“I didn’t like the idea”: The one artist Graham Nash didn’t want in Crosby, Stills and Nash
It’s a tricky beast trying to find the right person to join a band. There has to be a specific chemistry between everyone when they pick up their instruments, and when it comes to adding someone into the group or replacing an essential member, anyone should start packing their bags if they don’t manage to gel with the group when they start running through their material. But for a band that was made up of superstars from completely different bands, Crosby, Stills, and Nash gelling together from the first time they sang felt like a strange miracle.
Then again, no one would look at the trio and not think they could sing well together. They were all standouts in their respective acts, and since David Crosby had learned most of his vocal chops through years of working with The Byrds, it wasn’t that hard to get a result when running through songs like ‘Marrakesh Express’. Come to think of it, the vocals were so good that it was easy to forget that Stephen Stills was responsible for most of the music on the record.
Each of them was more than capable of playing their instruments, but Stills’s skills in the studio made him a shoo-in for their go-to session player. Even when playing in strange alternate tunings, Stills’s guitars always acted as an excellent balance for the band’s harmonies half the time, always having that signature drone underneath that allowed the vocals to move around a little bit more than usual.
For a band that was that much in sync, you’d think that Neil Young wouldn’t have needed to join the group. He was more than capable of looking after himself as a solo artist, but if anyone was in Stills’s position, it would make sense to get someone else to get some distortion out of the guitars every now and again.
After all, Young brought the edge to Buffalo Springfield, and hearing him adding his own voice to their music would have been a great balance to their softer sound. There was nothing inherently wrong with how the group sounded on their debut record, though, and when floating the idea of bringing Young into the fold, Graham Nash said disrupting their flow was the last thing on his mind.
“We had just discovered this vocal sound, and just made this great record. After many discussions, after it was decided that Neil should be invited to join, I didn’t like the idea.”
Graham Nash
In his mind, bringing in Young would have only threatened to disrupt their chemistry, saying, “We had just discovered this vocal sound, and just made this great record. After many discussions, after it was decided that Neil should be invited to join, I didn’t like the idea at first because I didn’t want to disturb that vocal sound. We were intimately linked, and we knew where we had to go with any particular piece of music. And that would all have to change with the addition of another voice.”
And while Nash did have a point, it hardly mattered when Young came into the fold with tunes like ‘Ohio’. Their previous record had been nothing but breezy tunes that any hippy could get stoned to, but Young was the one always pushing them forward, whether that was throwing some heavy guitar licks into the mix or giving the rest of their songs some teeth whenever they played live.
But like all great Young projects, he wouldn’t stay there for long, eventually leaving the band after a few years when he realised that his solo career was a lot more fun. Crosby, Stills, and Nash was always meant to be a stopgap project as the members all worked on their respective solo outings, but as much as Nash pushed back against the idea of Young joining, it’s hard to think of their legacy without thinking about all of them singing on tracks like ‘Helpless’.
