The 50th
anniversary of Woodstock in two weeks’ time sees the publication of two
substantial biographies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, one of them by my
friend Peter Doggett whom I know from long acquaintance is a great admirer of
the ‘band’. Woodstock and CSNY are synonymous but why the inverted commas?
Well, I have always believed that the crème
de la crême of rock bands are organic insofar as
they grow from a seed. They assemble as beginners, learning how to play their
instruments and produce music together, then struggle to achieve recognition
while focusing exclusively on this goal, much like The Beatles, The Who, U2,
R.E.M. and many more. The overriding conclusion of Doggett’s book, however, is
that although once touted as the ‘biggest band in the world’ Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young were never really a band in this or any other sense.
On the very first page of his
introduction he calls them a ‘collective’, not a term I’ve seen used before in
this context but one which defines their situation perfectly. Their only
struggle was between themselves for dominance. Their focus was partial at best.
They were not three together or for each other, as one of their loveliest songs
seemed to imply. In the beginning they were three individual musicians who after
apprenticeships elsewhere met by chance and discovered their voices produced an
astonishing harmonic resonance – their ‘trick’, as Doggett calls it. Then, to
reinforce the brand, they added a fourth member who too quickly for comfort eclipsed
them all.
The tender, illusively autobiographical
lyrics of ‘Helplessly Hoping’ are therefore misleading, implying a unity of
understanding and purpose that was never consistent in CSNY. In the spirit of
the times, however, the song conveyed so much more: primarily their fierce opposition,
shared by their fans, to the bad shit that coincided with their evolution, the
war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon and the blue meanies who didn’t like men with
long hair, recreational drugs and sexual freedom. This too was ambiguous, with David Crosby and Graham Nash certainly on the side of the righteous but Stephen Stills and Neil Young less
so. Nevertheless, the timing of their arrival magnified their celebrity by placing
them at the heart of America’s sixties countercultural revolution which reached
its apogee with Woodstock, at which CSNY famously appeared, and culminated in
the tragedy of Kent State, which inspired one of their greatest songs. All of this
has added greatly to their legacy and gives Doggett’s book a historical charge
lacking in biographies of rock acts who had the misfortune to graduate in less turbulent
times.
On the face of it, CSNY’s celebrity is
out of all proportion to their miserly output. During their ascent and
supremacy, the six-year period from 1968 to 1974 covered in great detail here, CSN
produced one great studio album, and with Young on board produced another
which was pretty good but not so great. A live CSNY album followed and that was
it, unless you count compilations, further live recordings and subsequent less
celebrated – but not necessarily substandard – reunion efforts over the succeeding
years that Doggett wisely mentions only briefly in a coda (in contrast to the
rival but inferior* CSNY biog also just
published, CSN&Y: The Wild, Definitive
Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup by David Browne).
The CSN&Y story is nonetheless very
complex, involving the comings and goings of the four individuals as well as a
huge cast of other musician pals, many girlfriends and ambitious managers, often
multiplied by four. The task of the biographer is further complicated by
unreliable or contradictory testimony from the four principals who remember
everything differently, this in large part due to the vast quantity of drugs
ingested at the time and in lesser part to score settling, a state of affairs
that continues to this day with Crosby only recently complaining that none
of his friends talk to him anymore. A five-page postscript is devoted to how
this impacts on the book.
To overcome these difficulties Doggett
assiduously lays out the contradictory testimony from interviews, some of them
his own, and autobiographies (by all bar Stills) and like a forensic scientist
gathers his evidence, draws attention to inconsistencies and reaches conclusions
with the proviso that regardless of what you might have read elsewhere, his
version is most likely to be the truth. I believe
him, too, not least because Doggett has been studying the subject for decades
and is rigorous in his analysis, as befits a former editor of Record Collector magazine at a time when,
for accuracy, its Beatle coverage and discographies were the best in the world.
