by David Browne
The audience guffawed as one; everyone knew Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were hardly newcomers. The public had first become aware of them eight months earlier with the release of Crosby, Stills & Nash, made before Young joined up with them. The bands they’d once been members of—the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies—had made some of the most dynamic, sparkling music of the ’60s. Yet the public embraced the new configuration in ways it had only occasionally taken the other bands to its bosom. The California-sun-drenched embrace of their labored-over, multitracked harmonies, the three distinctive-looking men reclining on an outdoor couch on the album cover, the variety of music from the dramatic, postapocalyptic soar of “Wooden Ships” to the turbulent churn of “Long Time Gone”: Whatever it was, Crosby, Stills & Nash quickly went gold, selling a half-million copies. As 1970 began, it remained firmly lodged in the top 10 in the States.
Starting with their name, which read more like a law firm than a rock band, they wanted everyone to know they were a paradigm for a new, more liberating era in rock and roll. The group format, they insisted, had become too restrictive, too limited, too Establishment. (To hammer that point home and tweak his former life, Crosby would sometimes play a few seconds of the chimey twelve-string lick of the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” onstage, which always drew a laugh: The Byrds? A pop group? How quaint!) As the Royal Albert Hall crowd witnessed, they didn’t even resemble a traditionally cohesive band. Crosby, at twenty-eight the veteran, had the bushy hair, serpentine walrus mustache, and stonerbliss smile of the hippie commune leader next door. Nash, who’d be turning twenty-eight the following month, had a head engulfed in sculpted brown hair and a wardrobe of vests and floral-print shirts that embodied modish counterculture. Stills was younger than both—he’d turned twenty-five three days earlier—yet more conservative in attire (white-button shirts, dark suit jackets) and hairstyle (sideburns and prematurely thinning dark-blond hair framing chiseled cheekbones). Young, the relative baby at twenty-four, opted for patched denim and whitelace shirts. His furrowed brow and shoulder-length locks set him apart from the others as did the way he’d lurk behind them, near the guitar amps, during their shows.
After opening with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the seven-minute Stills homage to former girlfriend Judy Collins that had become one of their signature songs, their utter self-confidence kicked in. As McCartney looked on, they sang one of his own songs, “Blackbird,” from the White Album. They’d tackled it before, including at Woodstock the previous summer, but tonight it was a declaration of their eminence: It practically declared that they were picking up where the Beatles had left off. (To their credit, they sang it lovingly, with Stills holding a long, raspy note in the “dark black night” line that made the song their own.) The rest of the show broke with tradition in numerous ways. For the first, acoustic half, the four sang some songs as a quartet, others separately, others with a combination of the four. Like their garb, the songs mirrored their diverse personalities and lifestyles. Crosby’s “Triad” openly coaxed a girl into having a ménage à trois; Nash introduced “Our House,” about the cozy, music-and-lovemaking existence he had back home in Laurel Canyon with his girlfriend Joni Mitchell. (He also told the crowd it was from a new album they’d just completed, to be called Déjà vu.) Young’s “The Loner” seemed to be as much about himself—the way he worked on his own schedule, at his own pace, on his terms—as about the song’s borderline-stalker character.
Halfway through the set, a curtain behind them parted, revealing a bowl-haired drummer, Dallas Taylor, and a very young-looking black bass player, Greg Reeves. Thus began the electric second half of the show, which shed additional light on their personalities. Stills was particularly competitive and driven, no more so than during Young’s tightly wound shuffle, “Down by the River,” during which the two men jabbed at each other with their lead guitars over the course of fifteen minutes. Like the group itself, the performance was both rehearsed and ragged, teetering on the brink of chaos. Just as the tangle of guitars and rhythm section was on the verge of collapse, Nash, ensconced behind an organ and waiting patiently for his moment, shouted, “All together now!” signaling a return to the song’s chorus—and, at last, an end to the show.
