Fire and Rain (35 page)

Although CSNY were ostensibly touring to support
Déjà vu
, they rarely played songs from it. Only “Teach Your Children” was a regular part of the acoustic set, and “Carry On” in the electric portion. “You gotta keep doing new things all the time,” Crosby—generally sporting the fringe jacket with tassels that was his trademark—told the Fillmore audience one evening. As if they were already moving on—or didn't want to remind themselves of what went into the making of
Déjà Vu
—they instead debuted, night after night, a slew of new or as yet unrecorded songs to reflect their tremendous creative waterfall. Nash broke out “Right Between the Eyes,” about an affair he'd had on Long Island during the band's early days. Young introduced “Don't Let It Bring You Down,” written in London during the first CSNY show and recently cut without them for the album he'd begun in Los Angeles. Stills played “Love the One You're With” in the acoustic set and a ballad about what he saw as his new maturity, “As I Come of Age,” during the electric. Even though audiences never once heard “Wooden Ships,” “Marrakesh Express,” or “Helpless,” they nonetheless stomped and screamed themselves nuts every night.

During the first soundcheck in the empty theater, immediately after the rug incident, another new song—“Ohio”—made its New York stage premiere. When the band finished rehearsing it that afternoon, the theater's staff gathered around Young, thanking him for writing it and extolling, “Right on!” Young accepted their praise and told them why he was moved to write the song.

Before it was performed each night, the band would introduce it as “an important song” (Nash) or “sort of a downer” (Young). On cue, the Fillmore staff would all emerge from their offices to watch CSNY blast out a song that captured the uncertainty and anger of the moment. Young would begin playing the song's doomy opening nine notes, Stills joined in, and off they went. By the end—Stills jabbing away, Barbata keeping up the incessant drumbeat, and Crosby shouting out the “How many—how many more?”—the song served as both rage and release.

All week long in New York, emotions ran high onstage and off, like thermometer mercury unexpectedly rising and plummeting. Stills dedicated “49 Bye Byes” to “Clark and his mother”—Collins, who was in the audience—while Nash sang his newly written “Simple Man,” about his breakup with Mitchell, as Mitchell sat watching him in the theater. During the Fillmore nights and the remainder of the tour, Nash couldn't bring himself to play “Our House,” afraid he would burst into tears while singing a song about his now-finished life with Mitchell.

On the second night, June 3, Bob Dylan—who'd moved from Woodstock to nearby MacDougal Street—decided to see what everyone was talking about. Slipping into the Fillmore, he took a seat in the sound booth to avoid recognition.
²
Wanting to impress him, Stills played four songs during his segment, including “4 + 20” and a rare solo acoustic take on Buffalo Springfield's “Bluebird.” But those were two more songs than everyone had agreed upon. In the break before the electric second half, the band trudged quietly up the Fillmore's winding stairs to the small, funky dressing rooms on the upper floors. All four of them, along with Roberts, Barbata and Samuels, piled into one room and closed the door, and Nash began lacing into Stills: “Who do you think you are,
doing another song?” Crosby and Young stood with their heads down, silently supportive of Nash's tongue-lashing. Stills, holding a beer can, said nothing. To signify his sputtering rage, he kept squeezing the can until the foam spilled out over his right hand and onto the floor.

A terrified Barbata thought the band would dissolve then and there, before he'd played more than a handful of shows with them. After a few moments of awkward silence, the drummer finally said, “Hey, let's go play!” Roberts quickly piped in: “Yeah!” With that, everyone filed back out for the second, especially electric set. On their way to the stage, they had to step over Bill Graham and Ron Stone, tussling on the floor over the band's last-minute insistence on filming the shows for the documentary.

The volatility was never-ending. Exactly a week after Nash had castigated Stills, the band played the Spectrum in Philadelphia. One of the visitors to their individual Sheraton hotel rooms was Joel Bernstein, a newly graduated local high school student and nascent photographer who'd already shot Young and Joni Mitchell. Only eighteen, the effusive, affable Bernstein showed up at the Sheraton with a stack of prints he'd taken of the band at the Fillmore shows. In his room, Young selected one of Bernstein's shots, of him walking down the street in New York, to be the cover of his next album,
After the Gold Rush
.

Talking to Bernstein, Stills had an urgent question: “Hey, where can you play pool around here?” Bernstein mentioned his parents' house in nearby Elkins Park, just outside Philadelphia. To the teenager's shock, a limo carrying Stills and Nash appeared at the Bernsteins' three-story granite home after the show. Both hung out in Bernstein's bedroom—one of his photos of Mitchell hanging on the wall behind Nash—before all retreated to the basement to shoot pool and smoke and snort various substances. Hearing the noise, Bernstein's father rang down on the intercom: What was all the commotion?
It's just my friends from the concert
, Bernstein replied,
they came over to play pool, hope that's okay!
Still curious, Stanley Bernstein, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe, appeared,
introducing himself to his son's pool friends. Luckily for his son, he either didn't notice or recognize all the white powder left over on the pool table.

