The songs that made David Crosby desparate to collaborate with Neil Young: “He was one of the best songwriters alive”
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) didn’t just appear out of thin air; somebody needed to pull the puppet’s strings to make it dance to the tune of full-throttle Americana. One stage in this manoeuvre included Neil Young proving to David Crosby that he was the right man and guitarist for the job.
Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash were the first three lined up for the supergroup, and even released their own studio album in 1969, which had a math-folk tinge. However, at the practical level, they knew they needed to add another fighter to the arena: on their debut, Stills played both keyboard and guitar. For the band to reach greater heights, particularly with their live sets, he knew he’d need an extra pair of hands.
So why Young? As Crosby recalled during a conversation for the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Lyrically Speaking Series, Stills “knew that Neil was terrific. I didn’t, really. I knew that he was good, but I didn’t realise how good”.
For the band to fit together, Young had to prove himself to Crosby. On a day like any other day, the latter was in a nondescript driveway belonging to a manager in his orbit, waiting for the rockabilly character. Young pulled in and parked the car; they both scrambled up to the top of the vehicle so Young could do what he did best: play.
That day, Crosby heard four songs and came to one quick conclusion, “I definitely wanted to be in the same group as that guy”. Still, he could only remember hearing ‘Helpless’ and ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’, while the other two were lost to the back corridors of his mind. ‘Helpless’ was originally rehearsed with his other band, Crazy Horse, in 1969, but it was refined and recorded by CSNY for their 1970 album, Déjà Vu.
That day with Crosby, the song was as magical as it would ever get, shuddering in musical infancy and harkening back to a bygone era of innocuous, doe-eyed childhood, but for ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’, Young’s influences are harder to track. At one point, he suggested it was his interpretation of the Spanish beaches, despite having never visited the continent. The track, in which a guitar tussles with itself for the first spell-binding two minutes, was first released on his 1969 album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
These two songs in particular led the often stern-lipped Crosby to admit of his sometime musical counterpart, “He was one of the best songwriters alive”.
Though his fascination led to friendship, the amicability between the two musicians didn’t last for long. In 2021, Crosby reflected on their creative partnership and had some less-than-kind words to describe the musical great. “He’s probably the most self-centred, self-obsessed, selfish person I know,” Crosby complained to The Guardian of his former bandmate, “He only thinks about Neil, period. That’s the only person he’ll consider. Ever!”
It’s a painful admission to hear, given that Young remains one of the most beloved classic musicians to this day, not least for his continued opposition to fascism in the United States; still, fame often makes selfish creatures out of even the most kind-hearted of us.
