STEPHEN STILLS Grows Up

The trouble I got into tryin’ to live up to what they said I lucked into at twenty five.

—“My Favorite Changes,”

Stephen Stills

Stephen Stills was dining/drinking with his band at a nightclub near Michigan’s Pine Knob Music Theater, the first stop of a new tour with a new set of musicians and in the wake of a new album release with a new record company.

Those old cliches one might normally use in describing such events were absent: No hangers-on. No groupies, except for a few wide-eyed bar maids here and there. No limos, just Ford station wagons parked outside. And in the background, an MOR band brushed away innocuously under the laughter of Stills and the boys who were rehashing the ups and downs of their premiere gig.

premiere gig. Stephen was celebrating the opener by getting pleasantly lit on scotch. Glass in hand, he plopped down at a table where myself, another writer from a Cleveland tabloid and a publicist from Columbia Records sitting. In the past, Stills had been tight in giving interviews. More were planned for this tour, however, because his “skin is thicker,” as he would say later; or perhaps he just needed the ink.

“My way of dealing with things is different,” Stills told the reporter from Cleveland. “It’s called growing up. In my mind, I’ve gone through a pretty natural progression in life. ” A few quick thoughts came to mind: Stills was in his third year of marriage with French singer Veronique Sanson and had a 14-month old son, Christopher Stephen. He had been overtly polite and friendly when he introduced himself to the table.

Now, normally there wouldn’t be any significance in the fact that a joking, polite family man had seated himself at our table. But with Stephen Stills in that role there was—at least in comparison with past reports where he’d been labeled “Uncouth,” “an arrogant superstar,” and “an insecure egotist,” along with tales of booze and drug revelry. Initially, then, I guessed all this would add up to a rock-rebel-goes-mellow story, but as the hours in Stephen’s company began to tick by, it didn’t.

"One of these days. Nett and I are going to make an album together thatll be a monster."

Stills remains a turbulent character. “Out front, I’ve always been a pretty salty cat,” he said. “I still am.” His restlessness surfaces in a variety of ways— in his inability to sit in one position for more than a few moments, in his need to play ten different guitars during a show (and keep another sixty around the house) or in the fact he’ll wear one T-shirt, two western shirts and five different football jerseys in the space of eight hours.

Stills likes to talk about his changes, but then again, going through a whole lot of them seems to be his most consistent quality.

The following day, Stills arrived at the Pine Knob stage ‘several hours before his next show. Though the opener had been ragged, Stephen blamed it on the jitters and confidently told Michael John Bowen, his manager, he wouldn’t be rehearsing with the band. We strolled into his intensely air-conditioned dressing room and Stills sprawled on a couch and placed his hands behind his head like a patient ready to unload to a shrink.

“I really don’t deal with the star syndrome anymore,” he said after the interview was well underway. “I used to. It was part of working it out. I used to get terribly paranoid about it...But I just realize it for the bullshit that it is but at the same time realize the phenomenon that makes it occur. I’m a star only because people think I am and if I’m not, I’m not.

“Jiveism,” he added. “That’s been the hardest thing to overcome. Partly on my own, partly by the British, partly by the press and the kind of trips people get into about music. It’s just really jive. Jive is jive is jive. Trying to get your music past all that jiveness is the challenge.”

In the past Stills has said he wanted deliverance from the “rock and roll circus.” I asked him if he found it. He got up from the couch and leaned against the walk “The circus I was talking about is the.. .hanger-on, the crowd that gravitates to the scene. I .find it dull.” The idea of making the gossip columns with Mick Jagger didn’t thrill him, I ventured? “That’s all glamour magazine stuff, part of the business. And I suppose I’ll always remain a little bit of an enigma because of my distaste for it.

“I do enjoy, though, going out with Mick Jagger,” he continued. “Because we always manage to find someplace and sit there quietly and get drunk and trade war stories. But I could never get into that Hollywood horseshit and who I was with. Jagger realizes it’s a tool and uses it. That’s probably one reason why he’s infinitely more successful than I. But I don’t begrudge him that.”

As the sound of his band rehearsing rose in the background, Stills began to talk enthusiastically about his solo outing and the group he’d assembled. Bassman Chocolate George Perry and drummer Tubby Ziegler, former studio men, would be getting their first large audience exposure. Vocalists/guitarists Rick Roberts, an ex-Burrito Brother, and Donnie Dacus, once a sideman for Stills’ wife, were themselves budding solo artists. Also in the group were organist Jerry Iaello and Joe Lala, percussionist and Manassds grad. Stills himself is playing surprisingly-searing lead guitar these days, unleashing the power of two Marshall amps in many of the 24 songs in their three hour show. It brought the audience to4 its feet and in one of the tw9 encoresj, the band even unveiled an allelectric “Suite: Judy Blues Eyes.”

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STILLS

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When he began talking about CSN&Y—“Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith,” he quipped—a tone of weariness crept into his voice. He ,said he “honestly” didn’t know if the band would ever re-group. Stills claimed Atlantic Records hadn’t backed his past solo efforts well, possibly, he said, as a ploy to pressure CSN&Y into making more albums. It was one of, the reasons, Stills said, he signed with Columbia—“because they took me fdr me.” “I’ve got a real problem,” he would say later. “People seem to think it was one of the greatest fucking groups in the world.”

“A lot of people seem to think CSN&Y should be in the studio, churning out the material,” I said. ■/'■

“Horseshit,” Stills shot back quickly, punctuating it with a chuckle. “Neil and I could never do that. He knows it. I know it. And Neil and I are great friends. One of these days, though, and this is a direct quote from him: ‘Stephen and I are going, to make an album that will terrorize this industry,’ which is absolutely true. We’ll get around to it, when we find the right band we both can agree on. We’ll just go in and make a mpuster.”

There’s another link with his past that Stills doesn’t seem, to be too happy about these days. As a patriarch of a drug culture that surfaced in the ’60’s, he said he feels partly “responsible” for the heavy drug abuse in subsequent years.

“That’s, why I get incensed about people who keep writing about me being a big cokie,” he said. “I mean drugs are...why fuck with people smoking flowers. So what if it makes them a little out of it. Or even blowing a little coke, it ain’t gonna kill ya,..I’m not going to be a hypocrite and defend anything but I feel partly responsible and it kind of makes me feel a little ashamed-.”

Stills walked over to a coat rack, grabbed it firmly and stared straight ahead. “On the one hand I see the danger of dope and on the other hand I’m part of the heathen defense league.” He laughed, then continued seriously. “I don’t want to pontificate about it one way or the other, except in the case of smack. Heroin incenses me. If we go into a whole thing, though, about cleaning up our act, then become like these puritanical figures that made us r^bel and get into it.. .but a lot of kids are figuring out how out of it it is. I’ve buried a couple of good friends and had old friendships dissolve because of drugs. It’s as real of a dilemma as power politics.

“There was always a reckless abandon to the way I did things,” he said. “Consequently I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning how to make records and bullshitting around in the studio. Now I’m trying to apply some of the discipline I learned early in life, and just get it together to use the knowledge a£ quickly and as efficiently as possible.” / ,

With a personality as mercurial as Stills’ had been known to be, I was interested in finding out what his fears were, what kept him up at nights?

“I have the standard fear of failure,” hg’d said. “I’d like to live long enough to do it all and I worry about being killed in a car crash and all that stock stuff. What keeps me up at nightds not any kind of fear, but I’ll sit there and my mind will start churning for a song, a screen play, for an arrangement or a certain business thing. And I’ll just go fucking nuts trying to shut it off.”