April 28th, 2000 Entertainment Weekly Issue#537/8 This cartoon and blurb appears in this issue: Between the Lines The Inside Scoop on the Book World by Matthew Flamm Genius Memoirs? They have an album and a tour. Now all Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young need to make their comeback complete are a few book deals. According to his agent, David Vigliano, Stephen Stills is mulling over offers for his autobiography, For What It's Worth. Not to be outdone, David Crosby began circulating a proposal, Since Then, a sequel to his 1988 memoir, Long Time Gone. But following a recent New York Post gossip item about the band member's competing projects, Crosby's agent, Al Lowman, decided to "withdraw the book until the playing field is clear." According to sources, Graham Nash's proposed biography has been tabled for the same reason. Still to be heard from: Neil Young, whom publishing insiders doubt will ever produce a book, despite a contract he's had with Villard for years. "It's not currently scheduled" was all Random House spokesman Tom Perry would say....   •I am proud to announce that www.suitelorraine.com has just been awarded the LEGACY CHOICE AWARD - for Excellence and the SUPER SEVENTIES CLASSIC AWARD. The awards are displayed on the CSN Online Site Map. •Neil Young's official website has been launched @ www.neilyoung.com •Neil's new solo record has just been released, entitled "Silver and Gold". It has been receiving rave reviews; Rolling Stone gave it 4 1/2 stars. •Stephen Stills appears in the JUNE issue of GUITAR PLAYER Magazine The article is called: "Playing fast is not necessarily best, Stephen Stills told GP readers in the Jan '76 issue. "It's what you play when. Basically, I'm a blues cat, and one well-placed blues lick can just rip your heart out. That's the theory I work on." As a key member of Buffalo Springfield, Stills proved the validity of his theory by adding super-sustained, creamy, fuzzed-out solos to several of the band's tunes, including "Questions," "Uno Mundo," and the majestic "Special Care," - which inspired this month's snapshot. (These three songs appear on Last Time Around, an album that perfectly captures the restless energy of American rock in 1968.) To emulate Stills' fat, soaring tone, roll off the highs on your neck pickup, and use an overdrive pedal to stun your amp's preamp section. Make the slide from C to F (bar1) controlled and even. In a mere eighth-note, you want to pass through a total of eight pitches with a sense that you've heard them all. Andy Ellis - Senior Editor of Guitar Player 04/26/00 INTERVIEW WITH NEIL YOUNG March 17, 2000 at Austin’s Driskill Hotel By Jody Denberg KGSR 107.1 Radio Austin http://www.kgsr.com/frames.html Here are some CSNY related excerpts from this NEIL YOUNG interview. Neil discusses the CSNY 2000 tour, Buffalo Springfield Boxed Set etc... Q:Was your reunion with CSN, was it sparked by putting together a Buffalo Springfield project that you were working on? A:Well, the project was pretty well complete and I wanted Stephen to come up to the ranch and check it out, see what we’d put together and see how he felt about it and what perspective he could bring to it. And we also had Richie Furay come in and listen to it. And so it -- you know, we listened. It’s a four-CD box set. And it’s -- like all of my box sets I’m working on, it is in chronological order. So it doesn’t go in the order that the records were released in. It goes in order of the recordings. So you have -- at the beginning, you have all these demos that we did when we first came to L.A. for the first Buffalo Springfield record. And then it goes into the -- I believe, the mono masters of the Buffalo Springfield record that we made -- that Stephen and Richie and I mixed. And then it -- and then there’s a lot of -- you know, a fair amount of unreleased Buffalo Springfield things in there. But it’s chronological. So the thing is, you hear us, you hear us as just, we’re just kids. You hear us coming together and you can hear the sound growing. And then you can hear it kind of breaking up and falling apart. You know, it’s kind of a sad thing. And then at the end, you know, the group -- they sound pretty watered down and it’s pretty obvious that it’s not the same group as it was in the beginning. And, you know, people come and go, changes and stuff. And so when Stephen and I listened to it, we realized, you know -- I mean, we’re laughing and crying and carrying on, talking to each other while this thing’s playing. And we realized that, you know, we really didn’t reach our potential at all. So that was a dawn on us: that we both knew that we hadn’t reached the potential of what we could do together. And so we -- you know, he