Fire and Rain (2 page)

With its completion, another Beatle project was also nearing the finish line. Almost exactly a year before, the band had been filmed rehearsing and recording new material at Twickenham Film Studios in the London suburb of Twickenham (and later at the studio of their company, Apple Corps Ltd., on Savile Row). Between the damp, impersonal space and the forced camaraderie the band tried to exhibit as cameramen continually circled them, the experience at Twickenham was notably unpleasant, and the unedited canisters of the film had been relegated to storage ever since. But in the fall of 1969, Allen Klein, the pugnacious, proudly coarse New Jersey-born accountant who'd taken over the band's business affairs the previous spring, had done the seemingly impossible. Striking a deal with United Artists, he'd actually revived the movie everyone would rather have forgotten, and
Get Back
, as it was initially being called, was set for a spring theatrical release.

A movie meant a soundtrack album, which in turn meant today's visit to EMI Studios. During the filming at Twickenham, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had banged out a rough take of “I Me Mine” as Lennon and his ever-present wife-to-be, Yoko Ono, waltzed hand-inhand. The footage was considered so charming that everyone agreed it needed to be in the film. (Additional footage of Ono would also mollify Lennon, who was worried that director Michael Lindsay-Hogg was focusing too much on McCartney.) Since that rendition of “I Me Mine” was fairly raw, even by the standards of the back-to-basics
Get Back
project, the band needed a more polished version to include on the soundtrack album now being assembled.

Consisting of only two verses—and a chorus that was only played once—“I Me Mine” barely amounted to a full song. Yet even in its final, manicured version, it exposed small cracks and divisions like sunlight pouring into a white-painted room. The verses, sung by Harrison, were lugubrious and mournful, laden with a sense of weary burden that had increasingly crept into his songs. Those parts felt less like a “heavy waltz,” as Harrison had described the song to his bandmates at Twickenham, and more like a dirge. On the chorus, Harrison's voice and the doleful tempo were overtaken by McCartney's frenetic, half-shouted exhortations and a faster, pushier tempo. (McCartney's piano overdubs were particularly frenzied, and his voice tapped into the manic Little Richard homages of the band's early Cavern Club days.) “I Me Mine” didn't merely feel like two songs welded together. It sounded like the mesh of two different people and personalities—one resigned to a finale, another desperate to avoid it.

The following day, January 4, the three Beatles, joined by McCartney's wife, Linda, returned to Studio Two to polish up a near-completed song, a hymn-like McCartney ballad called “Let It Be,” taped a year earlier. McCartney added a new bass part; Harrison replaced his original, squishy guitar solo with a more forceful one. A brass section was tacked on, as were backing singers, including Linda. The work was businesslike and somewhat tedious; at one point, George Martin scribbled “Lettuce Be” on a pad and drew a picture of a bunny to amuse himself. When it was over, the EMI staff, including Langham, punched out and checked the schedule to see who'd be working in the studio in the days ahead. The Beatles returned to their separate homes, in some cases over an hour outside London.

For two days, the Beatles had once more been a working band, one with a hit album on the charts (
Abbey Road,
their latest LP, was still the best-selling album in America). But at one point, Geoff Emerick, an engineer who'd also spent innumerable hours in the studio with the band,
stopped by to say a quick hello. He found McCartney strangely quiet and low-key. (Starr's mustache drooped around his mouth like a permanent upside-down smile.) What Emerick and others didn't know was that on December 30, 1969, EMI had informed Apple of its plans to release the soundtrack album to
Get Back
. The Beatles had reassembled at EMI a mere four days later, as if they couldn't wait to put the whole mess of a movie and record—and other, more pressing matters—behind them.

On the night of January 6, McCartney settled into his seat at the Royal Albert Hall. Along with five thousand others in the elegantly domed theater with boxed seats, he was about to witness the London debut of the band everyone was calling the “American Beatles.” (One of them was actually English, but a catchy press moniker couldn't be denied.) Thirteen months earlier, George Harrison had passed on signing them to Apple, but now they were stars on a headlining tour of Europe. In one sign of their stature, their massive sound system, complete with a lighting rig specially designed for them, had arrived in London from the States by boat. They were put up in the city's five-star Dorchester Hotel—where the grand reception party for the Beatles'
A Hard Day's Night
had taken place in now far-off 1964—and the Rolling Stones lent their managers an office in town. Whatever David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young wanted, they received.

They were a little nervous, with ample reason. All the major newspaper critics and a host of celebrities—not merely McCartney but Donovan and Ahmet Ertegun, the worldly, Turkish-born head of their label, Atlantic—had assembled to scrutinize them in person. Nash, who'd grown up in Manchester, knew some of his fellow countrymen were skeptical because he'd left the beloved Hollies and his native country to join this new band in Los Angeles. Before they began the show, they
calmed their nerves by indulging in one of their pre-show rituals, a shared joint. By the time Crosby, Stills & Nash took the stage—with Young to follow later—Crosby was either so high, nervous, or energized (or some combination of the three) that he didn't notice a stagehand slapping an “L” sign—the British learners permit for driving lessons—on the back of his brown fringe jacket as he walked out.

