CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

by Peter Doggett Narrated by Danny Campbell

Overview

An engaging and illuminating biography focused on the formative and highly influential early years of “rock's first supergroup” (Rolling Stone) Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young-when they were the most successful, influential, and politically potent band in America.

After making their marks in popular bands such as the Hollies and the Byrds, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash released their first album in May 1969. By the time they arrived at Woodstock a few months later, Neil Young had joined their ranks and together, their transcendent harmonies and evocative lyrics channeled all the romantic idealism and radical angst of their time.

Now, music journalist Peter Doggett chronicles these legendary musicians and the movement they came to represent at the height of their popularity and influence: 1969 to 1974. Based on interviews with the band and colleagues, along with exclusive access to CSNY's archive, Doggett provides new insights into their incredible catalog, from their delicate acoustic confessionals like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” to their timeless classics such as “Our House.” Doggett also uncovers plenty of new stories and perspectives on the four tenacious and volatile songwriters' infamously reckless, hedonistic, and often combative lifestyles that led to their continuous breakups and behaviors-extreme even by rock star standards.

“A must for CSNY fans and anyone who remembers the era when it ruled the pop charts” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), CSNY is a quintessential and definitive account of one of the biggest bands of the Woodstock generation.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator Danny Campbell’s hoarse baritone does little to draw the listener into this well-researched treatise on the career of the first rock supergroup, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY). The band’s creativity and innovative harmonies are traced historically and thoroughly explored, as are the personalities of each of its members, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young. Insightful portraits of their solo careers and group affiliations are plentiful. Experienced music history writer Peter Doggett has a highly informative style that is well documented. Sadly, the listener is still left wanting. Campbell’s narration has a dated “anchorman” style that suggests a lack of genuine interest in this fascinating story of a major force of rock. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

03/25/2019

As Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money) notes in this appreciative, attentive history of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the 1960s group spent roughly “two of the past fifty years as a functioning band” and the other 48 years “fending off questions about why they are no longer together.” Doggett zeroes in on that brief, musically fruitful period when David Crosby (who came from The Byrds), Graham Nash (of The Hollies), Stephen Stills and Neil Young (both of Buffalo Springfield) united to create chart-topping mellow folk-rock fronted with an “unearthly vocal blend.” In between tracking the ups and downs of the band’s relationships, particularly Young’s peripatetic unpredictability and Crosby’s weaknesses (“instinct, ego, vulnerability, and cocaine”), Doggett delivers a solid rundown of its artistic highs (the release of the 1970 Déjà Vu album) and more frequent lows (constant infighting and Stills’s arrest for narcotics possession). The group disbanded in 1970 but came together for a 1974 reunion tour, when they realized that performing to “Woodstock Nation” fans at least “guaranteed them a healthy income” on the nostalgia circuit. (Young recalls “the four of us and our handlers dividing up the loot and finding out exactly how much we made” after a Filmore show.) This honest, occasionally laudatory history will delight its baby boomer audience. (May)

The Times (London)

"Engaging . . . Doggett uses the saga of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as a metaphor for the Woodstock generation and their doomed mission to return to the garden."

Sunday Times (London)

"A meticulous chronicle . . . but also a deft portrait of a golden age tarnishing even as the band sang."

Houston Press

"Plenty of nuggets for the diehard fan...a more than welcome addition to the band’s bookshelf."

From the Publisher

"An enthusiastic history of one of rock music’s most significant supergroups. . . . The narrative is eminently readable. . . . A must for CSNY fans and anyone who remembers the era when it ruled the pop charts."
—Starred Kirkus Review

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator Danny Campbell’s hoarse baritone does little to draw the listener into this well-researched treatise on the career of the first rock supergroup, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY). The band’s creativity and innovative harmonies are traced historically and thoroughly explored, as are the personalities of each of its members, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young. Insightful portraits of their solo careers and group affiliations are plentiful. Experienced music history writer Peter Doggett has a highly informative style that is well documented. Sadly, the listener is still left wanting. Campbell’s narration has a dated “anchorman” style that suggests a lack of genuine interest in this fascinating story of a major force of rock. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-02-04

An enthusiastic history of one of rock music's most significant supergroups.

