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Fact #157168

When:

Short story:

When The Hollies play at the Whisky-A-Go-Go, Los Angeles, California, USA, Steven Stills and David Crosby decide to steal vocalist Graham Nash and form their own group, which will become Crosby, Stills And Nash. Also in the crowd are The Mamas And The Papas and John Sebastian.

Full article:

The birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash.
By Johnny Black

Henry Diltz (photographer) : In those days in Laurel Canyon, lots of musicians were either living there or just hanging out. Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Mark Volman of The Turtles, The Monkees, Peter Fonda … these people were around and they'd drop by each other's houses and sing their new songs, or trade licks they'd just learned. You just heard music in the air wherever you went.

David Crosby : Stephen and I had dug each other from afar when I was still in The Byrds and he was puttin' together the Springfield. He and I had a lot of musical areas in common … and I'd wanted to sing with Graham as soon as I heard King Midas In Reverse.

Stephen Stills : David had left The Byrds and was doing nothing in particular. I'd made that Supersession album with Al Kooper and then proceeded to follow Hendrix around, taking guitar lessons from him. I really was - one day we played for fourteen hours non-stop at my house in Malibu. Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records was supporting me, waiting for me to think of something to do.

David Crosby : Stephen and I were like 'No more bands, man. Through with it. Forget it. Too many hassles. No deal.'

Graham Nash : Mama Cass Elliott of The Mama And The Papas brought The Hollies to Los Angeles in February 1968 because she wanted her band's producer, Lou Adler, to sign us to Epic.

David Crosby : Cass brought Graham over to my house in Laurel Canyon, and didn't tell me who he was… so I didn't know who he was. I just liked the guy. Cass brought him over, and he had never smoked our standard, sinsemillic, crush-you-to-death-and-melt-your-mind, go-home-six-hours-later-in-a-stupor kind of weed. So he had an interesting afternoon.

Graham Nash : We had the day off on Valentine's Day so we offered to do a free show at the Whisky A Go Go. Everybody turned out for us. The Beach Boys, Mamas And Papas, The Doors, everybody were there…

David Crosby : Stephen, Neil Young and I were at The Whisky, and we watched The Hollies. We all came to the conclusion that, indeed, in the midst of that pile of shit, there was the best damn harmony singer around. So we took him home. We got him high, and we talked to him.

Graham Nash : Much later that night, we were riding in Stephen's Bentley. I'm sitting in the back, and suddenly they look at each other, point to me, and David says to Stephen, 'OK, which one of us is going to steal him?' Little did they know, I'd totally had it with The Hollies by then. I said, 'Listen, I'm not gonna take much stealing.'

Cass Elliot was the real catalyst. She had turned me on to grass. I started smoking a lot, getting more introspective, which was one of the reasons I was attracted to Crosby. As it happened, I already had some songs that I knew I could bring to the group. Marrakesh Express, for example, which I'd cut with The Hollies but that version sucked, and I knew it would work with these guys.

John Sebastian : I had rented a little place in Hollywood and I got a call one day from Stephen. He said he and David had learned a couple songs and what was I doing that afternoon? I was doing nothing so they came over with Graham Nash, who was visiting on holiday, and sang.

Graham Nash : They had two songs pretty well worked out, Helplessly Hoping and You Don't Have To Cry. I listened to You Don't Have To Cry and asked them to sing it again. In my head, I was working out a harmony part I could add to it. So I asked them to sing it again, and that third time, I pitched in with my part. David and Stephen looked at each other, and at me, and then we all burst out laughing, because we were all harmony freaks and it just sounded perfect.

John Sebastian : As soon as they started to sing with those three-part harmonies, it sounded fully formed. The sound was magical, other-worldly harmony, like nothing I'd ever heard before.

David Crosby : It was scary but, once we knew what we had, you could not pry us apart with a crowbar. We knew we'd lucked onto something special, man. We could hear it plain as day.

