Wild Tales (29 page)

Somehow things cooled down a bit and we played the rest of the show, but afterward the audience refused to leave. We’d delivered, and they wanted more. It was crazy, they just kept cheering in their seats. So we hit the dressing room, relaxing and smoking dope.
Roughly twenty minutes later, they were still there, going crazy, which is when
Bill Graham slipped a note under our door. It said: “Your audience awaits you.” We’d done our three-hour show, with two or three encores. We had very little left in the tank.

“We’re not coming out, no matter how much you pay us,” Neil told Bill. The next thing we knew, a hundred-dollar bill came sliding under the door. As soon as Neil saw that, he shouted, “Not enough!” Seven more hundred-dollar bills came sliding through at regular intervals. We were all laughing our asses off about it. Neil scooped those bills up and we went out to do another encore.

On the way to the stage, I had to talk Neil out of throwing the money into the audience. I knew if he did it, it would start a riot. I reminded him of how the first night I came to New York, someone had been murdered on the subway for a quarter. “You throw hundred-dollar bills out there—man, we’re dead!”

I don’t know what happened to the eight hundred dollars. Maybe Neil pocketed it. I don’t remember seeing my share of it, anyway. But the audience got their money’s worth, that was for sure.

No doubt about it, we had recovered our form. The band really cooked, we were loose and spontaneous, in exceptional voice, and our audience soaked up as much as they could get. Those audiences really loved what we were doing: not only the music, but our political raps. We were determined to engage our fans in meaningful dialogue from the stage. We railed against the war—all wars—Nixon, police brutality, environmental pollution, racial inequality, overpopulation, and politicians in general. We did a lot of amazing music in that short stretch and decided to release the best of it on a live album,
4 Way Street.
We were making an astounding $50,000 a night. Sitting at the top of the charts. Even with all that, we couldn’t save ourselves from self-destruction.

As the dates tumbled on—through Providence, Philadelphia, Detroit, Portland, Oakland, LA, St. Louis, Chicago, and Minneapolis—the delicate CSNY fabric got even more frayed. The
electric portions of our show brought out the best and worst in us, particularly when it came to Stephen and Neil. Their old competitive shit started frothing up onstage. The guitar breaks were like duels. Ideally, those guys should have been inspiring each other, picking up on a riff and playing it right back. Instead they were squaring off, trying to show each other up. Stepping all over each other. Afterward, in the dressing room, we’d almost have to separate them before they lunged at each other, ready to draw blood. It was a huge fucking mess.

It didn’t help that we were smoking insane amounts of weed. Fair to say that none of us ever went on without being high and
then
some. Fuzzy Samuels was so freaked out by the gigs, I heard that he took acid every single day of the tour. And we all had our eyes on our own personal shit. I was gathering songs for an upcoming solo album, David was mixing
If I Could Only Remember My Name
, Neil the same for
After the Gold Rush
, with Stephen still working on his eponymous album. It was that last album that eventually sealed our fate.

In July 1970, while I was camped out at the Chateau Marmont, Stephen called and said, “You remember that song of mine, ‘Love the One You’re With,’ that I cut in London? Well, I’ve brought the track back and we’re in Wally Heider’s with it. I need voices for the choruses. Any chance you and David would come down? I’m getting a couple of girls I know to sing, too.”

Considering this was Stephen and it was his first solo record, we were only too happy to oblige. I happen to love that song. Stephen got the title from
Billy Preston, who was playing with the
Beatles at the time. They were at Stephen’s house in Surrey, hanging with Ringo. Apparently, Stephen spotted some girl and made a comment to Billy about how great she was. Billy responded, “Hey, man, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” To which Stephen replied, “Excuse me, can I borrow a pen?” In any case, we went to Heider’s that night and met the other singers: Rita
Coolidge, her sister Priscilla, who was married to Booker T. Jones, and Claudia Lanier, all incredible voices. Needless to say, I flashed heavily on Rita. She was a startlingly gorgeous creature: part Cherokee Indian, part Southern belle with pigtails, lithe body, incredible in jeans, frills, feathers, exotic, the whole package. And a fantastic singer—smoky voice, really distinctive. All of which hit Stephen the same way as me. He was coming on to Rita all session long, but I beat him to the punch. I invited her to go to a concert with me the next day at five o’clock. Unbeknownst to me, Stephen called her to say I couldn’t make it. “Graham’s a little sick today,” he told her, “but I’ll pick you up around three.” So she ended up living with Stephen for a couple weeks.

