Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  In the aftermath of the Cocker tour, Coolidge needed a more stable, even-keeled force around her. The soap-opera element kicked in when she discovered what had happened the night of the CSNY show: Nash told her Stills had purposefully made up that story in order to escort her himself. At this point, Nash made his own growing feelings about Coolidge known to her. “I talked to Rita about it and she said, ‘I feel the same way,’” Nash recalled. “And I said, ‘There’s nothing we can do. I’m not touching you or kissing you or fucking—I’m not doing anything until we go to Stephen.’” Nash wound up writing a song, “Better Days,” with the situation in mind: “Though you’re where you want to be, you’re not where you belong,” he sang. “That was Rita,” he said. “She was with Stephen but didn’t want to be there. She wanted to be with me.”

  Deciding it was best to tell Stills to his face about this realignment, Nash and Coolidge drove to Stills’ house to personally deliver the news of their burgeoning relationship. Sitting poolside, a stunned and humiliated Stills spit at Nash (but missed). Nash moved out of Stills’ home and into a room at the Chateau Marmont. “Girls fell quite naturally in love or in lust with Graham,” said Crosby. “He had that lovely British accent and was a good lover and a gentleman.” Coolidge melted whenever Nash would call her “luv” with his British accent. The Coolidge triangle was far from the principal cause of any intra-band breakdown; fractures in the band had been building for months. But after the poolside conversation, Stills refused to speak to Nash, and the increasingly delicate thread that held them together finally snapped.

  His pride publicly wounded, Stills drowned his sorrows in whatever way he could, one result being his drug bust in San Diego. (The charges were eventually reduced to a misdemeanor and a fine.) By the middle of September, tiring of what he called “the incestuous California scene,” he rented a Lear Jet and flew to Colorado for a few weeks. Judy Collins had introduced him to the state during their relationship, and Stills rented a cabin, joined by Diltz, bass player Fuzzy Samuels, and his personal assistant Dan Campbell. With his solo album nearly complete, he buried his sorrows in work, planning sessions for another record and writing and jamming on songs in the house. “When you’re sitting there dealing with all these feelings, it’s, ‘Oh, poor me,’” he recalled. “All this stuff is coming out.”

  On September 18, two days after the giraffe-enhanced photo shoot, more troubling news arrived. A call to the cabin delivered the news that Jimi Hendrix had been found dead in a hotel room in the Notting Hill section of London after choking on his own vomit. Stills was devastated and angry. “I cried and drank,” he recalled. A friend awoke the next morning to find Stills cleaning out marmalade jars so he could have additional glasses to imbibe some more.

  The two men had made tentative plans to record an album together, perhaps even form a band. Now those plans, like those with Coolidge, were history. It was time to flee. The hell with all of them.

  He couldn’t tell if he was crazy, extremely high, or some combination of both. In the aftermath of Christine Hinton’s death, sometimes it was hard to tell. Whatever the reason, Crosby felt her presence all around him late one September evening. Standing before a microphone in an echo chamber at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco, Crosby told engineer Stephen Barncard to roll tape, then began singing a cappella—no words, just a full-throated blend of melody and moan. Then he sang another part, then another, ending up with six voices, each echoed back onto itself for a woebegone, eerie mass of twelve wailing Crosbys. A Grand Canyon of pain, the performance was a belated musical eulogy to her; fittingly, he called it “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here.”

  To the consternation of friends and past lovers, little about Crosby’s world had ever been conventional; everyone still talked about the nonstop parade of nude swimmers in his pool at his previous home in Laurel Canyon. But Crosby’s life now took on something actually resembling a routine. After Hinton’s fatal accident, he’d sold his house in Novato, where the Déjà vu cover had been shot; the place evoked too many painful memories. (Briefly, he’d lost the Halliburton case that contained some of her clothes, but after word of its disappearance or possible theft went out, it turned up amidst the Jefferson Airplane’s gear.) His home became the Mayan, now docked in Sausalito after he and Nash had sailed it back home from Florida. Crosby lived, ate, and slept on it, often well into the afternoon.

