‘Eat a peach, Neil’: why Crosby, Stills, Young and Nash hated each other

David Crosby was a Byrd, a jailbird, a sublime harmoniser, and a sower of disharmony. His death aged 81 brings down the curtain on one of rock music’s most colourful careers. Despite regular fallings out with his bandmates, it was those honeyed lead vocals – so memorable on songs like Guinnevere, Long Time Gone, Wooden Ships and Almost Cut My Hair ­– for which he will be remembered. The Marrakesh Express has left the station for the last time.

“I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times,” wrote former Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young bandmate Graham Nash in a tribute. “But what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years.” Crosby was, he added, fearless in both life and music. “He spoke his mind, his heart, and his passion through his beautiful music and leaves an incredible legacy.”

Stephen Stills described him as an “extraordinary, richly sentient being” who led a life “so well lived”. “His music will live on through us all even as he now sails to his eternal sunset,” Stills said.

Crosby’s career had numerous distinct but often overlapping phases: from The Byrds, to late-Sixties counterculture supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash, to super-supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to his prolific solo work. In later years he formed a jazz-rock band called CPR. He is best known for his spells in those supergroups, whose members had famously tempestuous relationships after they formed. The fallings out, reunions, partial reunions and almost-reunions were legion.

And yet, beneath it all as Nash suggested, there lurked enduring wells of peace and harmony. No finer example existed than in early 2022 when Neil Young took a stand against streaming giant Spotify. His ex-bandmates showed such solidarity that excitable corners of the internet even started speculating that a full reunion tour would follow. Although now, of course, impossible, it showed just how strong the bond between the men really was.

Last February, Young accused Spotify’s star podcaster Joe Rogan of spreading Covid misinformation in his episodes. The then 76-year-old issued the streaming platform with an ultimatum: either Rogan goes or I do. Spotify sided with Rogan, and Young removed his music from the service. Other artists such as Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren followed suit.

Then Crosby, Stills and Nash issued a joint statement. “We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternative points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences,” they wrote. “Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music ­– or the music we made together – to be on the same platform.”

Music’s most grouchy hippies were in harmony once more. The twist was as unexpected as it was fascinating. A brief look at their history explained why.

The group Crosby, Stills & Nash formed in 1968 after its respective members left The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies. For multitudes of music fans, it was a dream combination of three of the Sixties’ finest bands: jangly pop met folk rock met Merseybeat-era British songcraft, all bound together by mellifluous, stoned harmonies. The group signed with Atlantic Records and released an eponymous album featuring songs such as Marrakesh Express in May 1969.

Young joined the band later that summer (after Traffic’s Steve Winwood said no) and the freshly minted Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played an early-hours set at Woodstock. It was only their second show together but it forever cemented their place in the counterculture pantheon. Their 1970 album Déjà Vu contained tracks such as Almost Cut My Hair and Woodstock, in which they sang about setting their souls free on Max Yasgur’s farm. The album topped the US album chart and went on to sell 8 million copies. But there was already trouble in paradise.

Indeed, trouble pre-empted the band. Young had been in Buffalo Springfield with Stills, and there had been tension between the two (Stills believed that Young had “control issues”). It wasn’t a great bedrock for stability. A 1970 tour by CSNY was beset by problems: they fired their bass player just before hitting the road and there was a clash of egos between members. In Fire and Rain, David Browne’s book on the musical history of 1970, Stills is quoted as saying that the recording of Déjà Vu had been “bedlam” with everyone doing what they wanted in the studio.

Accusations of selfishness flew, and everyone had differing opinions over who was in charge. Excess was everywhere. According to Brown, Nash was so unhappy with the last note of his song Our House that engineer Bill Halverson had to fly from San Francisco to Los Angeles to find a Steinway piano to re-record the final, sustained note. Young kept a pair of monkeys in his hotel room, just to add to the madness.

At a New York concert in front of Bob Dylan on that 1970 tour, Stills played a long solo segment that had not been agreed by his bandmates. He was fired for a couple of nights before being reinstated before the group then broke up completely. All four members almost immediately recorded solo albums, the best known of which was Young’s After The Gold Rush.

The group tried to reconcile as a creative unit in 1973, but bickered. However they toured successfully in 1974, supported by artists including Mitchell, The Beach Boys and The Band (dates included Wembley Stadium). The shows were, by all accounts, sublime.

A review by writer Paul Williams for New York’s Soho Weekly News from September 1974 summed up the magic. “The format of the show – CSNY played for four hours, switching from acoustic instruments to electric, from one solo performer to another with all combinations of voices and instruments supporting him when appropriate – was very very effective. They kept the crowd up, kept themselves up, and tempered all personality excesses. All energy went into the music,” wrote Williams. The show, he added, more than fulfilled the promise implied by the band’s “superstar status”.

The vast Wembley show arguably marked the birth of stadium rock in the UK. But not everyone was happy. Crosby dubbed it the “Doom tour” and complained that Stills’ and Young’s monitors were too loud, meaning that he and Nash couldn’t sing their harmonies properly. And although a financial success, the tour was plagued by profligate spending: Nash claimed that although it made over $11 million, the band received less than half a million each. The tour over, they tried to record another album together but Young left after an argument. Something of a familiar pattern was reasserting itself.

The quartet split into pairs – Crosby and Nash recorded together, as did Stills and Young – while continuing various solo projects. Another brief attempt to record as a foursome was attempted and abandoned. Stills and Young reportedly wiped Crosby and Nash’s contributions to these sessions from the master tape after the latter pair disappeared to work on their own stuff. Internecine strife then became inter-internecine strife when Stills and Young fell out on a joint tour in 1976. Mid-tour, while on different coaches, Young sent Stills a telegram: “Dear Stephen, Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil.” Stills finished the tour alone.

That was it for over a decade. Although Crosby, Stills and Nash reformed (and Crosby went to prison after being convicted of drugs and weapons offences), it wasn’t until 1988 that the four reconvened for the American Dream album. They also played a memorial gig for promoter Bill Graham in 1991 and released another album, Looking Forward, in 1999.

In 2006 they hit the road again for the Freedom of Speech Tour – an unfortunate title, some might suggest, given their complaints about Rogan. The band played their last concert together at a benefit concert in California in 2013.

This latest phase of their careers contained some potentially awkward moments, such as when they all played the 2009 Glastonbury Festival at different times. While Young headlined the Pyramid Stage on the Friday night, his former bandmates played as a trio the following afternoon between Kasabian and Dizzee Rascal. It is not known whether their paths crossed in the backstage compound.

In recent years there had been speculation that they’d reform again. In 2017 Nash, speaking in the context of the Trump presidency, said that the issues keeping them apart “pale in comparison” to the good they could do if they got together. “I’d be totally up for it,” he said, before adding ominously, “even though I’m not talking to David [Crosby] and neither is Neil.” You can see where the problem may lie. Last year, Nash sounded less sure. “When that silver thread that connects a band gets broken it's very difficult to glue the ends together,” he told CBS.

Then Crosby had this to say about Young: “He’s probably the most self-centred, self-obsessed, selfish person I know. He only thinks about Neil, period. That’s the only person he’ll consider. Ever!” (Young has posted a tribute to Crosby, calling him "a very supportive friend in my early life".)

For CSNY fans, last year’s show of solidarity represented a glimmer of hope; in the long and troubled history of this band, a glimmer of hope was something to cling on to. But following Crosby’s death, and as Stills so memorably put it, a key member of one of music’s finest ever groups is now sailing to his eternal sunset.