Wild Tales (41 page)

Everyone we knew was invited. My friend Lisa Law, one of the original Woodstock photographers, put me on the phone with Stevie Wonder, who was the first major artist to sign on to the show. Once Stevie said yes, I used him to seduce the next big act. I called the Eagles and said, “Hey, CSN and Stevie are going to do this. Are you in?” Then I called the next guy and said, “Stevie, the Eagles, and I want to …” Before long, the bill was filled with
Bob Dylan,
Joan Baez, Jackson, Tom Petty, Gary U.S. Bonds, Stevie Nicks, Nicolette Larson, Don Fogelberg, and Jesse Jackson, who brought Mohammad Ali.

I remember driving to the concert not really knowing whether we could pull this off. The Rose Bowl was an enormous place. But when I arrived and saw it packed with a hundred thousand people,
I had to control myself from bursting into tears. It was a spectacular event, an incredible afternoon and evening of nonstop music. And in the process, we raised a ton of money for a damn good cause.

I
LOVED THE
impact we were making, but at the time I felt as though I were being pulled in twenty directions. My involvement in the No Nukes
album and movie was grueling, really exhausting.
Rudy Records was taking off as an independent LA studio. And my second son, Will, was born on January 12, 1980, just as
Earth & Sky
was being shipped out to stores. I was really excited about this rec- ord. Just before it came out, I was full of optimism. In an interview with a writer, I said, “It’s light, it’s airy, it’s a little ominous in the darker areas. There’s hope in it. There are rainbows, good feelings.” It seemed like a natural step forward in my musical evolution.

Unfortunately, the press and general public didn’t share that outlook. The sales were soft, with no help from the record company’s lack of promotion. It just didn’t catch fire. The airwaves were humming with exciting music from the
Pretenders, the
Clash,
Bruce Springsteen, the
Police, Pink Floyd, and the
Wailers, and somehow I got lost in the crowd. My album was softer, more complicated, lyrically abstract. It was very personal—perhaps too personal. And a couple of tracks felt unduly tense, thanks in part to my relationship with David. None of those things were solely responsible, but together they conspired to dampen my prospects.

To make matters worse,
Rolling Stone
sought to pile it on. One of their so-called critics really laid into
Earth & Sky
, arranging certain lyrics out of context in a mock conversation that, on paper, made the songs seem fanciful and inane. As if that weren’t bad enough, he ended the review saying, “Even his best friends won’t tell him.”

The whole thing was sad, incomprehensible to me. The writer seemed intent on slagging off my work without any real understanding or appreciation of what he was listening to. It lacked insight and any kind of value for the reader. A trained monkey might
have brought more to the game. That kind of criticism is the worst kind of journalism, cruel, pointless—and it hurt. I’d put my heart into that record.

Stephen came to my defense in the press. “Nobody talks about a friend of mine like that,” he said. “It’s bullshit journalism. If that writer walked in here right now, I’d deck him.” Spoken like a pal.

Despite all of that, I had to get it up to promote the album. There was a two-month tour, mostly small theaters, just a trio, nice and laid-back to complement the songs. Leah Kunkel, Cass’s sister, opened for me. The only other participant was Joey the Goldfish, who swam in his bowl onstage throughout all forty-eight shows except the show in Canada, where thanks to immigration I replaced the real fish with a slice of carrot.

It was a very satisfying experience. I learned a lot about myself and about performing solo on that tour. You have to work awful hard to hold an audience’s attention, which meant developing an intimacy and a great set of songs. It was easy for me to deliver the new material from
Earth & Sky.
As I said, those songs were close to my heart and, in concert, you can bring something to them that might be missing on record. Plus, I had the trusty CSN catalogue to mix into the set.

After all was said and done, I spent some time in Hawaii, recuperating and planning my next move. Stephen happened to be vacationing nearby at the same time and, as destiny would have it—as destiny
always
has it—we found ourselves sharing the same stage, doing a benefit for JoAnn Yukimura, who was running for political office.

Stills & Nash: We’d never explored that permutation. For one reason or another, I’d always partnered with Croz. But just the two of us onstage made a powerful combo. Our voices combined beautifully. We rocked that place in a way that surprised even us. It was eye-opening, on so many fronts.

