Watch rare footage of Buffalo Springfield rehearsing in 1986 for a tour that took 30 years to come to fruition
The breakup of Buffalo Springfield in 1968 marked the birth of a new wave of countercultural music icons: Crosby, Stills, & Nash and Neil Young. Nearly 20 years later, the original members of Buffalo Springfield – comprised of Neil Young, Bruce Palmer, Dewey Martin and Stephen Stills and Richie Furay – reunited to rehearse for a 20th-anniversary tour. It’s thought that the band initially wanted the rehearsals to remain a secret, but it was eventually decided that the meeting should be videotaped for posterity. Considering the tour didn’t come to fruition until 2011, nearly 30 years later, it’s just as well.
The footage was posted on the Neil Young News Reddit thread by the original cameraman, who had just finished another shoot when he received a phone call from Bruce Palmer informing him that Neil Young and Richie Furay were in town to rehearse with Buffalo Springfield. In any other context, a request to be ready at Stephen Stills’ house with a camera and lights in just half an hour would have been met with a stern ‘no’, but as luck would have it, the cameraman was only 15 minutes away from the property. Recalling the shoot, the Reddit user wrote: “I just happened to be the right person, with the right camera, with the right contacts at the right position in spacetime to record the practice, otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to look at right now.”
The rehearsals were taken as evidence that the band was planning on moving forward with their reunion tour. However, it wasn’t long before another project had taken precedence. In the post, Reddit user thrasher recalls: “A couple of weeks later, in wee hours of the morning, I was listening to Stephen laying down some bass tracks in his studio when David Crosby, (who had just gotten out of a Texas jail the day before) made a surprise visit and came through the door with guitar case in hand. I remember the moment as if were yesterday: David: ‘Hey, Stephen. Do you want to hear some open chords that I’ve been working on in my cell?’ Stephen: ‘Uhh…well, hell yeah!’ They played together for about an hour and a day or two later Graham Nash showed up. Stephen’s priorities shifted to reuniting with CS&N, in large part, to help out an old friend who was down and out at the time.”
Almost as quickly as Buffalo Springfield came together, they split off into various factions. A couple of months down after the original rehearsal, Crosby, Stills & Nash were on a tour of their own, and Neil Young was embarking with his Live In A Rusted Out Garage and Crazy Horse tours.
Meanwhile, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin were ploughing through their shows with Buffalo Springfield Revisited. It wouldn’t be until 30 years later that Buffalo Springfield would reunite in full for their 2011 tour.
