Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  Just a few years earlier, Stills had seen A Hard Day’s Night in New York’s Greenwich Village during his months as a struggling folkie. (Crosby and his fellow Byrds saw the same movie at the same time, three thousand miles way in Los Angeles.) Now, here he was, making music with half the Beatles and their producer. In contrast, the thought of returning to Los Angeles—and Crosby, Nash, and Young—was far less appealing. “I basically smelled a lot of trouble,” he recalled. “Everyone was getting very high. Being a rock star in the States with those guys—they were all becoming icons.” With that, Stills made a decision: “I said, ‘Well, this is great, this is it—I’m stayin’.’ I decided to become a really annoying groupie and meet all the British guys.” Before long, he, Starr, and Harrison were together contributing to sessions for an album by the transplanted American R&B singer Doris Troy.

  At first, Stills was intimidated by his surroundings and the notorious aloofness of British musicians. “He was very focused on Ringo, that’s for sure,” Voormann recalled of their first meeting. “I think he was overwhelmed by being in Ringo’s house.” Stills’ phlegmy, goodold-boy guffaw—“I was brash and obnoxious,” he admitted—was also a far cry from British reserve. But thanks to his father’s variety of jobs—working tract homes, tool designs, lumber, and real estate, among other vocations—he’d grown accustomed to being the new kid, the stranger in town.

  Even before Déjà vu was released, Stills had made the decision to make an album under his own name, and one by one, his new acquaintances began arriving at Island Studios. One night, Starr showed up earlier than everyone else; he and his drum kit were ready to go when Stills arrived. Eric Clapton popped in several times, once to add a box-cutter-sharp guitar solo to “Go Back Home,” one of Stills’ new songs, and another to get drunk with his new friend on tequila. Clapton had first jammed with Stills and Buffalo Springfield in Los Angeles two years before—the infamous April 1968 day when Clapton and everyone in the band except Stills (who managed a quick escape) was busted for dope while rehearsing at Stills’ home in Topanga. When they grew reacquainted in London, Stills helped Clapton finish one of his own new tracks, “Let It Rain,” adding harmony vocals and a bit of bass guitar to its coda. Another evening, Clapton popped in unexpectedly, saying he’d been driving around with a new song in his head and wanted to put it on tape before he forgot it. Stills ended up pitching in on that one, “Easy Now,” as well. (He wanted to overdub guitars and drums, but Clapton demurred, saying he wanted to keep the song simple. To engineer Bill Halverson’s surprise, Stills deferred to Clapton—and, Halverson noted, Stills rarely deferred to anyone.)

  At one of the many parties Stills attended, he met Billy Preston, the American soul-gospel singer and organ player now part of the Beatles’ circle (a year earlier, he’d played the electric piano solo on “Get Back”). When Preston cracked, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with,” Stills took notice. Preston thought nothing of the remark, but to Stills, it could be “the key line of a song,” and Preston let him keep it. Before long, it became the basis for a new melody that, like some of Crosby’s, encouraged everyone to get it on with whomever was available at the time.

  Stills also spent more time with Jimi Hendrix. The two had met at the Monterey Pop Festival three years before, and they’d been guitarjam buddies ever since in Hollywood and New York. They’d talked about making a record together, and Hendrix stopped by the studio where Stills was working and, in a half hour, added a slithering guitar part to “Old Times, Good Times,” an appropriately swampy track about Stills’ youth. The interplay between Hendrix’s six-string and Stills’ organ, each humping up against each other, was a promising start to a collaboration. The two became nightclub companions, jamming at the Speakeasy Club and living the pop star life. Although Stills had already been introduced to cocaine and had been fond of alcohol since his teen years, even he was disturbed by the sight of Hendrix popping whatever pills and drinking what liquids anyone gave him. “I would say, ‘Wait, those don’t go together,’” Stills recalled. But Hendrix was too big, his massive hands too eager to grab it all, to convince otherwise.

