Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

CHAPTER 1

EARLY YEARS–DECEMBER 1968

The experiment began almost by accident and, befitting the way it would toggle between love and something far from it, on Valentine’s Day. February 14, 1968, had been an overcast midwinter day in Los Angeles, but the weather didn’t deter the city’s pop music royalty from making its way to the Sunset Strip that evening. Commandeering the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Clark Street in West Hollywood, the hulking Whisky a Go Go had been a Bank of America branch until the building was transformed into a dance-crazy pop nightclub in 1964. Since then, the five-hundred-seat nightspot, with its incongruously old-fashioned awning over the front door, had hosted rock-and-roll mavericks as well as more soul and R&B acts than any other club in town; it was the place to catch everyone from the Doors and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention to Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and the Miracles, often with woozy lights and bubbles projected on the wall.

Crammed next to each other at one table tonight were David Crosby, best known for his affiliation with the Byrds, and Cass Elliot, the beloved and gregarious member of the Mamas and the Papas, whose enveloping harmonies had done their best to calm the country down over the past three years. Nearby were Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s pop-singer daughter, former Lovin’ Spoonful frontman John Sebastian, and at least three of the Monkees, the fabricated but socially connected TV pop band. Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, one of the most beloved if combustible of Los Angeles pop bands, was also in the crowd; one account also placed his bandmate Neil Young there. All were primed for a rare Hollywood performance by peers from across the ocean named the Hollies.

In light of the grim drumbeat of the nightly news, it made sense to want to escape for an evening. The war in Vietnam was thousands of miles away but hitting closer to home by the day. Weeks before, North Vietnam had stunned the world with the Tet Offensive, a barrage of surprise attacks on over a hundred cities in South Vietnam. That February day, just after it was announced that peace talks between North Vietnam, the United States and other nations had collapsed, the beleaguered US President, Lyndon Johnson, signed off on sending another 10,500 troops into war. Asked if nuclear bombs would be used to defend Marine outposts in South Vietnam, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “refused to speculate.” (Decades later, it would be revealed that Johnson had vetoed a plan that week to install nukes in South Vietnam as a last resort against the North.) Even the local news was unsparing: an eighteen-year-old living near the University of Southern California had been arrested for allegedly shooting his father in the face with a 16-gauge shotgun after a family argument.

Little intruded on the festivities at the Whisky a Go Go. In their native England, the Hollies had played the Cavern Club in Liverpool right after the Beatles; starting in the now far-off 1963, they had become a hit-making machine all their own. In the States, the Hollies were a regular pop radio presence—with kicky, full-voiced charmers like “Bus Stop” and “Carrie Anne”—but had yet to fully graduate to the counterculture world of FM radio. At the Whisky, one reason why they hadn’t was clear: they looked sharp in now-unfashionable matching dark jackets, and only one of them, goateed rhythm guitarist and harmony singer Graham Nash, sported facial hair. But the band’s even sharper-cut vocalizing, courtesy of Nash, lead singer Allan Clarke and lead guitarist Tony Hicks, was dazzlingly precise; onstage, the Hollies sounded exactly as they did on record, no easy feat in the sound-system-challenged days of the ’60s. Slicing through the arrangements, Nash’s keening, high-pitched voice, which Paul McCartney had once mistaken for a trumpet, was particularly impressive.

When the show ended, Stills and Crosby, who had been circling each other over the past year, two ambitious musicians in search of a magic combination to vault them to the top, loitered on the sidewalk outside the Whisky, near its yellow awning. Each was at a crossroads. Crosby exuded a sun-baked, up-for-anything gusto—“What’s the most fun we can have in 20 minutes?” would be his most devilish and successful pickup line—and his droopy mustache, occasional cape and hair flipping down to his shoulders made him one of the most recognizable figures on the city’s music scene, a naughty boy prince of pop. But at twenty-six, the now former Byrd faced an uncertain future after having been fired four months before from one of rock’s leading and most innovative bands. With Buffalo Springfield faltering and at least two of its members regularly missing in action, the blonder Stills—whose flashes of good-old-boy grins and phlegmy laughs could easily give way to an intimidating, penetrating stare that signaled his displeasure—could never tell if his band would exist much longer. When a newspaper reporter asked him a few months later about the state of the Springfield, Stills, all of twenty-three, mentioned a planned fall European tour but added: “I don’t know, though. You never can tell. You know, we might break up tomorrow.” Although Young had joined him at the Whisky, he was generally off somewhere else, which didn’t surprise Stills in the least; even then, no one could keep tabs on Young.

