*There’s an alternate version of “Down by the River”—same track, different background parts, different mix—with a very intense scratch vocal (done the night of the band recording) that hints at just what a challenge singing was to Young.
the guy with the balls
“That boy can flat yap,” said David Briggs, exhausted after a session with Joel Bernstein. There are those who will forever see Bernstein as the kid, the fan who crossed over, and his ability to endlessly pontificate can send the more-you-think-the-more-you-stink members of Young’s tribe over the edge. Bernstein’s devotion to his heroes has led to a sometimes lonely life. “Joel hasn’t been able to mate,” said Joni Mitchell. “Part of it is, he’s the court historian.”
Bernstein was fifteen when he discovered Joni Mitchell doing “Circle Game” on a Philadelphia radio station in 1967. “It was way past my bedtime. I’d never heard a song in a nonstandard tuning before, and I taped it on my dad’s Dictaphone. I stayed up all night learning to play it.”
When the unknown Mitchell came to play a small local coffeehouse, Bernstein was there. “He was still in braces,” she said. “His mother used to take him to the club and pick him up.” Joel began to haunt Mitchell’s East Coast gigs and, being an aspiring photographer, took reams of pictures. By 1969, Elliot Roberts was summoning him to document Mitchell’s Carnegie Hall gig and Neil Young’s appearance at the Bitter End. Five days into Joel’s college education, Mitchell called, asking him to fly out to Los Angeles to take publicity shots. He fled school and moved to Topanga Canyon. Bernstein had memorized his musical heroes’ every move, down to the weird ways they tuned guitars. “Joel did my tunings,” said Mitchell. “Then everybody wanted him.”
Bernstein went on to work with Dylan, Prince and scores of others, but it is Neil Young with whom he’s stayed the longest. His technical knowledge of Young’s work is unassailable; if Neil farted in a bathtub in 1964, Bernstein knows the date, location and whether it was recorded in stereo.
At the time I started this book, Neil called Joel in to start work on the Archives boxed set, and, sentenced to dealing with each other, we fought like cats and dogs. What a fucking know-it-all, I thought, and a longhaired folkie to boot. To him I was Mark David Chapman with a pen.
But like so many other odd couples in Young’s orbit, we became allies. We shared war wounds: While Neil had given his blessing to both projects, he seemed to delight in throwing as many obstacles our way as possible. Joel would hit the wall more than once with Young on Archives, just as there were long periods when Neil refused to talk to me at all.
I thought Joel might help me appreciate CSNY, like Ken Viola had with Buffalo Springfield, but after experiencing his idols up close, and wading through a mountain of archival tapes, Bernstein had seen his teenage worship give way to deep disappointment. His final analysis: “Bombastic, self-absorbed superstar group that showed great promise and had, in fact, some moments of gelling. But ultimately? A failure.”
At that time I was really excited, because I hadn’t been doin’ really well. I had a couple of records out, neither one was really too successful, Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and neither one of them were doin’ super-good, y’know, and then I joined Crosby, Stills and Nash and did that tour with them and my records started takin’ off—Everybody Knows started doin’ better and better, hung in there for a really long time. So I guess it helped me on all levels, joining them. Besides making what I thought was really great music that was really getting me off, more people were getting to know me as an artist and get interested in what I was doing. So it was a really good thing for me.
—Radio interview with B. Mitchell Reid, 1973
“I’ll never forget our ride in the limo on the way to see Neil,” said Dallas Taylor, recalling a 1969 Crazy Horse gig on Long Island they were crashing. “Stephen said, ‘How would you feel about Neil joining the band?’ ‘Wow, great—except isn’t that why the Springfield broke up?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, man—it’s gonna be different this time. It’ll be cool.’ But there was this tone of doubt in his voice.”
With their debut album topping the charts, Crosby, Stills and Nash were faced with the necessity of performing live—a bit of a problem, since so much of the record had been overdubbed by one-man-band Stills. Crosby and Nash wanted to keep the live presentation acoustic, but Stills had a fatal desire to hear the trio rock. Many possible musicians had been discussed and even approached before Ahmet Ertegun, at dinner with Stills and David Geffen, suggested the obvious choice: Neil Young.