  Nonetheless, Stills was happy to be in London, where he could run his own show and share the spotlight with no one. Few things in life made him happier than spending hours, sometimes days, toying with new guitar parts, arrangements, rhythm changes, and melodies, the very aspects of record-making that drove Young to distraction. To Halverson, Stills always seemed more comfortable in that situation than in social ones. When Maureen Starr drove him out to the Brookfield estate she and her husband were thinking about renting, Stills was even more entranced. Although he knew he’d eventually have to return to his band and country, he made the decision to put it all off as long as possible. He told the Starrs he would either rent or buy the house.

  When friends saw the photograph for the Déjà vu cover, they assumed it was inspired by Stills’ time in military school in St. Petersburg, Florida. But another reason for evoking North versus South was simple. “We felt,” Stills recalled, “like we were in the Civil War.”

  At that moment, everyone did. The country had been ripped apart politically and culturally during the past few years, and the shell-shocked results were now coming in. In February, one nationwide poll concluded six out of ten Americans were tired of hearing about Vietnam and considered the entire mission a blunder; another survey, by Gallup, indicated the country was moving in a more conservative direction. Which one was it? Nixon himself was a polarizing figure. “The ’70s will be a time of new beginnings, a time of exploring both on earth and in the heavens, a time of discovery,” he told Congress during his first State of the Union Address on January 22. Yet judging by poll numbers that had lurched up and down over the months leading up to the speech, the country still seemed unsure of him after his first year in office. Not only was unemployment high (four percent, an alarming figure at the time), but for the first time, a higher percentage of whites than before was collecting unemployment checks.

  Everyone’s nerves were frayed, nowhere more so than on campuses. At the University of California at Santa Barbara—ninety miles northwest of Laurel Canyon, which Nash and Stills still called home—tensions had been building for months after a well-liked anthropology professor was denied tenure. Given his outspoken antiwar views and kinship with the campus, a majority of the student body concluded he’d been punished for his beliefs.

  At shortly after 8 P.M. on February 25, something snapped. Maybe it was a rally speech by William Kuntsler, who was representing the Chicago Seven—Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Lee Weiner, John Froines, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger, all charged with conspiracy to “incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in and carry on a riot” at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. The trial was a postmodern media circus that seemed hard to take seriously, yet five days earlier, the defendants had been found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot; each faced up to five years in prison. Kunstler’s presence at the rally didn’t alone whip the nearly three thousand students into a frenzy. That moment arrived shortly after the gathering began, when, in plain sight of students, police questioned a black student activist in connection with a local robbery. The crowd taunted the police, and when someone threw a firebomb under the patrol car, everything went haywire.

  Before anyone knew it, as many as a thousand students living in Isla Vista, a placid Santa Barbara suburb, vented their rage. A real estate office was ransacked; windows in a Bank of America branch were smashed. The bank began burning when wood planks covering the broken windows, along with tables and chairs set against the building, were torched. By midnight, the police captain overseeing several hundred officers had to admit the situation was “not in control.” More police, complete with tear-gas grenades, began to arrive. Calm prevailed, but only briefly. The cops would retreat, and the demonstrators, scurrying back out from alleys, would eventually return, hurling rocks, expletives, and firebombs.
To protect themselves against the various projectiles, the kids used garbage can lids; the cops wore plastic eye patches.

  Once a shopping district, the streets around the bank were now a battle zone. Police were so outnumbered that a squad car was abandoned and promptly set on fire. On the third day, Ronald Reagan, the state’s might-is-right governor, called the demonstrators “cowardly little bums” and sent in six hundred National Guard troops to restore something close to calm. “We have two choices as to which way we can go,” Bank of America chairman Louis Lundborg announced. “We can divide into camps and shoot it out. Or we can try to find common ground so that we can grow together again.” The latter course, he said, was one that “can bring peace and with it a hope for the rekindling of the American Dream.” At that point, no one knew what the American Dream was anymore.

  The tension also extended to the other side of the Atlantic, to England, albeit in a somewhat gentler manner. Hearing that dossiers were being compiled on them—files that would include their political interests and activities—students at the University of Manchester organized what became the largest protest to that point in Britain. Carrying placards that read, “No to dossiers, yes to freedom,” eight thousand students took over the school’s administration building in February. After they’d settled in, they added a very European touch, ordering tea for themselves.

