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Photo by Joel Bernstein
CSNY’S Reunion: A Show of Strength
by Ben Fong-Torres
Seattle - Minutes after CSN and then Y, hit the stage for the
first concert of their reunion tour, it was clear that no other
group ever had a chance of replacing them while they were apart
- not America, not Bread, not Poco, not the Eagles, not Seals
and Crofts, or Loggins and Messina or Souther Hillman and Furay.
Not even Manassas or the original Byrds.
It’s been four years since the last tour, and each of the principals
has gone through weighty changes. But onstage, you can hardly
tell. The 1969 Woodstock language is still there; Crosby is the
group megaphone; Nash the gentle presence; Stills and Young the
fabled guitar stars. And although a couple of the voices have
measurably changed, the meat of the group is still the high harmonies.
But if any one action proved that the group hadn’t changed since
the old and golden days, it was their utter lack of foresight
and discipline in planning and executing, the first show. As Crosby,
his voice wrecked, would say the next evening, just before the
Vancouver concert, the group had mapped out 44 songs for what
they figured would be a three or three and a half hour stand.
And when they found themselves with fully nine more numbers on
their list at 12:35am, three and a half hours after they had opened
with “Love the One You’re With,” they decided to plunge ahead,
what the hell, first show and all.
And it ruined them and their Vancouver show. Not that the audience
noticed; in both Seattle and Vancouver, packed houses of 15,000
and 17,000 gave their heroes, heroes’ receptions and continuing
waves of ovations. But the group, of course, knew, and they scuttled
and shuffled around to accommodate Crosby’s sinking voice. Backstage
in Vancouver, after the opening electric set, Nash was shaking
his head at producer Bill Graham, wondering out loud if the group
could survive a tour of 30 shows in two months. Later, during
the solo sets, Neil Young would enter the dressing room in a foul
mood, saying the show, now trimmed by ten minutes was still too
long, that the concert - organized to begin electrically, break,
and then build from acoustic (with the whole group, then solo
sets) back to electric, finish. Nash himself would report: “David
is really bummed out.” After the concert, at a Denny’s coffee
shop, some fans gathered to complain about Crosby. “He’s singing
this song “For Free,” and he’s trying to tell everybody to shut
up so he could sing,” said one young woman. “How can you tell
17,000 people to quiet down?” Then he got pissed off because it
wasn’t quiet enough for him and stopped the song right in the
middle.”
Said Crosby: “I don’t bum out on people onstage. There were too
many people yelling, ‘Sit down.’ I asked them and asked them to
be quiet. But it was very loud and I had a great difficulty, and
once I stopped, I didn’t have enough emotional momentum to start
that song over again, so I went right into ‘Guinnevere’ - and
did a fucking good job on it!”
But Crosby was clearly unhappy as Nash had said. “During rehearsals
(at Neil’s ranch in La Honda, south of San Francisco), we never
had time to go all the way through the show, see how long 44 songs
would take,” said Crosby. “It was an honest mistake. I gave too
much, and ended up cheating Vancouver, I felt bad. I’d let them
down and I’d let the band down.” But as Nash and Stills and manager
Elliot Roberts said, the group cannot contain itself, once onstage.
Crosby agreed. “I get to a song like ‘Ohio’ (which closed the
opening electric set) and you know me. To hold back on that ......
Well I, don’t believe in controlled mediocrity.
CSNY are uniquely attractive, for some obvious musical reasons
and, not insignificantly, for some more mysterious personal ones.
The fact that the group broke up at the height of success in 1970
was puzzling enough. That Graham Nash would later attribute the
split to “stupid, infantile ego problems,” made it only more interesting,
and sad. Then came the announcements of impending reunion, followed
by almost ritual withdrawals of those announcements. The last
time was last winter, when the four got together in Hawaii, sang
together and even worked up some new material. “We realized how
good it could be,” said Crosby, “But and he slowed the next sentence
down: “We - weren’t - quite - ready - to - do - it. A couple of
us weren’t”
Anyway, as Elliot Roberts said, “It started to look like bullshit.”
