Wild Tales (32 page)

On October 10, 1971, Croz and I played an acoustic show at the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA. What made it interesting was that Croz had a temperature of 104 and was also suffering from the “Lebanese” flu. His mother was in the audience and he had to be on his best behavior. This concert eventually became the bootleg record
A Very Stony Evening.
Funnily enough this was the very same hall in which I became an American citizen many years later.

The tour behind us, in early November, David and I began recording sessions at Wally Heider’s in San Francisco for our first album together. We put together a dream band:
Russ Kunkel on drums, Leland Sklar on bass,
Danny Kortchmar on guitar,
Craig Doerge on piano, and the multifaceted
David Lindley, incredible musicians whom we called the
Jitters. Every musician longs to play with an outfit like that. It’s a true joy working with creative stylists. Once we decided what key the song was in, we left everything up to them. There was no need to tell them what to play; they were innovative and exploratory. Occasionally, we had a preconceived arrangement in our heads, but within that, a certain spontaneity took place, especially in the solos, where we just said, “Fuck it—let them express themselves however they want.” Onstage, that makes it fresh every night, and in the studio it creates unexpected energy, offering up all kinds of interesting alternatives. We took advantage of everything that band gave us, and you can hear the result on every track. The album, which was dedicated to “Miss Mitchell” for many reasons, wasn’t the all-out commercial success we’d hoped for, but it represented exactly where we were at, which, at the time, was a very agreeable place.

Back in March of 1969, David and I had been in the studio doing some mixing on the first CSN album. David had a nasty habit of taking out a buck knife and cutting little notches in the desk next to the studio board. You could gauge the progress of the album in those little nicks. On this occasion he was doing exactly that when the door flung open and a young, good-looking kid charged inside. Crosby leapt up and pointed the knife at the kid, who boldly grabbed it out of David’s hands.

“That’s
my
fucking knife,” the kid insisted.

I thought, “Wow! Who talks like that to Crosby?” David was a pretty formidable character, and he didn’t take shit like that from any skinny, cocky kid.

Croz grinned. “Aw, that’s just my friend
Jackson Browne.”

A couple of years later, I’d been hearing about this guy more and more. Word was all over the LA music scene about what a great
songwriter he was. A huge talent in the rough. Plenty of artists had already covered his tunes, and recently he’d been convinced to record his own material. In fact, Geffen had signed him to his label, Asylum Records.

Now, in November of 1971, Joni and I, with David and Joel Bernstein, were driving to Neil’s ranch for Thanksgiving dinner with him, his wife,
Carrie Snodgress, and Stephen. Croz had that “I just ate a goldfish and you didn’t” look on his face. “So what is it?” I asked. “None of you have heard
this
,” he said, and whipped a cassette out of his pocket. “This is the new Jackson Browne record.” Joni asked, “Who’s Jackson Browne?” Joel and Croz said, in unison, “Only your next boyfriend!” How true indeed. Later, Jackson invited me to sing a high part on his single “Doctor, My Eyes.”

T
HERE WAS A LOT
of pressure on us to reunite as CSNY, but throughout 1972 the four of us were too busy working the margins. Stephen was in Europe with his eight-piece band,
Manassas; Neil was shooting his first movie,
Journey Through the Past
, and promoting
Harvest
, his follow-up to
After the Gold Rush
, which became the top-selling album of the year. Croz and I were marching from theater to theater, entertaining joyous audiences, as well as ourselves.

One show in particular gave me a rush of significance. We played a benefit, along with Neil, for the
Prison Inmates Welfare Fund at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and I couldn’t help flashing on my father’s incarceration. All these years later, it remained one of the most affecting events of my life. The memory of it still haunted me. That night, departing from our usual onstage banter, I made a special plea for funds. “The prisoners—they don’t want luxury in there,” I told the audience. “They just want to be able to live like decent human beings.” Later, I said, “A man shouldn’t spend four years in there and be exactly the same when he comes out, maybe even less of a human being. He should be able to improve himself … C’mon, man, this is the world.”