Rock journalist Doggett (Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone: 125 Years of Pop Music, 2015, etc.) traces his protagonists from their origins through their early success in the Byrds (David Crosby), the Hollies (Graham Nash), and Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills and Neil Young). As the author shows, the Los Angeles rock scene of the late 1960s was a meeting place for nearly everyone who came to prominence in folk or rock. Prime among them was Crosby, who strutted around in a cape and whose counterculture credentials included introducing the Beatles to LSD. After one night at a popular music venue, Crosby, Stills, and Nash came together for a stoned singing party that gave birth to a new sound. With the addition of Young and the band's appearance at Woodstock, the legend was underway as well as the melodrama of fights, breakups, reunions, and excess. Doggett frankly admits that he is a fan of the group, and he traces the band's career from concert to concert, recording session to recording session. In addition to providing the stories behind the better-known songs, the author spends plenty of time on their lives offstage, including their liaisons with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins. Throughout, Doggett does a solid job differentiating among the four members of the group, each an interesting, if not necessarily likable, personality. Young gets most of the blame for the group's breakups, though with four enormous egos, everyone receives a due share. The author backs it all up with voluminous documentation, including interviews with all the participants and ample quotations from contemporary reviews of almost every record and concert, including the members' solo projects. The narrative is eminently readable, with few dull passages, even when the protagonists are sulking during one of the band's numerous fights.

A must for CSNY fans and anyone who remembers the era when it ruled the pop charts.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170437610
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CSNY
Asked, in a 1985 interview, to imagine an alternative lifetime in which he could have joined any musical outfit in the world, Bob Dylan singled out some of the catalysts of American roots music—pivotal bands in the development of jazz, country, and R&B. Then he astounded the journalist by offering a more modern name, one whose critical standing could hardly have been lower in the year of Live Aid: Crosby, Stills & Nash. A decade later, Dylan recorded a rambling folk ballad entitled “Highlands,” in which—for the first time in his career—he namechecked one of his contemporaries from the world of rock and pop: Neil Young. It was as close as the notoriously reticent Nobel laureate could have come to acknowledging his admiration for a quartet that had been acclaimed as America’s first rock supergroup, and that remains, fifty years later, the most powerful symbol of the so-called Woodstock generation.

David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young—the singer-songwriter collective universally known as CSNY—came together by accident rather than design. Scarred by their unhappy experiences with the bands from which they escaped in 1967 and 1968, they vowed that they would never become a group. Instead they set out to prove that it was possible for four irrepressibly creative, willfully egotistical individuals to combine their talents without sacrificing their personal identities. But they hadn’t allowed for the impact of artistic and commercial success, which transformed this loose, temporary aggregation of musicians into an institution. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have spent approximately two of the past fifty years as a functioning band, and the other forty-eight years fending off questions about why they are no longer together. Almost despite themselves, they created a sound and a myth so powerful that it would hang around their necks as a curse, and remain an enduring source of fascination for the rest of the world.

CSNY was never intended to be a quartet, even a transient one. In 1968, three refugees from successful but confining pop bands stumbled into each other’s company and discovered that when they sang together, they made a sound that was unlike anything else. For several weeks that year, ex-Byrd David Crosby, Buffalo Springfield leader Stephen Stills, and Hollies vocalist Graham Nash showed off their party trick for their peers in Laurel Canyon, and watched them gape in astonishment at the harmony blend they had found. All three men had songs to match, intensely personal expressions of romantic, psychological, and political turmoil that chimed with the spirit of their generation. Soon Crosby, Stills & Nash (alias CSN) was an act with a recording contract, and a manifesto that stressed both their brotherhood and their individual independence. They cut a debut album that caught the mood of the times and stoked rampant demand for a concert tour that could transport the Canyon’s secret to the rest of America.

Only then did Stills make the fateful decision to invite his sparring partner from Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, to flesh out the trio’s sound onstage. His recruitment brought a fourth maverick voice and mercurial songwriter into the mix. It transformed CSN into CSNY, and irrevocably altered the original trio’s delicate balance of power and creativity. The quartet came to national prominence with their performance at the Woodstock festival in August 1969, after which their music and their image became indissolubly linked with the fate of the baby-boomer era.

