by Lorrie Moore
Of course, it is a paying job to tour, and Stills has incurred the expenses of a celebrity who grew up without much. Jimi Hendrix, when asked about the problem of singing the blues once one has made so much money from doing so, noted the hardship of musicians’ making money (they are then harnessed by recording companies to make more). Hendrix was overworked and deeply ambivalent: “Actually, the more money you make the more blues you can sing,” he told Dick Cavett. Stills himself wandered into fame’s trappings: cars, drugs, horses, country houses (one in England purchased from Ringo Starr), seven children both in and out of wedlock, fine wines, ex-wives (including his first, the singer Véronique Sanson, the daughter of celebrated French Resistance fighters; “My French never got over the hump, you know?” he said of that divorce, and one imagines that “Marianne” was written about her). David Crosby, on the other hand, who drifted toward addiction and eventually solitary in a Texas penitentiary, was “Hollywood royalty,” the privileged son of Floyd Crosby, the renowned cinematographer of High Noon.
Sometimes the desire to make music fuses nicely with the need to make a living. Stills was always focused and driven, although this attribute is usually credited to his intermittent and more sober partner, Graham Nash (we could drink a case of Nash and still be on our feet). Change Partners chronicles Stills’s both specific and general doggedness, his ongoingness, his formation and re-formation of bands, beginning most successfully (after some pavement pounding in Greenwich Village) in Los Angeles, where in 1966 he assembled Buffalo Springfield (named after a steamroller that was repaving streets), which included Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer, and Neil Young, who had just driven down from Canada in his legendary hearse, ostensibly to locate the actual 77 Sunset Strip. Tom Petty described Stills’s guitar playing at that time as “fluid and bluesy” and Young’s as “fuzzy and angry.” Stills admired Young’s playing, and Young was in awe of Stills’s voice—one need only listen to the haunting Buffalo Springfield demo of “Four Days Gone” to hear why. (Stills’s voice had just a dozen more years before it began to lose its supple perfection.) For decades after, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young kept reemerging in various configurations, though each member was determined to do his own solo records. Hence Ahmet Ertegun’s title for their first live album, 4 Way Street.
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Backstage at the Ryman, preshow, Stills sits at a table and signs merchandise. When it is my turn in line, I hand him a fan letter and he sticks it respectfully and unopened in the inner pocket of his black sport jacket. (That women’s jackets don’t have these intimate pockets is a sorrow to me, though a boon to the handbag industry.) He wears thick, clear-framed glasses, a silvering goatee, and his hair is a light caramel hue to remind one of his blond youthful beauty.
In the Roberts book women speak repeatedly of Stills’s handsomeness and his shyness. People were drawn to him. Black musicians often felt he was the only one of CSNY they could connect with and attributed it to Stills’s southern, country-boy roots. Hendrix wanted Stills to join his band. For a stretch Stills, a left-wing activist, was also the only one in CSNY who could vote—Crosby had felonies, Nash was English, Young was Canadian. Stills made midterm elections his political focus—and though active in presidential campaigns from JFK onward (in the fall of 2016 he wrote a protest song against Donald Trump), he has also made appearances on behalf of local congressmen across the country, urging Americans to think about our government’s legislative branch. This he began doing with some success during the Nixon administration, helping to create Tip O’Neill’s House of Representatives, and we should expect similar efforts in 2018. In 2000 Stills was part of the Credentials Committee from Florida during the Democratic National Convention and in previous years served as a delegate. One can see the doggedness etched in his face.
Perhaps because my friend and I are from a university, Stills now mentions he recently received an honorary degree from McGill. Because he has been a working musician since he was a teenager and never went to college, he is visibly proud of and amused by this McGill doctorate. He says he is going to do some work with the neurologist Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music. I don’t mention the Roberts book, which makes no reference to this and is probably not a book Stills has even read, though there is a handy index for skimming. Stills signs our CDs, and we thank him and move on. There is a line forming to have one’s photo taken with him, and out of a fear of carnivals and cameras my friend and I do not get in it. My head is full of Stills’s songs, one of which from decades ago includes these words: “Help me…/ My life is a miserable comedy / Of strangers / Posing as friends.” Nonetheless, Stills is tolerating the backstage meet-’n’-greet/merch-perch rather well, although there is little revel in his demeanor—how could there be? He’s a trouper, a player, a soldier, a generous musician with his audience and his bandmates. But he is not an award-winning actor. In interviews he tends toward droll diplomacy, restraint, a dry quip. His signature costumes onstage and on album covers have been football jerseys, military jackets, and that poncho.
Grit, then, is the theme. Stills is one of the last remaining rock-’n’-roll geniuses from a time when rock music was the soundtrack to an antiwar movement—“For What It’s Worth,” “Woodstock,” “Ohio” (about the 1971 Kent State shootings)—back when the global counterculture was on the left rather than the right. Roberts’s book makes this inexactly clear. Stills has been on the scene from the start, forming Buffalo Springfield when Jimi Hendrix was being booked as the opening act for The Monkees on tour. He has seemingly played with everyone—from Bill Withers to George Harrison. He was the first person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice in the same night for his work in two different bands. “What a wonderfully strange and beautiful cast of characters life has handed to me,” he said in his acceptance speech.
And now on the Ryman Auditorium stage he cuts loose with the young, strapping Kenny Shepherd. Stills often steps back in a paternal fashion, and the Shreveport-born Shepherd does his Delta blues thing, long blond hair flying. Spotlights move around the stage searchingly, and I consider the musicians—Leonard Cohen, Prince, Leon Russell—who have died this past year and whom spotlights will never find again. Stills lets Barry Goldberg, the seventy-five-year-old keyboardist, play his best-known song, “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” (a 1974 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips). Congenitally deaf in one ear and now partially deaf in the other, Stills is brave to attempt his own “Bluebird,” with its difficult singing, and on its high notes his voice becomes a bit of a bray. “I’ve always sung flat,” he has said smilingly into cameras, and this embrace of time’s wear and tear feels spiritually strong and unself-pitying. Soon he unbegrudgingly performs what has become something of an albatross for him, his hit single “Love the One You’re With.” The human jukebox aspect of a rock concert is difficult to avoid. He shakes out his hands to rid them of pain. Colorful freshly tuned guitars are brought in at regular intervals. Overly warmed up, at one point he takes off his jacket and flings it across the stage. “Oh, well,” I say to my friend. “There goes my letter.” The band closes with Neil Young’s “Rocking in the Free World.” (It is a custom of Stills’s concerts to include one song by Young.) Shepherd remains a gifted, impeccable, shiny part of it all. But Stills is the one we love. He’s the one we’re with.
(2017)
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the many eagle-eyed editors and copy editors through the years, as well as to the tiny handful of people who thought this book was a good idea and encouraged it. You know who you are. A copy is in the mail, with gratitude.
—LM
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Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done
