Fire and Rain (36 page)

For all the disorder onstage and off, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young appeared untouchable as the tour carried on. By the weekend of July 4, two of their singles were on the radio: “Teach Your Children” and, despite periodic problems with airplay over its content, “Ohio.” After New York came shows at arenas in Philadelphia, Detroit, Portland (Oregon), Oakland, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Flying from city to city on commercial airlines, they pushed whatever envelope was available. Crosby would walk into airports smoking a joint, but the entourage of handlers, bandmates, road crew, and women around him made it hard for officials to determine the source of the odor. Crosby would eventually ditch the stash, but only when he arrived at the gate.

Yet just as the country seemed to be blowing a fuse as the summer dragged on, so did its leading rock and roll band. Between the ongoing flow of coke and pot, Crosby and Stills frequently butted heads on everything from repertoire to preferred substances. Backstage, Stone asked Samuels if the bass player, still adjusting to rock and roll lunacy, was okay; after all, he was so subdued. “I didn't worry if rock and roll guys were squabbling,” Samuels recalled. “It didn't bother me because I was so accustomed to being without.” Still, he told Stone he'd been taking acid every night to calm his nerves.

Even Crosby wasn't always immune. “People do the damnedest tricks on my head, man,” Crosby told
Rolling Stone
's Ben Fong-Torres after a Hollywood waitress with false teeth offered him a blowjob if he gave her tickets to one of CSNY's shows. “Things happen to me every day and I can't handle it.”

The shows became symbolic of the band's internal schism. During the acoustic sets, Crosby, Nash, and Young would often huddle together in one combination or another to play one of their songs, while Stills' solo spot was always companionless. (The exception was “Love the One You're With,” making its debut before Stills' recording of it had been completed; the audiences always chuckled along appreciatively when Nash introduced the title.) “There was David, Graham, and Neil, and then me—it was
Sybil
on wheels,” Stills said, referencing the movie starring Sally Field as a woman who suffers from extreme multiple-personality disorder. At the rescheduled Chicago show, the critic from the
Chicago Tribune
noted Stills appeared to be “brooding” by the side of the stage.

As Nash feared, the group-therapy session in Los Angeles in May had only been a temporary fix. “We thought Stephen might use the opportunity to pull himself together a little more,” Nash recalled. “And it appeared at first that he did. So we were willing to give it another shot. But it was obvious he hadn't changed at all.” Stills saw it differently. As with
Déjà vu
sessions, he felt the problem lay in the music. He found
the band sloppy, the shows drifting toward what he called “Grateful Dead bedlam.” Stills had no interest in the type of free-form, jazz-influenced improvisational music Crosby loved. “It never had that craftsmanship quality,” Stills recalled of the stage shows that summer. “It was like the Beatles'
Let It Be
: ‘Let's stop doing that creative stuff in the studio and just play as a band.' But everybody was so mad at each other that they couldn't. You could feel this angst. Dealing with David and Graham became like dealing with the Irish; they didn't remember anything but the grudges.” Onstage, Stills seemed to connect most with Samuels. “Me and Stephen had a different kind of bond,” Samuels recalled. “We knew about playing with each other. A lot of those [Crosby, Nash and Young] songs, they're so sleepy. They weren't good performing songs.”

The shows retained their share of raggedness. Nash's “Pre-Road Downs,” the opener of the electric set, chugged along harder than the studio version, but could also be woozy, and the harmonies on other songs could be spotty. Hired to fly to New York and Chicago and tape the sets for a live album, engineer Bill Halverson understood part of the reason why: They'd often look at each other while singing, their mouths wandering away from the microphones in the process. Stills himself sang “Carry On” off-mic one night. From behind his drums, Barbata would sometimes hear front-row audience members complaining the band didn't sound like their records.

The contretemps between Stills and Young spilled out during jams on “Carry On” and “Southern Man” that each stretched out to close to fifteen minutes a night. (“Another song that's bound to get us in trouble,” Crosby announced one night before “Southern Man,” which again caught a moment: That summer, Southern senators strongly resisted an extension of the Voting Rights Act that made it easier for blacks and those eighteen and over to vote.) Rarely seeing each other when not in the arenas, Stills and Young would finally engage in conversation onstage,
staring each other down with their instruments, slinging notes back and forth like tennis players.

Both men knew the spectacle benefit of these moments. “It was
entertaining,
” Stills said. “Were John Coltrane and Miles Davis dueling? No. We'd go off and come back to the original theme. We'd try to imitate what the other guy was playing. It worked out pretty well.” (“It's what the fans dug,” recalled
Rolling Stone
writer Ben Fong-Forres, who saw a number of CSNY shows that period. “They knew the entertainment value of that.”) When the two men were getting along, their toand-fros had a playful, fluid quality. When they weren't, the mood was different: Young would come out of nowhere with a bee-sting solo and Stills would respond with a rushed barrage of notes, as if they were having a contentious argument with their instruments. Stills felt they were goaded into the exchanges by their business associates: “‘He's a better guitar player!' It was destructive. I'd say, ‘Neil, are we doing that or not?' And he'd say, ‘No, we're just trading off.'”

Whether the exchanges were intentionally theatrical or not, CSNY had no choice but to hold it together and knew it. At the Fillmore, one particularly fervent audience during their weeklong run wouldn't let them leave without playing an additional encore. Backstage, they decided to resurrect “Woodstock.” The song was never easy to pull off live; recreating the dense, multitracked harmonies of the studio version required a pinpoint accuracy they rarely managed over the din of electric guitars and drums (and inefficient stage monitors). Preparing to play the number again, Nash introduced it as “a song we haven't done for a long, long time.” By then, the relatively joyous months of 1969—when a press release trumpeted them as the group “that brought happiness and laughter back to rock & roll”—seemed to reflect another lifetime.

