Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  Although now a devout student of Hinduism, Harrison could also be unpredictably moody, sullen, or sarcastic. Part of him stewed over the way the others, McCartney especially, were dismissive of his songs and still treated him as if he were simply the lead guitarist. He’d gritted his teeth through the Get Back and Abbey Road sessions. At Friar Park, Harrison was finally in control of at least one aspect of his life. He could work on his songs in solitude, without feeling the scrutinizing eye of McCartney. When he so desired, he even had his own bass player. Shortly after moving in, he heard Voormann’s marriage was breaking up. “Come on, stay here,” he told Voormann, who took his friend up on his invitation to move into one of the cottages on the estate. The two would play or talk about music, apart from the others and in Harrison’s own enclosed world. At one point, O’Dell overheard Ono remark that O’Dell was now in “George’s camp.” “We’re in camps now?” O’Dell thought.

  Lennon had his own luxurious camp by then. The previous May, he and Ono had bought Tittenhurst Park, an estate thirty miles outside London. Starting in the fall of 1969 and continuing into the new year, their friend Dan Richter had been overseeing its renovation. A thirty-year-old actor from the American Northeast, Richter had made his name with mime performances throughout Europe. While doing street theater in Tokyo in the early ’60s, he’d met Ono and Tony Cox. After moving to London in 1965, Richter reconnected with the couple and rented an apartment right next to theirs; the two homes shared a common balcony. Before long, Richter noticed all wasn’t well with the Ono and Cox marriage. Looking out his window, he’d see Lennon’s white limousine pull up and Ono rush in.

  In the summer of 1969, Richter achieved a level of fame. He’d been hired by director Stanley Kubrick to choreograph the enigmatic opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a group of prehistoric, manlike apes fight with another tribe and come across a mysterious black monolith. Richter wound up playing the head ape in the scene. But he was also addicted to heroin, and at the Lennons’ invitation, he and his wife Jill moved into two of the back cottages at Tittenhurst.

  Like O’Dell at Friar Park, they were overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place and its surroundings: seventy-two acres surrounding a massive white house with huge bay windows. Since he needed something to do, Richter was hired (albeit for no pay, at his request) to oversee the makeover of the home. A white marble fireplace was installed on the first floor. A round bed—resembling a turntable, at Lennon’s request—had been built for the Lennons’ bedroom (for which Richter had to search for custom-made circular sheets). The floors were covered with off-white carpets made of unbleached wool specially woven in China; a green Queen Anne desk was installed in the bedroom. Since Lennon wanted to wake up each morning and see water, a lake was dug where once had lain an empty field. Everyone darted around the estate on golf carts. “The money kept coming in,” said Richter, who signed off on all the work charges without ever looking at the bills. “It was like a waterfall.”

  By the time Lennon and Ono returned to Tittenhurst from Denmark, their hair still far from grown in, the work was dragging on; a planned recording studio off the kitchen remained under construction. Undeterred, Lennon and Ono went about their many varied plans. While they were in Denmark, a gallery exhibit of their partly nude lithographs, “Bag One,” had opened in London. (A tweedy Upper East Side gallery in New York City also displayed them, complete with ads that read, “Over 18 only.”) The British police raided the London gallery, confiscating a number of the prints on grounds of obscenity, although the charges were ultimately dropped. Later, at a press gathering in London, they publicly donated their shaved locks to Michael X, an incendiary, Trinidad-born radical who spearheaded the Black Power movement in the U.K. X was planning to auction off the hair to raise money for his commune, Black House. To some, their string of controversial media events were fun and charming, while others, like Brown, weren’t sure how seriously to take any of it.

  In contrast to the Lennons’ public joviality, the atmosphere around Tittenhurst grew as gloomy as the English winter. After the creative outburst that resulted in “Instant Karma,” Lennon seemed creatively adrift. Few other new songs emerged, and his main hobby became watching television in his bedroom. Lennon was clearly depressed, and he and Ono were squabbling more than they had. In March, Ono had a miscarriage. In his back cottage, Richter was trying to kick his heroin addiction with low doses of methadone; a doctor visited him daily. Lennon and Ono, who were talking about having a child, were trying to do the same. Richter never asked them about why they’d shaved their heads in Denmark but assumed it was connected to their desire to get clean. “We were all holed up,” he recalled. “They were up in their bedroom and I was over in mine. We all decided it was time to stop. You don’t have a good future if you use heroin. Both of them had their careers, and it was clear it was time to stop.”