Throughout the night, they remained anxious, and it showed: They exchanged in-jokes with each other and indulged in lengthy tune-ups between songs. Yet few seemed to mind. The Royal Albert Hall crowd laughed adoringly at their jokes and applauded every lapse, from the notalways-precise harmonies to the sight of the four professionals trying to decide what song to do next. (Set lists! So rigid!) They could seemingly do no wrong. Atlantic had already taken in $2 million in preorders for Déjà vu. At a company sales conference in Palm Springs, California, in January, label executives touted the album as one of its biggest potential earners of the year. CSNY would embody both the decade past and the decade to come: no rules, no restrictions, just as “free and easy” as “Wooden Ships” declared.
Back at the Dorchester, Ron Stone, a bearded native New Yorker who worked for CSNY band managers Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, noticed something odd. Reeves had sprinkled something outside the door of his room. When asked, he said it was witchcraft powder to ward off evil spirits. Hmmmm, Stone thought. What was that about? Reeves’ behavior had begun to raise eyebrows, yet no one could tell if it had to do with this heretofore-unknown aspect of his personality or the quantity of drugs everyone was now consuming.
For the time being, no one gave Reeves’ eccentricities much more thought. Introducing the bass player to the Royal Albert Hall audience a few hours before, Crosby had blissfully declared, “God smiled and sent us Greg Reeves.” Amidst the intoxicating applause, plaudits from their industry, and backstage temptations, it was hard to believe God would stop beaming their way anytime soon.
The signup sheets posted on each floor of New York University’s School of the Arts building—a big, blocky stucture on East 7th Street in the East Village surrounded by Polish diners, used record stores, and head shops—were almost too crude to be believed. Typed and mimeographed, each resembled a homework assignment more than a department memo. The first line, from the office of David Oppenheim, the School of the Arts’ imposing, culturally connected dean, read like an April Fool’s gag: “Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel has offered to teach a course in how to write and record a popular song.” According to the flier, the course would carry no credit and meet on Tuesday evenings from February through May. “Only those who are already writing and have music or lyrics to show Mr. Simon should apply,” Oppenheim’s instructions added.
Both the memo and the class were so modest that the sheets took a while to fill up. Only thirteen students in the graduate film and television program jotted down their names; no one from the dance department bothered. By the deadline, January 16, sixty-nine had signed up, and the following week they began showing up at the building, around the corner from the Fillmore East, New York’s leading rock theater. Cradling guitars and sheet music, they began congregating in a drab hallway in the East 7th Street building, waiting to be summoned for their auditions.
Although he’d never taught a class before, Simon, at twenty-eight, had indisputable credentials. The duo he’d formed with his schoolyard friend Art Garfunkel had had a fitful start: a hit single thirteen years earlier in 1957, followed by a series of flops, a breakup, a reunion, another flop, and finally, at last, a hit with “The Sound of Silence,” a melding of English-lit-class surrealism and sullen folk chords that Simon had written in the bathroom of his parents’ house in Queens, New York. This time, success stuck. Since December 1965, they’d logged eight top 20 hits, from “The Sound of Silence” through “The Boxer” the previous summer.
Physically, they resembled a high rise jutting up next to a brownstone. Almost nine inches taller than his partner, Garfunkel, who was also twenty-eight, towered over Simon. Garfunkel was blue-eyed and gaminlike, Simon brown-eyed and comparatively gnomish. Garfunkel’s blond Afro contra
sted sharply with Simon’s prematurely receding hairline, which Simon attempted to disguise by growing his hair longer on the side. But their voices, if not their looks, blended together, and their dotingly crafted, meticulously harmonized songs connected with a generation trying to remain calm during a chaotic period in America’s history. A 1967 Columbia Records press release touted them as possessing “a unique understanding of the soul of the young city-dweller” who sings of “the alienation, excitement and loneliness that are peculiar to and so much a part of life in the Big Town.” While flowery, the label’s hype wasn’t far from the truth: Simon and Garfunkel even looked like a couple of grad-school enrollees.
