WOODSTOCK ... AND ALTAMONT

Authors: Geoffrey Stokes, Ed Ward & Ken Tucker
Journal: Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock And Roll, Chapter 25
Date: 1986

... despite the distant rumble of heavy metal, there was on one wing of the rock continuum a flowering of softer, lyrical sounds whose foremost exponents were probably Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young, a group that almost met Zappa's criterion of just happening to come together. After Super Session, Stills spent the next few months "taking lessons" by hanging out and jamming with Jimi Hendrix ("I followed him around so much that people thought we were fags, and others thought I was some kind of groupie"). Back home in California, he began spending time with David Crosby, who'd jammed with Buffalo Springfield at Monterey when he was still a Byrd. As Crosby recalled, one night when the Hollies were in town, "We were at Joni Mitchell's ... Cass was there, Stephen was there, me, and Willie [Graham Nash], just us five hangin' out. You know how it is this time of night, so we were singin' as you might imagine. We sang a lot. What happened was we started singing a country song of Stephen's called 'Helplessly Hoping.' And I had already worked out the third harmony. Stephen and I just started singing it, Willie looked at the rafters for about ten seconds, listened, and started singin' the other part like he'd been singin' it all his life."

As Stills recalled, "Crosby and me just looked at each other - it was one of those moments, you know?" On the way home, believing they'd discovered a magic combination, they talked about it. Crosby "was saying 'no he'd never do it ... those guys have been together forever. But boy, what a sound! We were really full of it, but didn't dare approach him, so we came to the conclusion that we'd get Cas, to ask him - we were just too afraid."

They needn't have been. The Hollies were indeed successful, but not in the way Nash wanted. The Manchester-based Hollies had largely missed out on the first wave of the British invasion. A beat group, they'd been neither as frenetic as the Dave Clark Five nor as gimmicky as Herman's Hermits, and despite their soaring vocal harmonies, their string of English hits didn't translate to America until 1966's "Bus Stop." Though other hits followed, a 1964 style success wasn't what Nash wanted in 1969, and as the group's chief writer, he'd been trying to orient it toward a more personal sort of music. To no avail, however, so he was displeased not only by the potential lack of royalties when guitarist Tony Hicks pushed for them to make their next album all Dylan songs.

Under the circumstances, Nash was entirely ready to leave, but there was a problem. Though Crosby was under no obligation to any record company, Nash was signed to EMI in England and Epic, a CBS subsidiary, in America. Stills went to Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun, with whom he was under contract. As Stills remembered it, Ertegun's reaction was, "Ah, man, why do you make me go through all this trouble with Sir Joseph and Clive Davis just because you want harmony?" but he agreed to deal with Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI. Meanwhile, Stills agreed to approach his ex-band mate Richie Furay who had by then formed Poco. Like Stills, he and his new band were still under contract to Atlantic, but they hadn't yet made a record. 'I said, 'Hey, Richie, you've got a country group, right ... but what's a country group going to do on Atlantic, which, after all, is an R&B label. How would you like to be on 'Columbia'?"

As it happened, Columbia president Clive Davis owed Ertegun and Stills something of a favor. Though Stills hadn't notified Atlantic before he played on the Al Kooper Super Session album for Columbia, Ertegun had given CBS a release without holding them up. And so, in best baseball tradition, the labels worked a Nash-for-Poco trade. Equally in the tradition, it held both cubs: Atlantic got a certified supergroup, though it, too, broke up; CBS both kept the Hollies, who fared perfectly well without Nash, and got nearly a decade of mid-chart hits from Poco. Still, Poco was pleasant at best; the writers were in CS and N - and, eventually, CSN and Y

Despite their much-publicized differences in Buffalo Springfield, it was Stills whole recruited Young - though only at Ahmet Ertegun's suggestion. CS and N were about to go out on tour, and while Nash and Crosby "were in favor of us going out as a sort of augmented Simon and Garfunkel," Stills had different ideas. Harmonies were nice enough in their place, but that place was generally in a rock 'n' roll band, and the three eventually compromised on a half-acoustic/half-electric show. In May, when Ertegun, who'd also had Young under contract during Buffalo Springfield days, learned that Stills was auditioning New York keyboardists for the band, he suggested taking Young on instead; that way Stills could shift to keyboards himself. Young had been to one of their rehearsals and liked their sound, and though he wasn't as fascinated by vocal harmonies as Crosby and Nash, he was intrigued by the four-part possibilities.

By that time, however, after a solid solo album that had failed to chart, Young had started to work with three musicians from the Rockets, recording "Cinnamon Girl" and the harder-edged "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand," for the "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" album. Originally they were to get together only in the studio, but it went so well - Young: "To me, these guys were the American Rolling Stones ... there has never been a bad night with them" - that they decided to go on the road as Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Though he was strongly tempted by Stills's offer, Young was both obligated to and drawn by Crazy Horse, so rather than choosing between the two prospects, he decided he could do both.

For a while, he could. As part of CSN and Y, he recorded Deja Vu. The album's sweet and complex harmonies, a product of hundreds of hours in the studio, were close to perfect - if anything, the album was perfect to a fault. For three months, however, the band couldn't tour to promote it because Young was recording After The Gold Rush with Crazy Horse and gigging with them. There's no need to feel sorry for Young's partners in CSN and Y; when they finally took to the road for a series of stadium tours during the summer of 1970, they did so as the highest-paid American group in history. But it's true that Young's commitment to them was tenuous - he once described it as, "I play lead guitar, and occasionally I'll sing a song" - and after that, they, too, broke up for a few years, leaving Poco and the other soft-rockers to attempt, generally with less success, their marriage of shimmering country-choir vocals with guitar driven hard rock.