David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash & Neil Young sit shoulder to shoulder on wooden stools around a forest of microphones. On the far left, Stills plays a gentle riff on a snow-white, wide-body electric guitar. Across from him, Young, wearing a red flannel shirt and a black baseball cap, strums an acoustic guitar and sings "Old Man," from his 1972 album, Harvest.

Young's shivery tenor sounds fragile in the cold dark space of the Convocation Center in Cleveland. But when the other three enter the chorus with swan-diving harmonies - "Old man, look at my life/I'm a lot like you" - the song blooms with fresh meaning. Crosby Stills Nash and Young are no longer the four young bucks who overwhelmed rock in 1969 with pedigree and promise. They are in their fifties, and they sing "Old Man," a reflection on passing youth and lost opportunity, with electrifying honesty. Unfinished business runs deep in those bruised-gold voices.

There is no applause at the end - because there is no audience. CSNY are in final rehearsals for their first concert tour since 1974. Opening night, in Detroit, is four days away. But to hear this band in a big, empty room is to experience magic in its native state. Everything that makes CSNY one of rock's premier melodramas - drugs; feuds; Crosby's 1994 liver transplant and new celebrity as a sperm donor for lesbian moms Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher; Nash's boating accident last fall (he broke both legs); Young'son-off love affair with the whole enterprise - falls away when they just sing and play.

"It's like an archaeological dig - we're trying to find ourselves, the essence of what we do," Young says later. "You can see what CSNY is, how it fits together. And you can see that it's not perfect."

Tonight the group is brushing up on the quiet stuff. "Helplessly Hoping," from 1969's Crosby, Stills and Nash, gets some extra shimmer from Young's harmonizing. "Heartland" and "Someday Soon," two Nash ballads from CSNY's 1999 release, Looking Forward, are robust in performance, potent advertisements for the record's underrated, autumnal-folk charm. When Crosby and Nash pair up for their madrigal-pop showpiece, "Guinnevere," the vocal blend is as clear and precise as hand-cut crystal.

The next day, when CSNY plug in with bassist Duck Dunn of Booker T. and the MG's and drummer Jim Keltner, Stills and Young really go to town. Their friendship dates back to their luminous guitar duels in Buffalo Springfield, and the two rip into "Ohio" and "Down by the River" with scabbardlike riffing. In "Almost Cut My Hair," the guitarists stand toe to toe, rocking their bodies in tandem with each burst of amp howl. "When they start playing in harmony, they're floating in clean air," says Crosby, who is fifty-eight. "They're way up there."Nash, also fifty-eight, has a metaphor of his own. He compares Stills and Young to "two giant stags clashing horns."

"It is playing - it isn't fighting," insists Stills, who is fifty-five. "We're getting real good at our old Buffalo Springfield telepathy." He also quotes something Young said to him about CSNY's reunion: "I want to get back to where we started, before we became famous."

"In Neil's opinion," Nash says on the last day of rehearsals, "CSNY never came close to their potential, in all the shit we've done in thirty years. I think Neil is delighted that what is being uncovered here is a great road band."

That discovery comes late in CSNY's history. The group's collective discography is huge: solo efforts, CSN releases, the Springfield classics, Crosby's early work with the Byrds, Nash's mid-Sixties hits with the Hollies. But as a band, CSNY have made only four albums, one of which was a double-live package, 1971's Four Way Street. Another LP, Human Highway, was started in 1973 but never finished. "When we look at it from our fans' point of view, we must look like dipshits," Nash admits.

Young, fifty-four, feels no guilt. "We're entering a phase that is completely unknown - it fills me with wonder," he says of the arena tour, in which CSNY are playing to sold-out or near-capacity houses in thirty-four cities. "What's gonna happen? Are people gonna like us? I know we practiced real hard. I know we can rock. I'm just looking forward to the time when I can look around the stage and see everybody finally breathing a sigh of relief."That will happen," he adds confidently, "in the first show."

In the beginning, they were three.

David Van Cortland Crosby was born August 14th, 1941, in Los Angeles, the son of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby. He was a founding member of the Byrds, but he was thrown out of the band in August 1967, in the middle of the sessions for Notorious Byrd Brothers. "He thinks he can do anything," Stills says of David. "He's a Leo with a couple of Taurean aspects. And one of them is blinders - and no brakes."

"I am kind of a wild man," Crosby confirms. "I have a pretty good brain, but I'm just off-the-wall. I love what I love, and I love to do it. I eat life in big bites."Crosby talks about his father with a mixture of pride and regret: "He got one of the first Academy Awards they ever gave out, for a silent movie called Tabu [1932]. He was probably at his high point in the business when he did High Noon, for which he got a Golden Globe. But he was gone a lot because he worked on location. I wish I had been closer to him. I think it made me want to go out and seek attention, to be a performer. I always want you to like me.

