Crosby, Stills & Nash

Giving the phrase “super-group” an unambiguously good name is the California based band Crosby, Stills and Nash, who came together in 1968 after the bands that each member came to prominence in split up. David Crosby was the singer and songwriter from The Byrds, a band that he was dismissed from in 1967 due to friction with his fellow bandmates. Crosby had a friend in the form of Stephen Stills, whose band Buffalo Springfield had folded completely in early 1968. The duo began meeting up together and jamming, before writing the song “Wooden Ships” together on Crosby’s boat.

Inspired by the quality of “Wooden Ships”, Crosby and Stills started writing together regularly, coming up with a backlog of songs that neither of them knew quite what to do with. At around the same time, Graham Nash found himself in California after being kicked out of his band The Hollies. He’d known Crosby since The Byrds had toured the United Kingdom earlier in the decade and started seeing him again soon after he landed there. This all culminated in a party that Joni Mitchell threw in her house in July 1968, where Mitchell asked Crosby and Stills to perform a song of Stills’ composition that she’d heard earlier in the day.

As they performed, Nash chimed in with an improvised harmony line, and everyone who was listening found that they had great vocal chemistry together. The trio decided to form a band together, but didn’t want to be locked into a group structure that had burned them before. They decided to focus on the three of them performing together as three distinct songwriters and named the new group after their own surnames. This ensured that the band couldn’t continue without the involvement of all three of them. Clearly these were three carefree individuals who weren’t bitter with anything in the slightest.

Soon after they formed, the group managed to sign a record deal with Atlantic Records. However, they also signed a management deal with Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, giving them one of the most formidable management teams in rock music at the time. It was pretty much a given that anything they’d put out would be a hit and their self-titled debut album did not disappoint, spawning two hit singles off the back of it and peaking at number six on the Billboard albums chart. However, this presented the group with their own set of problems, as they needed to tour and Stills had performed all the instruments on the record save for the drums.

The band needed a fourth member to compliment them, and to Stills’ horror and Nash’s consternation, Ahmet Ertegun, the boss of their record label, suggested Stills’ Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young. Stills understandably didn’t want anything to do with his old band and Nash had never met Young before, but the initial meetings went well enough. Young became a paid up member of the band, one who was still allowed to continue his celebrated solo career during the band’s downtime. After recruiting a rhythm section in the form of the drummer on their first record Dallas Taylor and 19 year old Motown bass player Greg Reeves, they started performing live, with their second ever show taking place at a little gathering called the Woodstock festival.

Ever since then, their storied career has taken them into the heart of American rock. Every single member of the band having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of CSN&Y and in their previous groups. Their stories of interpersonal friction are as legendary as their music and their activism, and to this day Crosby, Stills and Nash can still put on one hell of a live show. With a back catalogue of songs that any folk-rock fan would swear by, Crosby, Stills and Nash come highly recommended.