“Two stags”: The CSNY bandmate Graham Nash called “toxic”
Toxic masculinity has become such a nebulous term that the academic report Toxic Masculinity: Men, Meaning, and Digital Media claims that it can no longer be clearly defined. However, if you peruse Graham Nash‘s memoir for long enough, you’ll come across a pretty clear actuality of it.
Memoirs have a habit of sanding down rough edges, but Nash’s recollections are striking for their candour. Rather than cloak past behaviour in the gauze of a different era, he confronts it head-on. In doing so, he offers a portrait of rock culture that is far less romantic than the harmonies might suggest.
“Well, I didn’t want to f*** John, I didn’t want to f*** Denny, and I didn’t want to f*** Cass. I wanted to f*** Michelle,” he explains when describing his sole motives for meeting The Mamas & The Papas one night. “Now this was pure toxic masculinity. Completely,” he opines.
The objectification of only meeting with his Laurel Canyon neighbours, because he wanted to fornicate with a member who was already in a relationship, is surely a fine example of damning machoism, but according to Nash, things only got worse when Neil Young turned his folk threesome, Crosby, Stills & Nash, into a foursome; and the rutting stags almost folked each other to death in a surge of competitive toxicity.
“It became more evident when Neil joined,” Nash said of Young’s arrival in 1969. “I’ve stood in the middle of Stephen and Neil countless times, with these two stags talking to each other through guitar riffs.” Things were spiralling out of control at the time, with egos creating a dangerous environment of competitiveness and a stark descent of empathy.
Creative tension can be productive, but only up to a point. When rivalry morphs into one-upmanship, collaboration becomes combat, and the music risks becoming collateral damage. For Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, brilliance and volatility were forever entwined.
However, it was far from just the arrival of Young that exacerbated the situation, and Nash openly admitted to The Guardian that fame and drugs were also playing their part. ”When we first started, there were no egos. I think that came from all the cocaine we snorted. That’s what brought egos into it. There were an enormous amount of drugs being taken,” he says.
The band were detached from reality in some ways; Nash revealed the depths of his lifestyle, explaining: “I’d get high in the morning and snort in the afternoon, and I’d keep going till 3-4am.” Did this have a defining impact on the sound of Déjà Vu? “I don’t know,“ Nash opines, “But we may have been able to make more music if we’d not been quite so stoned.”
So, with everyone culpable for their part in the decadence, what was it that Young brought to worsen the sour mix? “I’ve got utmost respect for him,” Nash initially states. Before instantly picking up a flaw, “You can put a European tour together with a crew of 25 people and then a week before he says: ‘Nah, I don’t feel like it,’ so all those people are now out of a job. Things like that with Neil I don’t agree with, but I understand his strength, and I applaud him for it.” But by the sounds of it, it’s not the most riotous applause.
