Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  A terrified Barbata thought the band would dissolve then and there, before he’d played more than a handful of shows with them. After a few moments of awkward silence, the drummer finally said, “Hey, let’s go play!” Roberts quickly piped in: “Yeah!” With that, everyone filed back out for the second, especially electric set. On their way to the stage, they had to step over Bill Graham and Ron Stone, tussling on the floor over the band’s last-minute insistence on filming the shows for the documentary.

  The volatility was never-ending. Exactly a week after Nash had castigated Stills, the band played the Spectrum in Philadelphia. One of the visitors to their individual Sheraton hotel rooms was Joel Bernstein, a newly graduated local high school student and nascent photographer who’d already shot Young and Joni Mitchell. Only eighteen, the effusive, affable Bernstein showed up at the Sheraton with a stack of prints he’d taken of the band at the Fillmore shows. In his room, Young selected one of Bernstein’s shots, of him walking down the street in New York, to be the cover of his next album, After the Gold Rush.

  Talking to Bernstein, Stills had an urgent question: “Hey, where can you play pool around here?” Bernstein mentioned his parents’ house in nearby Elkins Park, just outside Philadelphia. To the teenager’s shock, a limo carrying Stills and Nash appeared at the Bernsteins’ three-story granite home after the show. Both hung out in Bernstein’s bedroom—one of his photos of Mitchell hanging on the wall behind Nash—before all retreated to the basement to shoot pool and smoke and snort various substances. Hearing the noise, Bernstein’s father rang down on the intercom: What was all the commotion? It’s just my friends from the concert, Bernstein replied, they came over to play pool, hope that’s okay! Still curious, Stanley Bernstein, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe, appeared, introducing himself to his son’s pool friends. Luckily for his son, he either didn’t notice or recognize all the white powder left over on the pool table.

  As dawn arrived and their respective highs still lingered, Charles John Quarto—a bearded, gentle-mannered poet whom Nash had met in New York and who was invited along for several stops on the tour—joined Stills, Nash, and Bernstein (and a small film crew hired to document the tour) as they strolled through a nearby park. “Stephen and I sat on this huge tree trunk,” remembered Quarto. “He sang and I recited for forty-five minutes. I remember Nash’s face when he was looking at that. It was a beautiful thing.” After their Fillmore clash, Nash and Stills had again found common ground. That week, Billboard’s review of one of the Fillmore sets appeared. The performance, the magazine wrote, “reversed any trend of concern and disappointment as they strummed and harmonized in a new maturity.” The magazine added they had a promising future, “should CSNY stay together long enough.”

  Whether it was the Fillmore or any of the arenas CSNY would be hitting that summer, Ron Stone always found himself in the same place as soon as the last notes of “Find the Cost of Freedom,” the traditional show closer, faded. To collect the nightly earnings, Stone would march into the venue’s office and begin tallying the receipts and expenditures with the promoter. Some evenings, the work was over in minutes; other times, when the promoter would present a list of his expenses and attempt to deduct them from the band’s earnings, negotiations could last until dawn. Sometimes the promoter would have a few seedy thugs standing nearby. Stone quickly caught onto the game. “Leo, did you hear this?” he’d call out, a signal for Makota to walk into the room. As Stone learned, the sight of the tall, burly Makota always made the tallying run a bit smoother on the band’s end.

  When all was done, Stone would leave with as much as $25,000 in cash—“like a drug deal every night,” he recalled—and stick the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket. If the shows piled up and he didn’t have time to deposit the bills in a local bank, he’d simply pray no one knew he was walking around with about $100,000 in cash. Backstage one night, Crosby told Stone he looked pale and nervous. Stone said nothing: He didn’t want Crosby to know he’d misplaced one of those overstuffed envelopes—which, to his relief, was soon recovered by a crew member.

