Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young)

Crosby, Stills & Nash, also Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young when including occasional fourth member Neil Young, are a folk rock/rock supergroup. The band is known for their distinctive vocal harmonies and activist politics, and have a strong association with the segment of 1960s counterculture known as the Woodstock Nation. They are commonly referred to by their initials CSN or CSNY and, for a time, were one of the few North American groups to rival the Beatles in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

History

Formation

Initially formed by the trio of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the genesis of the group lies in two 1960s rock bands, The Byrds and The Hollies, and the demise of a third, Buffalo Springfield. Friction existed between Crosby and his fellows in the Byrds, which came to a head specifically in 1967 over two issues: his substitution, at the invitation of Stills, for an absent Neil Young during Buffalo Springfield’s set at the famous Monterey Pop Festival in June; and the Byrds’ rejection of Crosby’s controversial “Triad” composition as either a single or an album track in August. As a result, Crosby was dismissed from the Byrds in the fall of 1967.Zimmer and Diltz, p. 54 By early 1968, Buffalo Springfield disintegrated over personal issues, and after aiding in putting together the band’s final album, Stills found himself unemployed by the summer. He and Crosby began meeting informally and jamming, the results of one encounter in Florida on Crosby’s schooner being the song “Wooden Ships,” composed in collaboration with another guest, Paul Kantner.Zimmer and Diltz, p. 65 Nash had been introduced to Crosby when the Byrds had toured the UK in 1966, and when the Hollies ventured to California in 1968, Nash resumed his acquaintance with Crosby. Crosby and Gottlieb, p. 103 At a party at the home of either Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas, Joni Mitchell, or John Sebastian, depending on differing accounts, Nash asked Stills and Crosby to repeat their performance of a new song by Stills, “You Don't Have To Cry,” blending a second harmony on the spot into their singing.Zimmer and Diltz, pp. 72-3 The vocals gelled, and the three realized that they had lucked into something quite special.

The Hollies, who had enjoyed pop hits in the mid-sixties, had been struggling with the changing music scene in England due to the advent of psychedelia, and were planning to do an album of all Dylan covers. Seeing this as a step in the wrong direction, and creatively frustrated with the Hollies, Nash decided to quit and throw his lot in with Crosby and Stills. After failing an audition with the Beatles' Apple Records, they were signed to Atlantic Records by Ahmet Ertegun, who had been a fan of the Springfield and disappointed by that band's demise. Crosby and Gottlieb, p. 144 From the outset, given their respective band histories, the trio decided not to be locked into a group structure, using their surnames as identification to ensure independence and a guarantee against the band simply continuing without one of them, as had both the Byrds and the Hollies after the departures of Crosby and Nash. Their record contract with Atlantic reflected this, positioning CSN with a unique flexibility unheard of for an untested group. The trio also picked up a unique management team in Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, who had engineered their situation with Atlantic and would help to consolidate clout for the group in the industry. McDonough, p. 252 Roberts kept the band focused and dealt with egos, while Geffen handled the business deals, since, in Crosby’s words, they needed a shark and Geffen was it. Zimmer and Diltz, p. 79 Roberts and Geffen would play key roles in securing the band’s success during the early years.

Their first album, Crosby, Stills & Nash of 1969 was an immediate hit, spawning two Top 40 hit singles and receiving key airplay on the new FM radio format, in its early days populated by unfettered disc jockeys prone to playing entire albums at once. Other than the presence of drummer Dallas Taylor, Stills had handled the lion's share of the instrumental parts himself, a testament to his talent but leaving the band in need of additional personnel to be able to tour, now a necessity given the debut album’s commercial impact.

Enter Neil Young

Retaining Taylor, the band decided initially to hire a keyboard player, Stills at one point approaching Steve Winwood, who declined. Zimmer and Diltz, p. 92 Over dinner with Ertegun, the Atlantic label head suggested Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young, also managed by Roberts, as a fairly obvious choice. Crosby and Gottlieb, pp. 163-4 Initial reservations were held by Stills and Nash, Stills owing to his history with Young in Buffalo Springfield, Nash due to his not knowing Young at all outside of his work. But after several meetings, the trio expanded to a quartet with Young a full partner, the name duly changed law firm-style, the terms allowing Young full freedom to maintain a parallel career with his new back-up band, Crazy Horse. With Young on board, the group went on tour in the late summer of 1969 through the following January, their second gig being a baptism-by-fire at the Woodstock Festival in front of their peers, CSNY with their hit record of the event later being seen its embodiment. By contrast, little mention is made of the group's subsequent appearance at Altamont, CSNY having escaped mostly unscathed from the fallout of that debacle. Great anticipation had built for the group, and their first album with Young, Déjà Vu, arrived in stores in March of 1970 to zealous enthusiasm, topping the charts and generating three hit singles. Reflecting unerringly the tastes and viewpoints of the counterculture as the sixties changed into the seventies, with protest against both the establishment and the Vietnam War gearing up, the group made no secret of their political leanings, Crosby in particular. While staying at a house down the peninsula from San Francisco, the ubiquitous reports of the Kent State shootings reached Young and Crosby, inspiring Young to write his protest classic "Ohio," recorded and rush-released weeks later and another Top 20 hit for the group. Zimmer and Diltz, p. 127