As dawn arrived and their respective highs still lingered, Charles John Quarto—a bearded, gentle-mannered poet whom Nash had met in New York and who was invited along for several stops on the tour—joined Stills, Nash, and Bernstein (and a small film crew hired to document the tour) as they strolled through a nearby park. “Stephen and I sat on this huge tree trunk,” remembered Quarto. “He sang and I recited for forty-five minutes. I remember Nash's face when he was looking at that. It was a beautiful thing.” After their Fillmore clash, Nash and Stills had again found common ground. That week,
Billboard
's review of one of the Fillmore sets appeared. The performance, the magazine wrote, “reversed any trend of concern and disappointment as they strummed and harmonized in a new maturity.” The magazine added they had a promising future, “should CSNY stay together long enough.”

Whether it was the Fillmore or any of the arenas CSNY would be hitting that summer, Ron Stone always found himself in the same place as soon as the last notes of “Find the Cost of Freedom,” the traditional show closer, faded. To collect the nightly earnings, Stone would march into the venue's office and begin tallying the receipts and expenditures with the promoter. Some evenings, the work was over in minutes; other times, when the promoter would present a list of his expenses and attempt to deduct them from the band's earnings, negotiations could last until dawn. Sometimes the promoter would have a few seedy thugs standing nearby. Stone quickly caught onto the game. “Leo, did you hear
this?”
he'd call out, a signal for Makota to walk into the room. As Stone
learned, the sight of the tall, burly Makota always made the tallying run a bit smoother on the band's end.

When all was done, Stone would leave with as much as $25,000 in cash—“like a drug deal every night,” he recalled—and stick the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket. If the shows piled up and he didn't have time to deposit the bills in a local bank, he'd simply pray no one knew he was walking around with about $100,000 in cash. Backstage one night, Crosby told Stone he looked pale and nervous. Stone said nothing: He didn't want Crosby to know he'd misplaced one of those overstuffed envelopes—which, to his relief, was soon recovered by a crew member.

That such large amounts of cash were floating around was just part of the changes in the economics of rock and roll. When Bill Graham gathered his staff around at the beginning of CSNY's Fillmore East run, he laid that topic on the line as well. “He'd talk about how the business was changing and how much of the money you'd have to give away to bands,” recalled Arkush. Graham saw in his own Fillmore office how the business of rock was transforming, with CSNY a telling example. At Woodstock the previous August, they'd been paid $10,000, $5,000 less than Janis Joplin and the Band. But with two top 10 albums under their belts, CSNY could command more, as their managers Elliot Roberts and David Geffen well knew. Thanks to their maneuvering, CSNY would now demand over double that amount a night—and, more importantly, an unheard-of 60 percent of the gate (the money earned after expenses were recouped) compared to less than half, as other acts received. Around the country, ticket prices for the tour ran as high as $6.50. In Minneapolis, an ad-hoc group threatened a boycott when tickets were advertised at $10 each. Yet none of those protests deterred fans from flocking to see the band.

CSNY weren't alone in demanding a larger bite of the grosses. “Artists could do the math,” recalled Kip Cohen, the Fillmore East's managing director. “If the gross was over $45,000, the act would get an extra
$1,000. They caught on very quickly.
Everybody
caught on very quickly, in a matter of months.” Manhattan promoter Ron Delsener complained in
Billboard
that he was having trouble signing bands for his Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park. Delsener was offering a flat $2,500 a show, good money a few years before but now considered petty change. In particular, he cited Simon and Garfunkel as one example of an act that “asked so much money that I cannot even approach them.”

During the first half of the year, American and world economies had bounced up and down; in the States, fears of a recession were taking hold. But the music business was generating plenty of cash, thanks to rock and roll. Firms like the William Morris Agency began hiring special booking agents to handle rock tours. In midsummer, Columbia head Clive Davis announced his label had had the best six months in its history—thanks in large part to Simon and Garfunkel—and predicted that total sales for 1970 would top those of 1969. (In the end, he was right: the figure wound up being $15 million.) A new era of consolidations was on the horizon: The year before, the Kinney Corporation, a former parking garage and cleaning-services company, had bought Warner Brothers and, in 1970, added Elektra to its stable. When those labels were merged with Atlantic, the all-powerful Warner Music Group was created.

Bill Graham sensed the financial power was shifting from promoters and their venues to the artists and their managers. To Fillmore employees, the crowds seemed increasingly too drugged up to notice anyway. Ushers would sometimes have to direct concertgoers to different seats by telling them that, no, their ticket was not blue but another color, which meant a different section.

In such an atmosphere, the Fillmore East was doomed. Acts who'd headlined there over the previous year, like the Doors and Led Zeppelin, had moved on to arenas. Graham couldn't match the money or even the amenities. At the Fillmore, backstage catering amounted to pizzas
or deli sandwiches that crew members would run out and buy; soda bottles were set up in ice-filled garbage cans.

In his office, an increasingly disillusioned Graham, with help from Cohen, began working on an open letter to his industry. In it, he would announce the two Fillmores were “fighting for their very existence.... Economics have taken the music from the clubs, ballrooms and concert halls to the larger coliseums and festivals.” (When the Fillmore opened in 1968, tickets were $3, $4, and $5; by 1970, the prices had increased by fifty cents, but only after much in-house debate.) Graham warned there were “not enough acts” to replace the ones who'd moved on to larger venues like Madison Square Garden and the Los Angeles Forum.

The finished letter ran as a full-page ad in the June 27 issue of
Billboard
. “It was a statement that had to be made, that the corporate mentality was coming in,” Cohen recalled. “People could smell something was happening and it was time to cash in. It was pretty clear that the culture was changing.” Graham and Cohen sat back and awaited reaction within the industry. Surely, someone other than them had to agree.