played a song for me, a new song that was a great song and asked me if I wanted to play on it. So he -- you know, when I went down to L.A. a couple of -- oh, a month or so later, I played on the song and I played on a few other ones. And I just kept listening to the tapes and I played on them. And it was like, not really the way I like to do things. I like to play all at once and everything, so...But these songs that they had were done. And so I played on them. And then we played on some new ones where we played all at once. And that’s more fun. But it’s kind of like a process of coming back together again. I mean, working on each others’ tapes and then creating new stuff and then, you know, finally we had what we thought was an album. But in the making of it, I -- I only worked on their songs at first. I played on about 12 or 13 of their songs before I played any of my own songs. And then I just played them the 14 songs or so that I’d recorded for Silver and Gold, which had no title at the time or anything. And I said, “Just go ahead, just take whatever ones you want. Just take however many. Just take ‘em. We’ll sing on ‘em and we’ll -- you know, we’ll see what else they need, if anything, and then we’ll put them on this record. They’ll match everything…” ‘cause that’s the way we did this record, basically. So it’ll work. So they chose the ones they chose. Q:And then what happened in the meanwhile to the Buffalo Springfield box set? A:We finished it and it’s -- I believe it’s coming out pretty soon. Q:You know, it’s good to hear you sing about playing with Buffalo Springfield again. So many of us, we think of Neil Young as being in the moment. And yet, this is kind of a nostalgic song. Could Buffalo Springfield really ever play together again? A:Well, I’m sure they could, but I don’t know if they will. I mean, I don’t know if that’ll ever happen. It’s more like a musing of, you know, situation, just, you know, reflecting. Sunday afternoon philosophy. Q:Last spring, you did the solo tour. This spring you did the tour with CSNY. What do you enjoy about playing with a band versus playing, as you say, solo, which you’ve done for 30 years? A:Well, there’s another one, too. There’s playing in the band that I lead. There’s three things here, you know. And playing by myself is simple, but -- and it’s great and it’s direct and it’s really rewarding. But, you know, after playing about 40 shows like that, I can hardly -- you know, I get, I get kind of boxed in. I feel like everybody’s looking at me all the time. It’s kind of like you’re -- you sit out there for two hours and you’re the only one out there. And after a while, that kind of adds up. So it has a -- even though it’s fun, after a while I think my nerves get a little shattered. So I stop doing that. Then, you know, the playing with CSNY, when I was doing that, it’s really great. I mean, because I’m part of a band. I’m -- I don’t have to be in the front line all the time. I’m not always singing the lead. Sometimes I don’t even sing in the song. I just play my guitar. And that’s a lot like the way Buffalo Springfield was. And I like that, because that’s where I really feel comfortable is in a band where I’m not the leader of the band. Then you have Crazy Horse where I am the leader of the band. And I like to get down and play with them. So I have to have -- you know, keep changing from one thing to another to keep it -- you know, to keep the balance going. And also, as long as the songs keep going, that’s what dictates the pace of the change is the arrival of the new tunes. Q:Neil, how did you and David and Stephen and Graham come up with a set list for the CSNY reunion tour shows? Seems like that was a big challenge. A:Well, we rehearsed a lot and we learned a lot of songs. And then, you know, it was -- we had to -- we worked on an acoustic set. We worked on -- we decided on the form of the show, having that opening set an electric set, and then taking a break. It just all kind of came together one night. We had to pace it because we knew it was going to be long. So we had to figure out a way to -- you don’t want to come out -- we were thinking of coming out acoustic, but we nixed that idea of playing acoustic when we came out in favor of playing with the band so that we could, you know, introduce the band and kind of get everybody loosened up. It was almost like an opening act, our first set. It’s about an hour long. And then we took a break and then played the acoustic set, about an hour long acoustic set. And then instead of -- our problem was taking the break, another break. We didn’t want two breaks. So we came up with this seventh inning stretch, which was kind of a fly by the seat of the pants kind of concept thing for