Later in the year, we decided to explore that synthesis, jamming together at Rudy Records. We locked into a version of
Traffic’s “Dear
Mr. Fantasy” that was a killer, just a
killer
of a track. Stephen was in very good shape—rather, he wasn’t as messed up as he usually got. We had fun, started looking down the pike. I thought it would be interesting if we tried doing something together. I’m a team member; I like working with others. Solo records are reserved for those times when I have absolutely no other choice. David and I were barely talking at that point. He was completely fucked up and kept me out of his dark loop. He wasn’t around, so … screw it. We’d just do it ourselves, a Nash/Stills album.

Joel and I actually went to see David perform at the Marin Civic Center. I went in disguise, in a Groucho Marx mask. I didn’t want anyone, especially David, to know I was there. And he was horrible; it was heartbreaking to watch. He looked like shit. His voice was shot, he fenced with the audience. This was not the Crosby I knew and loved. His world, and part of my world, was crumbling right in front of my eyes. He needed help. He was losing total control at this point.

Later, David claimed that when I decided to make an album without him he was crushed emotionally. That may be true, but part of him understood why I made that decision. He was totally fucked up, and I couldn’t deal with that. Music is supposed to be a joy, it’s supposed to have expression. There was
no
expression in David at that time. I couldn’t risk that sucking the energy out of our sound. That might sound cold, but not to me. Music is what keeps me going through life. It is a huge part of my essence. I couldn’t dilute that.

Through
Mac Holbert, I’d also been following the details of a short tour David had been doing so that he and Jan could remain financially solvent. They went out in a van with a mattress in the back, which allowed them to freebase all day, using propane tanks and a torch. According to Mac, it was a horror show from beginning to end. They were going through an ounce of cocaine a day, thousands of dollars. One night, David had a grand mal seizure from the drugs; the next night, the same thing happened to Jan. I didn’t want
to be around that kind of behavior. The studio had always been a sanctuary for me. I couldn’t sacrifice that.

So Stephen and I recorded seven or eight tracks by ourselves, with
Mike Finnigan on the extra vocal part. We mixed it at Sea West on the north shore of Oahu and sent it off to Atlantic. A week or so later, Atlantic came back and said, “We’re not interested in Stills/Nash. We want a Crosby, Stills & Nash record in time for Christmas.” Needless to say, Stephen and I were sadly disappointed. We thought we’d made a good album, but if your record company isn’t keen on putting it out, what are you going to do? Instead we cobbled together another greatest-hits package called
Replay
, but if you ask me,
Retread
would have been more like it.

The smart thing would have been to put the Stills/Nash tapes aside until we could figure out a way to redo the project. It might have been a case of just needing better material. We were always writing; a great song lay just over the next rise. But we were forced to do something for financial as well as musical reasons, which wasn’t fun. Stephen needed the cash. I’ve been careful with my money over the years, but Stephen’s not as smart with money, never has been. He just spends what he wants, which drives his financial advisors crazy. So it put me in a difficult spot. I didn’t need the money, but my friends did.

Atlantic was so insistent on having CSN that I decided to contact David despite the off-putting performance I’d seen in Marin County. I must have called his house forty times from Hawaii. After the first two or three tries, I got the picture. Jan’s mother, Harper, would always screen the calls. “David’s at the beach.” “David’s at the grocery.” “David’s playing tennis.” (She should have known I wouldn’t buy
that
one.) There was always some excuse that he couldn’t come to the phone. We took our tapes back to Rudy Records and called David again. By some quirk, I finally got him on the line and explained the situation, how much we missed his voice on the record and the bind we were in. We arranged for him to come to Los Angeles, but his voice was in incredibly bad shape. He couldn’t sing
a note. That beautiful mellow Welsh vibrato was completely gone. So we took a couple of his best songs from the album Capitol had rejected—“Delta” and “Might As Well Have a Good Time”—and CSN’ed them, which means that Stephen and I added our voices.