Between “Ohio,” their appearance in both the festival and movie of Woodstock, and the runaway success of their two albums, the group found themselves in the position of enjoying a level of adulation far greater than experienced with their previous bands. The collective talents allowed the band to straddle all the flavors of popular music eminent at the time, from country-rock to confessional balladry, from acoustic guitars and voice to electric guitar and boogie. Indeed, with the Beatles break-up made public by April of 1970, and with Bob Dylan in reclusive low-key activity since mid-1966, CSNY found itself as the adopted standard bearers for the Woodstock Nation, vouchsafing an importance in society as counterculture figureheads equaled at the time in rock and roll only by The Rolling Stones. An entire sub-industry of singer-songwriters in California either had their careers boosted or came to prominence in the wake of CSNY, among them Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and The Eagles. All were managed, incidentally, by Roberts, and all but Nyro signed to Geffen’s Asylum label, which would be the home for what came to be known as the Mellow Mafia for the remainder of the decade.

However, the tenuous nature of the partnership, built into the group philosophy from the onset and strained by their success, weighed on the individual personalities, and the group imploded after their tour in the summer of 1970. Concert recordings from that tour would end up on another chart-topper, the 1971 double album Four Way Street, but the group would never completely recapture momentum as years would pass between trio and quartet recordings.

See main entries: David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young.

Shifting configurations

Between September of 1970 and May of 1971, all four released high-profile solo albums: If I Could Only Remember My Name, Stephen Stills, Songs for Beginners, and After the Gold Rush. Except for Young, signed to Reprise as a solo act before joining CSN, all were issued on the Atlantic SD-7200 "superstar" series, began in 1970 for CSNY and Déjà Vu, CSN product being the first four of five records issued with the 7200 designation.Atlantic Album discography site, retrieved 25 June 2006 All four solo LPs placed in the top 15 on the album charts, with Stills' entry peaking the highest at #3. Stills released an additional record in 1971, Stephen Stills 2, which also went top ten. Crosby and Nash embarked on a successful acoustic tour accompanied only by their own guitars and piano, captured for the 1998 document Another Stoney Evening. For a while, it seemed as if the group could simply not fail, either singly or in any permutation.

1972 proved a very fruitful year for all concerned: Young achieved solo superstardom with the chart-topping Harvest, to which CSN in separate pairs contributed backing vocals, and its attendant #1 single, “Heart of Gold.” Nash also joined Young to record Young's "War Song;" released as a single in the summer and credited to both, it has yet to see reissue in any medium.Zimmer and Diltz, p. 159 Stills assembled with another ex-Byrd Chris Hillman the country-tinged and very versatile Manassas band, releasing a tour-de-force double album of the same name; counting the three CSN records, his sixth top ten album in a row. On tour, Nash and Crosby rediscovered the joy they had felt with CSN at first, minus the egotistic in-fighting that had made the last CSNY shows so difficult.Zimmer and Diltz, p. 151 That enthusiasm led to the studio for their first album as a duo, a mix of abstract introspection from Crosby and concise pop tunes from Nash prosaically entitled Graham Nash David Crosby, which peaked at #4 on the pop album chart. With such differently styled and brilliant albums, all achieving commercial success, the quartet had little impetus to reconvene at this juncture.

Nevertheless, nemesis reared its ugly head in 1973. Young followed up his breakthrough year with an anti-commercial film and an equally anti-commercial tour, calling in Crosby and Nash to help him out near the end of it. A disappointing reunion of the original Byrds quintet, with Crosby in the forefront, got demolished by the critics and sold marginally well but not at the level Crosby had grown accustomed. Nash delivered his bleak second solo album in the aftermath of the murder of his girlfriend, which spent a dismal three weeks on the charts, and Stills’ second Manassas record fared little better than Crosby’s Byrds package. In June and July of that year, the four men united in Hawaii for a working vacation, ostensibly to record a new CSNY album, tentatively titled Human Highway. Recording at Young’s ranch, the bickering that had sunk the band in 1970 resumed, scattering the group and leaving Young to recall Crazy Horse for his brooding Tonight's The Night tour. Zimmer and Diltz, pp. 165-6

