The song that kick-started the Neil Young and Stephen Stills rivalry: “Backstabbing motherfuckers”
Although Neil Young and Stephen Stills have been great friends since they first met in Ontario in 1965, when they formed Buffalo Springfield a year later, it wouldn’t be long before a creative rivalry materialised.
Even though they might not have known it at the time, the tension grew because both artists were two of their generation’s most remarkable songwriters and guitarists, naturally treading on each other’s toes. In fact, Buffalo Springfield can also be deemed as something of a supergroup, featuring the likes of Richie Furay and Bruce Palmer.
But it was Young and Stills who stood out as the band’s two most significant creative figureheads. And they were young, uncompromising forces who had frankly never even gotten close to mellowing with age. That sense of ferocity was essential to their output – they were bold enough to seize the zeitgeist with cracking lines like, “There’s something happening here…”
As fans know, Buffalo Springfield also set a precedent for the brilliance to come later in the decade with the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, which remains the definitive countercultural act. There’s also the brilliant but often overlooked Stills–Young Band, which showcased the duality of the pair’s creative and personal relationship and delivered the forgotten 1976 album Long May You Run, which picked up where the pair left off with their Buffalo Springfield guitar adventures.
Fittingly, this occurred a decade after the group’s formation in Los Angeles, reimagining the 1960s world that they had worked into being.
The creative friction led to the pair achieving such triumphs together, with the sparks produced from a push-and-pull relationship a regular feature in the general story of popular music. This dominance of both men in Buffalo Springfield also meant they could fuse their respective influences and establish a distinctive and widely influential sound – often copied, absolutely never matched.
Reportedly, this creative rivalry of caustic bitching, backstabbing and brutal putdowns, during which the pair were trying to outdo each other at every turn, was fully kicked into gear by Buffalo Springfield’s debut single, which also, ironically, proved to be the song that announced the respective talents of Neil Young and Stephen Stills to the world. The effort in question is ‘Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing’. It nearly wasn’t the lead single, with Stephen Stills’ composition ‘Go and Say Goodbye’ in place as the A-side.
However, the album’s producers, Charles Greene and Brian Stone, gave in to pressure from the distributors and swapped the tracks’ placement. Giving a taste of what it was like working under the pair, who are noted as making the recording process for their debut album much more arduous than it had to be, drummer Bruce Palmer says in Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History: “They were the sleaziest, most underhanded, backstabbing motherfuckers in the business! They were the best!”
This surprise swap meant that the creative friction of Young and Stills’ relationship in the rehearsal room took on a different shade in public. At this point, Stills was already starting to deem Springfield as his band, and getting upstaged in such an explicit way by their lead guitarist meant that the state of play was more complex than he thought. In short, he was pissed and puzzled in equal measure.
Meanwhile, Richie Furay, who sings on the Neil Young song, felt he was often lost to the perennial power struggle between his two bandmates. The picture was fractured, and things were falling through the bloody cracks. Alas, it wouldn’t be long before the group broke up, and all were free to experiment with their own projects. But Young and Stills would never stop circling each other all the same.