My father had gotten a really shitty deal. He was never the same after he came out of prison, and his death, at forty-six, can be traced to that event. But his business with that camera wasn’t the whole story, as I discovered only recently. My father was one of eleven kids, and he had a sister, my Auntie Lily, who later became my Uncle Tony. I loved her/him dearly. But unbeknownst to me, she’d been stealing things all her life and storing them at our house. We had a cupboard under the stairs that was always locked, which was where her swag was stashed. So my father didn’t go to jail for the camera, as I thought. He was protecting his sister. He was convicted of receiving stolen goods—not just the camera, but all the stuff they found locked up in our house.

Things aren’t always what they appear to be. That wisdom was driven home again and again as circumstances evolved over the next few years.

In the fall, Neil’s career took an unexpected tumble. During rehearsals at his ranch for an extended arena tour, he fired guitarist
Danny Whitten, who used his paltry fifty-dollar severance to score drugs—and overdosed. Danny’s death had a devastating effect on Neil. The rest of that tour was marked by a series of listless, uneven shows, and he called David and me to step in and help. We joined him on the last seventeen shows of the tour.

While the tour was in progress, he issued
Journey Through the Past
, a double-soundtrack album to his film. After four spectacular solo LPs, the album failed to deliver and both it and the film were trashed by the critics.

Stephen also experienced a slide of sorts.
Manassas kind of withered away. It was too expensive a band to keep on the road, and the unending tour bled piles of cash. A second album,
Down the Road
, reflected Stephen’s condition. It was sloppy, disoriented, not a solid effort. “Things were moving too fast,” he told an interviewer about that period. “I got a little crazed. Too much drinkin’, too many drugs.” We nearly lost Stephen a couple of times. I remember one occasion in particular, at his house in Surrey. He OD’ed that night, and we had
to get a doctor there pronto, who pounded on Stephen’s heart while Crosby and I anticipated a bad ending. Luckily, we were wrong.

Croz and I were also chasing personal ghosts. David abandoned a reunion tour with his old group, the Byrds, and dealt with resurfacing depression, watching helplessly as his mother, Aliph, died from an agonizing bout with cancer.

All kinds of shit was raining down on us lads. It was time to get together and think it all over.

In the summer of 1973, Neil rented a funky wooden beach house by Mala Wharf in Maui, where the
Mayan
was anchored, which seemed like a lovely place for us to reconvene.

The house Neil rented was rather large, so there was room in there for all of us. Everyone except me brought family with them: David had
Debbie Donovan, Neil came with Carrie, Stephen had just gotten married to French chanteuse
Veronique Sanson, and
Elliot Roberts brought his girlfriend, Gwen, and her two sons along. It was a great place for all of us to hang out. It was within walking distance of the nearest burger joint. Nobody knew we were there, and anyone who did left us alone. Talk about paradise! There were palm trees, sandy beaches, beautiful sun, friendly people. I loved the place from the moment I set foot on it. And for a while, I thought Hawaii would solve all of our problems.

One day, soon after we got there, David said, “We’re gonna go diving.”

I said, “Who’s this
we
, Masked Man? I’m not going diving.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because there’s a fucking shark down there with my name on it, and I’m not going in. Screw you! Good-bye.”

He gave me some macho shit. “Hey, man, if I can do it, you can do it.” Anyway, we smoked a big one and thought about it.

Now, I’m not an ocean guy; I’m English. My fear of sharks came from seeing the movie
Tabu
as a child. When the young kid wants to marry the prince’s daughter and doesn’t have any money, even when he knows he’s got to give the chieftain a dowry, he
dives deep into the lagoon to where the giant clam is and steals its pearl—except the giant clam closes over his leg and a shark gets him. Ever since, I’ve been terrified of sharks. Ironically, Crosby’s father was the cinematographer of that film, so I can lay blame directly at David’s flippers.

Anyway, my first dive was about 140 feet, no training, completely mad, almost suicidal. There was a submarine off Lahaina that had been decommissioned and sunk to do paint experiments. We went down and swam around and inside it and came up—and I’m still alive. So Crosby’s father gave me the fear, and his low-down son took it away.

We all came to Hawaii with tons of songs. There was “Time After Time” and “Carry Me” from Crosby, “Human Highway” from Neil, and
“Wind on the Water,” “And So It Goes,” and “Prison Song” from me. There was definitely an album in that musical bounty. Rehearsals started almost immediately after we got there, seesawing between the deck of the
Mayan
and Neil’s house. Plans were to iron out the material before heading back to California, where we’d record at Heider’s. The album was going to be called
Human Highway
, after the song Neil had written. Everyone was getting along like a house on fire. Until the last day, when it was time to leave.