Roberts finally prevailed upon the group to realize their commercial potential, the quartet reassembling once again in the summer of 1974 with sidemen Tim Drummond on bass, Russ Kunkel on drums, and Joe Lala on percussion to embark on the first-ever outdoor stadium tour, arranged by San Francisco impresario Bill Graham, fresh off the large-scale indoor arena tour he had developed for Dylan’s return to the spotlight earlier in the year. The band typically played three and a half hours of old favorites and new songs: Nash's “Grave Concern,” Crosby's elegiac “Carry Me,” Stills' Latin-infused “First Things First,” and Young's majestic hard-rock epic “Pushed It Over The End.”Zimmer and Diltz, p. 173 For certain fans, Nash's unreleased film of the Wembley Stadium concert of September 14 attests to the excellence of this material, even though none of it ever appeared in a definitive CSN or CSNY studio format. Others have noted the cluttered, overambitious sound of the band--while a dedicated conguero was added to the group, only Stills employed Latin rhythms on a regular basis in his songcraft. As can be witnessed in the Wembley film, the four principals would often switch instruments within the context of the same song. The midset acoustic interlude disrupted the flow of the concerts in the opinion of Crosby and Young, who preferred the dual acoustic/electric set format of earlier tours. The shows attracted the stereotypical summer party crowd, many of whom would not refrain from talking during the acoustic set. This particularly annoyed Crosby, who refused to finish his solo rendition of Joni Mitchell's "For Free" on one of the earlier tour dates due to the excessive noise.

While they would have the press believe that their characteristic arguments were a thing of the past, typical of the era excesses took their toll. In a bout of cocaine-induced delirium, Stills began supplementing his trademark wardrobe of football jerseys with military fatigues, insinuating that he was a deep-cover CIA agent. In an ironic twist from the author of the menage a trois ode "Triad", Crosby's entourage included two quarreling girlfriends, furthering the tension. Throughout the tour, Young isolated himself from the group, traveling in an RV with his son and entourage and was reportedly resentful that his songs made up the bulk of the group's new material. An attempt at the new CSNY LP in the fall was scrapped, the label having compiled So Far to have something to promote during the tour. Nash viewed the re-shuffling of items from only two albums and one single as absurd; it topped the charts anyway.Zimmer and Diltz, p. 176 Songs from both the studio and stage from this period later appeared on various releases including Stills, Comes A Time, and Wind on the Water.

Reaching an impasse with the parent band, Crosby and Nash decided to re-activate their partership, inaugurating the duo act Crosby & Nash, touring regularly, signing to ABC Records and producing two additional studio albums, Wind On The Water in 1975 and Whistling Down The Wire in 1976. They continued to use the sidemen known as “The Section” from their first LP, this crack session group contributing to records by many others of similar idiom in the seventies, such as Carole King, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, in addition to the CN concert album released in 1977, Crosby-Nash Live. Crosby and Nash also became a cottage industry themselves, their vocal prowess adding to the appeal of various songs, including hits like Taylor’s “Mexico” and Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man In Paris.”

Stills and Young returned to their own careers, with Young gaining in critical accolades during the remainder of the century and beyond, as he weathered and embraced changes in taste and style to be, along with Bob Dylan, one of the few rock artists from the sixties still considered vital by the critical community into the early years of the new century. The non-aligned pair also united for a one-off tour and album credited to The Stills-Young Band, Long May You Run. Initially, the album started life in the spring of 1976 in Miami as the third attempt at a CSNY reunion, but when C&N were bound to return to LA to finish Whistling Down the Wire, S&Y wiped the vocal contributions by the other pair off the master tape.Zimmer and Diltz, pp. 185-6 Karma possibly negatively influenced by this decision, the old tensions going all the way back to Buffalo Springfield between Stephen and Neil resurfaced, exacerbated by Stills’ choice of professional studio musicians to back them rather than Young’s preferred Crazy Horse. After their July 18, 1976 show, Young's tour bus took a different direction. Waiting at their July 20th show, Stills received a laconic telegram: Dear Stephen, funny how things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil. McDonough, pp. 501-2 Young's management claimed that he was under doctor's orders to rest and recover from an apparent throat infection. Stills was contractually bound to finish the tour, though Young would make up dates with Crazy Horse later in the year.