  On the morning of March 9, WBCR, Brooklyn College’s student-run radio station, became the first outlet in the country to premiere Déjà vu. WBCR didn’t just debut it; they played it start to finish all morning long.

  Over and over, the students heard the opening, buffalo-herd rumble of Stills’ acoustic guitars on “Carry On,” his amalgam of a post-Collinsbreakup song and his Springfield song “Questions.” As if warding off Stills’ blues, its massed group harmonies—layer upon layer, a sound they could only achieve in a studio—barreled out of the airwaves. The Brooklyn students then heard “Teach Your Children,” a folksy Nash track inspired by his relationship with his father, who died when his son was in his late teens; a spry pedal steel track, courtesy of the Dead’s Jerry Garcia, added the requisite back-to-nature ambience. Next came “Almost Cut My Hair,” which Crosby had insisted the band record live in the studio, everyone playing and singing at once. (After flying up to San Francisco to work on the album, engineer Bill Halverson had to scramble to devise a way to cut the song that way, knowing the previous recording engineer had been fired when Crosby hadn’t gotten his way.) Crosby was the first to admit that its lyrics, a litany of hippie pride and paranoia, were far less sophisticated than those for his other songs—“juvenile,” he later called them. But Crosby’s raw, nearly hoarse delivery (which Stills disliked) was the sound of someone who meant every word he sang, and the way Stills and Young made electric-guitar mincemeat behind Crosby’s voice was the first indication on Déjà vu of what Young could add to the band.

  “Helpless” was another sign: an exquisite dirge, Young’s frail-sounding vocal encompassed by the Crosby, Stills, and Nash vocal massage and a Stills tremolo-heavy lead guitar that sounded like a forlorn fiddle. Joni Mitchell’s version of “Woodstock,” about to be released on her own Ladies of the Canyon, was somber and intimate. The CSNY version opened in a very different manner, Young wrenching notes out of his guitar and the carefully sculpted CSN harmonies vaulting over the chorus.

  Flipping the record to side two, the WBCR disc jockey was greeted with Crosby’s “Déjà vu.” With its shifting time signatures and Crosby’s jazz-influenced modal chords, the song was among the most difficult to record for the album. But by the time they’d finished laboring over it, it felt seamless; the moment when each of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash voices came in separately before converging was one of the album’s highlights. The students listening on WBCR then heard “Our House,” Nash’s harpsichord-enhanced serenade about his and Mitchell’s home life, all flowers, vases, and fireplaces. Stills’ “4 + 20,” an unexpectedly vulnerable tale of a normally macho man embracing the “many-colored beast” of despair, featured only him and his guitar. (The group attempted a harmonized version but felt his solo take was better.) Young finally reappeared with “Country Girl,” three songs sewn together. For all his love of Crazy Horse’s funky, bare-boned stomp, Young had a fondness for symphonic pop, starting with Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting to Fly.” “Country Girl,” the album’s most elaborately produced and arranged piece, all churchly organs and intertwining group vocals, was the next stage in that development. The album wound up the way it started, rousingly: “Everybody I Love You,” a harried adrenaline rush of electric guitars and stacked harmonies, combined two separately recorded songs edited into one.

  On songs like that and “Woodstock,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young never sounded more like a band; even Taylor’s drums were more prominent in the mix than on Crosby, Stills & Nash. But in other ways they were less of one. The general public had no idea Young played on only five of its ten songs. Supposed band tracks like “Carry On” were mostly played by Stills (and brilliantly so—few musicians could make themselves sound like one-man bands so effectively, as the layers of electric and acoustic guitars, celestial organ, and rumbly bass in “Carry On” attested). Déjà vu was a sonically enveloping and powerful illusion, but it was an illusion nonetheless. The group hug of Crosby, Stills & Nash was replaced by the sound of four men each in his own space.