John Sebastian : After that, they were like kids with a new toy, and they wanted to show it off to people. We'd often gather in the pool at Mama Cass's and sing. You'd get in there and want to pee in under five minutes, but it was terrific for becoming psychedelicized, staring up into the stars and singing.

It's difficult now to grasp just how radical what they were doing was. Rock music was an electric form, and here were these guys who were going to put acoustic guitars and harmony vocals to the front.

Joni Mitchell : The feeling between them was very high, almost amorous, you know? There was a tremendous amount of affection and enthusiasm running back and forth among them. And the sound, it was so fresh. Part of the thrill for me of being around them was seeing how they were exciting themselves, mutually. They'd hit a chord and go 'Whoooaa!' then fall together laughing.

Paul Rothchild (producer) : For the next several days, they played all the hippest houses in LA. They threw their shit up the flagpole to see if anyone would salute. Well, not only did people salute, they fell down on their knees. At that point, Crosby, Stills And Nash could have started a religion.

David Crosby : We asked John Sebastian to come and be in our band in any capacity. We told him that we loved him and his music so much, we didn't care if we had nineteen guitar players, would he please come?

John Sebastian : My feelings were very mixed. I loved what they were doing, but I couldn't see where I fit in. I would have been a fourth voice, under theirs, and I would have been playing drums because the last thing they needed was another guitarist. Also I'd just left The Lovin Spoonful and I'd been lucky enough to carry over a lot of our fans to my solo career. I really did wonder if I might lose them by throwing in my lot with another new venture. I never actually turned them down. The idea just kind of eventually went away.

David Crosby : John is on his own trip. I don't think that he'll join a band again, ever. His band was an unfortunate experience for him, and it didn't work out the way it should have. And John Sebastian needs a band like a stag needs a hat rack. But he does come and hang out with us, and he does play with us whenever he wants to, and as far as I'm concerned, John Sebastian can walk onstage with us anywhere, anytime in the middle of anything - even if we didn't know he was there - and just pick up and start playing, any instrument or microphone or anything he wants to do, he's that good. He can take off his clothes and sit down and start doing yoga exercises and I'll be just as glad that he's there. John Sebastian is a member of our group ... he's definitely one of the original Reliability Brothers. There are some of our other friends that we like having come and visit us and sing with us and shit.

Graham Nash : The Hollies wanted to do an album of Dylan songs, you know, make them really commercial, and I just had no enthusiasm for it. I called a meeting at AIR Studios in London and told the band I was leaving. It was hard, because Allan and I had been together since we were five years old. Everybody said 'You're leaving fame, fortune and all these hits? Are you crazy?' It was a big risk for me.

Allan Clarke (Hollies vocalist) : In his mind, he'd started to leave when he met Crosby and Stills. The alternative was a Dylan album. His frustration wasn't really with the material. He thought the group was being misguided, but he didn't just leave The Hollies. He left England, he left his wife, everything.

Steven Stills : I went to Ahmet and said 'Look, I've got this singing group … David Crosby, Graham Nash and me. David isn't under contract any more but Graham is signed to EMI in England and Epic in the United States, can you sort it out? He agreed to talk to Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI and I started thinking about the Clive Davis/Epic part of it.

David Geffen (co-manager) : I don't think anybody was really that excited about them… I remember Ahmet saying, 'Well, they're no Association.' Don't forget, The Buffalo Springfield never made it. David Crosby was no longer in The Byrds and was not that highly thought of. And Graham Nash was in a pop group called The Hollies and they were never very important in America anyway.

Graham Nash : In the end, to get me out of my Epic deal, David Geffen traded me for Richie Furay and Poco. They got Poco, and I went to Atlantic.

Stephen Stills : It was sorta like a baseball deal … trading players. So we pulled that off and got the details worked out. I got home one day and David was on the phone to Willie in England saying 'Yeah, Graham, we're coming just as soon as we can get some money' and I was able to produce twenty five $100 bills from my pocket and scatter them on the floor, so David told him we'd be over the next day.

