The Confessions of Stephen ‘Manassas’ Stills.
By Michael Watts
For some time Peter Sellers owned the house, and then he sold
it to Ringo Starr, who only lived in it two months before he hated
having to make the traffic-cluttered journey every morning down
the Guildford bypass to Twickerham Studios where they were shooting
“Let It Be.”
Stephen Stills lives in it now - the 14 rooms with oak beams salvaged
from the Armada, the low fireplaces, the sauna house, the Japanese
lakes, are his to roam. His status as a musician is betrayed by
a fully equipped rehearsal room, and two gold records on the living
room wall. On the same wall is a text from GEORGE HARRISON: “We’re
all one, and life flows on within you and without you.”
It ain’t me, babe: That song on the “Sgt Pepper” album has another
line about “The space between us all.” It seems to aptly reflect
the idea of Stills as a man out on his own, an isolated individual
surrounded by acquaintances: The Loner. When you ask him if Neil’s
song is really about him, he pauses a good long while and then
finally says he would have thought it was more applicable to Neil
himself. Alot of people, he knows, think the opposite.
Before diner he sits in an armchair in the halflight from the
huge logfire, the the big color television flickering silently,
his voice very soft and throaty, suddenly erupting now and then
in a gust of laughter.
He’s wearing an American footballer’s shirt, just like on the
cover of “Stephen Stills One” (NOTE: On the back cover of Stephen
Stills-lorraine) - only it’s got a number seven on it, not 41.
But his appearance isn’t that of a football player. If he was
a little shorter and slightly less heavy, he’d be everyone’s picture
of a jockey: the legs, in their boots and blue jeans, faintly
bowed, the face lean and sharp, the body forever bent in a vaguely
forward position.
Seven-man escape team: Without warning, Stills has astonished
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young followers by throwing the wraps
off a group of his own, Manassas, then unleashing a new album
of the same name (on Atlantic Records). The seven-man group throbs
with the promise of fresh creations, but its album has actually
burrowed back into the warm soil of Stills ’ musical roots. Stephen’s
beginnings are in black music, but more specifically in soul.
His new album, though, is more than half taken up with stone blues
from the Deep South. And one of the sides is pretty much country.
He’s recorded it with a band, also called Manassas, which has
Chris Hillman, on guitar, Al Perkins (also from the Burritos)
on steel and Telecaster, Joe Lala on congas, Paul Harris, organ,
Fuzzy Samuels, bass, and Dallas Taylor, drums. He says the album
sounds like Buffalo Springfield.
Break open the charisma: Is that what he wanted to get back to?
“Sort of.” Don’t look back and all that stuff! He smiles thinly.
“’Don’t Look at my Shadow, It’s Behind Me,’ is a song I wrote
on this album. I’ve just said, let’s get simple and right and
be flash enough to carry on with a little charisma. When Buffalo
Springfield started we were the rockingest , jumpingest, motherf-----s
you ever seen,” he chuckled throatily, and it never got recorded.
“Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin could really get like that. Bruce
was very affected by the Rolling Stones, y’know. He would lay
down a groove and we could’ve done anything. He relationship with
me and Neil and Dewey was the focal point of the group. He was
the focus that balanced Neil and I. Richie’s power was in his
showmanship.”His eyes turned vacantly on the silent television
screen in reminiscence.
A sexual monkey wrench: “At the beginning, Neil would sort of
stand off at the side and play his axe and be very cool, and everybody
dug that about him. And I was on the other side of the stage calling
it. I would call the show. That was before the ego trips, when
we lived together. We did everything, y’know. We’d cram ourselves
into a car together and all go off to the gig. But then we all
started working the Whisky and all those strange chicks started
in on me and Neil, and it kind of blew the whole balance.
“I remember particularly one time in New York, before Bruce really
began to withdraw. He just looked at me and said” “This band is
jive, this band is getting jive, man! He very seldom talked, and
when he did it was philosophy and stuff like that. An extremely
intellectual man, really self contained.
Trouble with Neil Young: “But my temper was starting to get in
the way ‘cos I would watch the shit go down. I was pissed off,
and I sensed that Neil was resenting the fact that I was starting
to play lead guitar. I was the arranger, and all of a sudden I
was treading on his territory, so he started getting into mine
and so forth and we just got into this ridiculous 21-year-old-boys
in the band gig. Then we were finding fault with everything. Everything
started to lose proportion and it got stupid, y’know. It was just
dumb, a kid’s trip. Chris and I can relate to the same experiences
about the Byrds that brought on the same trouble- trouble with
David and Roger.