  Around seven each night, he’d drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to Heider’s. Music would be his escape and salvation. In the same room where the torturous Déjà vu sessions had taken place a year before, Crosby began making the first record under his own name. Much like his lifestyle, it wouldn’t be traditional in any form. To indulge his every whim, he booked Studio C for himself for months and put out an open call to whichever musician friends were around. For support, Jerry Garcia, Crosby’s brother in outlier music, stopped by almost every night. Other members of the Dead, including Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart, visited, along with his friends from the Airplane like Paul Kantner and Grace Slick. The jam sessions and creative pokings-about, augmented by Crosby’s ever-present stash, would last for hours. “Jerry and I were both pushing-the-envelope kind of people,” Crosby said. “We liked doing things that other people thought were weird. They brought out an encouragement of ‘there are no rules.’”

  The intermingling of musicians produced the strangest yet most gorgeous music of Crosby’s career. In hazy-day soundscapes like “Tamalpais High (at About 3)” and “Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves),” harmonies and instruments bobbed and drifted, like waves lapping onto a shore and receding. Instead of singing words, Crosby—joined by Nash on the latter—sang wordless phrases rooted in the jazz records of his youth. “Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves)” was a particularly pastoral chorale—music basking in its own stoned-out bliss—yet it also bristled; by the end, Crosby began fervently scatting around his own one-man chorus, and Jorma Kaukonen and Garcia yanked sharp, shrieking notes out of their guitars. The song heaved and lurched until, suddenly, it ended. Even songs centered around Crosby’s voice and acoustic guitar were hardly campfire-sing-along material. “Traction in the Rain,” inspired by the jealous looks Crosby received one day while walking through a park with Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Fariña, had a glistening, benumbed calmness. “Where Will I Be,” cut at the sessions but held for a later album, was a statement of personal confusion, spaced-out and rhythmless—Crosby’s comment on how both his band and his lover were part of his past, leaving him alone and directionless.

  Much as Nash turned the group’s interactions into fodder for new material, Crosby put CSNY’s shambolic summer to song. With Garcia, Lesh, and Hart, he began rehearsing a new song, “Cowboy Movie.” Driven by the brusque strums of Crosby’s electric twelve-string, the song was rough and savage, Garcia playing with a piercing, angry tone rare for him. The lyrics, an Old West tale set to music, told the saga of an “Indian girl” who comes between a gang of outlaws, sowing the seeds of their destruction. The four principal characters were a “weird” cowboy named Harold, a wild-eyed gunslinger called Eli (“young and mean, and from the South”), a “Duke” good with dynamite, and the youngest, Billy; the girl, whom Harold doesn’t trust from the outset, is called Raven. After both become taken with Raven, Eli and the Duke “get down to it”; Eli pulls a gun, and in the end everyone’s dead except Harold. With each verse, Crosby’s voice sounded raspier and more pent-up, as if he’d been smoking all night and decided to record anyway. Anyone who knew anything about the band’s recent falling-out knew the characters’ real names. Coolidge, for one, was not amused. “If that’s the way David saw it, he has a right to think that,” she recalled. “David just thought I was the Devil.”

  For Crosby, the recording of his album, which stretched out into the late fall, embodied the new rock and roll: music without parameters, concrete personnel, and in some cases anything approaching a standard rock and roll rhythm. His art would now fully become an extensio
n of his personal life. “The Byrds, the Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield were very formulaic groups,” Crosby recalled. “Good bands, but in a form. Kantner and I were on a quest. We were rule-breaking guys who wanted to see more interaction between bands, more cross-pollination.” Kantner was using the same revolving-cast approach on his first record outside the Airplane, Blows Against the Empire; Crosby popped up on many songs on that one as well.

  Struggling to find his identity after the problems with CSNY and Hinton’s death, Crosby would later describe himself during this time as “not a happy camper.” But to some, he’d never seemed more content—as one friend put it, ”making the best music of his life and getting laid every night,” thanks to whatever girl happened to be on the boat with him at night after the hours in the studio. Everyone got high, made music, and slept with whomever they wanted. The proudly esoteric tracks Crosby was cutting would be released by a major label, Atlantic, without any qualms. It was easy, seductively so, to imagine it would all last forever.