For all the uncertainty gripping their careers, Crosby and Stills were now caught up in what they’d just witnessed inside the Whisky. Joined by Elliot, who seemed to know everyone in town and delighted in moving around musical chess pieces, Stills and Crosby talked elatedly about Nash’s performance that night. “Maybe we can steal him,” Crosby said out loud, according to one of many varying accounts. Crosby had already met Nash; they’d bonded in Los Angeles and London and had gotten stoned together. The only thing they hadn’t done together was sing, but in front of the Whisky, Stills and Elliot weren’t sure that was an option. In the rules-oriented world of pop in 1968, swiping a member of another group was fairly unthinkable, an affront to the bonds of a rock-and-roll band; legally and morally, there were still rules.

Whether they realized it or not that evening, Crosby, Stills and Nash were each dogged with insecurities; in one form or another, they were in search of acceptance, validation and victory. In due time, those needs, and how they intersected with financial concerns, would also pull in Young. But at the moment, they were men of radically different voices, temperaments and features (Stills and Nash chiseled, Crosby more baby-faced, even at his age) who were hungry for someone to complete them. They wanted what they wanted, and they decided that the established rules would not apply to them.

FOR NASH AND his school friend Harold Clarke, their first taste of a different, less suffocating world beyond working-class Salford, a suburb northwest of Manchester, arrived inside a pub. The two had met in elementary school (Nash had raised his hand when the newly arrived Clarke had shown up in class and needed a seat next to someone), and the two had first noticed the comfortable way their voices blended while singing “The Lord Is My Shepherd” at a school concert. It wasn’t long before they had hustled up guitars and together started singing skiffle—scruffy folk that had originated in the States but had undergone a revival in the United Kingdom—in the Clarke or Nash homes. When Clarke’s older brother overheard them, he thought the two kids, now in their teens, should try singing in public—specifically, at a nearby workingmen’s bar, the Devonshire Sporting Club. Clarke’s brother introduced them to the owner, who asked them to play him a few songs. Satisfied with what he’d heard, he told them they could play at the bar that same day, immediately after a juggling act. “We came offstage and the guy came up to us and said, ‘We like that and here’s 10 bob,’ a half pound in those days, quite a lot of money,” Clarke recalls. “Graham and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is okay.’”

For Nash, the moment would be formative, his first taste of rising above his surroundings and feeling less like an outsider. He’d been born amid the rubble of World War II; the Christmas 1940 bombings of Manchester and Salford had forced expectant mothers to relocate to hospitals in nearby Blackpool, where Nash arrived on the second day of February 1942. (Adolf Hitler had spared Blackpool, thinking it would make for an ideal seaside vacation spot once he had conquered Great Britain.) Nash would long be haunted by memories of the thick “blackout curtains” his family used at night so enemy bombers wouldn’t be able to determine where the towns and villages lay below.

In his teen years, Nash’s face grew lean, and his hair became an overgrown version of a Presley pompadour. But he could never escape the feeling that he was a societal black sheep. His father, William, cast metal in a local foundry. At the Nash family home in Ordsall, the gritty, blue-collar section of Salford, the bathroom was outside and hot water was in short supply. Unlike the more cultured types in London, two hundred miles to the south, Nash didn’t have fashionable clothes; his Manchester-area accent, combined with his frequent salty-sailor expletives, made his working-class roots even more pronounced. One of the few things that made him less than blue collar was music. “I definitely wasn’t cool,” he says. “If the leather wore out on the bottom of my shoes, I wore a pair of my mother’s manly-looking shoes. But when I started to play guitar and sing Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly songs, people started to treat me a little differently, strangely enough. And I realized that. I recognized the power in being popular. And so because I wasn’t ‘cool’ in my normal life, this one little area of playing and singing made me feel a little cooler than I was. And I liked that.”

Once their schooldays had ended, Nash and Clarke both followed their supposed accepted paths in life, working day jobs that, for Nash, included the post office. But their desire to play music and escape their lives was unquenchable. By their later teens, they were giving themselves a string of different names—the Two Teens, the Guyatones (named after the mass-produced Japanese guitar manufacturer), or the Everly Brothers–inspired Ricky and Dane Young—and playing regularly in whatever club or pub would have them. Clarke, who would soon rename himself Allan, had a strong, nasal tone that demanded he be the lead singer, and Nash had startlingly high harmonies that softened Clarke’s delivery. Additional musicians were added until, in 1962, the full group, first named the Deltas, transformed into the Hollies. The name was partly a nod to their hero Buddy Holly; it was also a reference to the Christmas decorations in a club they were playing. Asked to come up with a name before they took the stage, Clarke looked around and told the announcer, “We’re the Hollies,” and it stuck.

