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by Anthony Fawcett, Reed Books 1978
On a recent hot New York night, CSN took Madison Square Garden
by storm. They looked ordinary enough - three dudes in jeans and
cowboy boots - but when they picked up their axes and started
to play the effect was electrifying; when they'd sung the first
few bars it was very clear that the magic had not gone; the breathless
three-part harmonies, which so many have tried to imitate, never
managing to come close to these innovators, boomed crystal clear
around the walls of the Garden, sounding more perfect and delicate
than ever. It was a sound to warm the heart, and twenty thousand
fans roared in approval. During the encores the stamping of the
feet was so powerful that the arena floor bounced up and down.
The musicians looked a little older and had put on weight, but
what mattered was that their music had grown - there was a new
maturity in their songs. The high point in the evening was their
performance of the songs from CSN. Graham Nash's "Cathedral" was
an unexpected tour de force, and intense and poignant song which
he started on this thirty-third birthday after wandering into
the Winchester Cathedral on acid.
Stephen Still, too, seemed back on course with three powerful
new songs, two of them stark autobiographical paeans about his
marriage, both highlighting chilling vocals and fierce, virtuoso
guitar playing. Stills bites out the lyrics in "Run From Tears.":
RUN FROM TEARS by Stephen Stills
"I'm drowning, I'm fighting, something special is in me dying"
David Crosby is still the quintessential California dreamer, but
perhaps today he feels more intense about the music. He is still
the one who raps with the audience, quips, jokes, and smokes every
kind of marijuana imaginable. He sounds at home singing, "In My
Dreams," whilst he and Stephen cook up a storm with their acoustic
guitars:
IN MY DREAMS by David Crosby
"Dream, do you dream
Dreaming do you?
In my dreams I can see I can.
I can see a love that could be."
Graham remembers the first time he came to California, back in
1966: "It was absolutely a fine experience. I remember distinctly
flying into LA., looking down on all the pool and not believing
the amount of them. There wasn't that much smog, or not that I
noticed. I remember coming out of the terminal and climbing half-way
up a palm tree that was opposite there - I'd never seen an American
Palm tree before! I distinctly remember the warmth, and the freedom
I felt. I felt very much like I'd come to a second home here.
I love this country - it doesn't mean that I don't love England,
obviously - but I definitely appreciate this country for what
it is, and what it can be."
Graham's cathartic decision to pull his roots with the Hollies
and English life finally came about in 1969. His move to Los Angeles
inspired him and opened him up in several ways: "There were different
things to look at, different feelings to be evoked by things that
happened in your immediate environment. I loved the energy here,
that's what I was impressed with, blown away with, the amount
of energy and the amount of freedom to experiment - that I personally
didn't find in England at that time. Here, because of my past
experience in making records, people listened to what I had to
say about things, whether they did anything about them or not.
In England I was beginning to feel like people weren't even listening
to ideas and that was part of the stagnant thing that I totally
abhorred about my life with the Hollies at that time - I wanted
to do other things, utilize other sounds, you know - look at things
differently, write about different things other than what we'd
been writing about, which was just churning out 'good solid pop
songs'.
"For instance, I'd written 'Lady of the Island' and 'Marrakesh
Express' and they showed no interest in seriously considering
recording them. They made one attempt at 'Marrakesh Express' but
definitely would not attempt to record 'Lady of the Island' or
the first 'Sleep Song' - 'Take off my clothes/And I'll lie by
your side' - no we can't put that on it! Well, after a couple
of months of that a man is liable to go insane, especially being
the only one who is smoking grass at the time. That makes it difficult
when you're the only guy smoking in the band, especially when
they're giving you lines like 'You'd be dead in six months and
all that classic reefer madness!"
"So I began to definitely grow away from them, not so much as
people, but definitely as musicians. I was getting bored within
the group and yet when I came to California I found an immense
freedom, a real awakening of my own self-evaluation and all the
good things that one would expect with a change of environment."
One of the first new people that Graham got to know well was Mama
Cass of the Mamas and the Papas. He had met her when the Hollies
were playing in LA at the Whiskey, and was invited to one of their
recording sessions. It was the beginning of a very special relationship:
"We just established a really warm relationship which continued
until she died. I still feel her presence alot, very clearly ....
a nice good feeling. She introduced me to Crosby, she introduced
me to grass, she introduced me to acid - Cass was a very interesting
pivot point in my life. So I established a relationship with Crosby
because he was a punk and I loved him for it; I was a good singer
and he loved me for that and he loved my sense of humor, and we
just established a really fine friendship. We didn't sing together
at all until a couple of years after that.
