“No explanation”: the CSNY tour Neil Young completely abandoned
It’s not shocking for some artists to get a lot more fickle once they see what the industry has to offer. Many people want nothing more than to milk their artists for all they’re worth, but the best artists of all time usually know how to play the game and work around any restrictions put on them. And since Neil Young couldn’t care less about serving any industry executive, he certainly wasn’t going to take shit from any of his bandmates when going out on tour, either.
Although Young worked brilliantly within Buffalo Springfield, it was clear that he would spread his wings as a solo artist much better. Because the more people there are in a group, the more likely that both opinions and egos will get involved when making a song, so why not put your name in front of everything so everyone knows who calls the shots?
Then again, Young would not discount the idea of being in a group. His collaborations with Crazy Horse are as integral to his legacy as his pure solo work, and even if people know him for strumming away on his acoustic guitar on ‘Heart of Gold’, hearing him play off every musician on Rust Never Sleeps is a better snapshot of him in his natural habitat onstage.
But that edge that the Canadian icon had worked perfectly with the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Because when you think about it, the supergroup was in danger of being a bit too mellow for the traditional rock movement, and by the time Young began writing songs like ‘Ohio’ and ‘Helpless’, Deja Vu turned into the kind of album that most people could get behind either through the guitar licks or the harmonies.
Everything might have been fine when Young was working in the studio, but once he was confined to the road with CSN, he started to realise what he had tied himself to. This was another case of him catering to the flashier side of rock, and instead of grinding out the rest of the tour, Young saw fit to abandon it altogether and not tell anyone.
According to Graham Nash, none of the band knew until they were at a stop in Miami that Young had quit the tour, saying, “Neil and I would go to breakfast every morning, and he’d call me, or I’d call him – whoever woke up first. And one day, he called me around breakfast time and said, ‘Hey, are you going to breakfast? Well, I’m not because I’m in Los Angeles.’ He’d left. No explanation, no discussion, no reason. When we saw each other later on, we simply didn’t mention it.”
It’s easy to look at that kind of behaviour and chalk it up to playing the rockstar card, but Young wasn’t trying to leave his fans high and dry. It all came from him giving his whole self to a performance, and if there was ever a show where he seemed to be going through the motions, there was no real point in playing in the first place.