"I won big and early with the Byrds," he continues. "It gave me a lot of confidence. But it also didn't make me grow up. If I'd had to fight a lot harder to get what I got, I might have been a more mature person - a lot sooner."

Born January 3rd, 1945, in Dallas, Stephen Arthur Stills is the son of a peripatetic entrepreneur and was raised in Louisiana, Illinois, Florida, Costa Rica and Panama. "My father bounced around a lot," Stills recalls. "He'd start something up, be real successful, then get bored and start something else up. That would fail and we would be broke. We must have been broke at least five times, just living in a motel."

At one point, Stills' parents sent him to the Admiral Farragut Military Academy in St. Petersburg, Florida, because, Stills says, "I needed the discipline. I remember it as being great. I loved the drill. It was a relief to have some organization, because my house was always in chaos."

A gifted multi-instrumentalist, Stills played drums in his high school orchestra and studied bass and piano while living in Costa Rica. He was a running buddy of future Monkee Peter Tork on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early Sixties and recorded his first album in 1964 as a member of the Au Go- Go Singers. The following year, Stills met Neil Young for the first time while playing in Ontario with another group, the Company; Young was on the same bill with his own band, the Squires.

Stills and Young's three years together in Buffalo Springfield were a fractious time; each had the talent and will to be a leader. Young even left the group a couple of times before it fell apart in 1968. And while CSN was conceived as a trio of equals, Stills soon assumed a directorial role. "Stephen had a vision," Nash says. "David and I let him run with it." Stills played nearly every instrument on Crosby, Stills and Nash, earning the nickname Captain Manyhands.

Graham William Nash was born February 2nd, 1942, in Salford, a suburb of Manchester, England. His father was a factory worker and, according to Nash, "earned twenty-five dollars a week for his entire life. We were very poor when I grew up." Ironically, Nash is now as successful in business as he is in pop music. A lifelong photographer, he has a flourishing company, Nash Editions, specializing in digital fine-art printing.

A U.S. citizen since 1981, Nash first came to America with the Hollies in the mid-Sixties. "We arrived at the Paramount Theater [in New York]," he remembers, "and it was, 'OK, you're doing five shows a day, two songs.' 'Wait, two songs?' 'Yeah, this is a greatest-hits show. You gotta problem with that?' 'No, but I'm a bit hungry.' [Nash mimes picking up a phone.] 'Send this guy a BLT; make it fast! Next!'

"I thought, 'They like to do business here,' " Nash says, laughing. "In England, if you were recording at Abbey Road at ten o'clock at night and wanted a tambourine, you had to fill out a form in triplicate, pass an act of Parliament, and you'd get a tambourine in four days. Here you got it in four minutes." By mid-1968, Nash was itching for a reason to leave the Hollies and settle permanently in the U.S. He found it courtesy of the late Cass Elliott of the Mamas and Papas, a beloved grande-dame figure and networker in L.A. pop society.

Elliott had already introduced Nash to Crosby in 1967. She was a friend and confidante of both Crosby and Stills, who recorded a three-song demo in the summer of '68 as a duo, the Frozen Noses (a gag name referring to the aftereffects of cocaine use). And according to Stills, she was on hand - prompting the trio and admiring her handiwork - when Crosby, Stills and Nash sang together for the first time, at a party in her Los Angeles home. "They swear it was at Joni Mitchell's house," Stills says, referring to Crosby and Nash. "It wasn't. Joni Mitchell didn't know all three of us. Cass did. She was the queen. And she queened very well."

At Elliott's house that day, Crosby and Stills were duetting on a new, unfinished Stills tune, "In the Morning When You Rise" (a.k.a. "You Don't Have to Cry," on Crosby, Stills and Nash). Nash, listening closely, asked them to sing it again, then a third time. Halfway through the last pass, Nash jumped in with an additional harmony.

"That's exactly when CSN was born," Nash says. "I gave the Hollies a month's notice that I was leaving. Which was December 6, 1968. December 17, I'm in New York with David and Stephen, recording our first demo." Crosby, Stills and Nash was released on Atlantic Records six months later, on May 29th, 1969, and shot into the Top Ten.

But there was a hint of warfare to come when the three decided on a name. According to Nash, Stills wanted to call the group Stills Crosby-Nash, "hyphenated like some English lord's title. I said, 'Your ego may want it that way, but the only combination that rolls off the tongue is Crosby Stills and Nash.' It took awhile to persuade Stephen to go for it."

Nash insists he didn't mind putting his name last. "I've always tried," he says with a totally straight face, "to do what's best for all three of us."

Still, when asked about the lingering problem of compromise, Nash tells a joke that could apply to all three members of CSN: "Have you ever heard Crosby warm up for a show? 'Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.' "

[Excerpt From Issue 838 — April 13, 2000]