How cocaine led to the downfall of Crosby, Stills and Nash: “An enormous amount of drugs”
The longstanding holy trinity of hedonism—sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll—has managed to retain most of its romantic, aspirational connotations in our culture even after 70 years of time-tested incompatibility. Drug use and sexual indiscretions have provided the death blows to 100,000 bands by this point, but so long as we still have ex-members of those bands talking about how they’d happily “do it all again” if they had the chance, the mythology lives on.
Graham Nash, legend that he is, is a pretty typical example of this type of character. Between his work with the Hollies and Crosby, Stills & Nash, he made enough great music in the span of about six years to take him off the hook for the subsequent 50. The result, for better or worse, is a musician with a really entertaining rock memoir (2013’s Wild Tales), but plenty of lingering “what ifs” about what could have been accomplished if he and his bandmates had been a bit less focused on their primal, short-term desires.
In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, Nash spoke with great delight about the early days of CSN in Los Angeles; starting with the moment he first added his high harmony to the voices of Stephen Stills and David Crosby, and how “the world fucking changed from that moment”. With their superpowers activated, the trio of horny, cocky dudes in their mid 20s set forth on slaying all of their hippie pals with their harmonic magic.
“We used to go to our friends’ houses in Laurel Canyon, me and David and Stephen with a couple of guitars, and we’d kill them,” Nash said. “We were fucking fantastic. We had discovered a new way of singing, of creating a vocal blend, making our three voices into one. We would kill them. They could not believe what we were doing. Then we’d follow that with ‘Guinnevere,’ then ‘Lady of the Island,’ then ‘Helplessly Hoping’, and ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’, and they’re all on the floor with their fucking brains melting. That’s the image I see every time I think of those moments.”
With no clear sense of irony, Nash then notes that, “When we first started there were no egos.”
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I’m not sure that the obligatory “ladies of the canyon” would have happily confirmed that back in 1969, but nonetheless, Nash’s greater point is that he and Stills and Crosby—and new member Neil Young, as well—might have continued co-existing peacefully if not for the unfortunate influx of some new drugs into their daily routine, which warp-speeded the band’s first major implosion in 1970.
“I think [the egos] came from all the cocaine we snorted,” he said, looking back a half century on the moment things began to sour. “There was an enormous amount of drugs being taken. . . . I’d get high in the morning and snort in the afternoon and I’d keep going till 3-4am.”
Nash, like a lot of rock legends, isn’t exactly running through these tales with a frown of regret on his face. It’s more of a matter-of-fact contextualisation. After all, how much regret can one have when they’ve lived what would be considered—by most measures—a charmed life. Similarly, if you wrote some of the greatest songs of your generation when high as a kite, what possible reason would you have to say you’d wish you’d done things differently?
“We may have been able to make more music if we’d not been quite so stoned,” Nash acknowledged. That’s about as close as he gets to being contrite.