Heroin hang up: The theme of drugs has always weaved in and out
of Stills’ life as a musician. He’ll talk about drugs, but warily
because he knows that while the public is open to discussion on
certain areas, others are not yet regarded as permissible. And
besides, he’s concerned that there should not be any emulation
of the habits of rock stars. He is emphatically against the use
of heroin. It may be unhip, but he’s one of those musicians who’s
profoundly anti-heroin and he’ll do his best to preach against
it.
On the subject of coke - which is in wide use on the rock scene,
especially in America - he treads, very carefully. A couple of
years ago, he says, he was a “coke head.” He had a reputation
for it. He’s read extensively about the drug and is aware of the
danger of an aneurysm in the brain - a burst blood vessel that
can lead to cerebral hemorrhage.
The marijuana maze: At the start, he says it was just hash and
grass. He stopped that three years ago because he found that his
metabolism was such that he couldn’t handle it: “I’m now 27, but
I didn’t really start to grow up until around 25, and then I went
through a period of self-awareness. I started operating on the
fact that my head was too fast to begin with, that I was a fairly
high-energy person, and that when I got blown away on grass it
would all become confused and wouldn’t really calm me down. In
my very early twenties I was a tremendous pothead and had a real
good time doing it, but after a while it made everything a big
jumble. I found myself sitting in places vegetating with absolutely
nothing to contribute to a conversation.
Smacked out: “People would start talking about something that
I was perfectly capable of discussing, and I would sit there like
this” - he slumped in his chair - “as if I was smacked out. I
could hear the guy talking and understand him, and the answer
would come, but by the time I got it together it said something
else, another perspective had occurred to which would negate the
first thing that I thought of. That situation can get you pretty
neurotic. Which I got. So I just put it down.”
His notorious bust last year, however was not for coke but for
pills, Downers. It was just dumb, he says. There had been four
of them in a hotel and there were all kinds of drugs around -
“uppers and downers, pot and coke, and lots of other stuff. I
took responsibility basically for everything. I got a fine, which
was hefty enough but fair within the law.
A little help from the police: “What happened was that I took
some pills, got blown away, and blew my cool, and it ended up
like I was ODing on pills, and so they had to call an ambulance.
We were all drugged up and somebody crashed on the door and I
got up and kinda staggered over to it - I thought one of the people
didn’t have their key to the room - and the couple across the
hall were standing there and went “aaaargh!” They called the manager
and everybody. I don’t remember anything else until the lights
went on in the room and it was full of policemen. And that ended
that trip.”
The story of Hendrix’s death: “Jimi (Hendrix) took a dive, too.
I was told that somebody gave him a mandrax and said ‘Here! (he
clapped his hands sharply) you can’t drink when you take one of
these, right?’ And Jimi then said groovy and went down to a club
and got blown away on drinking, and went on a bummer ‘cos he couldn’t
hold it. He jammed with some guys and that didn’t happen, so he
said ‘Fuckit, I’m going to sleep,’ and went straight out of the
club. He went to bed and was sick, and having taken a mandrax
he didn’t roll over and so he swallowed his vomit. Completely
accidental, like that.”
Teaming up with Jimi: Stills had a great affection for Hendrix.
Right after the Monterey Festival he played with him, Buddy Miles
and Bruce Palmer at Stills beachhouse in Malibu; 14 hours solid.
Hendrix was also featured on “Old Times, Good Times,” on Stephen’s
first solo album. And they cut two records together in Island
Studios a couple of years back which Stills possesses and has
no immediate plans of releasing. With Conrad Isadore and Fuzzy
Samuels as the rhythm section, they jammed a lot and then Jimi
played some straight blues. There was even some intention of them
forming a band together. He said Hendrix just missed each other
going in opposite directions, says Stills. There was pressure
from their respective managements to cut their individual records.
One last Hendrix yarn: Stills is sorrowful when he talks about
him. Around the time of his death, he explains, Hendrix was in
a turmoil because he couldn’t find a band. There wasn’t anyone
good enough to play with him: “He was constantly frustrated in
a musical sense. We used to play together all the time at Steve
Paul’s place in New York (The Scene); and there’d always be some
bummer cat. One session I finally made it clear to everyone that
the following people take the stage and the rest will kindly stay
away. One time Jimi actually had to come over and kick me to play
lead guitar because I was bound and determined to show graphically
that the reason he was unhappy was that he’d never had anyone
lay it down for him.”