  That such large amounts of cash were floating around was just part of the changes in the economics of rock and roll. When Bill Graham gathered his staff around at the beginning of CSNY’s Fillmore East run, he laid that topic on the line as well. “He’d talk about how the business was changing and how much of the money you’d have to give away to bands,” recalled Arkush. Graham saw in his own Fillmore office how the business of rock was transforming, with CSNY a telling example. At Woodstock the previous August, they’d been paid $10,000, $5,000 less than Janis Joplin and the Band. But with two top 10 albums under their belts, CSNY could command more, as their managers Elliot Roberts and David Geffen well knew. Thanks to their maneuvering, CSNY would now demand over double that amount a night—and, more importantly, an unheard-of 60 percent of the gate (the money earned after expenses were recouped) compared to less than half, as other acts received. Around the country, ticket prices for the tour ran as high as $6.50. In Minneapolis, an ad-hoc group threatened a boycott when tickets were advertised at $10 each. Yet none of those protests deterred fans from flocking to see the band.

  CSNY weren’t alone in demanding a larger bite of the grosses. “Artists could do the math,” recalled Kip Cohen, the Fillmore East’s managing director. “If the gross was over $45,000, the act would get an extra $1,000. They caught on very quickly. Everybody caught on very quickly, in a matter of months.” Manhattan promoter Ron Delsener complained in Billboard that he was having trouble signing bands for his Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park. Delsener was offering a flat $2,500 a show, good money a few years before but now considered petty change. In particular, he cited Simon and Garfunkel as one example of an act that “asked so much money that I cannot even approach them.”

  During the first half of the year, American and world economies had bounced up and down; in the States, fears of a recession were taking hold. But the music business was generating plenty of cash, thanks to rock and roll. Firms like the William Morris Agency began hiring special booking agents to handle rock tours. In midsummer, Columbia head Clive Davis announced his label had had the best six months in its history—thanks in large part to Simon and Garfunkel—and predicted that total sales for 1970 would top those of 1969. (In the end, he was right: the figure wound up being $15 million.) A new era of consolidations was on the horizon: The year before, the Kinney Corporation, a former parking garage and cleaning-services company, had bought Warner Brothers and, in 1970, added Elektra to its stable. When those labels were merged with Atlantic, the all-powerful Warner Music Group was created.

  Bill Graham sensed the financial power was shifting from promoters and their venues to the artists and their managers. To Fillmore employees, the crowds seemed increasingly too drugged up to notice anyway. Ushers would sometimes have to direct concertgoers to different seats by telling them that, no, their ticket was not blue but another color, which meant a different section.

  In such an atmosphere, the Fillmore East was doomed. Acts who’d headlined there over the previous year, like the Doors and Led Zeppelin, had moved on to arenas. Graham couldn’t match the money or even the amenities. At the Fillmore, backstage catering amounted to pizzas or deli sandwiches that crew members would run out and buy; soda bottles were set up in ice-filled garbage cans.

  In his office, an increasingly disillusioned Graham, with help from Cohen, began working on an open letter to his industry. In it, he would announce the two Fillmores were “fighting for their very existence.... Economics have taken the music from the clubs, ballrooms and concert halls to the larger coliseums and festivals.” (When the Fillmore opened in 1968, tickets were $3, $4, and $5; by 1970, the prices had increased by fifty cents, but only after much in-house debate.) Graham warned there were “not enough acts” to replace the ones who’d moved on to larger venues like Madison Square Garden and the Los Angeles Forum.

  The finished letter ran as a full-page ad in
the June 27 issue of Billboard . “It was a statement that had to be made, that the corporate mentality was coming in,” Cohen recalled. “People could smell something was happening and it was time to cash in. It was pretty clear that the culture was changing.” Graham and Cohen sat back and awaited reaction within the industry. Surely, someone other than them had to agree.

