Wild Tales (21 page)

More than anything, it taught us that we didn’t need a producer. With Paul Rothchild, we’d have to give up artistic control as well as financial points, which would cut into our profit. We had the songs, we knew what we were doing. Give us a skillful engineer and leave us alone, we’d deliver the goods.

Despite our misgivings with the two-song demo,
Ahmet Ertegun managed to hear the magic. We gave him the Rothchild tape and he dug it right away. He was a true music lover, he had great ears and knew what he was listening to. He thought we had the best sound since the Everly Brothers, maybe better, more dynamic, with the same cutting edge as
Buffalo Springfield. Sign us to Atlantic? He’d love to, baby, but it wasn’t as easy as everyone thought. Legally, I was still tied to a label. Not
Parlophone, which had let me walk away, but
Epic Records in the States, to which the Hollies had recently moved. Epic wasn’t particularly willing to release me contractually, not after shelling out a small fortune for us a year or so earlier. Croz walked me through a few possible deal-breaking scenarios, none of which would have worked in my case. He’d been craftier. After the
Byrds canned him, he called Clive Davis, president of
Columbia Records at the time, and went ballistic, putting on an act to rival Pacino in
Scarface.
“I’m here in Miami, man. I’m sitting on my boat, and I’m leaving the music business
—screw all you guys!
” Laying it on thick. “I’m giving up the music business. I want my contract canceled. Fuck you! Good-bye!” Clive bought that crackpot story and let him go, free of charge. Since Epic and Columbia were both CBS labels, there was a better than good chance he wouldn’t fall for it twice. I knew this much: It was gonna cost me. So we decided to consult the oracle for advice.

David Geffen was a notorious piece of work, and I liked him immediately. He was a natural bully: brash, fast-talking, intimidating, fearless, a punk, all of it odd, considering he was a skinny little guy.
Anyone could have shut him up with a swift one across the cheek. But Geffen was smarter and sharper than the assholes running most record companies, and he didn’t take shit from them despite being half their age. I’m not sure where he got the stones to play that game, but he had them, and we wanted him on our side.

A former talent agent of the
What Makes Sammy Run?
variety, Geffen had morphed into a self-styled manager for
Laura Nyro, whom he adored. Took care of everything she needed so Laura could roost at the piano day and night and write those dark, moody beauties. It made sense for us to court a guy like that. Croz insisted that was the way to go. He wanted a street fighter like Geffen, a shark, as he called him, but he didn’t trust David enough to handle it alone. He thought we needed someone to balance the equation, so we convinced
Elliot Roberts, Joni’s and Neil’s manager and an old friend of Geffen’s, to team up with him as managers.

As it turned out, adding Elliot was a brilliant move. Geffen was the muscle; he made grown men cry. You’d never want to be on the opposing end of a negotiation with David. But Elliot also had our backs. He was funny and a scoundrel—a head, one of us—with an innate sense of holding things together. Every time a situation looked like it would blow us apart, Elliot knew how to defuse it, keep everyone cool. And that wasn’t easy, even in the beginning, when things were still relatively calm. David and Stephen were guys who could explode in an instant; you’d never see it coming and then
—BOOM!
—a stereophonic shit storm. Whereas I simmered like an English teakettle before letting off serious steam.

Anyway, Geffen took on the job of getting us a record deal. Since Stephen was already on Atlantic and loved Ahmet Ertegun, that label was at the top of our list. But early on, we got a reality check. Atlantic wasn’t breaking down any doors to sign us. Seems Ahmet thought we sounded a little like the Association, but without that group’s pop hits, like “Along Comes Mary” and “Cherish.” Damn right, we didn’t. Plus 1969 was the Year of the Guitar Player, the year of Hendrix, Clapton, Jeff Beck,
Carlos Santana,
Jimmy Page.
But, like I said, Ahmet had ears and heard the echoes of originality. And as guitar players went, Stephen had few peers. Anyway, he had no intention of letting Stephen out of his
Buffalo
Springfield contract with Atco. But eventually Ahmet and Atlantic came across with the goods.

That still left me dangling out in the cold, tied to
Epic Records. But Geffen and Ahmet figured out that Epic wanted
Poco, a country-pop group featuring
Richie Furay. Richie’s situation was almost identical to mine. He was tied to Atlantic via his own Springfield contract with Atco. So they made a deal to swap me to Epic for Richie. It was that simple. I was free to sign with Ahmet, which David did as well, and suddenly all three of us wound up on Atlantic.