An EMI Records executive saw them at the Cavern Club in December 1962. A month later they had followed the Beatles to EMI and were recording their first single, a peppy, breathless cover of the Coasters’ “(Ain’t That) Just Like Me” that hit no. 25 and set the tone for their original sound. “Our lives changed completely,” Clarke marvels. Suddenly, the two childhood friends who’d grown up feeling less than hip were seeing their songs—covers of R&B hits like “Searchin’,” “Stay” and “Just One Look”—on the British charts, and singing before throngs of squealing young women.

In early 1966, the Hollies broke through in America with “Look Through Any Window,” which played to their most charming qualities—swelling vocal harmonies, picturesque lyrics, and drummer Bobby Elliott’s kinetic rhythms. Whether written in-house or by outsiders, the singles that followed—the weather-driven love story “Bus Stop,” the belly-dancer-inspired “Stop! Stop! Stop!,” the Marianne Faithfull nod “Carrie Anne”—were impossibly magnetic radio candy and, deservedly, hits on both sides of the ocean. Nash had a hand in writing many of them, and momentarily, life felt grand: in 1963, he left the Manchester area behind and moved to London, marrying his girlfriend, Rose Eccles, the following year. By then, he and Clarke had even spent an inebriated evening in the studio with the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector, singing warbly backup on throwaways like “Andrew’s Blues.”

For all those accomplishments, the Hollies could never score an aura of hipness. In 1965, they released “Too Many People,” a politely political commentary describing how a million people died in an unnamed war. In fact, the song had its roots in news reports about the Mau Mau, a terrorist organization of the late ’50s and ’60s that was killing white farmers in Kenya to protest their settlements. It didn’t make the Hollies rebels, but it was a start. When the multi-hued late ’60s came into view, the band snazzed up its wardrobe with floral-patterned shirts and beads. “We went along with the flower-power stuff because that’s what was happening,” says Clarke. “We would have gone along with anything if we wanted a hit record.” But the band’s unhipness, the way it now made him feel as out of sorts as he had in grade school, gnawed at Nash, who longed for the credibility of the London scene. “Graham was going down to London and to the clubs and seeing things there that hadn’t come into his life before, like drugs,” says Clarke. “If there was anything happening, Graham wanted to be there. I was enjoying the ’60s, but Graham wanted to take it further.”

In the middle of 1966, the Hollies flew to Los Angeles for the first time to promote one of their records. If the palm trees and beaches he saw from the plane weren’t enticing enough for Nash, the immediate bear hug of the Hollywood music scene was. At a party, he met Elliot, known as Mama Cass, the queen bee of the scene, and Nash took her up on an invitation to attend a recording session for the Mamas and the Papas. To complete Nash’s trip to LA—and to fulfill her desire to make everyone feel connected—Elliot invited him to visit a friend of hers who lived in a wooden house on Lisbon Lane in Beverly Glen Canyon. There, Nash encountered a mustached man sifting through a box of weed—David Crosby of the Byrds—and Crosby promptly got his new acquaintance higher than he’d ever been. “I had better pot than anybody else,” Crosby says. “I got him whacked.” Although Nash didn’t know it at the time, Crosby stashed some of his drugs behind secret cupboards, along with guns and knives.

The trip was a grand awakening for Nash: people like Crosby and Elliot knew who he was and loved his singing. In a heartbeat, he felt hipper, more like an insider, than ever before (the Hollies dabbled in drugs but mostly stuck to drinking). Simultaneously, Nash began to take greater charge of steering the Hollies’ ship. At the same time—and in the same Abbey Road studio where the Beatles were concocting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in early 1967—the Hollies began recording Evolution, the first of two self-consciously psychedelic albums they would make. Nash played an even larger role in the same year’s Butterfly, which was stuffed with Indian sitars, a song about a flying horse, and another song titled, with trippy pretensions, “Elevated Observations.” They made a valiant effort to sound high, but they still came across as too chipper and perky, and Butterfly would be one of their least successful albums.

That summer Nash brought in his most ambitious undertaking, “King Midas in Reverse,” a self-lacerating account of his own infidelities and growing personal confusion. With its trilling strings and intentionally swervy, hallucinatory harmonies on the chorus, the record was the most ambitious the Hollies had ever made, although not everyone in the band approved. “The producer told us it wasn’t going to be a hit, but Graham was quite adamant,” says Clarke. “He was trying to be the Beatles. Everything but the kitchen sink was on that record. But it wasn’t the Hollies’ approach.” Although a sonic accomplishment, the single peaked at no. 18 on the British charts—about a dozen spots lower than “Carrie Anne” or the equally contagious “On a Carousel.” Although Clarke denies it, Nash feels the song’s lack of impact made the Hollies begin questioning his judgment and decisions.