The Reunion of Crosby Stills Nash & Young: The Ego meets the Dove
As Elliot Roberts, their manager, so daintily put it, they were pissing in the wind, these boy wonders of his who could make a million at the snap of four fingers. And yet, year after year, this all-time favorite group from out of the Woodstock era, these symbols of harmony in music, would try to get back together and would fail. “We really did try, every year,” Nash would say. “It just didn’t fucking happen because it wasn’t real.”
From the beginning, in the spring of 1969, Crosby, Stills and Nash had been preparing the public for their breakup. I first met them while they were cutting their first album and they were all saying, and this was the bottom line of my story, that they were not a group. From the Byrds, the Buffalo Springfield and the Hollies, the three men had had enough, they said, of outsized egos. Now they said they would band and disband as they pleased, go solo or form various duos for tours and albums as they pleased. They have been true to their founding principle. And it makes no sense.
After you’ve become the biggest in the biggest of all entertainment businesses, you’re supposed to look the other way and slip right by those old principles, on the way to four-way easy street. And if the public wants a reunion, a manager’s supposed to make sure it damned well gets one. Even if his wonders have to stay in different hotels, travel in separate curtain-drawn limousines and sing from isolation booths.
But Elliot Roberts is a laid-back sort of guy. Anybody who’s got a slice of several million dollars a year, who for four years sees the fortune’s dissipation because, well, because “it wasn’t real” and who doesn’t commit horrendous acts of frustration/violence–that person has got to be stone laid-back. Or he’s happy with the fortune he’s already made. Or he’s a real friend.
Roberts, it would be fair to say, is a bit of each. “I have to give him a great deal of credit,” says Graham Nash, “for his patience, to deal with the fucking mad people that we are.” But Nash remembers the founding principle: “I don’t like that word, reunion,” he says. “To be perfectly honest with you, I never felt that we were totally apart. I always felt that eventually we would grow up and realize what was happening. We’ve always been musically connected.”
Musically, there is no question about CSNY. If you’re into living-room rock, fireplace harmonies and just a taste of good old social consciousness, this is your group. At the concerts this time around, there were those who were there to remember. Instantly, they were thankful again for “Chicago” and “Ohio” as well as for “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “Our House.”
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Over the years, Crosby, Stills and Nash have shown up at a Young concert. Nash and Crosby have shown up at a Stills show. They’ve probably done a lot of visiting to each other’s living rooms. There clearly is that musical connection. So why couldn’t they get along for long enough to work together? What tore them so far apart that even music couldn’t reunite them for so long? They had, each of them, been unable to escape that mysterious thing called ego. At the St. Paul, Minnesota, Civic Center, the lights are doused, 19,000 voices rise out of the darkness and all you see are the blue fluorescent lights playing onto the Indian rug; it looks like a snowdrift onstage as Crosby, Stills, Nash and bassist Tim Drummond face off to establish the rhythm.
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Neil Young, in a Buick service department jacket and patched cords, is behind the organ. The power builds–it’s “Love the One You’re With”–and a floorful of people are suddenly shake-hopping in place. On “Wooden Ships,” springing up from central casting, there’s your clenched fist, front center, just as the chorus begins. In the middle of the acoustic set, Young introduces “For The Turnstiles” by saying: “Here’s a song I wrote a long time ago. There’s a couple of really good songwriters here tonight; I hope they don’t listen too closely.”
Minutes later it’s Stills, and he, too, pays tribute to a songwriter in the crowd: “This one’s for Bob,” he says, “because I know I’ve been that mad before.” Head bowed and hands flailing, he flies into “Word Game”: Would you knock a man down if you don’t like the cut of his clothes Could you put a man away if you don’t want to hear what he knows Well, it’s happening right here…
Through most of this set, Bob Dylan, in cowboy shirt, jeans and shades, has been standing in the midst of a small group on the floor off to the side, behind backstage barriers. He stands, unnoticed by the audience, next to a woman in a drug help jacket. Dylan is in his home state for a visit with family and friends. He’s with Louie Kemp, his buddy from their childhood days in Hibbing, just north of here, and the word has spread quickly that he has taken an apartment in town, is moving back and buying some property just outside Minneapolis. In short, Dylan is coming back home to stay.
As the acoustic set makes its transition back into electric, Dylan wanders off by himself. He is willing to have a few words. Over Young’s rock-star recall, “Don’t Be Denied,” Dylan shouts that he’s in town to attend a funeral. What about the talk that he’s looking for some property here?