A Fan's Book Review: Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts

Stephen Stills - 1972
From Dutch Television Program Toppop
Photo by VARA Broadcasting Association

Here's an interesting book review of Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts.

The "book review" is actually a fan's meditation on the music of Stephen Stills and is a lovely read full of anecdotes, humorous asides and semi-gushing prose that constitutes the core of fan musings.

From the review in The New York Review of Books by Lorrie Moore:

Now it was March 2017, and a friend and I were waiting for Stills to step onto the stage of Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium with the Allmanesque Kenny Wayne Shepherd and an old hipster keyboardist, Barry Goldberg. The three of them have been playing together, in a blues-rock ensemble called the Rides, since 2013. (Stills once said that Crosby, Stills, and Nash called themselves by their names not just so they could be free to come and go but because “all the animals were taken.”) The Rides, which Stills has called “the blues band of my dreams,” got its name from Shepherd’s and Stills’s shared love of cars. (“We’re not Prius people,” Stills has said.) That he continues to play gigs at his age is evidence of his stubborn professionalism; from the time he was a teenager—from the early Au Go-Go Singers to Buffalo Springfield to Manassas—he was the one to organize his bands.

The Ryman audience was again primarily made up of the generation that came of age during the 1960s—a sea of snowy hair. Stills himself was twenty-two during the summer of love. Because of prodigies like him, whose careers were enabled by the radio—especially ones in cars—almost every kind of music remains emotionally available to an audience this age, except perhaps hip-hop (though Stills has even done some crossover with Spike Lee and Public Enemy for the film He Got Game).

Stills may be hobbled by arthritis—backstage he bumps fists rather than shakes hands with fans; he has carpal tunnel and residual pain from a long-ago broken hand, which affects his playing—and he is nearly deaf, but his performance life has continued. Drugs and alcohol may have dented him somewhat, forming a kind of carapace over the youthful sensitivity and cockiness one often saw in the face of the young Stills. Some might infer by looking at the spry James Taylor or Mick Jagger that heroin is less hard on the body than cocaine and booze, which perhaps tear down the infrastructure. (“Stills doesn’t know how to do drugs properly,” Keith Richards once said.) But one has to hand it to a rock veteran who still wants to get on stage and make music even when his youthful beauty and once-tender, husky baritone have dimmed. It shows allegiance to the craft, to the life, to the music. It risks a derisive sort of criticism as well as an assault on nostalgia.

The Rides’ Nashville concert comes on the heels of a “definitive biography” of Stills by the British author David Roberts. Titled Change Partners, after one of Stills’s own songs, the book is an act of hurried, sloppy, aggregated love. Ignore the typos—mistakes such as “sewed” for “sowed”; “daubed” for “dubbed”—and don’t go looking for any psychological depth. Roberts has collected most of his data from widely available interviews. A speedy checklist of girlfriends—Judy Collins, Rita Coolidge, Joan Baez, Susan Saint James—plus wives and children will largely have to do for an account of Stills’s personal life. The lovely “Rock and Roll Woman” is declared in passing to be a valentine to Grace Slick.

Full review in The New York Review of Books by Lorrie Moore.

---