Stephen Stills is unwilling to rule out a reunion with Graham Nash and Neil Young, despite Graham Nash‘s recent claims that a CSNY reunion without David Crosby would have no heart.
“I can’t be so absolute,” Stills told The Globe and Mail. “There might be a reason for us to sing together. Maybe the upcoming election. But, at this point, it’s not about would we get together. Should we, is the important question.”
Stills’ response comes shortly after Nash shot down the idea of a three-fourths CSNY reunion in a Rolling Stone interview. “I don’t think that me and Stephen and Neil will ever play together again,” he said. “There’s no heart there. David was the center of it all, as crazy as he was. And my God, he was crazy. But he was the heart of this band. And that’s why I think that if Stephen and Neil and I ever played together, people would be missing Crosby. We would be missing Crosby. It just would be a much colder scene.”
Although they disagree on future reunion prospects, Stills did echo Nash’s claims about the significance of Crosby, who died in January 2023 at the age of 81. “The heart of the band was the collective. The glue that held the harmonies together was David,” he said. “He really had a sense of where that perfect note was that set it apart from the standard three-part harmony.”
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CSNY’s New ‘Live at Fillmore East, 1969’ Shows Supergroup ‘Just Throwing It Down’
The impetus for these recent interviews is CSNY’s freshly released Live at Fillmore East, 1969, which was recorded at the famous New York theater on Sept. 20, 1969. Split between its acoustic first half and electric second half, the album captures the nascent supergroup at the beginning of their tenure, and Stills said their camaraderie and enthusiasm are apparent throughout the recording.
“Doing the acoustic stuff from our first album was half a show. So, what are we going to do for the rest of it?” Stills said. “My idea was to have an acoustic part first, and then the curtains parted and there was the equipment and we went on to play some rock ‘n’ roll. We got the reaction, and we got to have all the glorious fun of playing insufferably loud. And, through that, I got a lot better at lead guitar.”
As for the groundbreaking talent of the era — including fellow folk star Joni Mitchell, who was in the Fillmore audience in September 1969 — Stills added: “We were full of ourselves, but, at the same time, we knew it was new territory. We were just throwing it down, you know?”
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