I felt that Rita wasn’t where she wanted to be, but where she belonged—for the time being. Stephen was an attractive man, musically and physically. Realistically, I understood what was going on. But I didn’t think Rita’s heart was in it 100 percent.

Due to the circumstances, Rita was hanging out with CSNY all the time. I saw a lot of her, and we became very attracted to one another. Very. Now, as an Englishman, I consider myself somewhat of a gentleman. There was no way that I was going to put the move on Rita behind Stephen’s back. But we fell for each other hard; our mutual attraction was almost unbearable. “You know I want to be with you,” I said to Rita, “and I believe you feel the same way. But I can’t even kiss you without dealing with Stephen. He’s my friend and partner—and he’s obviously in love with you.”

I had to do the right thing. So I showed up at Shady Oak with Rita and found Stephen in his studio. “I really like this woman,” I told him. “I think I like her more than you do, and I think she likes me more than she likes you. So having told you this, I’m going to be with her.”

What transpired was one of those moments when no one said a word—and then Stephen spit at me. Although he missed, this was hardly going the way I’d hoped, so I made a beeline for my car. Rita followed closely on my heels. She just grabbed what few clothes she
had in a closet and left along with me. That same day, I moved out of the Chateau and into her house in Beachwood Canyon.

Needless to say, Stephen and I didn’t speak for a while. I’m not so sure that he’s forgiven me to this day, even though I tried to handle it the best I could. If someone steals your girl—although to me it didn’t go down that way—you’re bound to hold a monster grudge. I’m sure Stephen has his own version of what went down, but in the end, it put another strain on things between us.

Living with Rita was a sweet little interlude, the perfect antidote to my crazy lifestyle. She was a straight shooter, very quiet, not gregarious at all. She had a very religious upbringing; her father was a preacher and her mother was a community organizer who raised Rita to be a thoughtful, considerate person. Rita understood what had happened to Joni and me. I was still greatly affected by the end of that affair. Rita was incredibly sensitive to my feelings and made things easy for me, especially with the vibe she’d established in the house. We had the upper floor of a two-family structure. Downstairs, her friend Annie shared a flat with two songwriters who were pretty good, so there was a lot of music in that place coming from the top and bottom floors. I was busy writing material for my solo album,
Songs for Beginners
, and Rita was writing, too; she was always on the piano. That woman could play: She played it way better than I did. In fact, she wrote the famous coda—the piano bit—to the end of “Layla.” Jimmy Gordon got the credit for it, but it was actually all Rita’s.

I wrote a batch of songs at Rita’s house: “Better Days,” for what we experienced during that time, and “Wounded Bird,” which was about the aftermath of Stephen’s relationship with
Judy Collins. Another song,
“Military Madness,” helped to get a lot of things off my chest. England had been bombed by the Germans, and when I moved to America I realized that the same issues were going on in Vietnam. The battle was raging, and I wanted to say something about the madness of the military agenda waging preemptive war—which is what happened later in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also
finished
“Chicago,” which stemmed from an incident following the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Chicago Eight had been busted for disrupting the event and desperately needed money for their defense.
Hugh Romney, the beat poet and alter ego of Wavy Gravy and my hero, called to ask if CSNY would come to Chicago to raise the funds. David and I wanted to go; Stephen and Neil also wanted to, but had other commitments. As a response, I wrote the song to them, asking, “
Won’t you please come to Chicago just to sing?
” Later, when I learned that
Bobby Seale had been bound and gagged and chained to a chair in the courtroom, once again I was deeply affected. It didn’t matter to me whether he was guilty or not. In my book, you don’t get to call that a fair trial. So I finished that song with a renewed intensity.

