‘It can be construed as him being an a**hole’: Graham Nash sticks up for the mercurial Neil Young

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The famously mercurial Neil Young has left more than one project seemingly at the drop of the hat — most recently walking out on a planned Buffalo Springfield reunion in order to work with Crazy Horse again.

Young also famously left a tandem 1976 tour with Stephen Stills, with whom he had been an on-again/off-again member of Crosby Still Nash and Young — notifying Stills via telegram. At least three times during that period, CSNY got together with an eye toward following up their celebrated 1970 debut as a quartet, only to see things fall apart. It would be 1988 before that finally happened, but even then Young refused to tour.

“It can be construed as him being an asshole,” former bandmate Graham Nash says in this clip, “but he’s not. He’s true to the muse — and you have to love him for it.”

Crosby Stills Nash and Young last issued a studio album in 1999. Tours followed in 2000, and 2002. But Young subsequently moved on again. Last year he released not one but two albums with Crazy Horse, but only after flirting with — and then abandoning — the idea of rejoining the surviving members of Buffalo Springfield, his pre-CSNY band, for a full-fledged tour. Instead, there were only a scattered number of 2011 dates.

“Neil only walks out for a very good reason,” Nash says, “and usually its because the muse isn’t there or the timing’s not right. Neil is one of the only musicians I know who stays absolutely committed to the music. If the music’s not there, or if he’s not in the right mood to make it, he won’t do it.”

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