Stephen Stills Promises 'Startling' Finds From His Archives

Posted on Jan 13th 2010 11:00AM by Steve Baltin
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From Buffalo Springfield to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Stephen Stills and Neil Young have been associated in the annals of music for four decades. Even after having successful solo careers, the two remain linked to many music fans. So now that Young finally released his massive career archives, his good friend Stills is using that as inspiration.

"Neil has been going through his whole life's recording and it's a big to-do," Stills tells Spinner. "And yes, it did inspire me conceptually in it's something an artist that's lived as long as I have and don't intend to be going anywhere soon should do."

What kind of anthology are we looking at here? "I'm talking about everything from my first tape of the 'Voice of America' in Costa Rica when I was about 13 or 15 to the latest thing I cut," he says. "This process takes forever because I've got a room the size of a bus full of tapes of outtakes and jams."

For music enthusiasts and Stills devotees, the words "outtakes" and "jams" are very promising. Does that mean there are some exciting finds in there? "Hell yes, because I found some startling stuff," he says. " Neil just found a bunch of startling stuff from the Stills/Young band. It's gotta be a surprise because I found things that I thought were gonna be great and I put on this tape and it's like 30 minutes of people trying to think of something, giggling and laughing. Then there's another one where I'm warming up to do a guitar solo and the tape's running and it's spectacular guitar playing that needs to be a new song. So yes. I found lots of surprises and some disappointments too."

Wtih Stills planning on releasing his archives and Young promising more where will the Stills/Young stuff end up? "If it was on both, considering the volume of Neil's boxes, I don't think it matters. We might call each other and say, 'This is your song, you should have this,'" he says. "We do have that relationship. But it's a safe bet some of them would end up on both."