At first Young was wanted only as a sideman. Ever the master manipulator, Elliot Roberts laid down the law: full partnership, equal songs. “He’d have to be a Y,” Roberts demanded. Graham Nash balked. “We’d spent a lotta time getting this beautiful harmonic sound together. I mean, Jesus Christ, wasn’t the album a huge multiplatinum success? I didn’t feel like we needed anybody else.”
Nash had never spent time around the reclusive Young, so the pair met to discuss matters over breakfast in New York City at Bleecker Street Café, near where the group was already in rehearsal. Young charmed Nash instantly. “Neil absolutely won me over. I came out of that breakfast two eggs over easy.”
This put Neil Young in an amazing position: He could reap the hype benefits of a smash album he didn’t even play on and in the process expose a gigantic audience to his own music. “CSNY was definitely not hurting Neil,” said Roberts. “Neil never had a downside in any of this, never. It could only help us. What we were asked to do is take something soft and give it balls…. Neil’s got balls dripping from his shoulders, there’s balls in his hair, there’s balls comin’ down his back—he’s got balls everywhere.”
Young was definitely the guy with the balls. He gutted one band—the Rockets—to create his own, then walked into a supergroup with full membership status and continued to work with Crazy Horse. “Neil made it clear that CSN was not his first priority,” said Roberts. “The work was the priority. So the seeds of discontent were always there.”
Once Young was in the group, his power continued to swell. “As soon as they started to rehearse, it was clear Neil was gonna be in charge,” said Roberts. “Everyone was afraid of Neil. Because Neil walked. When Neil said, ‘Fuck you, I’m leaving,’Neil left. Everyone else goes, ‘Fuck you, I’m leaving,’ and they go to the bathroom, roll a joint and come back. But when Neil said anything, he did it. He really did back out of Monterey. And this was terrifying to these guys, because they were full of that—every other thing was ‘I’m not playing, I’m not showing.’ Like little kids. Neil wasn’t into that. It was serious business.”
All CSNY needed now was a bass player. Bruce Palmer was in the band briefly but was unable to stomach the ego parade and was deemed too unreliable by Nash and Crosby. On Sunset Boulevard one day Young ran into Rick James, his old friend from the Mynah Birds. With him was a fresh-faced kid named Greg Reeves. * A protégé of Motown bass legend James Jamerson, Reeves had been making $38 a week as a session man on such hits as the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine” before heading to California. Both Reeves and James had just been fired from Ray Charles’s studio after the blind musician’s manager caught the pair rolling Charles a joint. Reeves auditioned for CSNY, and his fiery, idiosyncratic playing won the band over.
But Reeves, who told me that he lied about his age and was practically prepubescent at the time he joined the group—would have a hard time making his way through the vortex of rock stardom. He took to wearing capes onstage and casting spells on whoever entered his hotel room. “Greg went completely bats,” said Crosby. “He decided he didn’t like being a handsome young black kid. He was gonna be an Indian. Then he was gonna be a witch doctor.”
“Greg Reeves we all loved,” said Roberts. “Neil especially liked him, because he was so crazy. He had the same balls that Neil had—from second one, he was in your face rocking—but he was really a psycho. Greg had this sack with his sacred feather that he did all his prayers
with. And coming into London, the customs guy wanted to look in his feather bag and grabbed it out of Greg’s hands. Greg said, ‘This is sacred stuff—my God, you’ve desecrated it! OOMAH! OOMAH!’ And he starts dancing and chanting. We’re all in line, and now they’re coming from all angles—and we all had grass. Everybody was arrested.”
Drummer Dallas Taylor and Young would never quite mesh. “Neil would freeze him with a glance,” said Elliot Roberts. “You rush one or two times with Neil, and he glares at you. He gets in your face—he doesn’t, like, hope you’re seeing him from across the stage—he goes up to the drum kit and does the time for you. And you’re embarrassed. When Neil glared at people—much bigger people who could kill him, and I knew a lamb chop could hurt Neil—they backed down. When he glared at you, it was like ‘WAAAAAAGHHHH! UGGGHHHH!’”
