Last February, Stephen Stills joined bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash in announcing that they’d be removing their music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young, who was spearheading a protest of podcaster Joe Rogan’s “dangerous” anti-vaccine misinformation.
“While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during the global pandemic has deadly consequences,” the trio wrote at the time. “Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music—or the music we made together—to be on the same platform.”
So it came as a surprise to see Stills, a year and a half later, sharing the stage with—and helping to raise millions of dollars for—notorious anti-vaxxer and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week.
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Reached for comment through a spokesperson, Stills told The Daily Beast: “I support President Biden. I was there as a guest to support Eric Clapton who performed.”
Stills was photographed arm in arm with Clapton at the private fundraiser in Brentwood, California. But unlike Clapton, who has been outspoken in his opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine and has even refused to play venues where vaccination is a requirement to enter, Stills has previously seemed to be aligned with Crosby, Nash, and Young on the issue that has dominated RFK Jr.’s primary campaign against President Biden.
Just before the Spotify boycott, in January 2022, Nash publicly pushed back on Kennedy for using his song “Chicago (We Can Change the World)” in a promotional video for an anti-vax rally he was holding in Washington, D.C.
“I do not support his anti-vaccination position as the history of the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines is well documented,” Nash said at the time, adding, “I believe in science and facts, and do not support such blatant disregard for either, nor for my rights as a musician.” His manager indicated that a cease-and-desist letter would follow.
Nash later revealed that bandmate David Crosby died after contracting COVID-19. “After three days of rehearsals, he felt a little sick. And he’d already had COVID, and he had COVID again,” he said on a podcast this past April. “And so he went home and decided that he would take a nap, and he never woke up.”
Ironically, Crosby wrote one of CSN’s most iconic songs, “Long Time Gone” about the 1968 assassination of RFK Jr.’s father, Robert F. Kennedy.
“It was written the night Bobby Kennedy was killed,” Crosby wrote in the liner notes for a 1991 box set. “I believed in him because he said he wanted to make some positive changes in America, and he hadn’t been bought and sold like Johnson and Nixon—cats who made their deals years ago with the special interests in this country in order to gain power. I thought Bobby, like his brother, was a leader who had not made those deals. I was already angry about Jack Kennedy getting killed and it boiled over into this song when they got his brother, too.”
