“Who the fuck are you to tell me?”: the producer David Crosby wanted nothing to do with
If anyone wants to make an excellent record, there has to be at least a little bit of give-and-take between the musicians and the producer. The idea of anyone messing with an artist’s sound isn’t going to be taken lightly. Hence, whenever a producer suggests playing a song again or axing a track from the final mix, it can get close to an all-out war while finalising everything. And for a band already known for being as testy as Crosby, Stills, & Nash, David Crosby would never take anyone telling him how his music should sound.
After all, that was why they all left their respective acts in the first place. Graham Nash had been working on some of the greatest material of his career by the time the supergroup started, and since ‘Marrakesh Express’ was deemed too weird by the rest of The Hollies, it fit like a glove once the trio added their signature harmonies to the track.
But even their supergroup would be fraught with tension the minute they commented on each other’s songs. Outside of having Neil Young add his two cents to everything, their lack of output over the years usually came from zany periods where they either couldn’t be bothered to work with each other or the strange era when they fractured into two separate duos. And even then, the band was never in top form, with Nash walking out on Crosby due to the latter’s growing reliance on drugs in the studio.
For a brief moment in the late 1980s, Crosby looked like he would make it out of his drug stupor. He had spent years trying to kick his demons, and when he finally resurfaced, people were happy to see him doing well again. American Dream may have been a piss-poor way of them showing that they were healthy again, but a song like ‘Compass’ stands as a nice statement of where Crosby was headed rather than a masterpiece.
If anyone knew how to make a proper comeback for a classic rock act, though, it was Rick Rubin. He was already bringing Aerosmith back from obscurity as far back as the mid-1980s, and throughout the 1990s, it was easy to find him working on tunes by Johnny Cash and Tom Petty alongside the heavier acts of the day like System of a Down and Slayer.
“It was not a great experience.”
Graham Nash
The idea of him working that same magic for CSN felt like a no-brainer, but as Nash remembers, Crosby and Rubin got off on the wrong note from the minute he walked in the door, saying, “It was not a great experience. First of all, he pissed off David Crosby. David said that we wanted to do ‘Blackbird’ and another Beatles song. Rick said, ‘There will only be one Beatles song.’ Crosby [was] like, ‘Who the fuck are you to tell me…’ From the start, it was irritable, and when Crosby’s not into something, it’s very difficult to pull it off. We kept trying, but it didn’t work. You can’t tell us what to do.”
Then again, it’s strange to see the band face such pushback from Rubin, considering how well he had worked with Petty and Cash. Petty, especially, had been one of the most no-nonsense rock stars alive, and given the fact that he was more than willing to compromise whenever Rubin walked into the room, it could have been much easier to get to work with something that sounded as breezy as the trio’s harmonies.
While the album they were working on never came to pass, it would have been nice to see them move away from the production that they had been working with. American Dream was a bit of a hot mess all the way through, and while things had improved since then, they needed something a bit more dry if they were going to make a proper comeback.