The audience guffawed as one; everyone knew Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were hardly newcomers. The public had first become aware of them eight months earlier with the release of
Crosby, Stills & Nash
, made before Young joined up with them. The bands they'd once been members of—the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies—had made some of the most dynamic, sparkling music of the '60s. Yet the public embraced the new configuration in ways it had only occasionally taken the other bands to its bosom. The California-sun-drenched embrace of their labored-over, multitracked harmonies, the three distinctive-looking men reclining on an outdoor couch on the album cover, the variety of music from the dramatic, postapocalyptic soar of “Wooden Ships” to the turbulent churn of “Long Time Gone”: Whatever it was,
Crosby, Stills & Nash
quickly went gold, selling a half-million copies. As 1970 began, it remained firmly lodged in the top 10 in the States.

Starting with their name, which read more like a law firm than a rock band, they wanted everyone to know they were a paradigm for a new, more liberating era in rock and roll. The group format, they insisted, had become too restrictive, too limited, too Establishment. (To hammer that point home and tweak his former life, Crosby would sometimes play a few seconds of the chimey twelve-string lick of the Byrds' “Mr. Tambourine Man” onstage, which always drew a laugh:
The Byrds? A pop group? How quaint!
) As the Royal Albert Hall crowd witnessed, they didn't even resemble a traditionally cohesive band. Crosby, at twenty-eight the veteran, had the bushy hair, serpentine walrus mustache, and stonerbliss smile of the hippie commune leader next door. Nash, who'd be
turning twenty-eight the following month, had a head engulfed in sculpted brown hair and a wardrobe of vests and floral-print shirts that embodied modish counterculture. Stills was younger than both—he'd turned twenty-five three days earlier—yet more conservative in attire (white-button shirts, dark suit jackets) and hairstyle (sideburns and prematurely thinning dark-blond hair framing chiseled cheekbones). Young, the relative baby at twenty-four, opted for patched denim and whitelace shirts. His furrowed brow and shoulder-length locks set him apart from the others as did the way he'd lurk behind them, near the guitar amps, during their shows.

After opening with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the seven-minute Stills homage to former girlfriend Judy Collins that had become one of their signature songs, their utter self-confidence kicked in. As McCartney looked on, they sang one of his own songs, “Blackbird,” from the White Album. They'd tackled it before, including at Woodstock the previous summer, but tonight it was a declaration of their eminence: It practically declared that they were picking up where the Beatles had left off. (To their credit, they sang it lovingly, with Stills holding a long, raspy note in the “dark black night” line that made the song their own.) The rest of the show broke with tradition in numerous ways. For the first, acoustic half, the four sang some songs as a quartet, others separately, others with a combination of the four. Like their garb, the songs mirrored their diverse personalities and lifestyles. Crosby's “Triad” openly coaxed a girl into having a ménage à trois; Nash introduced “Our House,” about the cozy, music-and-lovemaking existence he had back home in Laurel Canyon with his girlfriend Joni Mitchell. (He also told the crowd it was from a new album they'd just completed, to be called
Déjà vu
.) Young's “The Loner” seemed to be as much about himself—the way he worked on his own schedule, at his own pace, on his terms—as about the song's borderline-stalker character.

Halfway through the set, a curtain behind them parted, revealing a
bowl-haired drummer, Dallas Taylor, and a very young-looking black bass player, Greg Reeves. Thus began the electric second half of the show, which shed additional light on their personalities. Stills was particularly competitive and driven, no more so than during Young's tightly wound shuffle, “Down by the River,” during which the two men jabbed at each other with their lead guitars over the course of fifteen minutes. Like the group itself, the performance was both rehearsed and ragged, teetering on the brink of chaos. Just as the tangle of guitars and rhythm section was on the verge of collapse, Nash, ensconced behind an organ and waiting patiently for his moment, shouted, “All together now!” signaling a return to the song's chorus—and, at last, an end to the show.

Throughout the night, they remained anxious, and it showed: They exchanged in-jokes with each other and indulged in lengthy tune-ups between songs. Yet few seemed to mind. The Royal Albert Hall crowd laughed adoringly at their jokes and applauded every lapse, from the notalways-precise harmonies to the sight of the four professionals trying to decide what song to do next.
(Set lists! So rigid!)
They could seemingly do no wrong. Atlantic had already taken in $2 million in preorders for
Déjà vu.
At a company sales conference in Palm Springs, California, in January, label executives touted the album as one of its biggest potential earners of the year. CSNY would embody both the decade past and the decade to come: no rules, no restrictions, just as “free and easy” as “Wooden Ships” declared.

Back at the Dorchester, Ron Stone, a bearded native New Yorker who worked for CSNY band managers Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, noticed something odd. Reeves had sprinkled something outside the door of his room. When asked, he said it was witchcraft powder to ward off evil spirits.
Hmmmm
, Stone thought.
What was
that
about?
Reeves' behavior had begun to raise eyebrows, yet no one could tell if it had to do with this heretofore-unknown aspect of his personality or the quantity of drugs everyone was now consuming.

For the time being, no one gave Reeves' eccentricities much more thought. Introducing the bass player to the Royal Albert Hall audience a few hours before, Crosby had blissfully declared, “God smiled and sent us Greg Reeves.” Amidst the intoxicating applause, plaudits from their industry, and backstage temptations, it was hard to believe God would stop beaming their way anytime soon.