CSNY at Nassau Coliseum, 1974

This piece hung in the NY Historical Society Museum Exhibition called "Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution," in New York City from February 14, 2020 through January 3rd, 2021. 

Almost 5 years to the day after their second performance as group at Woodstock, CSNY played Nassau Coliseum. “For me—and I'm only one of four, remember—the best concerts‐on the tour have been the indoor ones, especially the one at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island,” said David Crosby after the tour had ended.

Bill Graham was hired as the manager for this tour of huge stadiums and arenas by CSNY and he employed his west coast go-to artist, Randy Tuten, to create this poster. The tour commenced on July 9 at the Seattle Center Coliseum and featured 30 dates in 23 locations, ending at Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury, New York on September 8. A live album of material performed at this show was released in 2014 called CSNY 1974.

In the two years after CSNY split up the individuals in the band released 2 solo albums each and every one went Gold, proving the group to be appealing commercially apart as well as together. In fact, only the individual Beatles as a group also achieved gold records with regularity after their breakup, reinforcing the notion of CSNY as the American Beatles. The foursome showed little interest in regrouping given their individual success, but with the real Beatles defunct and Bob Dylan not touring, public enthusiasm remained strong for CSNY as the new counterculture leaders to record and/or do concerts together

The CSNY 1974 stadium tour set the precedent for every similar outing to follow. Bill Graham would work in the same capacity for the Rolling Stones on their American tours of 1975, 1978, and 1981, adding more stadium dates with each subsequent excursion. As lucrative stadium tours with their large audiences became more feasible during the 1970s, so did live albums from those tours (Frampton Comes Alive) became equally more lucrative. Rock was solidly big business now, coming a long way from Woodstock.