  For all the disorder onstage and off, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young appeared untouchable as the tour carried on. By the weekend of July 4, two of their singles were on the radio: “Teach Your Children” and, despite periodic problems with airplay over its content, “Ohio.” After New York came shows at arenas in Philadelphia, Detroit, Portland (Oregon), Oakland, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Flying from city to city on commercial airlines, they pushed whatever envelope was available. Crosby would walk into airports smoking a joint, but the entourage of handlers, bandmates, road crew, and women around him made it hard for officials to determine the source of the odor. Crosby would eventually ditch the stash, but only when he arrived at the gate.

  Yet just as the country seemed to be blowing a fuse as the summer dragged on, so did its leading rock and roll band. Between the ongoing flow of coke and pot, Crosby and Stills frequently butted heads on everything from repertoire to preferred substances. Backstage, Stone asked Samuels if the bass player, still adjusting to rock and roll lunacy, was okay; after all, he was so subdued. “I didn’t worry if rock and roll guys were squabbling,” Samuels recalled. “It didn’t bother me because I was so accustomed to being without.” Still, he told Stone he’d been taking acid every night to calm his nerves.

  Even Crosby wasn’t always immune. “People do the damnedest tricks on my head, man,” Crosby told Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres after a Hollywood waitress with false teeth offered him a blowjob if he gave her tickets to one of CSNY’s shows. “Things happen to me every day and I can’t handle it.”

  The shows became symbolic of the band’s internal schism. During the acoustic sets, Crosby, Nash, and Young would often huddle together in one combination or another to play one of their songs, while Stills’ solo spot was always companionless. (The exception was “Love the One You’re With,” making its debut before Stills’ recording of it had been completed; the audiences always chuckled along appreciatively when Nash introduced the title.) “There was David, Graham, and Neil, and then me—it was Sybil on wheels,” Stills said, referencing the movie starring Sally Field as a woman who suffers from extreme multiple-personality disorder. At the rescheduled Chicago show, the critic from the Chicago Tribune noted Stills appeared to be “brooding” by the side of the stage.

  As Nash feared, the group-therapy session in Los Angeles in May had only been a temporary fix. “We thought Stephen might use the opportunity to pull himself together a little more,” Nash recalled. “And it appeared at first that he did. So we were willing to give it another shot. But it was obvious he hadn’t changed at all.” Stills saw it differently. As with Déjà vu sessions, he felt the problem lay in the music. He found the band sloppy, the shows drifting toward what he called “Grateful Dead bedlam.” Stills had no interest in the type of free-form, jazz-influenced improvisational music Crosby loved. “It never had that craftsmanship quality,” Stills recalled of the stage shows that summer. “It was like the Beatles’ Let It Be: ‘Let’s stop doing that creative stuff in the studio and just play as a band.’ But everybody was so mad at each other that they couldn’t. You could feel this angst. Dealing with David and Graham became like dealing with the Irish; they didn’t remember anything but the grudges.” Onstage, Stills seemed to connect most with Samuels. “Me and Stephen had a different kind of bond,” Samuels recalled. “We knew about playing with each other. A lot of those [Crosby, Nash and Young] songs, they’re so sleepy. They weren’t good performing songs.”

  The shows retained their share of raggedness. Nash’s “Pre-Road Downs,” the opener of the electric set, chugged along harder than the studio version, but could also be woozy, and the harmonies on other songs could be spotty. Hired to fly to New York and Chicago and tape the sets for a live album, engineer Bill Halverson understood part of the reason why: They’d often look at each other while singing, their mouths wandering away from the microphones in the process. Stills himself sang “Carry On” off-mic one night. From behind his drums, Barbata would sometimes hear front-row audience members complaining the band didn’t sound like their records.

  The contretemps between Stills and Young spilled out during jams on “Carry On” and “Southern Man” that each stretched out to close to fifteen minutes a night. (“Another song that’s bound to get us in trouble,” Crosby announced one night before “Southern Man,” which again caught a moment: That summer, Southern senators strongly resisted an extension of the Voting Rights Act that made it easier for blacks and those eighteen and over to vote.) Rarely seeing each other when not in the arenas, Stills and Young would finally engage in conversation onstage, staring each other down with their instruments, slinging notes back and forth like tennis players.

