The song Neil Young wrote about the “dead weight” of CSNY
CSNY may have encapsulated the countercultural zeitgeist with their 1970 masterpiece Déjà Vu, but their influence was as fleeting as it was profound. Songs like ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ and ‘Woodstock’ stood as anthems of defiance, resisting the tides of change sweeping through the late hippie era. Yet, the very spirit they embodied also brought challenges, and the band quickly fell victim to the pitfalls of the era. Their time at the pinnacle was short-lived—a reality Neil Young has candidly reflected on in his writings.
CSN’s self-titled 1969 debut was a masterpiece that pushed folk into a truly transcendental realm and appealed to the very metaphysical, narcotics-altered perception of the counterculture, typified by classics such as ‘Guinnevere’ and ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’. Then, the astounding happened. They brought in Stephen Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield bandmate, Young, and the group added another gilded strand to their already coruscant skein.
Young, who had already released two albums since leaving Springfield and had pioneered a searing form of proto-alt-rock on his 1969 masterpiece, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere—his first with long-time backing band Crazy Horse—was in a prime position to help CSN and particularly his old friend Stills take it up a notch when he linked up with them in July 1969.
In August of that year, the quartet took to the stage at the iconic final celebration of hippiedom, Woodstock. With the eyes of the music industry and the world upon them, they were thrown in at the deep end, openly wracked with nerves. Yet, they pushed through, and the performance proved to be a defining moment. By the time they released their debut effort as a quartet in March of the following year, they had cemented their status as one of the most exceptional outfits of their era—and arguably the greatest supergroup of all time.
Yet, the band could only capture the spirit of their era by being a product of it. While this positioned each member at the forefront of the countercultural movement, it also made them susceptible to its darker sides, which can broadly be described as ‘rockstar behaviour’. Drugs, egos, creative tensions, and the added drama of Stills’ then-lover, Rita Coolidge, leaving him for Graham Nash, all played a role in their acrimonious breakup in July 1970. It was a bitter conclusion for a group that had, not long before, been one of the hottest acts on the planet.
While the other members would have oscillating careers, Young’s solo arc would take off in the intervening years between their split and their 1974 reunion tour, with him releasing classics such as Harvest, Time Fades Away, and Tonight’s the Night, despite the latter two being among his bleakest cuts due to the heartbreaking personal circumstances that underpinned them. In 1973, the quartet started working on their now-storied incomplete follow-up to Déjà Vu, Human Highway, but the issues that had plagued them before eventually killed the project. It’s a fascinating and frustrating point for fans when you note each member agrees that it would have been their best.
Regardless of their personal problems, CSNY’s stock was still high. In 1974, they embarked upon a two-month, 31-date tour, but it was not to be the scintillating return to form that many imagined. Whether it be Stills and Young cranking their guitars up to such extreme levels they drowned out the harmonies of Stills and Crosby, the fact that they weren’t a group best suited to stadiums, the drug-taking reaching new heights – including Stills becoming a husk of himself due to a reliance on Percocet and Percodan – and the band seeing nowhere near as much of the $11 million takings as they should due to heavily intimated mismanagement from the legendary Bill Graham and his camp, it became clear to Young that the group was doomed.
Young, who was in one of his most critical creative periods, was let down by the trio wasting the opportunity and would even travel separately from them. Things hit rock bottom one day when trying to bring Human Highway to life, and he left. He wouldn’t link up with them again until 1988’s American Dream. This was also a sign of things to come, and the band imploded not long after his departure.
Clearly, the second demise of CSNY at its peak greatly impacted Young. Later in the decade, he wrote ‘Thrasher’, a highlight from 1979’s reflective Rust Never Sleeps—a record that accepts his place amid changing times and tastes—about the band. He wrote it while driving through New Mexico during the period filming the movie Human Highway, and the state’s striking environment and winding roads prompted thoughts about his long and twisting journey up until that point.
Qualifying his departure with allusions such as “They were poisoned with protection / There was nothing that they needed” and “They were lost in rock formations”, Young expresses, “So I got bored and left them there / They were just dead weight to me / Better down the road without that load”.
Later, in a 1985 interview, Young reflected on that brutal description of the band as a “dead weight”. It felt like that at the time for him, and not them, he maintained. Ever the realist, he concluded: “It might have come off a little more harsh than I meant it, but once I write I can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings.’ Poetically and on feeling it made good sense to me and it came right out. I think I’d be doing a disservice to change it based on what I think a reaction would be. I try not to do that.”
