Here’s
some excerpts from the interviews…
1973 - Ken
Weiss:
" 'Black
Sheep' is a song written by Stills, with the background vocals on the
demo sung by Three Dog Night. It was never released by Stills, but I went to
Germany, I think in '75 or '76, and got it recorded by a German artist named
Joy Fleming. It was a Top 40 hit in Germany but that was it. "Stolen
Stills" was a concept album created due to Stephen's habit of taking
portions of one song and incorporating them with portions of others as well as
adding new materials. All of the songs bear parts of others that most fans
would recognize. It was never released as Atlantic didn't think there would be
a market for it."
1974 - Joe
Lala:
"My family is big in the food
business in Florida. In Tampa, the family had organized a big dinner for
everybody. My Godfather - he wanted to make a speech. He stands up and says ,
'I don't know the name of the band, so I'm gonna call it “Joe Lala and his
band”, and I wanna welcome you to Florida.' They all get a kick out of that.
The next day, when we get to the stadium, the dressing-room trailers said
"The Joe Lala Band" instead of "CSNY". The day of the show
, Bill Graham hired a bus for my family to avoid the inevitable parking
problems. He built an extra wing on the stage so that my family could sit
there. We were hanging around in the back stage area while the Beach Boys were
on. Bill came up to me and said, 'I want you to bring your family up here - I
wanna show you all something.' He brought them around to the back of the
trailers where he had made a whole reception area just for my family: food,
music, drinks - big bottles of it - and antipasti. That was just to die for! Three guys in Tuxedos came out from behind
another trailer with accordion, clarinet and mandolin. They were playing
Italian songs. A lot of people said a lot of things about Bill Graham, but he
was the perfect gentleman."
1976 - Graham
Nash:
"Anger played an important
role in CSNY, but it was rather frustration which caused the cancelling of a
lot of projects. When we start to see things going the wrong way, then Neil
doesn't want to be any part of it. No discussions, he's gone... When we were in
Miami, we were staying at the Mutiny Hotel. Neil and I would go to breakfast
every morning and he’d call me or I'd call him - whoever woke up first. And one
day he called me around breakfast time and said, 'Hey, are you going to
breakfast? Well, I'm not, because I'm in Los Angeles.' He'd left. No
explanation, no discussion, no reason. When we saw each other later on, we
simply didn’t mention it."
1976 - Craig
Doerge:
""Out Of The
Darkness" was a song that I wrote. The music took me a year and a half
to write. I really worked hard on that. It was very classical and David and
Graham wrote the lyrics in 20 minutes in the back of a limousine. And I was a
little pissed off when I heard that. I thought: 'How can you do that, how can you do that so fast, it's not
fair.' But they just were able to do that - they had heard the melody a lot
because they heard me playing it and they knew what I was trying to say. After
"Wind On The Water", a couple of those outtakes and some outtakes
from "Whistling Down The Wire" became known as what we call the
"dirty thirty". About thirty pieces of music… some of them could be
songs. They started spontaneously and ended spontaneously, but they were
anywhere from 2 and a half minutes to 10 minutes. We played together all the
time so the energy-level was very high in the studio. We’d listen back to the
pieces and musically, some of it is right up there with the tracks that were
released… it's just that there weren't any words to them. Once in a while
Crosby would come in and would sing a blues and we’d start playing a take of a
blues number like "Motherless Children". Graham has always
been toying around with the idea of maybe some day going into the "dirty
thirty" tapes and writing some words to them, because the tracks are there.
It would be fun if he did. Some of them could be made into songs. Not all of
them. Sometimes it's just a jam without vocals."
1988 - Joe Vitale:
"We wanted to use real
strings on "Soldiers Of Peace". We had this string band, a
very expensive string band, 'cause it was like 80 people out there. Crosby was
not into this. He didn't want to spend that much money on all these strings
sessions. But he said, 'I'm outvoted, you go ahead and do it.' He didn't even
come to the sessions. We spent several thousand dollars and when we were done -
and they did a great job - the strings were beautiful. David was asked to come
and to listen to what we did. But… there's a piece of equipment in the studio
which will knock something out of tune, so we ran all the strings through this
unit and we brought them ever so slightly out of tune. And then David came to
the studio to listen to it. He has been against this for two or three months,
remember, but he showed up anyway...Well, we played the track back to him and the strings... they weren't horrible, but they were just
enough out of tune, so that you couldn't use them. And we sat there and
listened and nobody said anything and when the song was done we went, 'Oh man,
that was great!’ David just turned to
Graham and said, 'Can I talk to you for a minute out in the hall?' Well, out
they go and we were like cracking up in the studio. And David says to Graham,
'I don't know how to tell you this, but you can't use these strings!' You know, David has perfect pitch. Graham
said, 'Why? We’ve just spent thousands of dollars on this !' And Crosby
replies, 'Because, they’re all out of tune.'
We’d nominated Graham as the fall guy, because he could keep a straight
face the longest and when they came back into the studio, Graham shrugged, 'Hey
guys, I've got some bad news.' And we couldn't take it anymore - we just
cracked up laughing! David was so pissed off that he left for a while..."