Once the glue that held the collective together musically, Stills' solo career descended into freefall, the result of a collapsing marriage and copious drug use. Crosby & Nash also faced diminishing returns, although their Wind On The Water album was the only disc by any member of the quartet to fare well in the marketplace during the period from 1973 to 1976. Stills approached the pair at one of their concerts in Los Angeles, his Rose Mary Woods act in Miami apparently forgiven, setting the stage for the return of the trio.

CSN Redux

Ironically, the sweet-sounding hippie symbols of the Woodstock Nation chose the zero year of punk, 1977, to reappear with CSN. It was propelled by solid songs from all three principals, trademark vocals, contemporary production, and as usual a hit single from Nash in “Just a Song Before I Go.” The album soared up the pop albums chart, just missing being their fourth number one in a row, held off the top slot by one of the best-selling LPs of all time, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. The meticulously-crafted CSN fit right in with the ruling commercial sounds of the day, just as Young was imagining his reaction to punk with the Rust tour and albums, illustrating how far the two camps had diverged. Regrouping as a regular touring unit, after a five-year lay-off between releases which saw a solo album apiece by Stills and Nash, they hit the top ten one more time with Daylight Again in 1982. Complications were brewing due to Crosby's increasing dependence on freebase cocaine, making his participation problematic. The Nash record of 1980, Earth & Sky, was to be another Crosby-Nash project, Crosby’s participation discontinued due to excessive drug use. Crosby and Gottlieb, p. 314 Daylight Again was initially undertaken by Stills and Nash alone owing to Crosby’s subsequent decline in productivity; however, Atlantic Record executives refused to release the latter LP until Crosby was reinstated. Crosby and Gottlieb, pp. 353-4 Crosby joined his partners for the track “Delta,” and the album contained two hits, Nash’s “Wasted on the Way” and Stills’ “Southern Cross,” the latter accompanied by a popular video on the nascent MTV network. But the group now relied on outside composers and singers to augment their material, hardly the force they had been ten years past. The trio continued to tour, but the bottom fell out for Crosby, arrested and jailed on drug and weapons charges in Texas in May of 1982. Having cut a potential title song for the film War Games that wasn't used, the band released it as a single and hastily assembled concert recordings around two studio tracks for the album Allies, their lowest charting record to date. Crosby was sentenced to two terms, but the conviction was overturned; arrested several more times, he finally turned himself in to the authorities in December of 1985. Crosby and Gottlieb, pp. 438-9 He would spend eight months in prison, and Nash and Stills released another round of solo albums in the mid-1980s.

On a promise to Crosby should he clean himself up, Young agreed to rejoin the trio in the studio upon Crosby’s release from prison for American Dream in 1988. Stills and Crosby were barely functioning for the making of the album, and the late eighties production completely swamped the band. McDonough, p. 625 It did make it to #16 on the album chart, but the record received poor critical notices, and Young refused to support it with a CSNY tour. The band did produce a video for Young’s title-song single, wherein each member played a character loosely based on certain aspects of their personalities and public image.

CSN recorded two more studio albums in the 1990s, Live It Up and After the Storm, both low sellers by previous standard and mostly ignored by all except for their remaining core fans. A well-conceived box set arrived in 1991, four discs of expected group highlights amidst unexpected better tracks from various solo projects. Owing to certain difficulties, manager Roberts, no longer with the trio but still representing Young, pulled most of Neil’s material earmarked for the box; only seven CSNY songs in total remained to be included. McDonough, p. 248

After the Storm barely made the top 100 on the album chart, and by the late nineties CSN found themselves without a record contract, Atlantic having let go of a band once one of its cash-flow titans. They began financing recordings themselves, and in 1999 Stills invited Young to guest on a few tracks. Impressed by their gumption, Young increased his level of input, turning the album into a CSNY project, Looking Forward, released on Young's label Reprise Records. With writing credits mostly limited to band members, the disc was better received than the previous three albums, and the ensuing CSNY2K tour in 2000 and the CSNY Tour of America of 2002 were major money-makers.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash, with and without Young, left a major imprint in terms of both business practices and on the course of the rock and roll during their 1970s heyday. The flexibility and recombitant aspects of their aggregation forced the record companies to accommodate their dictates, rather than the other way around as was still often the norm, shifting the balance of power in the industry a bit more toward the performers, even though that shift did not become permanent. They utilized their visibility as a platform to speak out against injustices, said practice very much a product of their time but still a relatively new phenomenon, far riskier in their day than now. An entire subset of popular music arose in their wake, various topical and personal singer-songwriters embracing the 1960s Haight-Ashbury/Laurel Canyon social and political values the group transmitted into the 1970s. Targets of punk ire and post-punk sarcasm for embodying the hippie hypocrisy of preaching social equality while being shuttled around by jet and limo.