Roberts, who manages Crosby, Nash and Young, finally went to each
man, got summer cleared, and began mapping out the season’s biggest
rock and roll tour, some 30 dates, most of them much larger that
the kickoff’s in Seattle and Vancouver July 9th and 10th. Two
shows at Oakland Coliseum July 13th and 14th drew a reported total
76,000; another outdoor show - at the Ontario Motor Speedway in
Southern California August 3rd - was expected to draw somewhere
near 200,000 and 40 - 50,000 were projected attendance figures
in Houston, Denver, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee and several
other spots. Unofficial total gross estimates ranged between 800,000
and a million persons paying an average ticket price of $8.50.
Were CSNY back together only for the money? “Well,” said Roberts,
“it’s not a benefit. But I’d have to say that money is not a factor.”
Crosby, while admitting that he has spent most of his money over
the years, maintained that he does not need CSNY income in order
to survive. The reason for the reunion, he said, should be clear;
“It’s the best goddamned music any of has every played - and we
all know it.”
In keeping with CSNY’s nature, the schedule was not totally firm
a week into the tour; a date had not yet been fixed for the closing
show at Madison Square Garden, and whether a mid September stop
in London, at Wembley Arena, might extend to other parts of Europe,
was still to be figured out. At the last minute, and invitation
to Kenny Passarelli, who’d worked with Stills, to be the group’s
bassist was canceled, and the backup band consists of Tim Drummond,
from Neil Young’s tours and the Harvest and Time Fades Away albums,
on bass; Joe Lala, from Manassas, on percussion, and Russ Kunkel,
who backed Crosby and Nash on their tours and duet album, on drums.
The first show, in Seattle, was a show of strength and of health,
Stephen looking bright-eyed and snappy in one of his collection
of football and hockey jersey’s; Neil with his hair drastically
trimmed smiling out from his reflective shades; and Nash and Crosby
maintaining their respectively under-fed and over-nourished appearances.
The four soul-slapped, back patted and hand shook their way through
the first part of the show, shifting seats and instruments with
ease through, “Love the One You’re With,” “Wooden Ships,” “Immigration
Man,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Change Partners,” ‘Traces,” (a new
Young song), Nash’s “Grave Concern,” preceded by a litany of Watergate
gibberish (“I don’t recall”.....”I can’t seem to remember,” “to
the best of my recollection...”), “Black Queen,” Almost Cut My
Hair,” and “Ohio.” Stills was giving Young, plenty of room to
roam on lead guitar, a comment for those who remember stories
about Sunset Strip duels between the two major forces of Buffalo
Springfield; Stills would later shine for himself on his banjo
number, “Know You Got To Run,” and several Latin-beaten jams.
The hour long electric set was followed by an acoustic session
that at first aroused the crowd with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,”
which suffered from a poor mix and a few offed keys, and “Helplessly
Hoping.” A beautiful “Blackbird,” a group favorite since the earliest
days in Laurel Canyon, was followed by a Neil Young lament, “Human
Highway,” by which he only recently discarded along with an entire
album called Tonight’s the Night, in favor of the just released
On the Beach . The song showed off Young’s new voice, the high
end seemingly chopped off, the whine now more a moan. Nash sang
“Prison Song” and a lovely new love song, reminiscent of “I Miss
You” on Wild Tales, and Crosby began the solo spots with a new
tune reflecting his own maturity - “Carry Me” - then a tribute
to his “favorite songwriter” with “For Free” by Joni Mitchell,
and “Guinnevere,” which had Nash sneaking up to weave in a perfect
laser beam of harmony. Here, the audience was stilled, many on
the main floor assuming Fifties civil-defense huddle positions,
heads sunken between knees. Nash follows with “Sleep Song” and
“Our House,” which earned an ovation, and he gave way to Stills
for “4+20” and the banjo workout. Young then peformed two more
new compositions, both musically light-hearted “Love Art Blues”,
and “Long May You Run,” which he wrote for his refurbished ‘48
Buick Roadmaster. When he finished “A Man Needs a Maid,” it was
12:35am, and people could be seen packing up and leaving. But
the transition back to electric had just begun, with “Don’t Be
Denied,” then several Stills numbers that extended into lengthy
jams, along with “Deja' vu’” and “Preroad “Downs.” “Long Time
Gone” and “Carry On” closed the show and ignited a full ten minute
encore call that got the group back on for “Chicago.”
At 1:37 in the Pacific Northwest, with the monorail long out of
commission, and several hundred people suddenly needing rides,
CSNY wove together into a four man hug. They had overdosed, and
the next night would be a disaster. But they had proven that they
were in it, more than anything else, for the music.
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