  By then, Lennon’s other planned activity, the Music and Peace Conference, had been discarded. In the middle of March, John Brower told Billboard it had been canceled because he “didn’t want another Altamont.” But he was just saving face. Earlier, Lennon had sent Brower a telegram declaring he wanted nothing to do with it anymore. The entire project collapsed of its own naïveté, poor planning, and Lennon’s requirement that the shows have free admission. The first major cultural event of 1970 was finished before it started.

  On March 17, about two weeks after Harrison and Boyd moved into Friar Park, the Beatles nearly reunited. Harrison threw a twenty-sixth birthday party for his wife on the grounds, and Lennon, Ono, and the Starrs showed up and took their first private tours of the estate. All were impressed with the imposing grandeur of Friar Park. Afterward, everyone gathered in the main hall, smoking pot and casually chatting. The McCartneys were invited, but few remember seeing them there.

  Even Starr began to realize he needed something to do—a plan, both creatively and financially. After all, he wasn’t the one receiving all those checks for publishing royalties from Beatle albums. He began doing something he’d rarely done before—writing a song, this one with the working title “You Gotta Pay Your Dues.” In the basement studio of his Highgate home, he sang what he had for Voormann: a “nah nah nah nah nah” melody and little more. “He had a few nice starts for songs and then didn’t know how to carry on,” Voormann recalled. “George or I would say, ‘Well, you could play another chord there.’ He always did things with the help of his friends. Like that song.”

  Harrison, always eager to help his ally, started to shape and trim the many words Starr began jotting down for the lyrics. In late winter, Starr bore down on what would be his first genuine statement as a recording artist in his own right. Lending a hand in the studio over the course of many days were Harrison, Voormann, George Martin, and on piano, one of Starr’s new friends, Stephen Stills.

  CHAPTER 4

  Hold still, thought photographer Tom Gundelfinger as he aimed his antique camera at the men gathered in David Crosby’s backyard. A few more seconds and Gundelfinger could snap the ideal photo for the cover of the new album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Using a hundred-year-old camera that required his subjects not to move was challenging enough. That they’d snorted up a line of cocaine right before the shoot began wasn’t helping: No wonder they all seemed so jittery.

  They’d begun arriving at Crosby’s house in Novato, just north of San Francisco, one late morning in November 1969. After a group breakfast and shared snort, the costumes and props rented in Los Angeles—a Confederate uniform, a buffalo hunter’s jacket, a white frilly shirt, pistols, rifles, bullet belts—were disbursed. Down to the smallest detail, everything was precisely the way they wanted it for an album everyone knew would be one of the biggest of the following year.

  How far and how fast they’d come. Just a year before, in the winter of 1968, Crosby, Stills & Nash had had the dubious distinction of being rejected by the Beatles. The three had joined forces months before and left their home base in Los Angeles to woodshed
material in an apartment on London’s Moscow Road. Dropping by to hear them sing, George Harrison and Apple A&R man Peter Asher politely listened and left. Later, the three were told Apple had passed for unspecified reasons. Maybe the Beatles didn’t want competition, or perhaps Harrison remembered the feud he’d had in 1965 with the Hollies, the Manchester pop band that showcased Nash’s high, keening harmonies. Harrison had dismissed their cover of “If I Needed Someone,” his contribution to Rubber Soul. “You can’t please everyone,” a peeved Nash fired back at the time, adding, “The Beatles are always having a go at us quietly. But I’d back any of our boys against any of the Beatles musically anytime.”

  One year, one gold album, and a tsunami of accolades later, it was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—not the Hollies—who had a shot at unseating the Beatles. Even before it was completed, Déjà vu was being treated as an event; Rolling Stone used that very term in an article published during its recording. In January, two months before its release, Atlantic began advertising the album in music trade magazines.

