The Band with the Law-Firm Name

This weekend, a bright luminary from my high-school and college days, Graham Nash, will perform in Minneapolis. The newspaper story to promote that concert caught my attention, because I had recently read a collective biography of the first rock-and-roll supergroup, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (by David Browne, 2019). Nash’s appearance coincides with the 54^th anniversary of the group’s first album. The eponymous record, sans Young, was released in May 1969 and had a huge impact on the pop music of that era.

I won’t go to the concert for a couple of reasons. First, I have no desire to see an 81-year-old singer struggle to perform the songs he had written in his rebellious twenties. I prefer to listen to the old CDs and remember the performers the way they were in their prime. Watching a wrinkled Rod Stewart strut around the stage and croon “Don’t ya think I’m sexy” at 78 holds no appeal for me. Second, I saw CSN&Y perform the Auditorium Theater in Chicago in 1974. I have fond memories of that show, despite the fact that I was the only audience member who was not stoned (I was still a distance runner in those days). I recently found the ticket stub from that show (historians save everything), and one thing stands out for me on that faded piece of thin cardboard: the price. The band was roundly criticized in those days for the high price of their concerts, so it was probably a struggle for me to come up with the SIX DOLLAR admission price. The Nash concert, circa 2023, lists prices as “$100-140.” Even allowing for a half-century of inflation, paying 20 times the price for 25% of the product qualifies as dubious economics in my mind.

All four members of the original band were already regarded as stars when they first coalesced in the late ‘60s. Nash was a founding member of the Hollies, a British group that had a string of hits such as Bus Stop, Look Through Any Window, On a Carousel, and He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother. Stephen Stills and Neil Young were both members of Buffalo Springfield, an early and influential folk-rock band best known for a song that became something of an anthem for the protest movement of the ‘60s, For What it’s Worth. David Crosby started with the Byrds, who had major hits with covers of Bob Dylan songs such as Mr. Tambourine Man, All I Really Want to Do, and Pete Seeger’s Turn, Turn, Turn. With Crosby kicked out of the Byrds and the others chafing under the restrictions of their respective bands, they came together in Southern California in 1968.

Stories vary about the exact origin of the group, as decades of time and years of drug use have generated conflicting accounts. The most credible version, however, is that Crosby, Stills, and Nash first sang together at a gathering of musicians in Laurel Canyon, California at the home of Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas. Everyone in the room immediately recognized they were hearing something special, as the tight harmonies of the three seemed both natural and magical. The ball started rolling, Nash and Stills quit their bands, and they began practicing as a trio. Hoping to avoid the pitfalls and restrictions of performing only as a group, they chose the name Crosby, Stills, and Nash so that they could all pursue solo careers while coming together as a group when they felt so inclined.

The multi-platinum record Crosby, Stills, and Nash won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and featured an iconic cover photo of the three performers sitting comfortably on the front porch of an abandoned house. Along with the Byrds and the Band, CS&N are credited with ushering in a new style of pop music that people began calling “folk-rock.” Along with the hits Marrakesh Express and Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (which Stills wrote for his girlfriend, folk-singer Judy Collins), the song Helplessly Hoping has been used ever since to teach alliteration to high-school English students (“helplessly hoping, the harlequin hovered,” and “wordlessly watching, she waits by the window and wonders”). Within five years, performers such as the Eagles, America, Fleetwood Mac, and Jackson Browne would emulate the group and help create what became known as the “California Sound.”

Since Stills had played almost all of the instruments on the album, the band added a drummer and bass player for the planned live tour to promote the record. They also recruited a former Stills bandmate who had often been seen tooling around L.A. in an old hearse, Neil Young. (The hearse, or one of the hearses owned by Young, was immortalized in his song, Long May You Run) The group played one show together in Chicago in the summer of 1969 before being invited to play in an outdoor concert in upstate New York. At Woodstock that August, Stills articulated their nervousness by exclaiming to the 500,000 audience members, “This is only the second time we’ve played in front of people, man. We’re scared shitless.”

Their second album, Déjà Vu, generated hits such as Woodstock, Teach Your Children, and Our House (which Nash wrote about domestic bliss with his then-girlfriend, Joni Mitchell). As the title of their live album, 4-Way Street (1971) implied, though, they were a group preparing to separate after three years together. All four members took advantage of the open-relationship of their collaboration and went their individual ways to record solo albums. After that, the dysfunctional super group fell into a pattern that repeated itself over and over again for decades. They would (1) come together to begin another studio album or tour together. (2) Frictions or jealousies, often exacerbated by excessive drug use, led to an acrimonious breakup. (3) They pursued interests in various combinations of CSN&Y or with new bands, often sniping at the others in the media. Finally (4), one of the members would tentatively reach out to the others and suggest a new attempt at reconciliation. For fifty years, the quartet acted like an old couple that marries, divorces, and remarries over and over again. The death of David Crosby earlier this year ended any speculation that they would ever reunite as a full band.

The members of the band often played or sang with other stars of their era. James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Rita Coolidge, John Sebastian, and Art Garfunkel all sang on one of the solo albums or had members of CSN&Y singing background with them. After reading the Browne book, another fact jumped out at me: The window of opportunity for a particular genre of music was remarkably small in the 1970s through ‘90s. The landscape of popular music changed rapidly. Folk-rock soon gave way to Disco, Heavy Metal, Punk, New Wave, Spandex-and-Big-Hair Rock, Rap, Hip-Hop, Grunge, and so on. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, like other stars of their time, struggled to find or maintain relevancy. They produced occasional hits, but increasingly found themselves relegated to “oldies” or “easy listening” radio formats.

In my memory, though, they will always appear as they did in that 1974 concert in Chicago. The stage was simple, without any of today’s massive Broadway-like production elements. They stood in front of massive speakers, around mic stands trailing thick black cords, with three members clustered on an oriental rug, sometimes sharing one microphone, and one guitar player off to the side. As the show unfolded, four distinct personalities emerged. The bushy-headed, walrus-mustachioed Crosby served as the hippie bard, a cloud of marijuana smoke wafting around his head. Stills was the intense technician, focused on replicating the sound they had created in the studio. Young was the one who stood apart from the group, aloof, sometimes playing with his back to the audience, and battling Stills for control of the sound. He seemed intent on allowing spontaneity and the spirit of the moment guide the music, rather than an artificial product of the sterile studio. Occasionally, Young would win, luring Stills into soulful, back-and-forth, dueling solos on their electric guitars and eliciting a smile of pleasure from his bandmate. Nash was the fourth member, serving as amiable host, introducing the songs, and occasionally leading the good-natured barbs that provided comic relief. Then there was the harmonic convergence of their voices. Unlike the harmonies of bands before them, in which multiple singers would hit specific notes and hold them, their voices swirled together, sometimes soaring above the melody, other times weaving in and out with each other. Each voice seemed to draw strength from the others while at the same time leading the others to greater heights. This was definitely a case of the combined whole being stronger than the individual parts.

So, I will not be attending this week’s Graham Nash show, and he will have to Carry On without me. Instead, I will close my eyes and try to recreate the majestic sound of those intertwined voices uniting on Carry On or Judy Blue Eyes. It makes me smile just to think about it.