FLASHBACK: The Actual Honest to God Reunion of Crosby Stills & Nash

"The Actual Honest to God Reunion of Crosby Stills & Nash"
Rolling Stone by Cameron Crowe - June 2, 1977
(Click photo to enlarge)
With the reunion of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young now confirmed for the 2013 27th Annual Bridge School Benefit Concert, we've been getting a bit nostalgic lately.

Here is a Rolling Stone interview from June 2, 1977 The Actual Honest to God Reunion of Crosby Stills & Nash by Cameron Crowe. (Via 4waysite. Thanks!) Lots of interesting comments.

And here's the obligatory Neil content:

They [CSN] assume that Neil Young knows exactly what they’re up to in Miami, using two months of studio time that Young himself wanted to book. But there has been no communication. He is spoken of in friendly but distant terms. Young views CSNY as an occasional marker in his own career, but CSNY comes first for the others. “I love singing with those guys,” he said in 1975, “but CSNY tends to get too big. Too many people attach too much importance to them. I enjoy being able to visit, but I want to avoid people thinking, ‘Oh, there’s Neil Young from CSNY.’”

“At this point,” Crosby says, “I don’t know how to deal with my relationship to Neil at all. The last time the four of us were together, the psychic balance in the room, the level of trust, love or friendship was like”…Crosby whistles…”real strange.”

That was last May, and the room was the very same Criteria Sound Studios. Recording sessions by the Stills-Young Band had reached an impasse. Young called Crosby to see about giving CSNY another shot. Crosby and Nash, close to finishing their own album, Whistling down the Wire, in Los Angeles, flew to Miami Beach. It was a disastrous move. Besides a lack of material and some disagreement over the approach, there were rapidly approaching deadlines. A summer-long Stills-Young Band tour was scheduled to begin in June, and Crosby and Nash were already late delivering their own album. They finally had to rush back to L.A. to wrap it up, leaving Stills and Young to work on the CSNY album until they returned. Instead, the album reverted to a Stills-Young project. Crosby and Nash were not invited back to Florida, and their vocals were wiped off the tracks to make room for others.

Crosby was livid at the time. “I have nothing but contempt for those two,” he said then. “I refuse to be on call for them any longer.” Now, he can rationalize the incident: “Everything was wrong. I wish to fuck, man, that I had not felt so long an enmity for those cats over that.”

In the end, the Stills-Young tour fell apart after a month. Crosby and Nash played throughout the summer, and the incredible irony occurred: the two harmony singers, the leftover pieces of the old group, outsold the Stills-Young album (Long May You Run).

Ahhh. Those were the days. So much water under and over the bridge. What a saga.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - ~2000

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