“Hey, Crosby, someone made this for you,” Nash said, sticking his head
into his bandmate's Minneapolis hotel room on the afternoon of July 9. A bare-chested Crosby was lying in bed, puffing on a joint while chatting on the phone with Dylan. Several girls swirled around. Like Stills, Crosby was reveling in the applause and stature he'd felt were too long in coming. For Stills, success compensated for barely knowing his mother while growing up; for Crosby, fame and its rewards made up for the devastation of Hinton's loss. As Stone recalled, “David drowned his sorrows in some of the most beautiful women I've ever seen.”

Nash tossed Crosby his gift: a pillow in the shape of a pistol, made from an American flag. Crosby chuckled and stuck it behind his back while he continued talking on the phone. Henry Diltz, who'd arrived in Minneapolis the day before, pulled out his ever-present camera and Crosby, in a playful mood, inhaled a joint and put the pillow gun against his right temple.

Crosby was merely being playful, but the gesture also bespoke a prevalent feeling about the tour by the time the band flew into Minneapolis for its final show. Diltz himself had been waiting over a month to fly out from Los Angeles to shoot the band. When the tour had resumed in Boston, he was poised to leave with them to snap on-the-road shots for a collection of sheet music. But the constant unrest kept delaying his departure. “I am once again in limbo over this tour,” he wrote in his journal on May 26.

Diltz finally received word to fly out to Minneapolis and, upon his arrival, sensed a mixture of weariness and unease. “They had things between them, feelings good and bad,” he recalled. “There was a little apprehension, a little unfriendliness. There were various energies between people.” Before the show at the fourteen-thousand-seat Met Arena that had originally been set for May 2, everyone congregated in Roberts' room for an end-of-tour banquet with special guests like Young's irascible mother, Rassy, and Charles John Quarto. Before the show at the arena, CSNY gathered in a backstage bathroom and shared a joint. Starting
with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” they played their standard set with few hitches. By then, there was no point in scratching any open wounds onstage; they were almost done.

When the show finished, all of them, along with crew and management, took over a room at the Radisson Hotel for a late-night poker game. They were newly wealthy men and unafraid to show it; over the course of the night, hundreds of dollars were tossed onto the table. Everybody was having a relaxed time until someone began banging on the door. Stone went over, pulled it open, and was face-to-face with a persistent fan. Stone told him to go away; the band needed privacy. He closed the door and returned to the table.

Another knock. Again, the same fan; again, the same do-not-disturb request. Stone slammed the door and returned to the game. Finally, a third knock. This time, Stone didn't want a conversation. Unlatching the door, he threw a punch and slammed it shut. He didn't even look to see how much damage he may have caused.

Everyone should have been aghast. Instead, they all laughed, a collective release after a particularly bumpy year. “Tremendous relief, relief beyond nothing you could imagine,” recalled Stone. They'd finished the tour and wrapped up their obligations to management, promoters, and themselves. “We'd completed something without it going off the rails,” recalled Nash. Yet even Nash knew how perilously close they'd come to doing just that.

CHAPTER 12

“Steve Stills got busted,” James Taylor said, squatting by the side of Highway 101 outside Tucumcari, in northeast New Mexico, as
Rolling Stone
reporter Michael Goodwin looked on.

“Oh, no,” said a startled Laurie Bird, whose brown shag framed a prematurely wise face. “Was it for cocaine?”

“Well, they
found
cocaine,” Taylor replied with laconic terseness.

After several postponements,
Two-Lane Blacktop
, Taylor's feature-film debut, finally began shooting in and around Los Angeles the first week of August. The delays were rooted in casting and cash. Director Monte Hellman had been intrigued by the idea of recruiting non-actors; during the same time he auditioned Taylor, he also took a meeting with another, even manlier singer-songwriter, a Rhodes scholar named Kris Kristofferson. (Kristofferson and Taylor had both performed afternoon sets at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival, and Kristofferson recognized another hunky songwriting talent when he saw one.) Hellman was still considering full-time actors as well, like James Caan, a veteran of TV dramas and roles in Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman movies. In the end, he wanted Sam Shepard, a young East Village playwright with a dash of acting experience on his résumé. But when it looked as if his first son would be born during shooting, Shepard backed out. Hellman settled for his second choice—Taylor—but further delays ensued when the original backers bailed out. Hellman and his producer, Michael Laughlin, scrambled to find a new home for their project—eventually winding up with Universal—but as a result, the filming schedule was delayed once more.

The caravan of cast and crew had just arrived in the Albuquerque area when the Stills news broke. On August 14, local paramedics had raced to a hotel in La Jolla, California, after someone reported the sight of what looked like a sick guest crawling around a hallway. When the fire and police departments showed up, they found the man lying on his bed, seemingly having a seizure and talking incoherently. In the room next door was a naked woman; strewn about the suite were cocaine and barbiturates. Stills was promptly arrested. In the middle of the night, he called management assistant Ron Stone at home. Deciding he didn't want to drive three hours down to La Jolla—and thinking that perhaps his client would learn a thing or two after a night in jail—Stone decided not to post bail. Stills spent the night in a cell and was bailed out by Stone the next morning on a $2,500 bond. “I took some pills, got blown away, and blew my cool, and it ended up like I was ODing on pills,” Stills recounted later to
Circus
magazine writer Michael Watts. “ . . . I thought one of the people didn't have their key to the room and the couple across the hall were standing there and went, ‘Aaargh!' I don't remember anything else until the lights went on in the room and it was full of policemen.”