Fifty years ago this May, one of rock & roll's most enduring and contentious brotherhoods began when David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash released their classic album Crosby, Stills & Nash. The trio almost immediately became a quartet when Neil Young joined them, right in time for the historic Woodstock festival that August 1969. That performance, alongside Crosby, Stills & Nash songs like "Wooden Ships" and "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," announced the arrival of rock & roll's first "supergroup." Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young had been assembled from the remnants of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and the Hollies. But the new sound the four men created-rich in harmony and shot through with social commentary-defined a sensibility and an era.
In time for these 50th anniversaries comes David Browne's CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup (Da Capo Press, an imprint of Hachette Books, 4/2/19). The most up-to-date biography of the legendary band, the book takes readers through five decades of drama and music of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young. Using new interviews with David Crosby and Graham Nash and many comrades, including Judy Collins, Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, John Sebastian, the Byrds' Roger McGuinn, and the late Pegi Young, David Browne weaves together pivotal moments of CSNY history: the albums both finished and abandoned, the generation-defining performances, the excesses and arrests, the stories behind some of the most influential songs, the dust-ups, and the reunions-both amicable and otherwise. In vivid, novelistic detail, Browne reports on many of their most extraordinary stories: the inside tale of the machinations of how Young came to join the trio; revealing new details on the mayhem of the making of their classic quartet album Déjà vu; Crosby and Nash's (wildly embarrassing) mid-tour softball game against up-and-coming rock star Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band; Stills' many wild tales; new insights into Crosby's dramatic fall from addiction and his shocking resurrection; their interactions with everyone from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump; and never-before-revealed insights into the making of their 2000 and 2006 reunion tours.
The sweeping story of rock's longest-running and most dysfunctional musical family, CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG is the book classic-rock fans (and those who've discovered their music for the first time) have long awaited: a detailed history of a band whose career successes-amidst personal failures and dramas-came represent how the "free-love" fantasy of the '60s deteriorated into the "Me Decade" excess of the '70s and the survival of the boomer generation well into their seventies.