All that was left was for us to make the music.

I
THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO MAKE AN ACOUSTIC
album, just the three of us, our guitars and those voices. But as soon as we moved out to Sag Harbor, the game plan changed. Stephen had other ideas. Suddenly, a band materialized out of nowhere: Harvey Brooks on bass, Paul Harris on keyboards, and Dallas Taylor, a drummer who got on with Stephen much the way I did with Croz. Stephen was also a unique bass and piano player. He felt he could take care of it all between us.

Sag Harbor played an important part in our development. We were finally free, we had a shitload of incredible songs to rehearse, and we were smokin’ it and snorting like crazy. We’d get up at various times, have breakfast and coffee in the kitchen, and sometime around two o’clock we’d head into the living room, where the drums were set up, and get to work. All told, this was rock ’n’ roll ecstasy.

Our goal was to coordinate an album’s worth of material. There were plenty of songs to choose from. We already knew we had the sound. The Everlys were always in the back of our minds when we approached each vocal, but adding that third voice, that third harmony, really broke new ground. Two-part is a snap; most decent singers can do it in their sleep. It comes almost naturally. One voice carries the melody and the other hits an interval somewhere above or below that. There are really no restrictions on where you place the harmony. You can move around wherever you like on the scale.
The choice is more emotional than technical; it creates the feeling. But three-part gets trickier with guys like Stephen, David, and me. Normally, you’d go directly to the triad, the three sequential notes that make up the arpeggio in a chord. In a C chord, that meant breaking into a standard C-E-G harmony, which for a singer is basically going on automatic pilot. Not us. We were flying free-form, doing it by feel. Our voices had range and pinpoint control, which allowed us to locate the tension in the harmonies. We experimented with melodic dissonance, modal chords, and irregular arpeggios, using flexible notes that combined in unusual ways. And that’s what gave us our unique sound.

One of the first songs we tried was
“Wooden Ships,” which David and Stephen wrote with
Paul Kantner. Man, we were dipping and looping all over the place. When we segued into the chorus, it was obvious we were in uncharted territory with the harmonies. The last phrase of each line soared to new extremes.

We knew from that moment what our harmonies could do.

The same thing happened with every song we tried. We marched right through ’em:
“You Don’t Have to Cry,”
“Long Time Gone,”
“Marrakesh Express,”
“Guinevere,
” “Helplessly Hoping.” Constantly experimenting, exploring subtle new sounds. It was a remarkable couple weeks in early January 1969. We hardly did anything but rehearse. Outside it was snowing like crazy, we had a fire blazing in the fireplace. Everything was working; it was an exhilarating feeling.

All of us were inspired—and wired. Croz, as always, had stocked his Ice Bag, so called because his initial pound of sinsemilla came in a bag that used to have ice in it. Now it bulged with weed and
coke. We were movin’ on up. Coke had become a mainstay of the LA scene. Stephen and David
loved
cocaine, and I wasted no time acquiring their appetites. What was not to love? Things go better with coke, right? It made you feel even better than you felt, and I was feeling pretty fucking good to begin with. I loved cocaine, too, no doubt about it, and for a while it became a real part of my social life.

Of course, three hippies wired to their eyeballs in a snowbound cabin for a month—sooner or later, someone’s gonna snap. We decided to clear out of that joint at the end of January, before the mood changed and we chewed off each other’s limbs. Besides, we’d done what we’d set out to accomplish. We had an album’s worth of great songs by the time we left for Los Angeles. Now all we needed was a name.

Rest assured, we weren’t going to name ourselves something young and dopey. We’d already been Byrds, Springfields, and Hollies, faceless entities. This time around we were going to use our last names, but we didn’t know in which order they would appear. I spent some time sounding them out in my room and figured out that “Crosby, Stills & Nash” rolled off the tongue better than any other configuration. Trouble is, that didn’t go down well with Stephen. Stephen wanted his name first. I understood why. He’d just come off
Super Session
—with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper—which boosted his reputation, and when push came to shove he was the leader of the group. He was a master arranger; he was going to play every instrument on the album other than the drums. And that’s a strong position to be in with Crosby and me. Stephen insisted we call ourselves Stills-Crosby-Nash, with hyphens, but the way I heard it, it just didn’t sound right. At the time, we decided that this was a democratic group, and if two of us decided on one name, the other guy would just have to deal with it. It wasn’t hard convincing David that CSN sounded more musical. That’s two to one on my scoresheet. I hadn’t been in America all that long, but there was a lot to like about this democracy business.

