Fact #132520

Graham Nash : Bill (promoter Bill Graham) called me in my room at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in early ’74. Bill said a lot of money could be made, and we knew Bill was used to putting on large events and had just produced Bob Dylan‘s 40-date tour. Bill also pointed out that something on this scale had never been tried before, which sounded pretty cool to us.

FM radio was making rock albums popular. And many fans saw our tour as another shot at Woodstock, which they either had missed in ’69 or wanted to revisit. The country’s mood had shifted, too. Watergate was coming to a head and kids were fed up with government manipulation. They realized that, in large numbers, they had power. Our band stood for keeping it real, which connected with them.
(Source : Wall Street Journal interview)

Chris O'Dell (road manager) : When I got to San Francisco before the tour a bunch of people were sitting around a table. They were opening Marlboro packs, taking out all the tobacco, filling them up with pot and putting them back into the packets. We're talking about very detailed work because we had to get them through customs and have them look like they were never opened. Then they took Vitamin C capsules, filled them up with cocaine and we put them in a bottle. We carried around these things in a trunk and the band took stuff whenever they needed it. It was just a really druggy tour. I remember Stephen came in once and he was holding the biggest ball of cocaine I'd ever seen in my life. I just couldn't believe it.

Graham Nash : We actually had a guy that was employed just to provide us with cocaine. We needed an incredible amount of energy to pull off that tour and I'm sure it helped in a way, but it is a very subtly destructive drug and there was a lot of it around. We were rock and roll stars at the height of our power and the height of our commerciality and the height of our ability to put asses on seats. We had it all. And sometimes you need to break that tension. Drugs and women were a part of that entire process.

Tim Drummond (bassist) : The promoters supplied us with cocaine if we wanted it. I was like, 'I'm not putting this shit up my nose.' I was into cocaine back then, but I got my own. Then they all came to me wanting some of mine! I had to send somebody out to help these guys out. There was an ample amount. You could find it anywhere. I did my share, and I'm still here. It's all a matter of how smart you were. There wasn't any heroin, though. That took you the other way.

Chris O'Dell : One time they spilled cocaine on the carpet. They just got down on the floor and sniffed it off the carpet. I just went, 'Oh my God, this is so weird.' I'd never seen anything like it. They probably don't remember that.

Graham Nash : I started taking Percocet and Percodan, too. I call them 'I Don't Give A Shit' pills. Someone could have said to me, 'Hey, your leg's on fire.' I would have been like, 'I don't care, man.' We were just up all night. It was insane. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody because the cocaine/quaalude ride should be in the ride of horrors in the circus.

Stephen Stills : As bad as things got, I don't even think it was the craziest tour I ever did. I had some overly lubricated solo tours later on, and then Manassas… For a few years of my solo career the bourbon king showed up and it was just messy. I don't run from it. I own it. It left my voice shot. It's cool now because I've gotten it back. I'm hitting the high notes again. The present for me is fine.

David Crosby : I don't think any of the causes we espoused were wrong except for the drugs, particularly hard drugs. We were right about everything else: civil rights, women's rights, anti-war, anti-nuke…"

Steven Stills : Rehearsing outdoors at Neil's ranch was my idea. I said, 'Neil, we’re coming to your ranch and we’re going to build a stage across the road from your studio because we’ve got to learn how to play outdoors.' He didn’t want all those people in his house, but it actually worked.

Joel Bernstein (photographer) : Word got out about the rehearsals. They had a PA set up and they'd rehearse Monday through Friday. The sound travelled for miles, throughout the hills. I started seeing people who were walking down the road from all over. I picked up a hitchhiker that had flown up that morning from Burbank Airport to try and listen. They'd walk down the road and get to a gate barring the road. They just climbed the hills, got high and listened to everything. It was wild.

Stephen Stills : I had just come back from coral diving in Hawaii. I was tan and really cut. There's an album cover of a solo album [1975's Stills] shot at those rehearsals. I look at it now and go, 'I want that body back!"I wore football jerseys before it was cool. People like Jann Wenner would always ask me, 'What's with the football uniform?' I'd say, 'We're in a football stadium and they're loud and colorful. And I like football.' The next year Mick Jagger shows up with a Philadelphia Eagles uniform at a show.

David Crosby : Looking out on the crowds, you could see that people still had the Woodstock vibe and were entranced by the music. But the rush wasn’t the size of the audiences. It was what I felt from them. When you sit across from someone and feel what they’re feeling, it’s a beautiful thing. When you get 5,000 people feeling the same way, it’s a palpable rush. When 50,000 people are feeling the same thing at the same time as you’re playing, it’s this big invisible wave crashing on you. We called that ‘the juice.
(Source : not known)

Graham Nash : The Beatles had done Shea Stadium and the Stones had done a couple of Hyde Park gigs where there were a 100,000 plus, but these was the first tour of this magnitude.

