Name: Crosby, Stills, and Nash (Separately) with Bob Costas, 1989, 1991
Uploaded: 2023-01-24T17:40:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Crosby, Stills, and Nash (Separately) with Bob Costas, 1989, 1991' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Crosby, Stills, and Nash (Separately) with Bob Costas, 1989, 1991' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-24. Transcript available.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash (Separately) with Bob Costas, 1989, 1991

Tonight, as far as late night goes, Dave's had better shows,
but Jerry Pail smooths things over for guests Robert Klein and Sinead O'Connor.
Then later, from the heart of the Woodstock Nation and Crosby stills Nash and
Young, Graham Nash.
The infighting, the backstabbing, it means nothing to us.
The music is what would last.
Thanks for staying up later. I'm Bob Costas.
Tonight, an opportunity I'm really looking forward to.
We'll talk about some of the history of rock and roll with Graham Nash.
And before we get into that, let's take a look at the video from the American
Dream album,
the first Crosby, stills Nash and Young album in 18 years.
The musical harmonies of Crosby, stills Nash and Young are much acclaimed,
but it's no secret that there was a lot of personal disharmony from time to
time.
Absolutely. Do you ever fight with your brothers?
I don't have any brothers. I used to fight with my sister.
Yeah, sibling rivalry on an intense level, but you've got four people.
People who are very intense, very opinionated, very strong about the way that
they want to do things,
the way they want to hear their own particular music.
It's just like a family.
Just like a family or even more intense in that regard?
Even more intense.
I mean, intense to the point where sometimes you have to say, I can't take it
anymore.
Yeah, we did that for many years.
We've started albums, almost completed them, and just walked away from it.
We've always only wanted to make music when we loved each other dearly enough
to be true to the muse of music.
And sometimes it just wasn't there, and we knew it.
But we had the strength to walk away from it and not be forced to make albums
that we didn't want to make.
That's one of the great things about Atlantic Records.
They truly understood that this was a special bunch of people,
that they should leave us alone and let us make the music,
and they would take it when it came.
In 69, when we first signed with them, we signed for six albums.
We still haven't done six.
And Armand Erdogan and the people in Atlantic have been kind enough
to keep the corporate lawyers away from us,
because they had every right to force us to make records.
But they wouldn't be able to do that, and they know it.
That must have been an interesting dynamic, especially in the late 60s and
early 70s.
Rock and roll guys, much more on the edge then than they appear to be now,
coming out of Woodstock Nation.
But having to deal with guys who, I guess, stereotypically were guys in shiny
suits
with pinky rings and big cigars, just trying to turn out records.
That's true in almost every case other than Armand Erdogan.
Armand is truly a music man.
He's a writer and a producer, and he knows quality when he sees it.
And he kept everybody away from us, and it's to his credit.
That's why this new record is with Armand.
You know, after all these years, after 18 years, we went back to Armand,
because we were loyal to him, because he was loyal to us.
On a new record like American Dream, 20 years after your greatest fame,
how much of the chemistry naturally exists, and how much do you have to work to
put back in place?
We don't have to work at chemistry with this band.
It's like Crosby says, it's like juggling four bottles of nitroglycerin.
You know, you drop one, and it's all over.
Except that this year, there were no tops on the bottles.
And it was very interesting.
First of all, we managed to get right back to where we left off, which was an
amazing thing.
And second of all, I think we'd grown up a little.
We'd matured a little.
We were much more compassionate with each other, much more understanding.
You know, it didn't bother me that Stephen put an F chord into my C chord, you
know,
which happened, you know, several years ago, and we didn't speak to each other
for a couple of years.
Silly things like that.
We were much better at it this time.
Were you always the most tolerant of the four, the least confrontational?
I think of an album like Deja Vu, where it's easy to distinguish which is the
signature song of each.
Deja Vu is Crosby's, and obviously, for obvious reasons, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes
is Stills.
And Neil Young's, at times, abrasive confrontational style is right there in
Ohio.
The anger jumps out at you.
And then your song is Teach Your Children, which was one of the most conciliatory
songs of a very volatile time.
Yeah.
We're very, very different people.
And the fact that we make music together astounds me even today.
I don't know what the hell these four people are doing together.
It doesn't make sense, but it does.
What role have you played in trying to get David Crosby back on the relatively
straight and narrow?
It's a good question.
I love David dearly.
I find him to be a fascinating man.
He's brilliant.
He's very, very different than me.
When he was at the depths of his, let's say, depression, I tried everything to
get him off drugs.
I tried doing more drugs than he did.
I tried doing none at all.
I tried everything.
And it was only when Crosby himself turned himself into the FBI and made the
decision to go for life instead of death that I began to realize it was only
David could do it.
None of his friends could do it.
The intervention that we did with, you know, 12 of his closest friends meant
nothing.
All at one time?
All at one time.
These dozen came together?
Oh, yeah.
Who was there?
Well, myself and Jackson, Jackson Brown, Grace Slick, Paul Cantner, Carl Gottlieb,
who wrote David's autobiography with him, a bunch of other people.
I'll sat him down one day, and I'll never forget it.
I'm sitting in David's living room, pretty much like this in Mill Valley.
There's 12 of us.
We know what's going to happen.
