Credit: Far Out / Atlantic Records
Sat 19 September 2026 21:15, UK
If you want to become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, then you’ve got to be able to overcome the fear of performing in front of large audiences, and this is arguably the hurdle at which so many artists fall short of achieving stardom.
Personally, I’d be shitting myself if I were asked to perform to an audience of ten of my closest friends, so it’s probably for the best that my preferred method of communicative entertainment is through the written word. To be performing to approximately 10,000 people would be the stuff of nightmares for many people, myself included, and stretching beyond these numbers feels somewhat incomprehensible.
Surely only a madman would put themselves forward to perform anything bigger than this, let alone for their second-ever show, but that’s exactly what Crosby, Stills and Nash did early on in their career as a supergroup. Formed in 1968 after they’d all come to the end of their tenures in other projects, they immediately set about recording a debut album which would be released in May 1969, going on to become a landmark release in folk rock.
They did this instead of focusing on immediately going out on the road, presumably to ensure that the set they had would be completely water-tight, but after the album started to gain traction, they were encouraged to begin touring the material they’d made together. Granted, all three of them already had plenty of experience between them when it came to performing to larger audiences, but perhaps they had bitten off more than they could chew by playing to a crowd of roughly half a million people so early on in their time together.
This was the estimated attendance of Woodstock 1969, which Crosby, Stills and Nash were booked to perform at despite barely having existed prior to the festival taking place, and as you can probably imagine, this was the most daunting thing they’d ever exposed themselves to in their careers to date.
Admittedly, the band were performing at the unholy hour of 3am on the Monday morning, four days into the legendary festival, and so people may well not have been as attentive as they might have been earlier on in the weekend. That said, Stephen Stills still addressed the audience to inform them that they were utterly terrified about the prospect given their infancy as a group.
“This is only the second time we’ve ever played in front of people, man,” he told the crowd, “We’re scared shitless!”
Further reading: From The Vault
The band ended up playing two sets, one acoustic and one electric – they were joined by newly recruited bandmate Neil Young on the latter – and managed to stretch their scant repertoire out to an hour in total, which isn’t bad going for a band playing only their second show and running entirely on the adrenaline of such a frightening scenario.
The band evidently overcame their fears and came out unscathed, but by 3am, you can rather imagine that the hordes of hippies were either flagging or totally zonked out of their minds to the point that any soundtrack would have been acceptable for the circumstances.
That being said, you don’t hear of any other acts doing this for their second-ever show, and there’s probably a good reason for it. Crosby, Stills and Nash just happened to be competent enough for it to work in their favour.