The road from Laurel Canyon to Woodstock had spanned precisely one year; and over the next twelve months, everything CSNY had built fell to pieces around them. But the resonance of their image, and the power of their music, remained undimmed, even as it haunted the four men’s attempts to thrive outside the band. Eventually, and inevitably, the four men came back together, for an epic, groundbreaking 1974 tour that catapulted rock culture into a new era of greed and excess—and also ensured that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young could never function again as a brotherhood of equals.

How could a union so brief and so troubled have left such a profound impression on American culture? If the initial pull of CSN was their vocal harmonies, what made CSNY so vital, and their legacy so deep, was the impact of their songs—and the personalities that powered them. Indeed, the men and their music became impossible to distinguish: their songwriting expressed exactly who they were, and what was happening around them, and it allowed their listeners to locate their own place in a world beset by conflict and oppression.

Each of the quartet had left a distinct mark on the mid-1960s pop scene, from Crosby’s chart-topping singles with the Byrds and Nash’s worldwide success with the Hollies to Stills’s and Young’s tempestuous, inspired work with Buffalo Springfield. With Springfield’s 1967 hit “For What It’s Worth,” Stills had demonstrated that a song could transcend its origins and become an all-purpose rallying cry in an age searching for direction and stability. What marked out CSNY from their peers was that all four members of the band simultaneously discovered the ability to speak for, and to, their times. They did this in markedly different ways, from Crosby’s provocative political rants to Nash’s romantic lyricism, Stills’s restless self-questioning to Young’s ambiguous poetics. But collectively their four discrete voices combined to make up a force unlike any in rock history—a cabal of gifted, driven, arrogant, and fearless lyricists and composers, with the stage presence and raw talent to translate the chaos of a turbulent era into timeless anthems.

It is those tunes—“Carry On” and “Long Time Gone,” “Helpless” and “Teach Your Children,” “Ohio” and, of course, Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”—that make up the quartet’s most beloved legacy. CSN and CSNY released just twenty-two songs together during their brief flowering in 1969 and 1970, and most of them have become rock standards. They’ve formed the heart of every concert that the band (in either formation) has performed since then, arousing a collective sigh of joy from audiences, no matter how stale they have become for their composers. But while crowds called out for a reprise of their greatest hits, all four musicians were desperate to forge new ground, documenting the changes in their psyches, their personal relationships, and the society around them. So the story of CSNY is not only a chronicle of artistic triumph and popular acclaim; it’s the tale of how four individuals battled to maintain their separate artistic identities when much of their audience simply wanted them to repeat the past.

I’m a fan, and have been unashamed about it, even during those decades when proclaiming your love for CSNY was tantamount to joining a leper colony. For reasons I can’t quite explain, but I can always feel, the music made by those four men still touches me more deeply than any other. I can see and describe its faults, but as in any enduring love affair, they are ultimately irrelevant. “Music gets you high,” Graham Nash once wrote, and their music always works for me, even without the chemical and herbal aids that used to be synonymous with the band during their most self-indulgent eras.

I’ve been fortunate to have interviewed, befriended, and worked on projects with many of the members of the band and their circle. What emerged was the story of how four preternaturally talented, and utterly distinct, individuals found their way into each other’s company; created music that can still make it feel wonderful to be alive; and then, almost immediately, let the magic slip away. One decade was the key to their collective lives: the period between 1964 and 1974, which carried them from musical apprenticeships to what was then the most lucrative tour in rock history.

Something remarkable happened to bring them together; and something fundamental vanished when their 1974 tour and its aftermath drove them apart. Any sense that CSNY was an active, functioning, real band ended that year. Since then, only memories and fragments of the dream have survived: delicious fantasies that have sometimes managed to mask the profound dysfunction of their collective relationship. But there is something so thrilling, so life-affirming, so magical in the sound that those musicians can make and have made together that it is possible to forgive all those decades of missed opportunities; all the “time we have wasted on the way,” as Graham Nash once put it.

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