Piecing together the story of CSNY is a
bit like doing a jigsaw. The labyrinthine journeys that brought them together involve
The Byrds, The Hollies and Buffalo Springfield, of course, but Doggett doesn’t
have the space to dwell overlong on the histories of these groups, only on the
formative years of the four, none of whom had what might be termed conventional
childhoods. Depending on whom you believe, Crosby left or was fired from The
Byrds for his overbearing manner, while Nash felt The Hollies were too
lightweight for the post-Pepper era.
Stills and Young, the key members of Buffalo Springfield, became dissatisfied
because the group failed to realise its potential. The first three found one
another in LA, probably after a Hollies gig in February, 1968, at the Whiskey club
which opens the book, and for the next few months traversed the globe meeting up whenever and wherever they could. Doggett is spectacularly good at detailing all the travelling
involved – it’s almost as if he was given a folder containing the stubs of all
their airline tickets to and from LA, New York and London – an early indication
of the research he must have undertaken to fit the pieces together.
Young joined after the first album was
recorded but before they’d played live, ostensibly to boost the stage sound.
Thereafter he’s a bit of a ghost, here today, gone tomorrow, resolutely his own
man. Stills, the most skilled guitarist, most ambitious and most industrious,
tries to assume a leadership role but is undermined by Crosby’s wilful
tendencies and Young’s Will-o’-the-wispishness. Nash adopts a resigned but
generally composed attitude to his colleagues’ rampant egos, as befitting an
Englishman, but he stands his ground when pushed too far. The infighting is
exacerbated by drugs, especially when cocaine displaces marijuana, and their
relationships with women. Pliant groupies are everywhere but more permanent
bonds became muses and influenced the collective’s productivity, partly because
some affairs overlapped: Crosby and Nash both courted Joni Mitchell, who comes
out of the tale with more honour than most; Stills and Nash both courted Rita
Coolidge; Stills courted Judy Collins, who inspired his magnificent ‘Suite:
Judy Blue Eyes’; Crosby lost his true love in an automobile accident; Stills married the
French actress Véronique
Sanson; and Young lived with American actress Carrie Snodgrass. By the end of
the book all these relationships, and more, are over.
Then there’s the money which in turn
leads to profligacy. We are told that when Nash arrived in LA to turn the ‘trick’
into something tangible, he left almost all his cash in the UK and this leads to
a characterisation of him as the least materialistic, a trait he shares to a
certain extent with Crosby except where sailing boats are concerned. Young and,
especially, Stills are more acquisitive and when it is pointed out by
management that the inclusion of Young massively increases their box-office
potential there is a good deal of angst when Young goes his own way.
Throughout his book Doggett offers a
comprehensive guide to the songs, their genesis, their evolution and, in many
cases, a shrewd critical assessment, and he’s also good on the concerts, many
of which are substandard due to iffy pitching and guitars going out of tune. Indeed,
I can’t recall reading a rock biog before where tuning is such an issue. Although
clearly a fan, he doesn’t flinch at pointing the finger of blame at whichever
individual is responsible for several shows disintegrating into an appalling
mess, so much so that when listening to playback tapes one or more of those
involved either throws a tantrum or breaks down in tears.
All of which clarifies why temperaments
boiled over and CSNY didn’t last long, at least in the first flush of their calling.
It’s a bumpy ride but immensely absorbing if you’re interested in the workings
of this most mercurial collective and why they imploded as often as they did.
Apart from the coda, Doggett’s book concludes with the quartet going their own
way after the 1974 stadium tour which just happened to be the only time I
caught them in action, at Denver’s Mile High Stadium on 25 July that year. In
my Melody Maker report of that show I mentioned that Stephen Stills had been quoted as saying that the
first time they went out on the road was for art, the second time for the girls
and this, the third, for the dollars, but Graham Nash took exception to this.
“We’re doing it for the music, man, because all of us know that none of us can
make as good music together as we can apart,” he told me in no uncertain terms.
He was probably right but so is Peter Doggett when he points out that CSNY have
spent
approximately two of the past 50 years as a functioning band and the other 48 fending
off questions about why they are no longer together. That’s because they were
never really a band in the first place.
*
At least according to my former MM
colleague Richard Williams who reviewed both books simultaneously in last
weekend’s Guardian Book Review
magazine.