Images swell up in Crosby's mind as he starts thinking about the
old days, Cass Elliot, and the first time he met Graham. "I had
known Cass since 1962," he begins. "We had been on tour together
in 1963, when John Kennedy got shot. We were in the same bus,
on tour. She was in a group called The Big Three and I was in
a group called Les Baxter's Balladeers. She was my ace. She brought
Nash by and didn't tell me who he was. He was a really nice cat,
I really liked him. Then later on I listened to a Hollies record
and I could hear that there was one of those guys in there, I
said, 'Ah, Ohh! There's one!' There's certain bands that anytime
you hear 'em for the first time, you'd say, 'Oh, there's another
harmony singer - I can hear him in there.' Soon as I hear it right
away, that there was a guy in there who could sing harmony in
a way that was just fantastic."
It was David who took Graham along to meet Stills. The result,
it seems, was destiny. "It felt like that," Crosby agrees, "it
was sure obvious, man, that we were supposed to be doing that.
That was a big thing for Nash to quit a really successful group.
The Hollies were doing well, they had hits. But, I sort of knew
him by then, and I knew that he didn't have any room to grow.
They wanted him to be the same as them, and he was growing faster.
The same thing happened in both our bands. The Byrds weren't too
flashed with "Triad" and when they threw me out of the band I
was writing "Guinnevere" and "Wooden Ships."
Stephen remembers first coming to LA: "I got out here and it was
really confusing because all the towns that I'd been in before
were cities where you could walk. I mean, LA was just - you know,
I couldn't afford no car. And I really didn't have anything going
at all. There was a current influx of New Yorkers to LA about
the same time I arrived, which sort of created that situation
in Laurel Canyon. We had our houses and we'd go over and hang
out, and trade songs and licks and ideas, y'know - a whole mess
of us."
Stills musical background was shaped early on when his family
went to live for a while in Costa Rica, Central America, when
he was twelve, later returning when he was fourteen. There was
a Latin/jazz combo that played in the hotel in San Jose and Stephen
spent alot of time with them. He told me: "There was a bass player
named Paolo White who played jazz, the piano players name was
Pebe Hire and there was a trumpet player named John - they were
all from Porto Limon which is on the eastern coast of Costa Rica.
I would just hang out and listen, Paolo taught me bass scales
and once in a while I used to sit in on drums. Pebe taught me
piano, he had the Errol Gardner influence, you know, and he taught
me how to get a good spread - from what I first learned when I
was eight or nine to playing fifths with my left hand and being
able to manipulate octaves.
"But Paolo gave me the feel of the bass. In other words, the bass
and the way I carry the bass, comes from what he taught me; that
little upbeat thing, little bit of a push, and then you have a
timbale that is on a stricter rhythm. It's a whole little marriage
of rhythms that I got from all of that. And the same thing applies
to my guitar playing and everything."
After the success of CSNY, Stephen lived in England for a couple
of years - in between trips to his cabin in the Colorado Rockies
- in Brookfield House, Surrey, a Tudor mansion and estate which
he bought from Ringo. The house was full of low ceilings, beams
from the Spanish Armada, and brick fireplaces. The grounds included
Japanese lakes, a house-sized pool room where the band rehearsed,
a large pond and stables -Stephen's second love was horses. He
owned a thoroughbred, Major Change and an Appaloosa, Crazy Horse.
"I go through terrible agonies getting myself fit," he says. "It
takes three weeks to get yourself fit enough to ride and exercise
racehorses. Getting up at four o'clock and all that, but that
gets me off just as must as playing a guitar does."
CSN getting back together has been a personal triumph of Crosby.
He is all too aware of the number of times they tried without
it happening. "What it does prove," he says seriously, "is that
music triumphs over bullshit essentially. 'Cause the only reason
that CSN or CSNY, either one, failed to make records the other
times that we tried was personal egos, personal bullshit. Nothing
else. "We are talking in the bedroom. He suddenly jumps up, "Let
me show you something," and he disappears into the closet. He
reappears with a mock-up album cover of CSNY standing in the sand
in Hawaii, catching the last rays of the sunset. "It would have
been the best CSNY album that we ever made," he explains painfully.
"It was gonna be called Human Highway, and that's how close it
got," he wistfully stares at the cover. "Man we had songs.......
Did we have songs! Nash's 'Wind on the Water,' my 'Carry Me,'
Just stupendous one's of Neil's and Stephen's both. It woulda
been the best one. It would have made Deja Vu look like child's
play. There it is.
"So to keep trying again and again after things like that, which,
believe me, are more painful to me than they are to you.... give
us full credit for that . But mainly, I give the music credit
for being that strong. It just is. It's so strong now. God knows,
I'm not easy to get along with, but the music is strong enough
to make Stills want to. Y'see, he'll say 'I may be mad at that
little sucker, but I wanna go make some music with him, and he'll
seek me out and try. And it's the same with me. God, I have butted
heads with him more than any human being in the world. And yet,
do I want to make music with him? In a hot minute, I'd walk from
here to LA! That's how really strong it is. Thank heavens! Otherwise
there wouldn't have been a CSN record."
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