John Sebastian : They spent a while at the end of the year, rehearsing at an apartment in London, Moscow Road. Finally, they moved into a place I owned in Sag Harbour on Long Island, to rehearse in my garage, the first couple of months of 1969.

Just about the only thing was missing was a name. Crosby and Stills had called themselves Frozen Noses, kind of a joke about what cocaine does to your nasal passages. And while I was playing with them, we called ourselves The Reliability Brothers, which was also a joke because we were actually a bunch of totally stoned musicians.

Graham Nash : We didn't get the name for the band until we were recording the first album at Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles, California, USA. We didn't want it to sound too much like a permanent group, so it had to be our names. Steven wanted Stills Crosby and Nash, but I vetoed that because it just didn't sound right. The only way of combining our names that sounded good to me was Crosby Stills and Nash, so I put that forward, and of course Crosby was delighted. The only problem with it came when we did the album cover. Henry Diltz photographed us on a sofa outside an old abandoned house on Santa Monica Boulevard, but when we saw the shots we realised we were in the wrong order. We went right back to re-shoot it but the house had been torn down, so on the cover of the first album, I'm Crosby, David is Nash and Stephen is the only one with the right name over his head.
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What's Up Laurel Canyon…

Researched and compiled by Johnny Black

In the sixties, Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles was a quite astonishing hangout for West Coast musicians,of which Crosby Stills and Nash were only a small part. Here are some other memories of Laurel Canyon in its heyday…

Mark Volman (vocalist, The Turtles) : We all lived there because it was affordable. It wasn't an overly desirable neighborhood. All of us were striving and finding our way. I lived there from 1967-1987. It was in the middle of the Hollywood dream. It was close to the music industry and what it represented to the 60's at the time. We came together and wrote songs. It was the spirit of it. A five to seven minute drive down the canyon and you were either on Hollywood Blvd or the Sunset Strip. We mostly rented, there wasn't a whole lot of buying. I remember my wife and I going to Robby Krieger's (The Doors] house and playing Yahtzee with him and his wife or having dinner at John Densmore's (The Doors] house. I also remember hanging out with Three Dog Night and Tim Buckley. There were jamming sessions and hanging out with Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash. Being in The Turtles was my job. When we weren't on the road, my wife and I volunteered at our child's elementary school. Laurel Canyon was where we lived. I never looked at it as a tourist attraction. (Source : interview by Helen Marketti, www.lifestyles2000.net, April 2007)

John Haeny (engineer, Elektra Records) : My Laurel Canyon house was on Ridpath. In the living room was my stereo system, with big electrostatic speakers, extraordinarily exotic for then, and a five-foot hookah that I was keeping for my drug dealer whose mother wouldn't let him have it at home. I extended visiting privileges to him provided he brought the grass. He would show up from time to time with his friends, and I would invite my friends. We would lock all The Doors and windows so the smoke would stay in the room. We were all into popsicles. I had the world's largest collection of popsicle sticks. We would fill the bowl of this huge hookah, a cup, cup and a half, and keep it lit by throwing popsicle sticks in, and pass the rope around till everybody passed out.

I woke up one morning to some chaos, and there was Judy Collins nude in my front yard. The yard had a high wooden fence and succulents, and there was Judy with her clothes off and a photographer. They were shooting the album cover for Wildflowers. They ultimately came into the house. She was sitting on the floor, with some clothes on now, by a curtained wall with light coming through the window and one of my exotic brass vases with some dried flowers in it, and that became the back cover. The nude pictures were scotched.

Also at the Ridpath house I introduced Judy to Stephen Stills and that resulted in their romance, and their romance resulted in Stephen writing 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.'

Carole King was in and out of Ridpath - it was a dog owned by Carole and Gerry Goffin that sired my dog Niki's first litter of puppies. Neil Young was around. I was at some friend's house with David Crosby - we were all in a pack, you know, all buddies then - and somebody had brought a tape in of a young girl that nobody knew much about, except Judy had discovered her as a songwriter, and it was Joni Mitchell.