Four singer/songwriters with a rhythm section: CSNY was now complete, but it would never be a cohesive musical unit. As Graham Nash stated, “I never considered Greg or Dallas part of CSNY. I considered them hired hands—always.”
Equally tenuous for some was Neil Young’s place in the outfit. His presence certainly increased the supergroup hype factor, but many felt the addition was aesthetically wrong. Young could spin out lightweight pop as well as the next guy, but for the most part his talents ran to the deeper, darker side of things. “It was like Muddy Waters sitting in with the Rolling Stones,” said writer Richard Meltzer. “Crosby, Stills and Nash is great, but why did they ask Neil to join?” said Chris Hillman. “It didn’t make any sense to me.”
—Lie to me and tell me you joined Crosby, Stills and Nash for the money.
It was Stills. Stephen came out and asked me to play in the band. I said, “Sure—we can do somethin’ as good as the Springfield was.” That’s what I was lookin’for. But I never really got that. That was gone.
Ahmet and all those guys found out what it would be like with me in it, as opposed to without me. We went through a little period where they were tryin’ to decide if my name should be on it. At the beginning, when Stephen came and asked me to play with them—he never really put it to me that it was gonna make it CSN and Y—but he never said it wouldn’t, either.
Stephen’s heart wasn’t in it being just CSN—that’s how I feel about it—but Graham’s probably was. Y’know, they had already done this big hit record. What the fuck do they need me for? That’s the way they were lookin’ at it. Now—if my name hadn’t been on it, and I’d been another guitar player in CSN, that woulda worked out great. But when they found out what they needed me for, then it became a different thing. They all realized if they were gonna have to have me there, they were gonna have to say I was there. Or I wasn’t gonna be there.
CSNY was pretty good—some nights it was really good—but we had a little trouble staying good after the beginning. It was always a little too much. I was kinda like a third foot in that band. I loved those guys. We went through a lot of shit together. And we were into it—but we were into it for ourselves as well. Everybody was tryin’ to do their own thing. I don’t think it was ever supposed to be a band. It wasn’t a band. That wasn’t ever a part of it. It’s like the Mamas and Papas weren’t a band, either.
So it didn’t work. But we tried. I had some good times with ’em, especially with Crosby. Crosby’s a great singer. I learned a little bit about singing from CSN, but their sense of harmony and my sense of harmony were not quite the same. I heard things a different way.
Live, it was more exciting, because Stills and I had somethin’ goin’ on. When he was on I was on, and we were happening, it was a great thing. Because Stills and I still had memories of Buffalo Springfield—how great that was, that we could take that farther. We tried to re-create it, but it never really happened. Instead of havin’ one guy who was pretty laidback, didn’t really play a lot—Richie Furay—we had two guys who didn’t really play electric guitar at all. Crosby and Graham, they were both acoustic-guitar players. Strap on an electric and it just kinda got in the way of Stephen and I. There was never enough room.
It had to be during the 1970 CSNY tour that I somehow got turned on to Coltrane, ’cause I had a Sony cassette player and some John Coltrane—My Favorite Things, Equinox—and I used to listen to that shit all the time. Nice melodies, the bass player was really good … I thought Coltrane was great.
It gave me refuge. I would go into my room, turn up my jazz records really loud and nobody would come in there. Not that I didn’t wanna see ’em, but sometimes I’m just not ready. I have to get ready to see people. I do okay for small amounts of time with spontaneous visits—after a while I gotta get back in my hole and have that long tunnel so I can see people comin’.
—What’s that about?
I dunno. That’s the way I feel comfortable. Maybe I’m shy. It’s just the way I am.
