“ Jimi Hendrix loved the way I sang. We would have been a two-guitar band. It would have been just great.”

STEPHEN STILLS looks back on a rollercoaster career that has seen him survive superstardom, booze, drugs and cancer to enjoy his current renaissance Interview by Rob Hughes

The summer of 1971 was a testing time for Stephen Stills. Latest album Stephen Stills 2, despite a rapid ascent up the US charts, had come in for a fair bit of criticism from the music press, mainly for its liberal use of brass, R&B and some highly ambitious, grandiose epics like Open Secret and Bluebird Revisited. This wasn’t the Stills they’d come to know, the flashing blade with the flashing chords rooted in the poetic traditions of folk and blues. The acoustic guitar wizard and one quarter of harmony central, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. This was Stills ranging far and free, unlocking his inner Otis Redding. Hurt but undeterred, and true to the nature of a man with expansive appetites, he set out on a 52-date tour of America, backed by The Memphis Horns.

The first gig in Seattle was a disaster. Thanks to the recent closure of aerospace giant Boeing, the city’s largest employer, only 3,000 people turned up in an auditorium fit for five times that number. A crestfallen Stills did what most would do in the circumstances: he got blind drunk. It set the mark for the rest of the tour, Stills often taking to the stage utterly sozzled, “singing sharp and playing flat”. He was also still mourning the collapse of his recent affair with singer Rita Coolidge, the Indian girl in David …

by Rob Hughes
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