Elliot Roberts (rock manager) : Jackson was up the block, Joni was two houses down, Zappa lived on the corner. We really did all walk to the Canyon Country Store, smoking a joint together along Lookout Mountain Road

John Haeny : Joni was living on the next road up from Kirkwood. David Crosby was producing her first album. The people who recorded it were basically incompetent, and the tapes were a mess. David was having serious problems with the mix. I was exclusive to Elektra, but David came to me and asked would I sneak out and remix. We did it in the dead of night in a little studio at Sunset Sound. I didn't have a written contract with Jac, but it was a violation. Years later Jac told me he had always known I did it. There wasn't much going on that Jac didn't know about; he was a fox. He let it go because he knew Joni was important.

Jackson Browne : I met John (Heaney, Elektra Records engineer) on Ridpath. A great guy, an interesting guy, very funny. He had these two white dogs, huskies, that he loved like they were his family. He was a genius engineer. Intensely talented. He made everybody sound great. Through his mind and his mike placements, he could shape things. And his demos sounded like completed records. He was sort of odd, a little goofy-looking, very sincere, not much of a hipster, probably a kid who had grown up taking apart Wurlitzer theater organs. Very anal retentive. In the studio he was fastidious beyond belief about how he wanted to do things, and he talked about it all the way: "I want to do this, I want to do that." Most people reserve a lot for the mix: "It'll really sound great when we mix it," and then you play this game, Beat The Demo. But John right there in the session could make it sound fantastic. He could hear it all at once.

Bob Zachary (Elektra Records producer) : He used to say, "Watch my hands, when you see them starting to sweat, we are only a take or two away from the best take."

Jackson Browne : John was neurotic as hell, with little tics. "I've got a bladder the size of a walnut," he would say, and go to the bathroom. One time he nearly cut my thumb off in the middle of recording. He was doing an edit, he had the razor in his hand, I was reaching for a book of matches, and he thought I was going to step on the loops of tape cascaded onto the floor waiting for him to take up onto another reel. He screamed, "LOOK OUT!"- and he did like an umpire's safe motion with his hand and cut me right across the thumb, and the blood poured out, blub-blub-blub.

Ned Doheny (guitarist) : I met John on Ridpath too. We were all crashing on that street, in every sense of the word. Incredible String Band was there. Gentle Soul. And Nico, talking about Dr. Hoffman on his bicycle.

Judy James (wife of noted music biz executive Billy James) : Around Ridpath was always an alternative area, with dirt roads, fire roads.

Jac Holzman : I remember someone saying the streets looked like they had been laid out by earthworms.

Judy James : It had gotten rundown and cheap before us, a lot of garages turned into one-room thises and thats, so there were always actors and musicians. There was a sense of hanging-outness, of finding out what was going on in the music business if you walked up and down Ridpath.

Jackson Browne : There was amazing tribal life. There were houses supported by record companies, groups living with an account at the health food store.

Jac Holzman : Billy James' mailbox had listings for twenty groups, plus companies and artists.

Jackson Browne : Billy was my manager, and he ran the Elektra office for a while. Sort of a hipster cat, something like a dancer. And he was very funny, very smart. Like somewhere in between a James Dean and a Mort Sahl. He was older than us, must have been in his thirties, but he was still one of us, he was a freak.

Judy James : No one owned furniture. People would be living on the floor, many of them on our floor. Runaways. Kids who were parentless. Groupies. This tremendous influx of kids from Orange County.

Billy James : Penny Nichols stayed in the laundry room downstairs for a while. Jackson slept over. Pamela Polland. Tim Buckley, Jimmy Spheeris, Greg Copeland, Steve Noonan, wonderful writers. All coming out of Sunny Hills High, Orange County. We were never alone. We had a dining room table made of three-quarter-inch ply with two-by-four legs. Seated a lot of people. Ray Manzarek came to dinner and told me it was the first time he had ever seen an artichoke.