  During this time, word leaked out that Crosby, Nash, and Young—no Stills inserted between them—would be releasing a single together. The song, “Music Is Love,” had its origins in an August Hollywood jam in which Crosby began strumming and singing what he called “silly stuff” and Young and Nash spontaneously joined in. After Nash and Young borrowed the tape and overdubbed additional instruments, “Music Is Love” wound up on Crosby’s album. Its creation affirmed the way in which he, Nash, and Young had grown closer in the aftermath of the group’s collapse. Nash and Young dropped by the sessions for Crosby’s album; Young and Garcia traded solos on one take of “Cowboy Movie.”

  Young’s hesitation toward a full-time commitment to CSNY gnawed at Nash (but not Crosby), but neither Nash nor Crosby felt as threatened by Young as Stills did. They couldn’t help but admire his uncompromising approach to his music and presentation. (“As of this writing, Neil’s about to okay the test pressing. Again,” sighed a Reprise Records ad in September for Young’s nearly complete After the Gold Rush.)

  Starting with Crosby, the CSNY breakdown also played itself out geographically. During the summer, Young had bought a 140-acre ranch south of San Francisco. (His first wife, Susan, would file for divorce from him in October.) Even earlier, Nash had purchased a four-story Victorian townhouse on West Buena Vista Street in Haight-Ashbury, on the edge of Buena Park. Like Crosby, he’d grown weary of Los Angeles and envisioned himself relocating to Northern California with Mitchell. Now, that romance over, Nash decided to make the move himself. “I thought, ‘Fuck, I’ve got a house in San Francisco, I’d better go and live there,’” he recalled. With its front-door pillars and balcony, the structure felt regal even before Nash moved in, yet he enhanced it further, installing a skylight and a bath that led into a stream with goldfish on the fourth floor. Although the three weren’t within quick driving distance of each other, they were still in the same Northern California vicinity.

  Since all four had songs that hadn’t made it onto Déjà vu, the logical response was to make records of their own, whether Ahmet Ertegun, David Geffen, or Elliot Roberts liked it or not. “It was never up to management or Atlantic,” Crosby said. “It was up to us.” On September 7, Young became the first to release his own music that year. Recorded on and off over the previous year, After the Gold Rush reflected his time with Crosby, Stills, and Nash: It was more focused on acoustic songs and relatively pared-down arrangements than either of its predecessors, Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It even included a few tracks, “Southern Man” and “Tell Me Why,” he’d performed with them that summer.

  After the Gold Rush presented Young as both balladeer, on “Birds” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and rocker, notably the whirlwind that was “When You Dance I Can Really Love,” with Jack Nitzsche wildly pounding piano keys. Even throwaways like “Till the Morning Comes” (with Stills chiming in on harmony) and “Cripple Creek Ferry” felt meaty. With its preorders of four hundred thousand copies, the album was clearly a breakout, breakthrough piece of music—definitive proof that Young didn’t need the other three and their mania for anything other than a larger bank account.

  Although everyone expected Young to work on his own (“All of us knew we were going to do solo records, Neil above everybody,” said Crosby), Nash’s decision to go that route was the most telling. It was ironic that the band member who had worked hardest to preserve the group should be the one who helped fracture it, thanks to his affair with Coolidge. But in the end, the chaos on which CSNY thrived had finally unnerved even Nash. “You can only stand so much psychodrama in your life,” he recalled. “I needed a break from them.”

  Like Crosby, he’d accumulated a batch of songs over the year and now had the luxury of time and money to commit them to tape. Over the course of several months starting in September, he casually began cutting them with a loose-knit ensemble of players he’d worked with all year, except Stills: Barbata, bassist Fuzzy Samuels, and now Coolidge, who came up from her home in Los Angeles and stayed with Nash while he recorded at the same Heider studio where Crosby was settling in.

