Photo By Mitchell Weinstock [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Stephen Stills
By Hunter60
“I feel like I am just learning how to play the guitar. I mean, really learning to play the guitar …”
Stephen Stills
There are some musicians that labor long and hard for the limelight and there are those who have phenomenally long-lasting careers where they stand just to the side of center stage. Musicians who you may recognize when someone mentions their names or perhaps that one or two solo hits they may have had and yet you may never mention them when you talk about guitar heroes or influences. Stephen Stills is such a musician. He has been a member of two very influential and popular late sixties and seventies acts and is known as much for his complete and smooth harmonies as is for his intricate guitar work and ability to write a timeless song.
But there is no denying that Stills has earned his place in rock and roll’s history.
Stills was born in Dallas, Texas on January 3rd, 1945 to a military family. As a child, his family bounced around the Southern United States, putting down roots, briefly in New Orleans, Louisiana. His early travels with his family even took him through the Panama Canal, Costa Rica and Ecuador (where he graduated high school). Stills was fascinated by music at an early age and took to a variety of instruments easily (guitar, mandolin, drums and keyboards) but it was the guitar that captivated his interest the most. Stills went to college briefly in Florida and soon returned to Louisiana State University where he was to have majored in Political Science (something that would become an underlying theme in his music throughout his career). He continued to practice and play his music while in college and working as a stable boy at a race track (his love of horses became a hobby and a underlying theme in a good bit of his art throughout his career). But it was not academics that had his interest. He dropped out early and migrated to New York City, drawn to the nexus of the folk scene that was emerging into American culture.
In New York in the early sixties, Stills did his apprenticeship with a host of small folk-based bands in and around the city at coffee shops and impromptu jam sessions. His first permanent gig came as a guitar player for the Au Go Go Singers, a folk group that became the ‘group in residence’ at the Club Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. The group was the where Stills meet Richie Furay which set the stage for the creation of a sixties icon; Buffalo Springfield.
The Au Go Go Singers toured the Northeast of the United States and Canada. During one tour of Canada, a group by the name of The Squires opened for them. The Squires lead guitarist was a kid by the name of Neil Young and the three formed a brief friendship. Shortly after their return to the United States, Furay and Stills were becoming more enamored with the rock and roll scene and Stills left the Au Go Go Singers in 1965 and headed to Los Angeles to seek his rock and roll future.
Stills found session work and occasional gigs with local bands in his early days in LA. He even did an audition for the television show, The Monkees. Although he was passed over for the part, his friend Peter Tork was cast in the show. According to Geoffrey Stokes in his ‘Rock Of Ages: The Rolling Stone History Of Rock and Roll’, he was not cast because of his ‘imperfect teeth and incipient baldness’. Stills began to call Furay who was still on the East Coast and pestered him to relocate to California. Furay eventually relented and soon reunited with Stills. The pair spent their time writing songs and playing the occasional gig when on one particular afternoon, Stills spied a hearse cruising around town with a Canadian license plate. Stills recognized the hearse as Neil Young’s and flagged the vehicle down. Stills, Furay and Young formed Buffalo Springfield (originally called The Herd) shortly afterwards adding bassist Bruce Palmer and drummer Dewey Martin to the lineup.
A year later, in 1967, the band released their self-titled debut and their solid, Stills penned hit, ‘For What It’s Worth’ threw them into the national spotlight. ‘For What’s It’s Worth’ is considered by many to be one of the greatest protest songs ever written. Although despite persistent chatter and rumor, the song was actually written about street riots in Los Angeles in 1966 and not the Vietnam War.
Local gigs lead the band to open for The Byrds where Stills met David Crosby, another figure who would become very prominent in his career. Despite their enormous debut success, Buffalo Springfield was a clash of egos and rampant drug use and the band was doomed practically from the beginning. By the time of their third album ‘Last Time Around’ released in 1968, the group had collapsed.
Stills rebounded quickly with work on 1968’s classic ‘Super Session’ with fellow musicians Al Kooper (Blood, Sweat and Tears) and guitarist Mike Bloomfield (Electric Flag). Stills was called in when Bloomfield failed to show up for the second recording session and Kooper split the record with Bloomfield on side one, Stills taking the over the fret work on side two. The Super Session was not meant as a permanent gig and Stills was soon back out looking for work.
Cass Elliott of the Mama’s and Papa’s invited Stills to an impromptu jam with former Byrd David Crosby and Graham Nash of The Hollies at Joni Mitchells home in 1968 leading to the formation of Crosby, Stills and Nash. The group released their self-titled debut in 1969 (to which Joni Mitchell contributed with the painting of the trio that adorns the albums cover). The album was a huge hit propelled on the strength of the single ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, another Stills penned track (he wrote the song for Judy Collins).
Late in 1969, Neil Young joined the group and in 1970, the group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, released their debut as a foursome ‘Déjà vu’, an enormously popular album (containing the hits ‘Teach Your Children’, a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ and ‘Our House’). From the start, the group was a loose affair designed to allow the members a lot of latitude to pursue other projects and solo work. The group released a live album; ‘Four Way Street’ in late 1970 and Stills also released his first self-titled disc that contained the hit ‘Love The One Your With’. Even though the album had guest appearances by Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton (the only album on which the pair ever appeared together), it was Stills writing and intricate guitar work that made it a hit. Stills told Rolling Stone in 1971 that the song ‘Love The One You’re With’ came out of a party one night with Billy Preston. Preston had been talking about a song he had been writing that contained the line. Stills said, “I asked him if I could pinch the line … he said ‘sure’, so I pinched it and wrote the song”.
He followed up his debut solo work with ‘Stephen Stills 2’ in 1971. By 1972, Stills began to tour and record with his backup band Manassas that contained ex-Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman. Manassas recorded two albums in the early 70’s, again, Stills hitting chart success. Two more Stills solo albums were recorded in the mid-70’s when he signed with Columbia (Stills and Illegal Stills), neither bringing the same level of acclaim of his previous work. In 1976, Stills and Young did the duet album ‘Long May You Run’ with the title track again becoming a hit.
1977 saw Crosby, Stills and Nash reunited for ‘CS&N’ another mammoth disc, selling over 4 million units. Again, the latitude of the group afforded Stills the opportunity to record on his own and Stills released ‘Thoroughfare Gap’, an album that received little fan fare. In 1980, Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded ‘Replay’ and for 1982’s ‘Daylight Again’ which contained the hits ‘Southern Cross’ and ‘Wasted On The Way’.
By the 1990’s, Stills had re-emerged both with Crosby, Nash and Young as well as continuing sporadic solo efforts. Stills continues to tour on occasion as a solo act and joins Crosby and Nash (and occasionally Neil Young) on stage when the band ventures back out on the road.
Stills is still lauded by his fans and critics alike and yet of all of the sixties and seventies era icons, he has managed to have a lengthy career of sterling proportions and yet never quite achieved the legendary status he was due. And Stephen Stills seems okay with that.
“Once you decide that it is the art that is important and not how popular and well received you are, you now longer have an albatross”.
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