Joel Bernstein : I found footage from the Capital Center (Aug 20, 1974, Landover, Maryland) in Graham's Vault. I was very surprised to find it and I have no idea how it got there. They were the first venue in the US to feature an in-house live, real time video system that projected beams - which were too small by today's standards - to screens hung up near where the scoreboard is in today's arena. There was a director, but it was semi-pro at best. It was recorded to open reel, one-inch tape. It's a format that wasn't used for very long. The show they taped happened to be one they audio recorded.' Since the format was so archaic, it took a lot of work to get the footage together.

The cameras had tubes in them and the tubes were shaking with the bass. You can see the picture vibrate with the bass. It's quite remarkable. With the case of Wembley, we were using the MPSC transfer from the original PAL Master. We have no idea where the master is.

Russ Kunkel (drummer) : Playing venues that big created a sort of circus atmosphere. There were just so many people. You have to remember, it wasn't just CSNY. There were opening acts like Joni Mitchell, Santana, the Beach Boys, the Band. It was an amazing bill. Can you imagine anything like that today?"

Tim Drummond : The guitar duels between Stephen and Neil got really loud. I'd just wander between the amplifiers and do my thing so I could hear myself. I was lucky I made it through that tour without ruining my ears."

Joel Bernstein : I wish the communication between them was such that they could have sorted out the volume issues onstage instead of letting it be. There was this weird troglodyte notion, and this wasn't just a CSNY problem, that you've got to turn it up to eleven. That's not the case at all. You need to trust your PA mixer. When the volume did come down they were playing wonderfully. They didn't need to make it that loud.

David Crosby : We had good monitors, but Stephen and Neil were punching well over 100 db from their half stacks. Graham and I simply couldn't do the harmonies when we couldn't hear ourselves. Also, when you play a stadium you almost have to do a Mick Jagger where you wave a sash around and prance about. I can't quite do that. We did what we could, but I don't know how many people in the audience really got it. A lot of them were there for the tunes. When we'd start them, they'd hear the records.

Graham Nash : We're good at what we do, but when you can't hear it's easy to get out of tune. It was tough playing stadiums, but we'd committed. What could we do? It was exciting to walk out in Wembley Stadium, for instance, and see something like 90,000 people. We just had to suck it up and rely on the music. They're not coming to see Brad Pitt. We're not heart throbs. It was the music that we depended on and we consistently played real music.

Stephen Stills : They didn't have video screens back then. I remember seeing the Beatles at Dodger Stadium. I thought to myself, 'There should be drive-in movie screens. What's wrong with these people?' Years later, I went to New York and tried to sell these pretty heavy-duty guys on how to do concerts. I said to them, 'You should have drive-in screens with a closed circuit feed of the show if you're doing things this big.' They looked at me like I was from Mars. Who knew that would become the standard for the industry? I was a very inventive twenty-three year old punk.

Russ Kunkel : Sometimes there was a set list, but it changed a lot. There weren't many soundchecks. What you have to remember about these guys is that they're magicians and music is magic. We had arrangements for songs and we knew how they went, but when it came to solos there was no telling how long Neil would play. He would turn around to me while soloing and I'd see his eyes over the top of his mirrored sunglasses. It was like he was saying, 'I could die doing this solo. I'm going to give it everything I have, so you'd better go with me.' It was an incredible experience.

David Crosby : The advantage of having four writers is that you've got this enormously wide palette to work with. We were writing new songs every night. There must have been a dozen times where one of us would come in and say, 'Hey, I've got a new song. Here's how it goes. What do you think?' Take 'Time After Time.' At the end, of it, Neil and Stephen just walked on and started singing with me. Stephen was holding his little son Christopher. They didn't know the song, but they joined in. And then Neil… My God. 'Pushed It Over The End,' 'Don't Be Denied,' 'Mellow My Mind.' He knocked it out of the park over and over and over. He set the bar very, very high.

Steven Stills : Old Man was just beautiful after we put our harmonies on it. I just listened to a piano solo from that tour. I could have sworn we didn't have a piano player on the stage and was I was like, 'What? Who? I can't play piano like that.' Turns out I can.

Graham Nash : We'd all written so many songs that it was hard to make a set list. We were constantly writing. During that tour I wrote a song called 'It's All Right.' I decided to go onstage and do it even though the rest of the guys had never heard it. On the tape you can hear Stephen going, 'What are the chords?' I said, 'Well, it's kind of a D to a G and you go down to the A.' I'm talking them through it and showing them the chords while we were performing. It was insane.