As soon as he saw the flier for Simon’s class, Ron Maxwell, a twenty-one-year-old NYU graduate film student, called one of his high-school friends from nearby Clifton, New Jersey, a fledgling composer and pianist named Joe Turrin. The previous year, the two had written Barricade, a rock opera inspired by Maxwell’s time in Paris during the 1968 student uprising. At the appointed audition time, Maxwell arrived at the building—the same one where he’d hung a handmade “US Out of Vietnam” banner out a window as one of his teachers looked on with headshaking disdain.
Maxwell and Turrin were called in, and there was Simon, alone in a classroom with only an upright piano. At all of five feet one, Simon was more diminutive in person than on his album covers. The three shook hands and made some introductory small talk. Simon seemed impressed that Maxwell and Turn had written an entire show. Propping up the 150-page libretto of Barricade, Turrin settled in behind the piano and began playing, Maxwell singing the lyrics and acting out the plot. In the middle of one song, Turrin noticed Simon standing behind him, staring at the score. Turrin, who’d studied at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, was instantly rattled: Paul Simon, of all people, was scrutinizing his work.
At the end of the performance, Simon looked at Turrin apologetically. “I didn’t mean to bother you,” he said. “I can’t believe you notated all of that.” To the surprise of both would-be students, Simon told them he couldn’t read music. To Turrin, the admission was shocking: One of the leading songwriters of his generation, the man who managed to slip a phrase like “superficial sighs” into the chorus of a pop single, couldn’t decipher sheet music?
Had Turrin and Maxwell known more about Simon, they would have been equally surprised. At that moment, he and Garfunkel were on the verge of a new and potentially colossal era. The week before the scheduled start of the course, Columbia Records would be unveiling Bridge Over Troubled Water, the duo’s first new album in over a year. The label’s radio department was hustling hard to promote the title song, which Billboard had already declared a “national breakout single.” A tour of Europe and another headlining date at New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium were being planned. Yet here was Simon, committing himself to nearly three months in a classroom at NYU. Everyone assumed it was a lark—that when it ended, Simon would resume the career that had finally paid off for him after years of dues-paying. It was inconceivable to picture Simon without Garfunkel, without further luminous melodies, and without the syllable-for-syllable harmonies that made him and his partner seem less like entertainers and more like brothers.
In the ramshackle offices of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in Washington, D.C., co-organizers Sam Brown and David Hawk knew they needed a second act for the new decade. But what, precisely? The Moratorium had begun in the spring of 1969 as a call for students to strike in opposition to the Vietnam War. Gradually, the plan mushroomed into a nationwide antiwar rally. Held October 15, it defied even Hawk and Brown’s most optimistic expectations. Around the country, a million people congregated to express their disapproval. In what Time dubbed “a calm, measured and heavily middle-class statement of weariness with the war,” one hundred thousand gathered in Boston Common, bells in small towns tolled somberly, and World War II veterans in Detroit suburbs congregated to show their solidarity. Students burned draft cards, but no one anticipated the housewives in Texas who blocked a bridge leading to a defense plant.
The new decade was already sending mixed signals. On one hand, aspects of the one before appeared to be intact. The Beatles were completing a new album and film. In the wake of Woodstock the previous August, which had lured a half-million generally peaceful music fans to New York farmland, a slew of similar multiday and multi-act festivals were being planned throughout 1970. In July and then November 1969, America had finally succeeded in dropping men onto the moon; a third mission was set for April.
Yet other events of the previous six months had been hard to comprehend. No one yet knew what to make of a series of ritualistic murders in Hollywood the previous August, supposedly led by an elfin, wild-eyed hippie named Charles Manson who looked like someone who could’ve been in those Woodstock throngs. In December, a free concert by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway in northern California had ended with the knifepoint murder of a young black man at the hands of a Hell’s Angel. (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had played at that very show, hours before the murder.) The fact that the decade had begun with John Kennedy and ended with Richard Nixon, who’d been inaugurated in January 1969, didn’t bode well. Even Mad sensed a change in the winds. In its January 1970 issue, cartoonist Sergio Aragones rolled out another of his gleeful skewerings, “Protest Demonstrations.” A group of whites holding “White Supremacy” signs head toward an intersection; a band of African-Americans, holding their own “Black Power” signs, are on a collision course with them from another direction. Between them, a street preacher carries his own sign: “Prepare to Meet Thy Doom.”