“A bunch of dopes in the mud not even paying attention,” said Richard Meltzer of Woodstock. He left on the first day. “Woodstock was just the first time the middle class got hip to the whole rock scene. By the time you had that many people doing it in one place, it was closer to an Alan Freed show … it was minus the sixties consciousness. It was just entertainment value.” Ken Viola, also present, was similarly disenchanted. “As a communal event it was a big success. But I remember being at Woodstock and saying, ‘It’s over.’” *
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s first two live performances were on August 16, 1969, in Chicago. To give an idea of how big the hype around them was, Joni Mitchell—already an established artist who had played Carnegie Hall—opened for them. (“Neil took me aside and said they should be opening for me,” said Mitchell. “He was kind.”) Just two days later, CSNY joined The Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Band and Sly and the Family Stone at Woodstock, and despite the competition, many felt it was CSNY’s gig. As Grace Slick told writer Dave Zimmer, “They represented the Woodstock sound—whatever that is.” They would also later record a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” which Young complained Stills overdubbed the juice out of. In hindsight it seems appropriate: an overblown performance of an overblown song for an overblown event.
Although Crosby, Stills and Nash’s overwrought performance is intact, Young—who played only two of his compositions, “Mr. Soul” and “Wonderin’”—isn’t seen in the Woodstock documentary (although he’s more than occasionally visible in recently surfaced outtakes). “To this day, I have no idea why Neil did not want to be part of that,” said Nash, indicating a real lack of awareness of what Young’s all about.
The CSNY phenomenon spread across America like an unchecked virus, but for many observers they peaked as a live entity during their first concert dates, from August 1969 to January 1970. Everyone had new songs, the egos and drug habits hadn’t mushroomed out of control. An audience tape from their seven-day stand in Los Angeles at the Greek Theatre contains an understated acoustic version of Young’s “I’ve Loved Her So Long” with Nash providing stunning harmony, showing how effective Young could be within this configuration. Electrically, things tended toward the grandiose, as evidenced by their first TV performance, a live “Down by the River” for The Music Scene taped in September. Fans of the outfit revere this performance, but the bombastic Stills/Young guitar duels and the hopped-up vocals leave me yearning for the simplicity and spook of the Horse.
September 6 also brought a surreal appearance on the This Is Tom Jones variety show, featuring Jones himself bellowing lead vocal on Crosby’s “Long Time Gone.” “It was very highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call,” said Elliot Roberts. “Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones Show! What possessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit.’ Crosby had this weed of doom … Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.”
Footage of the Big Sur Festival from September 13 provides another prime cut of unintentional CSNY hilarity. Some nut in the audience starts to harangue CSNY for being rich rock stars, and Stills, who
would later explain that he was in a sour state because the group was playing for free, bolts from the stage, high as a kite in an outrageous fur coat, and goes after the guy as Crosby pleads for “Peace and love, peace and love” over the microphone. After an embarrassing tussle, Stills returns to the stage and launches into a muddled apology. “Y’know, we think about what that guy was sayin’ and we look at these fur coats and pretty guitars and fancy cars and say, ‘Wow, man, what am I doin’?’”
That December, CSNY would provide the only comic relief at the event Richard Meltzer describes as “the evil embodiment of Woodstock”—Altamont, infamous, of course, for the death of audience member Meredith Hunter. CSNY provided a moment of absurdity before things turned murderous.
What was really memorable for me about that gig was, the CSN portion of it was just fuckin’ nuts. I’ll just give you a picture, okay? These gigs were all ridiculously unorganized, and we showed up there and there was no way to get to the stage. We were on the other side of the crowd. So we get this pickup truck, and we’re driving this pickup truck through the crowd. I think everybody was pretty high. Crosby and Stills were standing on the front of the truck or on the running boards, yelling, “CROSBY STILLS NASH AND YOUNG!” Just like, y’know … parting the sea.
I thought it was Fellini-esque. I mean, he’s standing there yelling the name of the band in the crowd—how much fuckin’ recognition do you need?
A lotta times CSNY was pretty crazy, and I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it had more to do with drugs than I realized. I mean, everybody was, like, toasted. I wasn’t doing drugs, but drugs were starting to surface in other places—and were having a negative impact, I might add. Was I naïve? I think so. Crosby’d probably be laughing like hell if he heard that. He’d be rolling around goin’, “Maybe you were a little naïve … that’s all right, Bernard.”
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