Imagine being Stephen Stills. You’re in Buffalo Springfield, responsible for many of their hits, you’re their leader, but there’s high tensions, due in no small part to creative differences between you and Neil Young. So the band breaks up and you start a new band with the guy from the Hollies and the guy from the Byrds that likes to write songs about threesomes. You bust your ass recording a debut album where you play the majority of the instruments: a real tour-de-force showcase for your talents and it is massively successful, a smash hit. What is your next move? To fill out your arrangements live, you, for some reason, invite Neil Young, the guy who tried to take over to your last band, to join the band. There’s no way he’d do it again, right? Young’s arrival brings even more success to the band: the follow up album you record with him goes to number 1, sells 8 million copies…but the recording sessions were full of conflict and you find yourself butting heads with Neil Young once again. There’s no way he’s going to do it again…try and take control from you over *your* band, right? Neil Young: “I’ll fucken do it again” Then, a month after your album is released, May 1970, the Kent State massacre happens. Neil Young walks into the woods and comes up with “Ohio”. You and the boys put some vocal harmonies over his song, which is more aggressive than anything else you’ve ever recorded. Your record company rushes the song out for release at the same time that “Teach your Children Well” is climbing the charts. You go on an extended tour that summer and by July 1970, CSNY is calling it quits. So, you, Stephen Stills, start a solo career and have success, but your old foil, Neil Young is starting to have hit after hit, becoming a massive star. By the time 1974 rolls around and Young agrees to reunite CSNY for a stadium tour, he is the pretty much the main draw and a precedent has been set: CSNY only happens when Neil wants it to happen. The success of the band you started, the band whose career was started by the excellent record you toiled over in the studio, is now fully dependent on Neil Young being around to pull in a big payday and Neil has had no problem pulling the plug on CSNY at a moment’s notice. Sure, CSN can draw a crowd, but CSNY is another story and that’s how it’s going to go for the next 40 years. Now, reader, I’m sure you’re feeling pretty bad for Stephen Stills. What an outcome for the guy who was supposed to be “it”. Don’t feel too bad…for starters, he’s got tons of money. He definitely treated Neil Young pretty poorly - to the extent that a few of his albums after this one have a Neil Young cover on them as a sort of mea culpa, but also…he managed to get one of Jimi Hendrix’s last solos captured on tape for this album (Good Times Old Times) and then proceeded to bury parts of it under his own organ playing (that’s not a euphemism, get your mind out of the gutter). If you’re still feeling bad for Stills after all that, go ahead and listen to his 1978 album, “Thoroughfare Gap”. Any good will you still had for the man will evaporate in no time - Seriously, you owe it to yourself, as means of better understanding Stephen Stills, to hear “You Can’t Dance Alone” and especially “Can’t Get No Booty”.