  To make its significance as unambiguous as possible, an equally momentous package was required. In the late summer of 1969, Gundelfinger (who later changed his surname to O’Neal) received a call from art director Gary Burden: CSNY, Stills in particular, wanted the jacket of its next album to resemble an old leather-bound book (or, Stills said, “a hymnal”), and the band wanted to be photographed in Old West garb. They hadn’t yet decided to call the album Déjà vu, but the image played off one of Crosby’s two contributions to the album, a spacey, tempo-shifting song with the refrain “we have all been here before.” Could Gundelfinger devise a way to make the photo look as if it were a hundred years old?

  Gundelfinger checked in with Stills, who had a simple message: “He said, ‘I want the real deal,’” Gundelfinger recalled. “End of story. End of conversation.” For a few hundred dollars, Gundelfinger found a store in Hollywood that rented him a well-preserved wooden-box camera from the Matthew Brady era. Using it would be tricky: It had an exposure time of two and a half minutes, and the pictures would have to be developed immediately.

  On the day of the shoot, Gundelfinger found himself in Crosby’s backyard watching the four of them, along with Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves, suit up. Since their album was being recorded in the Bay Area, the photo session had to be shifted up north. Crosby became a hippie version of Buffalo Bill, Nash a farmer, Stills a soldier, Young something close to an aristocrat. Somehow, they remained still enough for Gundelfinger to take two shots. The task completed, the four of them whooped it up.

  Ultimately, the photos didn’t have enough contrast in them, forcing O’Neal to use a shot from a modern camera he’d set up as a backup next to the antique box. (In the one they ultimately chose, a dog wandered into the shoot seconds before he snapped.) To make the newly taken photo look like a relic from the days of Gettysburg, Gundelfinger soaked the negative in a chemical solution and let it dry in the sun, a method used by Civil War photographers. If Stills wanted the real deal, he now had it—or something as close to it as possible.

  The photograph was merely phase one of several torturous steps in the album’s packaging. The faux-vintage band photo had to be placed in precisely the right spot on each imitation-leather (actually hard-cardboard) cover—and it had to be done by hand, since record-plant machinery hadn’t yet been invented to do it automatically. For Ron Stone of Lookout Management, the process was “an absolute fucking nightmare. The band looked at it and said, ‘That’s fucking great.’ I looked at it and said, ‘How the fuck are we going to do this?’” At seven pressing plants around the country, hundreds of thousands of CSNY photos had to be hand-glued onto the embossed cover. When the label learned four of the plants were gluing the photo the wrong way, production was switched at the last minute to the remaining three. No one could, or would, say no to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

  As rock and roll bands went, they were especially complicated—and seemingly incompatible from the start. Crosby had been a handful from the day he was born in 1941. The son of Hollywood cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who’d won an Oscar for his work on the 1931 film Tabu, he’d been raised in seeming comfort, and from an early age, his singing voice was disarmingly sweet and honeyed. A chubby kid who never lost a recurring roundness in face and body, Crosby had a naughty twinkle in his eye that shaped what came next in his life. His back story included jail time for burglary, a roaming life as a folksinger that took him from Los Angeles to New York to Florida to San Francisco to, finally, Los Angeles again, during which he impregnated (and left) one woman and befriended songwriter Fred Neil and future Jefferson Airplane cofounder Paul Kantner.

  Finally, in 1964, Crosby found the musical combination he’d yearned for when he met two fellow folkies, Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark, at the Troubadour. Inspired by the Beatles and their way with electric guitars and harmonies, they, along with Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, became the Jet Set, then the Byrds. From the start, McGuinn heard about Crosby’s bad-boy reputation, but couldn’t deny his talents as a harmony singer. The Byrds’ shimmering 1965 cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was merely the starting point for music that came to encompass folk, country, and Beatle-influenced sonic adventures that the Beatles themselves admired. Crosby eagerly devoured the pop-star life, swooping into Sunset Strip nightclubs with his green cape and mischievous grin, joints in each hand.