The tensions in CSNY: Such a selfless attitude seems quite remarkable
in a musician who is popularly supposed to be a megalomaniac.
Stills agrees that’s his image, but he doesn’t concede that it’s
his image, but he doesn’t concede that it’s the truth. In the
final analysis, he says, someone has to be the boss. It takes
a strong ego to be a musician, he points out, particularly if
you’re an arranger. And that’s his gig. That’s why he left Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young: before it got too heavy. He won’t play
with them again until it’s comfortable once more, until they no
longer suspect him of ulterior motives to sabotage their songs.
A pause to relax: After midnight, over the dining room table,
he talks for nearly two hours about skiing , horseracing, and
motor cars; references to Jean-Claude Killy and the famous American
horse, Man O’War, crosscut in the conversation with how he once
drove home smashed from Tramps pub one nite in exactly 37 1/2
minutes. (It took almost an hour-and-a-half for us to get there).
The girl who ran off with the grocery money: There’s alot of myth
that envelops superstars, and Stephen Stills, much as he detests
the tag, finds himself on that particular pedestal. It’s lonely
at the top, sings Randy Newman. In a slightly different context,
in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” says much the same. But is seems almost
too pat to stylize him as “the loner,” the guy with lots of hangers-on
but no friends.
It was like that once, in California, Stephen concedes. He was
green and people took advantage of him. He would ask chicks to
buy his groceries give them $300. dollars and tell them to keep
the change. They always did. That way he lost $27,000. dollars.
For Stephen Stills, or most any superstar, read Bob Dylan: “Where
one man’s life might begin, that’s exactly where mine ends.”
DEMONIC FURY: The Making of Manassas
At Miami’s Criteria Studios, where Stephen Stills recorded his
double Manassas record, Stills is not exactly thought as a friendly
guy. Criteria’s Howie and Ron Albert, the young engineer duo who
first met Stills several years ago when he ambled into their control
room for a look around, and who then sweated through three months
of night and day recording with him a year later when he came
back to work on Stephen Stills II, both swear that when Stills
flew out of Miami with the finished tapes under his arm he still
had never really uttered a personal word to either of them.
But things began to change last September when Stills winged back
to Miami once more and settled in to work on Manassas. With him
were the seven musicians destined to become his new group - Dallas
Taylor, who’d been with Crosby, Stills and Nash; Caribbean Islander
Calvin (Fuzzy) Samuels, who flew in from his English home for
the sessions; Joe Lala, former member of Blues Image and a native
Floridian; Paul Harris, who’d once arranged for the Mama’s and
Papa’s; ex-Byrdman Chris Hillman; Al Perkins and Paul Harris.
Despite the fact that Rolling Stone Bill Wyman - who dropped in
to play bass for two weeks and to help write the music for the
cut eventually titled as “The Love Gangster” - was supposedly
on a Florida vacation, the atmosphere in the studio was hard and
driving. “Rock ‘n Roll Crazies,” “Cuban Bluegrass,” “Jet Set,”
and the others were all laid down, reworked, and perfected at
a pace most humans would find unbearable.
It was to take four months before the album would finally be completed,
but from the moment he set foot in the studio, Stills knew the
exact effect he wanted on tape. Often he refused to leave the
studio until he was totally satisfied with a track, laboring for
72 or even 96 grueling hours without even looking at the clock.
“We only stopped to eat, not that Stephen eats much,” says Howie
Albert, “but the other guys in the group got hungry.” And while
they ate, Stills impatiently paced around the room nibbling Doritos
and leaving half empty corn chip bags by the hundreds strewn around
the studio and control room. Once, after over 80 hours of straight
hard work, engineer Howie Albert went home and collapsed in bed,
only to be awakened three hours later by the ringing of the phone.
Stills “had gone home and couldn’t sleep because things were going
around in his head. There was one part he wanted to finish.”
In all his months of fiendish labor at the Criteria Plant, Stills
never once softened towards the studios employees. He maintained
a guarded pleasantness, but if he was sitting in the control room
and someone other than the Alberts walked in, he froze up - his
conversation stopped, and he didn’t resume until after the intruder
had left. None-the-less, when it was all over, Howie and Ron Albert
no longer saw Stills as the cold, inhuman musical machine he’d
seemed to be the year before. “You sure get to know a guy when
you spend that much time with him,”exclaimed Howie as Manassas
was going through its final mixes. “As a person, he finally has
my respect.
Joe Lala, SS and Al Perkins©
Chris Hillman and SS ©
(photo's are from the article - there is no photo credit)