I’m still not quite sure what happened—and I’m not sure if anyone exactly knows. The four of us had gathered on the beach in front of the house. It dawned on me that we’d need an album cover, so I grabbed Stephen’s Hasselblad, stuck it in the sand, worked out the exposure and framing, walked into the shot, and had my friend
Harry Harris snap the shutter, which produced a juicy color portrait that was absolutely fantastic. A cover in one shot! We could hardly believe our luck, but that was as far as our luck would go. Right after that, some business, some cocaine thing, went down, and suddenly we weren’t talking to each other. The energy just fell out of the project. We broke up and left Hawaii separately.

This is the kind of shit we put ourselves through. Music, drugs,
talent, ego, excess, stubbornness—mix them together and it’s a powerful explosive.

One night after rehearsals, Croz and I were at my house in San Francisco, smokin’ it, when Croz looked out of the window and saw a guy trying to steal the hubcaps off his Mercedes. Because my bedroom was situated under the eaves, the huge, triangular windows didn’t open, so Croz grabbed a handgun out of his bag, hustled downstairs to the front bedroom, and fired at the guy out of the open window to scare him off. Worked like a charm. The guy stopped what he was doing and fled. But David assumed the guy had a getaway car nearby and would come back for it, because you can’t very well go running down the street with hubcaps.

Sure enough, not ten minutes had passed before the guy came back to retrieve his car, and David took a few more shots at him, putting one directly in the trunk of the car, just for good measure.

Two days later, I’d returned to Neil’s ranch, where we’d resumed CSNY rehearsals for
Human Highway
. That meant my house was empty. But
Joel Bernstein, who by this time lived in an apartment next door and had never been told of the earlier shooting incident, noticed a suspicious guy who had pulled over in a VW and seemed to be casing the joint. Joel came over to make sure that the guy knew that the house was occupied, and got the shock of his life when two bullets came screaming in through the window. Obviously, the guy had come back and mistaken Joel for David. And he must have been a pretty good shot, because those shots were close, way too close for comfort.

Crosby always had guns around. Later, he would say it was because of what happened to
John Lennon, but he’s been fascinated with firearms since he was a kid. And the
Manson murders helped fuel his point of view. Those killings occurred in a house owned by Terry Melcher, who had produced the
Byrds. Croz had been there often and lived less than a half mile away, which prompted him to add a twelve-gauge shotgun to his arsenal. I grew up in England,
where no one, neither police nor criminals, had guns, so to me the gun thing was a pretty bad scene. Personally, I believe that the gun lobby—along with the tobacco lobby, the alcohol lobby, and the pharmaceutical lobby—will be seen as major criminals in years hence. But as far as Croz and CSNY went, it wouldn’t be the last time that guns played a role.

That was CSNY in the summer of ’73. And it’s been a trait of ours repeatedly through our entire existence. Put all of us in a room, and anything could trigger a fatal blast. We were our own worst enemy. What a partnership!

For a while, we kicked around in splintered variations. I actually went on before Neil when he played the Roxy’s opening in Los Angeles when Cheech and Chong had to cancel, and Croz and I continued performing as a duo in slightly larger settings. Stephen attempted to jump-start
Manassas. Meanwhile, in the fall of 1973 I decided to stretch out on my own, putting together material for another solo album.
Wild Tales
was a good collection of songs but dark and moody, which was where I was at the time. Even the cover was pretty stark;
Joel Bernstein’s black-and-white shot of me looking intense, forlorn, caught the vibe perfectly. For whatever reason, the public wasn’t ready for it. The album never caught fire and Atlantic didn’t promote it. The whole affair left me in a deep emotional hole.

Around this time, I was out doing something in Los Angeles with David when we drove back to his boat in Newport Beach. The plan was to spend a nice night having dinner, then go to the
Mayan
and smoke one, enjoying ourselves. David had his stash in the big shoulder bag he always carried. As we pulled into the shipyard, we noticed a convoy of black sedans in the surrounding parking lot.