  As he’d shown when writing “Chicago” six months earlier, Nash had a tendency to relay his feelings about his musical partners or lovers in song rather than conversation. (In that way, Nash could simultaneously play the roles of good and bad cop.) Songs for Beginners, the album that began taking shape, continued that bent. With Coolidge supplying a fireplace-warm vocal harmony, he recorded “Simple Man,” his song to Mitchell, as well as another on the same topic, “I Used to Be a King.” (“In my bed, late at night, I miss you,” he sang.) He chastised his fellow superstars in “There’s Only One” (“Can we say it’s cool/From a heated pool”) and recorded “Better Days,” the song inspired by Coolidge and Stills’ relationship. The sessions were easygoing, the songs charmingly melodic and gentle, and Young and Crosby joined in now and then—both played on “I Used to Be a King.” “Being with Graham was as easy as breathing,” recalled Coolidge. “We just went in and did it, no pressure, no drugs and alcohol. That was fairly unique in those days.”

  The absentee band member was never far from Nash’s thoughts. In “Wounded Bird,” he addressed Stills directly, advising him to “take to heel or tame the horse/The choice is still your own.” The song had been inspired by Stills’ breakup with Judy Collins, yet it also echoed the events of the summer, especially lines like “Humble pie is always hard to swallow with your pride.” This time, though, he didn’t have to worry about a reaction, since his partner was over six thousand miles away. No one was sure when they’d see him next.

  Days at Brookfield House in Surrey were rarely as ordinary or surreal as they were on October 22. In the morning, geese honked by the side of the pond, and an eccentric gardener named John made the rounds. On the front lawn, Stills tossed around a football with a visitor who’d just arrived from the States, comanager Elliot Roberts. At the breakfast table inside, talking and rolling joints, were Crosby and, of all people, Stills’ one-time rival, Nash.

  A few weeks earlier, following his Colorado detour, Stills had moved into Starr’s Tudor home, which he’d begun renting in the spring. Against the advice of the band’s other manager, David Geffen, Stills opted to stop renting and instead buy the house for 90,000 British pounds. (To Stills’ surprise and annoyance, Allen Klein, representing Starr, unexpectedly raised by the price by 10,000 pounds at the closing.) Now Brookfield House was all his: the wandering swans, the orange grove, the separate movie theater, the doorways built so long ago that it was easy to bump one’s head walking into a room.

  Although Nash remained in love with Coolidge, he and Stills had mended their broken fences once more. Nash, who always worked the hardest to keep the band on an even keel, had heard the stories about Stills’ excesses and decided to fly to London to see for himself. “We were very concerned,” Nash said. “Everyone knew where this Stephen Stills story was headed. It wasn’t as if we were clean, smoking dope and
snorting. But we had it more under control than Stephen did.”

  Over breakfast, Crosby, Nash, and Henry Diltz, who’d joined Stills as houseguest, talked more immediate concerns, namely politics back home. Two weeks earlier, the Yippies in New York had received a tape featuring the voice of Bernardine Dohrn; on it, the cofounder of the Weather Underground announced “a fall offensive of youth resistance that will spread from Santa Barbara to Boston.” Two days later, the group, most on the lam following the March brownstone incineration, followed through on the threat: Explosive devices went off at an ROTC building at the University of Washington and an armory in, as promised, Santa Barbara. At a press conference, attorney general John Mitchell, hardly sympathetic to antiwar protesters to begin with, snapped, “They’re psychotic and out to destroy our institutions.”

  In tandem with an increasing number on the left, Crosby actually agreed with Mitchell for probably the first and last time in his life. Although he’d long been a vocal critic of the government, Nixon, and the Warren Commission’s report on John Kennedy’s assassination, Crosby was disturbed by the Weathermen. Their actions, he explained over breakfast in Stills’ house, would be little more than an excuse for Nixon to declare a police state in America. “It would be instant war on us all,” he told Nash and Diltz, adding the Weathermen were “fools.” “Setting off bombs in office buildings was stupid,” he recalled later. “All you do by going that route is become more suppressive.”