the audience to get into. And it worked. So we got Harry Carey singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame and everything on the videos. And we’re all out there just hanging out, while they’re changing the set. And Crosby’s out there carrying on. And, you know, it’s just -- we’ve got these little tents we can go into that are out there like the Dead used to have. So we managed to put it together, put their songs in there, you know. It wasn’t that hard, really. Q:Did the set list vary at all throughout the tour? A:At first we stuck with pretty well the same set list. And then we varied it a little bit. And then we kind of got into another groove for a while. And then we started adding new songs after we started getting really confident. We added Eight Miles High. That was the first one we added, which really rocked. And it was cool to be playing that with Crosby. It was like the Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds playing Eight Miles High with the Hollies singing along, you know. (Smiles) I’m telling you, that was pretty good. No, we just -- you know, we try to, we try to mix it up as much as we can, but it’s a long show. And soundchecks are -- you know, they take a little bit out of you. So you want to save what you have for the show, you know. Q:How did you feel about the public’s response to the new songs from Looking Forward and the album? A:Well, you know, I think the album was a disappointment because I don’t think it reached out. For some reason, it didn’t, it didn’t really get the acceptance that I hoped it would. But as far as the music goes, you know, my songs that they picked from my selection from -- that I had recorded for Silver and Gold, they took three of my songs. I thought they came out really well. I like the way they sang on ‘em and everything. It sounds really good to me. And the funny thing is, when those songs were taken from the mix, were taken from the other songs, they -- the songs that were left were -- you know, there were too many songs. And they were all -- originally there were too many songs for Silver and Gold. And they were all struggling and kind of holding each other down. And when CSN picked those three songs out and then I was left with the other ten or eleven, they suddenly just fell into place. It was really a great feeling, because I was struggling with trying to put it together. And when they took those three songs out, it just -- everything else was left. I mean, I just wrote them out in order of what I wanted to hear and that was it. It never changed again. The running order was right. Everything was right. So there was something about it that was really right, where you give something away and you get something back. You know, it’s like a reward for sharing or something. I don’t know. It’s a good feeling. Q:Do you think you’d ever tour again with CSNY or make another record? A:Sure. No reason not to. It’s like returning to the mothership now. •David Crosby will be a guest 05/28/00 on CSPAN's "Booknotes" segment, as an author. He will discuss his new book "Stand and Be Counted". 04/24/00 In this issue of Pollstar Magazine, Stephen Stills is listed under the "Exclusive Agency Signing's". He signed as a solo act with ICM (International Creative Management). •Here's hoping this is a "sign" ;-0 that Stephen is perhaps about to embark on some solo dates! Whether they be corporate dates, one-offs, casino gigs or a mini solo tour. This is good news. •Also in this issue, CSNY Tour 2000 is maintaining it's National #2 position on the Concert Pulse Chart in Pollstar. •Out of 30 dates tabulated so far, here are the averages: Average Gross: $1,201,254.00 Average Tickets: 15,877 Average Price: $75.66 •The Crown Jewel so far, (and I do not think any of the other dates will surpass it), MSG-Madison Square Garden which came in as follows: 04/03/00 & 04/04/00 100% capacity both nites=37,380 tickets sold in NYC! Gross: $2,770,888.00 Damn! and of the 8 shows I saw this tour... the Garden shows were the HOTTEST! Nothing like a full house and a hot New York crowd. 04/23/00 In The New York Times Magazine section, there is an article about VH1 and their "Behind the Music" series. It discusses how it is the network's highest rated show. A large photo of David Crosby is shown at the top of the article, from his own episode of BTM, and there is a brief mention of him in the article.   04/22/00 David Crosby participated in the Earthday 2000 celebration in Washington DC. His performance was broadcast in the USA on the cable network, CSPAN. David looked and sounded great! He performed 3 solo songs 01. Long Time Gone 02. Dream for Him 03. Kings Get Broken (brand new song!) Later he played with James Taylor and Carol King.