CSN was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997; Crosby has also been inducted as a member of the Byrds, and Stills as a member of Buffalo Springfield. Interestingly, Young has been inducted for his solo work and for Buffalo Springfield, but has not been inducted with CSN.

Various compilations of the band’s configurations have arrived over the years, the box set being the most comprehensive, and So Far being the most commercially successful. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have set tour dates for 2006, and individual retrospective sets have been slated for release from David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.4waysite.com, retrieved 9 June 2006

Trivia

In the event of Nash's former group, the Hollies, being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, CSNY would become the first group of musicians to have each member inducted into the Hall of Fame twice.

Nash was a co-founder of MUSE, Musicians United for Safe Energy, the organization that produced the No Nukes concerts in which CSN participated in 1979.

In 2006, long-time manager Gerry Tolman died in a car accident.

The CSN logo that Crosby, Stills and Nash used in the mid-1970s through the 1980s, was designed by the late Phil Hartman, long before he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live.

When it was announced that the band was forming, they ran into a slight contractual problem. Nash was already signed to Epic Records, the North American distributor of records by his group the Hollies, while Crosby and Stills were signed to Atlantic. In order to resolve this problem, Geffen engineered the deal whereby Nash was essentially traded to Atlantic for the rights to Richie Furay's band Poco, Furay signed to Atlantic as a result of his membership in Buffalo Springfield.

Well-known songs

" Judy Blue Eyes" from Crosby, Stills & Nash
"Marrakesh Express" from Crosby, Stills & Nash
"Wooden Ships" from Crosby, Stills & Nash
"Helplessly Hoping" from Crosby, Stills & Nash
"Teach Your Children" from Déjà Vu
"Woodstock" from Déjà Vu
"Our House" from Déjà Vu
"Carry On" from Déjà Vu
"Ohio," A-side single
"Just A Song Before I Go" from CSN
"Southern Cross" from Daylight Again
"Wasted on the Way" from Daylight Again

Themes

Anti-war and counterculture

Like many other artists of the late 60s, anti-war politics and countercultural issues pervade much of their music, notably in "Wooden Ships" (as stated above co-written with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane), Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair" and "Long Time Gone," Nash's "Soldiers of Peace," Stills' "49 Bye-Byes/America's Children," Young's "Ohio," Crosby and Nash's "Yours and Mine", and of course their cover of Mitchell's "Woodstock."

Sailing and ships

Experience with sailing and nautical references provide the basis for many songs as well, most likely initially driven by Crosby, who learned to sail at age 11 and lived on a boat for many years.suitelorraine.com, retrieved 9 June 2006 As seen above, the cover of their 1977 album CSN shows the three on a sailboat. Songs which feature this theme include "Wooden Ships," Crosby's "The Lee Shore" and "Shadow Captain," Stills' "Southern Cross," and Young's "Through My Sails".

Album discography

For individual discographies, see main entries on David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young

Crosby, Stills, & Nash (and Young)

Crosby, Stills & Nash, Atlantic 1969
Déjà Vu, Atlantic 1970 *
Four Way Street, Atlantic 1971 *
So Far, Atlantic 1974 (compilation) *
CSN, Atlantic, 1977
Replay, Atlantic 1980 (compilaton; out of print)
Daylight Again, Atlantic 1982
Allies, Atlantic 1983 (out of print)
American Dream, Atlantic 1988 *
Live It Up, Atlantic 1990
CSN (box set), Atlantic 1991 (compilation)
After The Storm, Atlantic 1994
Carry On, WEA 1998 (compilation)
Looking Forward, Reprise 1999 *
Greatest Hits, Rhino 2005 (compilation)

(* with Neil Young)

Crosby & Nash

Graham Nash David Crosby, Atlantic 1972
Wind on the Water, ABC 1975
Whistling Down the Wire, ABC 1976
Crosby-Nash Live, ABC 1977
The Best of Crosby & Nash, Atlantic 1978 (compilaton; out of print)
Another Stoney Evening, Grateful Dead 1998
The ABC Years, MCA 2002 (compilation)
Crosby & Nash, Sanctuary 2004
Highlights, Sanctuary 2006

The Stills-Young Band

Long May You Run, Reprise 1976

References

Zimmer, Dave, and Diltz, Henry. Crosby Stills & Nash: The Authorized Biography (First edition), St. Martin’s Press, 1984. ISBN 0-312-17660-0
Crosby, David, and Gottlieb, Carl. Long Time Gone (First Edition), Doubleday, 1988. ISBN 0-385-24530-0
McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey, Neil Young's Biography (First Edition), Random House, 2002. ISBN 0-679-42772-4

Notes

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