The ‘Doom Tour’: Incredible footage of CSNY’s wildest chapter caught on camera
The coked-out megalomanical circus that saw David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young storm across America in the first and most decadent superstar open air stadium tour of the rock era was nicknamed the ‘Doom Tour’ by Crosby because of the feuding, the drugs and the fact that a small army of promoters and hangeroners were sucking at their hyper-megastar corporate rock teets like there was no tomorrow.
There had been big rock tours in the past, but CSNY’s extra ginormous 1974 outing—dreamed up by manager Elliot Roberts and put into action by rock promoter Bill Graham—was like plotting a military invasion of each new town that the show moved to. The beachheads were 50,000 to 70,000-seat football arenas, which saw stages erected and massive PA systems hooked up by a legion of roadies.
Other acts on the tour included The Band, Joni Mitchell, Santana and the Beach Boys. The tour was so decadent that they supposedly had pillowcases with “CSNY” embroidered on them! Don’t even ask what the “coke budget” was.
The ‘Doom Tour’ grossed around $11million back when $11m was still a hell of a lot of money, but the principals only pocketed half a mill each after expenses (and the promoters, natch) were paid first. Only Young kept both feet (literally) on the ground, travelling in a bus with his son Zeke and avoiding the insanity.
“Bill called me in my room at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in early ’74,” Nash told The Wall Street Journal about the tour. “Bill said a lot of money could be made, and we knew Bill was used to putting on large events and had just produced Bob Dylan’s 40-date tour. Bill also pointed out that something on this scale had never been tried before, which sounded pretty cool to us.”
“When 50,000 people are feeling the same thing at the same time as you’re playing, it’s this big invisible wave crashing on you. We called that ‘the juice.'”
David Crosby
“FM radio was making rock albums popular,” Nash added. “And many fans saw our tour as another shot at Woodstock, which they either had missed in ’69 or wanted to revisit. The country’s mood had shifted, too. Watergate was coming to a head and kids were fed up with government manipulation. They realized that, in large numbers, they had power. Our band stood for keeping it real, which connected with them.”
It’s a notion that Crosby also agreed on, as he added: “Looking out on the crowds, you could see that people still had the Woodstock vibe and were entranced by the music. But the rush wasn’t the size of the audiences. It was what I felt from them. When you sit across from someone and feel what they’re feeling, it’s a beautiful thing. When you get 5,000 people feeling the same way, it’s a palpable rush”.
When they put together the CSNY 1974 live album a few years back, they included a fantastic extra on the Blu-ray box set, a 42-minute-long excerpt from a video recording made of their show at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, on August 20th, 1974.
It says at the beginning that this was recorded using the 18,000-seat arena’s “in-house” video system and that it was never intended for professional release. Judging from the number of cameras present and the effort involved, this obviously was something seen on the hockey and basketball arena’s large video screens.
Highlights include a superb ‘Déjà Vu’ jam, Nash doing ‘Grave Concern’ from his dark, nearly unknown Wild Tales solo LP and performing Linda Ronstadt’s harmonies as Young does a stunning ‘Old Man’ in what is one of the best performances of the song that I’ve ever seen.
The set list here is ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, Grave Concern’, Old Man’, ‘Johnny’s Garden’, Our House’, Déjà Vu’ jam and ‘Pushed It Over The End’.