One of the reasons that Neil wound up having more songs on this box set than the rest of us is that he hit a writing spell that was unbelievable. He wrote On The Beach, Don't Be Denied, Pushed It Over the End, Hawaiian Sunrise. He'd hit it. As a band, we only want to present the best face, which is why he's got the most songs. David and Stephen haven't complained yet, and it's too late now.

Graham Nash (From his 2013 book Wild Tales) : Crosby took two beautiful women with him on tour… Often I would knock on his hotel door, which he kept propped open with a security jamb, and he'd be getting blown by both of these girls, all while he was talking and doing business on the phone and rolling joints and smoking and having a drink.

Graham Nash : Somewhere in the Midwest, I think in Minneapolis, we were at the hotel after the show and Bob Dylan came by. Stephen and Tim Drummond immediately corralled him into a different room and shut the door. That wasn't nice.

Tim Drummond : He played us all the songs from Blood on the Tracks on acoustic guitar. We were on twin beds, across from each other. Oh God, I can't tell you how great it was. At one point Stephen said something to him about the songs not being good. I was so Goddamn embarrassed. He was probably coked out. Dylan, being the arrogant man that he was said, 'Well, Stephen, play me one of your songs.' That was the end of it. Stephen couldn't even find one string from another at that point.

Graham Nash : Stephen walked out of the room and said to me, 'Bob's no musician.' In the back of my mind, I also remember Stephen buying a Precision bass for Paul McCartney and telling him it was time to start playing a 'real' instrument and not his old Höfner. He's saying this to one of the greatest bass players in the world.

Graham Nash : I probably spent 80 percent of my free time on that tour watching the Watergate hearings. I would have all three networks up on three televisions and watch constantly. Coming from England, I was just fascinated by it. I actually took great hope from it. I mean, it's an incredible thing for the country to indict its president. I was very hopefully that the country would be able to steer itself back to normal living, whatever the hell that is.

David Crosby : I remember Nash and I watching the hearings every single day. We hoped they were going to lead the country into a better era, but we'd already seen the cover-up on Kennedy's execution and the second Kennedy's execution. We did hope that somebody would rip the lid off this one because it was pretty blatant. There was so much evidence and it was so completely damning. We hated Nixon. He wanted to widen the war. We wanted to end it. We were elated when he resigned. We played at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City that night. You can hear the elation in our voices. The son of a bitch was gone. Of course, another one followed him.

Graham Nash : Our main feeling at the end of the tour was that we weren't as good as we could have been. But when you really delve into the music, it's there. Joel and I tried to uncover the gems. It was mainly David that called it 'The Doom Tour.' In a way, he was right. But it wasn't that all the music was bad all the time. There were some brilliant, brilliant musical moments that I wanted to uncover.

David Crosby : People have said to me, 'How can you call it the Doom Tour if it was so good?' I was talking about stuff outside the music when I labelled it that. I'll admit it, we're a little shocked at how good this music is. A lot of what we remember is stuff that went on around the tour, not what happened onstage. But when you're confronted with the tapes and with the video you have to say, 'Jesus, these guys were really kicking it here and pushing the envelope.' I love that we had all these great songs. I love that we treasured them and treated them respectfully.

Graham Nash : I think the tour made just over eleven million dollars, which of course was a lot of money in those days. We all got less than a half million each. It was obvious that between Bill Graham, the promoters and a bunch of others, they all had a good time. Let's just put it that way. But I'm really not blaming anybody. It was forty years ago. What the fuck can I do?

David Crosby : The main thing I learned about business from that tour is to always pay attention. Even when you're making millions of dollars, somebody else might be making the same millions of dollars completely illegally at your expense while you weren't watching. If there's that much money involved, there are going to be sharks circling. That's why we signed up with David Geffen. We got our own shark.

Graham Nash : Everything was just so excessive. The CSNY logo that Joni [Mitchell] did was branded onto wooden plates and to the pillowcase in our hotel suites. There were leather luggage tags. There were private jets and helicopters. We didn't realize we were paying for all of it.

Stephen Stills : Let's just say that a lot of people had a lot of fun. Mick Jagger and Prince Rupert Loewenstein had a much tighter grip on how to do things at that time. Our whole tour was certainly lavish and people were being paid off the gross. There were so many people involved. I wish I could say I learned from it, but I'm pretty stubborn.

(N.B. Most of the oral quotes in the item are sourced from a Rolling Stone feature which can be found at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-oral-history-of-csnys-infamous-doom-tour-20140619)