“I was so pissed”: The songs Graham Nash said ruined a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion
No fan of Crosby, Stills, and Nash expected them to be together for the rest of their lives. Every single one of them had their own separate bands to look out for, and when they eventually made records, it was understood that it was a side project in between making their solo joints. But Graham Nash seemed to be the one who genuinely believed in the music, and he was not going to simply roll over when great songs were stolen right from under his nose.
Then again, the key factor in any CSN album was getting every single one of them to cooperate with each other. For a band that had been known for harmony for most of their career, they were never the most harmonious group behind the scenes, which often showed when they started lobbing insults at each other. And if three people in the studio were already too many, Neil Young wasn’t about to help matters.
Young was famously fickle about everything he worked on, and if he felt that he wasn’t ready to work on a record, it was out of the question for him to scrap everything and move on to something else. It might be considered a dick move for anyone that he works with, but at the same time, it’s hard to think that any of the songs that turned up on Rust Never Sleeps would have benefited from having Nash’s high harmonies on top of everything.
But absence does make the heart grow fonder, and towards the mid-1970s, Young seemed to be warming up the idea of coming back to his old buddies. He had records like After the Gold Rush and Harvest out of his system, and since his old buddies hadn’t gone anywhere, tunes like ‘Midnight on the Bay and ‘Long May You Run’ had the basic skeleton of what could have been great CSNY tunes.
Then again, getting everyone involved with a project normally involves waiting, and that wasn’t part of Young’s vocabulary. He always acted on impulse whenever he made his finest records, and since Nash was working on the album Whistling Down the Wire with David Crosby, he was blindsided when he found out that Young cut a record with Stephen Stills instead.
“The chances to make a CSNY record are few and far between. There was no reason that it shouldn’t have been a CSNY record, except for greed.”
Graham Nash
All the pieces were there, but Nash was infuriated that Young couldn’t have had the courtesy to wait, saying, “David agreed that they were great songs, and we knew we had good songs, since we were in the middle of a record. So we went to Miami to sing with Stephen and Neil. Well, they decided to take me and David’s voices off, and put it out as a Stills/Young record. I was so pissed. Because the chances to make a CSNY record are few and far between. There was no reason that it shouldn’t have been a CSNY record, except for greed.”
But Young was never in the business to make money, either. He knew what he wanted out of his music half the time, and since this is the same person who played the ultimate joke by giving his label an album that was bad on purpose, it’s not like he was looking to throw away songs that had potential out of pure spite either.
He had enough sense to realise when songs were working, but the last thing that Young wanted to do was be kept at arm’s length, and if Nash and Crosby were going to make records on their own, who said that he couldn’t make one as well? It’s a low blow by any metric, but Young knew it was better to serve himself sometimes than to worry about whether or not certain voices are on his albums.