I also wrote “Frozen Smiles” for Stephen, because he was too busy listening to people who filled his nose rather than his heart.

The first show Croz and I ever did as a duo was in Detroit in January 1971.
Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland had been doing a series of shows called “FTA,” which was nicknamed the “Fuck the Army” shows.
Mac Holbert was the tour manager, and he put me in touch with Jane, who recruited me and Croz to get involved. I traveled by train to Detroit and we managed to raise money to help fund the
Winter Soldier Investigation.
John Kerry, our present secretary of state, had a certain credibility, being a decorated veteran, and he became an eloquent spokesman for the movement.

My song “Oh! Camil” was written for
Scott Camil, another spokesman and a highly decorated vet, who had earned two Purple Hearts, a Combat Action Ribbon, two Presidential Unit Citations, a Good Conduct Medal, a National Defense Service Medal, a Vietnam Service Medal with three stars, a Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, a Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm Leaf, and a Vietnam Campaign Medal during two tours in Vietnam with Charlie Company, First Battalion, First Marines, First Marine Division. Another hero of mine.

He decided that he would have to raise his voice and speak out
against what he and his fellow soldiers had been doing, and became a founder of the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization, after seeing the many atrocities our soldiers had committed against Vietnamese civilians.

I’d been cutting tracks for my solo album for some time and finally had enough good material to give it the requisite weight. I cut most of
Songs for Beginners
in early 1971 at Heider’s in LA, which was like old home to me, while producing two other albums at the same time, for my friends Seemon and Marijke, half of the Fool, and for the poet Charles John Quarto. All my supertalented friends turned out to help: Croz and Rita, who played piano and sang all the voices with me on “Simple Man.” Phil Lesh,
Jerry Garcia,
Dave Mason, Dorian Rudnytsky,
Johnny Barbata on drums, and Chris Ethridge on bass. Clydie King, Vanetta Fields, Brenda Lee Eager, and Dorothy Morrison sang backup. Most great backup singers know instinctively when—as well as when
not
—to sing; they had it down to a science and managed to turn it into an art.

All told, I was pretty proud of that album. As a writer, I thought I’d come a long way since the Hollies. In the interim, I had learned a lot about myself, and working with these accomplished people taught me a damn sight more. My engagement with what was happening in the world had become more sophisticated, and I felt the confidence to express my political and social opinions. All of it fed the music, and the music fed me, which is right there in the grooves of that solo record.

At this point, CSNY were all caught up in our individual projects. David was involved with the Dead and the Airplane in a mash-up called the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, and he was working with
Paul Kantner on Jefferson Starship’s
Blows Against the Empire.
I had the acid-drenched pleasure of mixing the entire second side, which included “Have You Seen the Stars Tonight.” Neil was out on tour and writing material for
Harvest.
And Stephen was up to his eyeballs in a second solo album, cutting it in Miami, presumably as far away from us as he could get.

Our double-record live set,
4 Way Street
, was released in February 1971 to mostly mediocre reviews. None of us was happy with the way it sounded: spontaneous and
authentic
, which meant occasionally out of tune. Stephen had pressed us to fix the mistakes, arguing that the album would still be live as long as it maintained the live
feel.
But Croz and Neil argued for a warts-and-all approach … It had to be
pure.
And they won.

Even though it sold millions of copies, the album didn’t bode well for our long-term future together. With each of us off in his own little world, rumors were flying all over the place: We weren’t talking to each other, it was the end of CSN, the end of CSNY, the end of the innocence, the end. But that’s all they were at that point: rumors. Although I knew better. In our hearts, we all did.