We had a helluva time in Sag Harbor, cementing our friendship, getting wasted together, just hanging out, enjoying life. But I was especially looking forward to reuniting with Joni. We’d only had short bursts of time together since starting our relationship. And both of us were going through incredible changes. Mine, of course, was a whole life reversal, an upheaval, but Joan’s was every bit as transformative. Since her debut LP,
Songs for a Seagull
, a cult following had risen up around her. Artists were lining up to cover her songs, and
Judy Collins had a top-ten hit with “Both Sides Now.” Joan was working on a new album, which would be called
Clouds
, that promised to solidify her reputation, and things were taking off for her at a fantastic clip. The fans were starting to attach all kinds of significance to her songs. Plenty of accolades, but a lot of weirdness, too. It was pretty intense, a lot to handle, but we had each other, which kind of kept everything in check.

We decided to meet in New York City the last week of January. And on February 1, 1969, the night before my twenty-seventh birthday, Joni played a solo gig at
Carnegie Hall. It was a typical Joni moment. She came dressed as always in eclectic secondhand clothes, wearing what I learned was a parade skirt, an enormous flared thing with a sequined American eagle on the front, and on the back, an artichoke. Her mother, Myrtle, took one look at her and said, “You’re not going onstage at Carnegie Hall wearing
that
, are you?”

I’d met her parents,
Bill and Myrtle Anderson, a few months before this. Joan and I had gone to visit them in her hometown, Saskatoon—a nice suburban house, not posh but very clean, stark white walls. I can’t describe what Joan’s room looked like because I wasn’t allowed within twenty feet of it. Bill and Myrtle were a very straight, religious couple, and they weren’t about to let a long-haired hippie sleep with their daughter under their roof, that was for sure. It surprised the hell out of me. It wasn’t like she was a virgin, not even close. But just to make sure, they put me in a downstairs bedroom, separating us by a floor, and made it clear I’d need an army behind me if I intended to sneak up there.

Carnegie Hall was a very big night for her. Joni absolutely killed that New York crowd. She was stunningly brilliant. The audience loved her. She was one of them—she talked about stuff that touched their hearts, real life, and they knew it.
Reverence
is not too much to describe the vibe in that place, which was a pretty heavy thing for Joan to take on. It was quite a moment for me, too, watching her on that legendary stage. Just Joan, a piano, and a guitar that sounded like an entire orchestra. The Hollies knew how to work a crowd, using showbiz techniques to build a performance. But this was different from anything I’d ever seen before. It was the kind of excitement that built from the inside out, nothing artificial or put-on about it. As far from showbiz as one could possibly get. Joan’s audience was emotionally moved. Clearly, she was on her own trajectory.

There was a great backstage scene after the show. Crosby was there, and David Blue, and Joni’s Canadian friend Leonard Cohen, and Harold Leventhal, and
Joel Bernstein, her photographer, who later became one of my very best friends. It seemed essential that everyone mark a turning point in Joan’s career. Afterward, we all piled into a cab and went downtown to the Bitter End. Turns out it was Don Everly’s thirty-second birthday. Even Dylan showed up to celebrate that milestone. He slipped in quietly, sat in the audience, and brought three songs to the
Everly Brothers—who didn’t like any of them. I knew exactly how that scene should have gone down.

In any case, it was time to put up or shut up. We began to record our first album on February 8, 1969, at Wally Heider’s studio at the corner of Selma and Cahuenga in Hollywood. I didn’t know much about studios in America, but Stephen and David felt it had the right vibe. Heider’s was a beautiful little dump of a place. We recorded there because it was private, off the beaten track. Very few people knew anything about it. Nobody would be hanging out, there’d be no buzz. We wanted to be left alone to do what we had to do. We didn’t want the musicians’ union in there, no record company honchos or hangers-on. We knew we could never have been
as private or as invisible at Western, A&M, or Goldstar, and besides, Stephen and David had recorded at Heider’s before.