The future of the Moratorium was as undecided as the newly born’70s. Brown and Hawk’s original plan called for a series of similar mass protests: one in October, two in November, three in December, four in January 1970, and so on, building into a continuous, nonstop display of public disgust. Yet they knew they couldn’t possibly top the first October 15 event. A second gathering, this time organized by New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, wasn’t at all their planned sequel. In a letter to the New York Times published November 11, a Mobilization co-organizer declared plans for “legal and peaceful, totally non-violent demonstrations in Washington, San Francisco, and points in between.” Unfortunately, they didn’t all turn out that way. When one speaker in Washington encouraged the crowd to storm the Justice Department, Hawk, who like Brown wasn’t involved in the Mobe’s planning, winced. As if on schedule, marchers from the more radical fringe began running through the Washington streets and police were lobbing tear gas.
Instead of holding further Moratoriums and Mobilization events, Hawk, Brown, and their colleagues decided on the most sensible option: raising money for pro-peace candidates running in the upcoming midterm elections. Assuming they won, those officials could begin cutting off funding for the war. The plan was pragmatic and sensible—and, Hawk knew, would have zero appeal to the rising number of far-left groups. He wasn’t even sure what to call one of the leading groups, since their name kept changing: Was it the Weathermen or the Days of Rage people? Whatever their moniker, Hawk knew they favored open combat in the streets over subvert-from-within tactics. The Weathermen made the Moratorium organizers promise not to denounce them publicly. Privately, though, Hawk was worried how far they were going to take their tactics and what impact they could have. Was the public intelligent enough, he wondered, to distinguish antiwar demonstrations from violent hooliganism?
While those debates ensued, a far more immediate problem needed to be addressed: paying for the expenses involved in mounting the October and November Moratoriums and replenishing the Moratorium fund. With the help of Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, one of pop music’s most passionate antiwar advocates, a benefit—the Winter Concert for Peace—had been planned for Madison Square Garden in January.
The day of the show, January 28, Hawk, a studious-looking, bespectacled community organizer and former Cornell student, flew to New York, went to the
Garden, and addressed the twenty thousand in the venue. In the minds of Hawk and Moratorium workers like Jane Barlow, the show achieved the perfect balance of political rally and quasi-Woodstock music experience. Thanks to his connections in the music business, Yarrow had assembled a wide-ranging assortment of acts: folksingers Richie Havens and Judy Collins, the Long Island blue-eyed soul band the Rascals, the big-band pop group Blood, Sweat & Tears, the cast of Hair, and the Edwin Hawkins Singers (who’d taken gospel to the pop charts the previous year with “Oh Happy Day”). With memories of the first Moratorium still on everyone’s mind, the crowd was noticeably charged.
That is, until the arrival of the headliner, Jimi Hendrix. Two and a half years earlier, Hendrix had ignited the audience and his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival. But the man who took the New York stage now was a far cry from the carnal rock and roll gypsy of Monterey. He looked and sounded prematurely careworn. Taking the stage very late with his new band, Band of Gypsys, he made it through only one song before he began muttering incoherently. “That’s what happened when Earth fucks with Space,” he told the crowd before sitting down. “Never forget that.” Both the audience and the musicians were baffled, if not uneasy, and Hendrix soon left the stage.
No one ever quite knew what drug Hendrix was on or who gave it to him. His intake had become so notorious that few at the Fillmore East had been surprised when he consumed a large amount of cocaine backstage at a New Year’s Eve show just a few weeks earlier. But as he left the stage and the Winter Concert for Peace crumbled to a close, Hawk grimaced in his seat. This wasn’t the Hendrix of Monterey, Woodstock, or “All Along the Watchtower.” This Hendrix, he thought, was too far gone. The concert organizers were disturbed but tried hard not to dwell on the evening’s unfortunate anticlimax. They had another, similar concert to plan for the summer.