Cass Elliott was living up the hill with Butchy. Tim Hardin was a couple of doors up. Leonard Cohen came calling. Frank Zappa was on Kirkwood, which is the street you take to get to Ridpath, and then he moved to a log cabin at the corner of Laurel Canyon, with a bowling alley downstairs. Lots of people lived in that house with Frank.

John Haeny : Then there were Deering and Billy Howell, rich kids who liked to have stars around. They had a big house. We would head up there at midnight. David Crosby and Paul Rothchild and I ended up in the shower there with lots of Vitabath, which was very big in those days.

Barry Friedman (Los Angeles scenester) : And Jack the castle man, this guy who owned a bunch of castles. Different stars would rent them and move in with their entourage. They could make wonderful entrances down the stone staircases and they were good for practicing in and careening about on the parapets in various states of undress. I remember Nico with Jackson in tow coming down the stairs one day. That was quite a sight.

Jackson Browne : Paul Rothchild lived on Ridpath too. Paul was like a superman. He knew about all sorts of things. He sat me down and had me listen to Kurt Weill and Bertold Drecht, long before The Doors recorded Alabama Song. He drove a Porsche and wore a velour hat, a Borsalino. These were things that denoted one's station, these were the people who had made a fortune or were on the way to making a fortune.

Fritz Richmond (jugband virtuoso and Elektra Records engineer) : Paul's main room was one of the nicest music listening rooms that anyone knew of in Hollywood, and because of that people would come by with their tapes. I had my juke box there, and people would come over to check out what things sounded like on the juke box. The Doors would come up for playbacks. And Janis Joplin. I would wake up in the morning and hear her cackling away downstairs. She had a unique laugh, that woman.

Dan Rothchild (son of Elektra Producer Paul Rothchild) : My father had a story about a couch that Fritz eventually donated to a rummage sale in Portland in 1989. Among those who sat on the couch were Janis Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, Paul Butterfield , Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and another dozen butts of distinction. That couch should have great vibes.

Jackson Browne : So there were interesting houses we could walk to. Or we would catch a ride to Peter Tork's house on Willow Glen. Peter had been a dishwasher at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and now he was a TV star, a Monkee. My friend Ned Doheny and I would say, "Let's go up to Peter's house, see what's going on." Sometimes you would walk in and there would be twelve girls in the pool, naked. And they were beautiful women, people of substance, not bimbos-not that we would have minded if they were bimbos. One time Jimi Hendrix was up there jamming with Buddy Miles in the pool house, and Peter's girlfriend was playing the drums, naked. She was gorgeous, like a Varga girl is gorgeous, this physically flawless creature. She looked like the drawings of Indian maidens that they airbrush on motorcycle tanks. I don't think she was as good a drummer as she was an object of desire, but she was something. Barry Friedman was on Ridpath too, about a block from Billy James, two blocks from Paul Rothchild.

Judy James : Once, Barry phoned everyone and got us all to drop the needle on the new Stones album at exactly the same moment, so that the canyon would echo with music.

Barry Friedman : One night it was full moon, we're all sitting around in various states of decomposure, and a voice is heard echoing over the canyon, "This is God speaking. I have a message for you." And He gave His message. Well, thousands of people throughout the canyon were somewhat freaked by this experience and talked about it for days. It turned out it was Barry McGuire, the 'Eve Of Destruction' guy, who had set up this huge sound system, I think at The Mamas And The Papas' house up at the top of Lookout, and blasted this diatribe to the stoned minions below.

Jackie De Shannon (singer/songwriter) : You had a lot of artists, writers, recording artists, living up there. You could go down to The Strip and, in one evening, have The Byrds at one club, the Lovin' Spoonful at another … The Doors. It was just so exciting. Wee thought it would go on forever. It was just an incredible time. (Source : interview with Pat Curran, Shindig, Nov 2008)

Arthur Lee (Love) : Jim Morrison (of The Doors] used to sit outside my door when I lived in Laurel Canyon. He wanted to hang out with me, but I didn't wanna hang out with anybody.