—“a definite game changer,” Nash would remember 40 years later.
The group formed and signed with Atlantic for
creative, personal and legal reasons. Crosby had been kicked out of The Byrds
because of his increasing wish to write songs (which, he had come to see, was
where the real money from music came
from) and his difficulty in getting along with the other bandmates. Columbia
Records head Clive Davis gladly gave him his freedom, figuring his days as a
commercial force, outside the Byrds, were over. Crosby urged his new friend,
Nash, to leave his British group, The Hollies, which had rejected his songs.
Following the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, Stills
was still on the Atlantic label. With Crosby, in effect, a free agent and able
to join him, that left only Nash at large. That problem was solved when
Atlantic, in effect, traded Stills’ former bandmate, Richie Furay (who had
moved on to the country-rock group Poco) to Columbia to effect Nash’s release
at that label from the Hollies.
In order to make sure that future incarnations of
the band could tour if a member departed, the new trio decided to use their
surnames to christen the new entity. But what would be the order of the names?
In an early hint at the later ego problems that would roil their relationships,
Stills wanted his name first. He
seemed to have a fair claim to it, as their label was his original one and, as
the group member most musically versatile (he would play every instrument on
their debut LP except drums), he was the dominant studio presence. But he was
outvoted 2-1 when Crosby cheerfully went along with Nash’s insistence that
“Crosby, Stills, and Nash” rolled off the tongue easiest.
That hurdle was surmounted, as everything else soon
appeared to be in these early halcyon days of the group. Much of it happened
through consumption of mind-altering substances. During business meetings,
Crosby would urge his new friends to smoke highly potent weed “so we’re all on
the same page.” (Additionally, their growing penchant for cocaine would earn
them an industry nickname: the Frozen Noses.)
Toward the end of the recording sessions, Phil
Spector came in with his dark, wordless, deeply weird presence. But
really, who needed the creator of the Wall of Sound when Crosby and Nash could
so easily find another studio obsessive who could drive bandmates as crazy as
himself?
Stills would occupy within the group the same slot
later held by Lindsay Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac: a guitar master and
production wizard with a mile-wide perfectionist streak—and whose own tortured
love affair would find similar memorable expression on vinyl. In Buckingham’s
case, it was with the 3½-minute “Go Your Own Way”; for Stills, it was with the
seven-minute “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
The latter tune, the most jagged of love songs,
inspired by Judy Collins, ranged widely in tone and lyrical content, yet was
held magically together by songwriter Stills’ deft guitar textures in the
instrumental bridges, as well as by the seamless vocal harmonies that would
become one of the group’s hallmarks. The average listener wouldn’t notice the
mood shifts from self-accusation (“It's getting to the point where I'm no fun
anymore”) to expressions of love (“I am yours, you are mine”) to bewailing the
needless frustrations created by a love (“Please be gone I'm tired of you”).
The voice could be blunt and in your face (“You make it hard”) to poetic (“Lacy
lilting lady/Losing love lamenting”). (Indeed, in the case of those last lines,
an elementary school English teacher of mine cited it as an example of
alliteration.)
It took close to forever for just that one song to
come together. After 10 hours, when the tapes were played back, Stills wasn’t
sure they’d gotten it. The trio went back in for another 10 hours, despite
Nash’s insistence that they’d already killed it. At the end of the 20 hours,
Stills agreed: the original was best.
It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him.
At other times, he rescued what seemed hopelessly
mixed-up. Case in point: “Long Time Gone,” Crosby’s outraged reaction to the
assassination of Robert Kennedy. The
group had been floundering when Stills told Crosby and Nash to “get a burger
and go home” and let him at it. The next day, upon their return, Stills had come
up with an arrangement that worked beautifully.
Crosby had an unusual--potentially deadly--method of measuring their studio progress, according to Nash's 2013 memoir Wild Tales: cutting notches in the desk next to the studio board. At one point, a teenager burst into the room and, when Crosby pointed the knife at him, grabbed it out of his hand, saying it was his knife. When Nash wondered aloud about it, Crosby smiled: "Aw, that's just my friend Jackson Browne."
Throughout, the group achieved what they had aimed
for at the beginning: magical harmonies that recalled the Everly Brothers.
Essential in this process was Crosby. Art Garfunkel (who knows a bit about such
things) recalled it in an interview for “Croz’s” autobiography, Long Time Gone: “The middle man does the stuff that makes the chord work,
but you never notice it. David can be right in front of your eyes in a sort of
velvety way and you’ll never notice him.”
Unfortunately, what did get noticed about Crosby—exacerbated, no doubt, by his rampant
drug use—was his brash, arrogant manner. “David was obnoxious,
loud, demanding, thoughtless, full of himself,” recalled the group’s former
manager (and future entertainment industry mogul), David Geffen. (That
impression undoubtedly became lasting because Geffen was busted at an airport
for carrying pot cross-country at the insistence of Crosby—who then had the nerve
to scream at him when he showed up for their meeting without it.)
The LP Crosby,
Stills and Nash sold two million copies in 1969 alone, and has been named one of Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The addition of Neil
Young later that year—and the resulting Déjà Vu album—pushed them to even greater commercial and artistic heights, paving the way for the Southern California rock of Joni Mitchell (lover, successively, of Crosby and Nash), Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, the Eagles, Dan Fogelberg and Warren Zevon. But,
if three large, often drug-fueled egos were bad enough, four represented a recipe
for an explosion. First went the innocence, then the camaraderie. They had it all, then were lucky to make it out with
their lives. The music was incredible, but even with the occasional get-together over the years, the pity was that there wasn't more of it.