He's coming off the road, and I can hear him walking up the path going,
Oh, boy, it's good to be home.
Oh, boy.
And he opens the door.
Oh, God.
And there we were.
And we said, David, come and sit down.
I'll have something we want to say to you.
But it didn't work.
I mean, 12 of his closest friends, you know, told him personally for, you know,
10 minutes each how much he had hurt them
and, you know, what he meant to them personally.
And his response was to go into the bathroom and freebase cocaine some more.
And it was infuriating.
Jackson Brown took him the next day on a private jet down to a treatment center
in Southern California.
He walked out after an hour.
Couldn't handle it.
They wanted to separate him and Jan, and that was the worst thing that could
have happened for them, right, you know,
because they only really had each other.
And they left.
But David made the decision in Florida to turn himself in, and he ended up
doing a year in jail.
And I'll never say that jail is good for anybody, but it certainly saved David's
life.
And so what role did I play?
I played his friend.
I loved him.
I wanted him to be alive.
I wanted him to keep creating music that meant so much not only to me, but to
many other people.
So I tried to be his friend.
When you look back now on the relatively short history overall of rock and roll,
but it's the history of a lifetime in your case,
do you regret the drug involvement?
Not how much you might have personally been involved, but the fact that there
was a period of time when rock and roll almost glorified drug use.
That's absolutely true.
And did I regret it?
I didn't.
I don't regret anything I've ever done.
Not at all.
Because whatever it is that I've done, whatever I've been through, whatever
experiences have happened to me,
I am here right now talking to you.
I'm still alive.
I'm still creative.
I still feel effective in my society.
I still feel I can change the world.
I have three great kids and a beautiful wife.
My life is fantastic.
So whatever I did brought me to this point.
So I can never regret it.
When David Crosby finally emerged from prison, what was the post-prison reunion
like?
Phenomenal.
I was doing a solo tour and headed for Texas.
I arrived at the airport in Houston and expected to be met by somebody from the
place that I was playing, and there was Crosby.
And I hardly recognized him at first.
He put on a lot of weight.
Of course, his hair was short.
His mustache had been cut.
But he was standing there, smiling.
And I played the show that night.
There's a part in the show where I play Wind on the Water, which was a song I
wrote for the Great Whales.
And preceding it, there's an acapella vocal piece that Crosby wrote called
Critical Mass.
And the two have always been linked, and no matter whether I've been playing
the show with David or not, I always, you know, put the two pieces of music
together.
Lights go out.
These beautiful voices come on.
People know that it's the beginning of the wind on the water, the curtain opens,
and the entire place falls down.
Because they recognize Crosby's silhouette, and he comes out in the dark, and
it was so overwhelming that we were almost in tears.
And I, you know, really, truly, almost.
It was triumphant for David.
He had made it back to living.
He had fought off a very bad time in his life.
He was back, and everybody knew it.
And it was, if anybody was there at that concert that night, they saw a very
special night.
If I went to one of your concerts, what would I see in the audience?
Is your audience people who first hooked on to you when they were in their
teens or early 20s?
Or can you reach people who are that age now?
Our audiences are between 14 and 42.
And I don't know how it is, but the 14-year-old kids know all the words to the
songs.
Their mothers, their brothers, their sisters.
It does me, um, gives me a great feeling.
Because it means that the music, which has always been the most important part
of us,
the infighting, the backstabbing, it means nothing to us.
The music is what will last.
It will last beyond our fighting.
It will last beyond bad reviews from Rolling Stone.
It will last beyond all of it, hopefully.
And when 14-year-old kids who were conceived after some of the songs were
conceived,
sing the song, the words to those songs, it makes me feel great as a musician.
Which of your songs makes you feel best?
Maybe you can't narrow it down to any one.
I can narrow it down very much.
It's always the one that I'm writing now.
It's always the one that is on the edge of coming into creation.
When you've written songs, you know, you have to let them go.
You record them and you let them go out of your system.
And it gives me more room inside for more creation.
But the song that I always love is the one I'm writing right now.
The American Dream album.
Yeah, a good piece of work.
We'll hold it up so you see it, folks.
You look like David Letterman when you do that.
The inspiration behind it.
It was born very much out of the feeling that we talked about earlier with Crosby
coming out of jail.
Neil called Crosby one day and said,
Listen, you know, I'd like to make music with you, but I just can't tolerate
this situation.
If you ever manage to get straight and free of drugs, I'd like to make another
album.
And it was a great carrot for David to do.
Now, that's not the reason why he straightened up, but it certainly was one of
the reasons why American Dream came into being.
We went to Neal's Ranch, which is in Northern California.
We sequestered ourselves away for about 11 weeks and had a wonderful time.
In the video, the American Dream video, you're surprised in bed by an almost
assaultive guy with a guitar,
and he puts his foot on your chest, and whoa!
That's the first time my kids ever met Neal.
They'd heard about him for years, of course, and that was the first time they'd
ever met him.
And to see him in that punk rocker outfit was insane.
I took my kids down to the set, and when my son Jackson saw me in bed with that
blonde,
he looked over at me and he goes,
Hey, Dad, you scored.
He's 10?
Yeah.
He's a very bright 10.
You run into people routinely now who like your music,
but who politically, culturally, in terms of their own lives,
are completely on the outside of what you were talki