  Both men knew the spectacle benefit of these moments. “It was entertaining,” Stills said. “Were John Coltrane and Miles Davis dueling? No. We’d go off and come back to the original theme. We’d try to imitate what the other guy was playing. It worked out pretty well.” (“It’s what the fans dug,” recalled Rolling Stone writer Ben Fong-Forres, who saw a number of CSNY shows that period. “They knew the entertainment value of that.”) When the two men were getting along, their toand-fros had a playful, fluid quality. When they weren’t, the mood was different: Young would come out of nowhere with a bee-sting solo and Stills would respond with a rushed barrage of notes, as if they were having a contentious argument with their instruments. Stills felt they were goaded into the exchanges by their business associates: “‘He’s a better guitar player!’ It was destructive. I’d say, ‘Neil, are we doing that or not?’ And he’d say, ‘No, we’re just trading off.’”

  Whether the exchanges were intentionally theatrical or not, CSNY had no choice but to hold it together and knew it. At the Fillmore, one particularly fervent audience during their weeklong run wouldn’t let them leave without playing an additional encore. Backstage, they decided to resurrect “Woodstock.” The song was never easy to pull off live; recreating the dense, multitracked harmonies of the studio version required a pinpoint accuracy they rarely managed over the din of electric guitars and drums (and inefficient stage monitors). Preparing to play the number again, Nash introduced it as “a song we haven’t done for a long, long time.” By then, the relatively joyous months of 1969—when a press release trumpeted them as the group “that brought happiness and laughter back to rock & roll”—seemed to reflect another lifetime.

  “Hey, Crosby, someone made this for you,” Nash said, sticking his head into his bandmate’s Minneapolis hotel room on the afternoon of July 9. A bare-chested Crosby was lying in bed, puffing on a joint while chatting on the phone with Dylan. Several girls swirled around. Like Stills, Crosby was reveling in the applause and stature he’d felt were too long in coming. For Stills, success compensated for barely knowing his mother while growing up; for Crosby, fame and its rewards made up for the devastation of Hinton’s loss. As Stone recalled, “David drowned his sorrows in some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

  Nash tossed Crosby his gift: a pillow in the shape of a pistol, made from an American flag. Crosby chuckled and stuck it behind his back while he continued talking on the phone. Henry Diltz, who’d arrived in Minneapolis the day before, pulled out his ever-present camera and Crosby, in a playful mood, inhaled a joint and put the pillow gun against his right temple.

  Crosby was merely being playful, but the gesture also bespoke a prevalent feeling about the tour by the time the band flew into Minneapolis for its final show. Diltz himself had been waiting over a month to fly out from Los Angeles to shoot the band. When the tour had resumed in Boston, he was poised to leave with them to snap on-the-road shots for a collection of sheet music
. But the constant unrest kept delaying his departure. “I am once again in limbo over this tour,” he wrote in his journal on May 26.

  Diltz finally received word to fly out to Minneapolis and, upon his arrival, sensed a mixture of weariness and unease. “They had things between them, feelings good and bad,” he recalled. “There was a little apprehension, a little unfriendliness. There were various energies between people.” Before the show at the fourteen-thousand-seat Met Arena that had originally been set for May 2, everyone congregated in Roberts’ room for an end-of-tour banquet with special guests like Young’s irascible mother, Rassy, and Charles John Quarto. Before the show at the arena, CSNY gathered in a backstage bathroom and shared a joint. Starting with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” they played their standard set with few hitches. By then, there was no point in scratching any open wounds onstage; they were almost done.

  When the show finished, all of them, along with crew and management, took over a room at the Radisson Hotel for a late-night poker game. They were newly wealthy men and unafraid to show it; over the course of the night, hundreds of dollars were tossed onto the table. Everybody was having a relaxed time until someone began banging on the door. Stone went over, pulled it open, and was face-to-face with a persistent fan. Stone told him to go away; the band needed privacy. He closed the door and returned to the table.