  The industry received a taste of their fractiousness on March 11. On the same day Déjà vu went on sale, Crosby, Stills & Nash won Best New Artist at the annual Grammy Awards, beating out Led Zeppelin and Chicago. Held in the banquet room of the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and not yet televised, the evening was a low-key affair. Even so, none of CSNY attended. Stills remained in London. Young, who’d made his disdain for showbiz trappings clear, was in Topanga Canyon, about to begin recording further songs for his third album, After the Gold Rush. Ahmet Ertegun had to accept the award on their behalf.

  By then, Crosby and Nash were on the western side of Mexico, awaiting a visit from Elliot Roberts. Roberts wasn’t thrilled that two of his star clients had hightailed it out of California for over a month, but he also knew there was little he could do to control them. Bearing contracts for them to sign, he flew into the Punta Graham jungles with Gary Burden, their plane touching down on a cow pasture that doubled as an airfield. On the Mayan, Roberts pulled out paperwork for Crosby and Nash to look over; he and Geffen had lined up a major tour for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Nash signed the contracts dutifully, but part of him wasn’t looking forward to the roadwork at all.

  PART TWO

  SPRING INTO SUMMER A Feeling I Can’t Hide

  CHAPTER 5

  When it came time to name the album, Peter Asher thought the answer was obvious: Sweet Baby James. Asher felt it was the perfect title, clever and attention getting. Taylor wasn’t taken with the idea; after all, he pointed out, the song with that title was about his older brother Alex’s son. He didn’t want anyone to think he was referring to himself. But a deadline loomed for the record’s early-March release, and besides, Warners head Joe Smith thought the title track could be Taylor’s first hit. Sweet Baby James it would be.

  As potential hits went, “Sweet Baby James” hardly fit the bill when it arrived as a 45-rpm single in late February. An idly strummed waltz, it loped rather than bolted; Carole King’s piano and Russ Kunkel’s drums clomped along agreeably, and the pedal steel guitar of Red Rhodes, the player of choice for L.A. acts like the Byrds and the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith, gently curlicued around Taylor’s voice. To Warners executive Stan Cornyn, the music wasn’t all that different from crooners of a previous generation—it just sported longer hair. “If someone who you could say was today’s version of Steve and Eydie and Vic Damone—that good voice you liked to hear, that your mother would not say ‘Turn that down’—James was certainly there,” Cornyn recalled.

  From the plaintive sound of Taylor’s voice to the crisp, woodsy crackle of his fingerpicked
guitar, Sweet Baby James was undeniably old-fashioned—pre- rather than post-hippie. The songs referenced country roads, the Berkshires, and highways. A version of Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susannah,” a song the Taylor family had tackled together back in the Carolinas, evoked the traditional folk songs Taylor had grown up with, as did his own “Lo and Behold,” whose chorus, a choir of overdubbed Taylors, harked back to work-song spirituals. “Anywhere Like Heaven” was Bakersfield country music after a long drought. Even Taylor’s phrasing—like “dough-gies” for “doggies” on “Sweet Baby James”—felt more Midwestern than southern Californian.

  Asher and Taylor knew they’d overplayed their hand on his first album, which was too ornate and fussy. The comparatively uncomplicated arrangements worked out in Asher’s living room for Sweet Baby James were intended to ensure that Taylor would now be the focus. Sweet Baby James shared several things in common with its predecessor. Each contained songs that focused mostly on voice and guitar, each had infusions of brass and horns, and each alluded to inner pain. But if James Taylor was the musical equivalent of a British tea parlor, its follow-up was an unvarnished log cabin. “Sunny Skies” was nudged along by arm-in-arm acoustic guitars and a temperate drum tap. “Fire and Rain” was a masterpiece of production accents, from the dramatic tumble of Kunkel’s drums before the final verse to the use of a cello (played by another session man, Bobby West) instead of an electric bass to underscore the melancholy on the song. Asher only let loose as a producer on the album’s last track, “Suite for 20G,” which piled on horns, Kunkel’s toughest beat on the record, and Kortchmar’s sputtering electric leads.