  One of the many musicians Crosby met on the scene was Stills; in fact, Buffalo Springfield had once opened for the Byrds. Stills’ family had called Illinois, Louisiana, and Florida home at various points; during his high-school years, they were living in San Jose, Costa Rica. Stills’ musical palette came to encompass the blues he’d heard down South, the Latin music he’d loved in Costa Rica—and, finally, the folk music of the Village, where he relocated in 1964 after graduating from high school in Costa Rica. Determined and musically dexterous, Stills was already adept at playing guitar, drums, and numerous other instruments, and in New York, he’d joined a large-scale folk band, the Au Go Go Singers. Yet it was only after he relocated yet again, to Los Angeles in 1965, that his career jelled. With his Au Go Go bandmate Richie Furay and an elusive and inscrutable Canadian named Neil Young, Stills formed Buffalo Springfield. By then Stills had a reputation for being talented, self-assured, and obsessed with moving his career forward as fast as possible. Everything about him—his prematurely hardened and wary expressions, his aggressive body language, even the way he sometimes wore suits to photo shoots—set him apart from the hippie crowd around him.

  Crosby had met Nash when the Hollies made their first trip to Los Angeles in 1966, the same year they cracked the American top 10 with “Bus Stop” and “Stop Stop Stop,” two exceptionally vibrant examples of the Hollies’ crisp, ebullient harmonies and hooks—merry-go-round Merseybeat pop. With his Manchester childhood friend Allan Clarke, Nash had put that band together around 1962. Their earliest English hits were white-British-boy covers of R&B songs like “Stay” and “Searchin’,” but they soon forged their own identity. Crosby and Nash had been introduced to each other by Cass Elliot, the beloved member of the Mamas and the Papas who’d known Crosby from their days in folk groups.

  In different ways, all three felt stymied by the middle of 1968. Stills had tasted success when Buffalo Springfield hit the top 10 with “For What It’s Worth,” his eerily calm song about the Sunset Strip “hippie riot” of 1966. But thanks in part to Young, whose thirst for fame never equaled Stills’, the Springfield had fallen apart. The previous fall, Crosby had been fired from the Byrds for his motormouth personality and risqué material. Nash, longing to be taken seriously as an artist of the rock era, was encountering resistance to his new songs from the Hollies. Hard as it was to believe, an effervescent new song he’d written about trendy hippies traveling to the Middle East, “Marrakesh Express,” was deemed too experimental.

  Stills and Crosby, who hooked up first, were an unlikely duo. Stills’ voice was a croon wit
h a twist of leathery raspiness, while Crosby’s was nothing but sweet. Stills preferred liquor over Crosby’s favorite indulgence, pot. Crosby was brash and unafraid to share his opinions at any moment; Stills tended to simmer and struggle between bouts of self-assurance and self-doubt. Stills was almost tyrannically regimented; Crosby wasn’t. But both were unemployed, low on cash, and desperate for a new career break, and their voices proved to be a better blend than anyone would have thought. Depending on the source, all three first sang together at either Joni Mitchell’s or Cass Elliot’s house, but the vocal blend they achieved was inarguable. “I’d heard that golden sound that me and David and Stephen created, and I wanted it,” Nash recalled. “As a musician I had no choice. I knew what harmony was, and the Springfield and the Byrds were known for their harmonies, but this was different.”

  The months that followed—in Los Angeles, London, and Sag Harbor, New York—were ambrosial for them. The songs were pouring out; Stills alone knocked out almost two dozen between the spring and fall of 1968, songs about his former lover Judy Collins like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “So Begins the Task.” With Crosby and Kantner, he wrote “Wooden Ships.” Confident in the sound they created, with three disparate voices that blended in ways that previous harmony groups like the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons hadn’t, they’d break into their songs for anyone who’d listen. Nash took the high parts, Stills the low, and Crosby was the warm middle—and each man’s voice, unlike harmony groups of the past, was also very distinct in the mix. To better understand record deals, Crosby and Nash took a Manhattan restaurant meeting with Paul Simon, whom Nash had met during his Hollies days. (The Hollies had done a cover of Simon’s “I Am a Rock.”) By early 1969, they’d worked out their contractual mess (each was on a different label) and wound up on Atlantic, the Springfield’s home; Atlantic head Ahmet Ertegun was a passionate fan of Stills’.