Those early sessions with Stephen had been a joyful experience, but once David came back, the mood turned dark. Everyone was apprehensive. “Can he do this?” “Did we make the right decision?” “Are we torpedoing the positive energy?” The atmosphere was tentative, fragile. The chemistry was different between David and me. On the one hand, both of us realized that he was now a flat-out junkie. He was freebasing without compunction, not even hiding it discreetly. (Although I didn’t know at the time that he was also chipping with heroin, which shocks me, even to this day.) On the other hand, David felt triumphant that we had to get him back into the band. He listened to what Stephen and I had done and said it wasn’t good enough, that we were kidding ourselves—and, who knows, he may have been right. Maybe we did need David. And that sparked his usual cocky self. “Ah-ha-ha! So you had to come back and get me, didn’t you. You have to have me.” That vibe wasn’t conducive to great music.

I worried about his irrational behavior. I was worried for him physically—he could have dropped dead at any moment. Underneath it all, I knew he was still David, and all I was doing was waiting for him to come back. I had great faith that Crosby would make it through. Whatever makes him an incredible human being was still inside there … somewhere. Maybe I was naïve, maybe I was too optimistic, but I never believed that he would die. When you’re dealing with a dear friend, you can usually take him by the shoulder and say, “Hey, listen to me for a second.” But when that friend is a junkie whose eyes are vacant and whose ears tune you out, you try another approach. I grappled with all these disparate feelings and handled them in my usual way: by examining them in the lyrics of a song. Because David was a sailor and he and I were both
familiar with the idea of Valhalla and the Viking funeral of putting a body on a boat and pushing it out to sea, I began to feel there was a way of talking to Crosby that he just might listen to. So I wrote
“Into the Darkness,” which is brutal and direct.

I wrote the song on the north shore of Oahu and recorded it before David came to the session. I was angry. My friend had been taken over by demons. And when I played it for Crosby at Rudy Records, he just glared at me—and from experience, let me tell you, those kinds of looks from Crosby speak volumes. The song had accomplished exactly what I’d hoped, a complete indictment of his behavior. It made him angry and uncomfortable, and he said so. Tough.

In Oahu, I’d also written
“Wasted on the Way,” which was another song that was critical of our band. We had so many chances to make great music together, but too often we blew it due to ridiculous distractions. Hey, our own fault—but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to speak my piece.

David is not on “Wasted on the Way.” It is actually Timothy B. Schmit, who has a great falsetto, standing in for him. And on the album’s title track,
“
Daylight Again,” a beautiful song that Stephen
wrote instantly onstage one night while thinking about the Civil War, we added Arthur Garfunkel’s gorgeous baritone to round out the vocals.

Ahmet Ertegun visited the studio while I was mixing
“Wasted on the Way,” and at the end of the song, he said, “Hey, man, that’s fantastic. CSN never sounded so good.”
Stanley Johnston, who was producing the session, was about to turn around and say, “Ah, but Ahmet, that’s not CSN … ” when I kicked him
really hard
under the table. Ahmet was too delighted that we had listened to his plea for a CSN album. The last thing I wanted him to know was that David wasn’t singing much on that track.

Normally, we have a complete sense of what an album should be, even though we often finish writing some of it in the studio. This one, however, was a pastiche of the Stills/Nash sessions at Rudy Rec- ords and Sea West, as well as the best tracks taken from David’s Capitol album. Almost two years in the making, from start to finish. One of the most frustrating projects I’ve ever been involved in. And I thought we did a fabulous job pulling everything together on
Daylight Again
, considering it was bits and pieces.

The cover was also a last-minute slap-together. Tradition has it that a picture works best to sell an album, especially for as identifiable a group as Crosby, Stills & Nash. I would have preferred it that way, with an image of the three of us together, happy and healthy. But David looked dreadful. He was overweight. He looked like Dra- cula: No amount of makeup could make him presentable. And there were those sores, his famous staph infection. So we approved an illustration by
Gilbert Williams called
Celestial Visitation
, three flying saucers hovering above a temple in the canyon of a magical kingdom. Another bit of a smoke screen to mask our ongoing anarchy. Proof, again, that we were wasted on the way.