Stephen Stills: Just Roll Tape Out In July

In April 1968, after Stephen Stills left Buffalo Springfield but before he joined CSN, the singer-songwriter found himself in New York at a recording session with then-girlfriend Judy Collins. When she finished, Stills wandered down the hall with an engineer and an acoustic guitar. Peeling off a couple of hundred-dollar bills, Stills told the engineer, “Just roll tape.” What he captured at that historic session were the first-ever versions of classics he would later record solo and with CSN, CSNY, and Manassas. Lost for decades, Eyewall/Rhino unearths this extraordinary moment in rock ‘n’ roll history for a collection of unreleased music. JUST ROLL TAPE APRIL 26th 1968 will be available July 10 at regular retail outlets and www.rhino.com for a suggested price of $13.98. “Some you’ll know; some you might not,” Stills says of songs included in this collection. “[T]he tape has been lost to the wind for almost 40 years until Graham Nash discovered it’s existence and urged me to release it. Somehow, it’s found its way back, and these songs now feel like great friends when they were really young.”

After recording these now-historic demos, Stills left the masters in the studio, and they were almost discarded when the facility closed in 1978. Musician Joe Colasurdo, who was rehearsing there at the time, was told by the owner that he could cart off any tapes he wanted to before they cleared the place out. After seeing Stills’ names on several of the boxes, Colasurdo kept them safe until he could find a reel-to-reel machine to play them on. Realizing the treasure he had, Joe began attempting to get the masters safely back into Stills hands, an undertaking that took much determination, and — amazingly — 25 years. In 2003, he was connected to Graham Nash after happening to meet a close friend of his. Nash received the tapes, passed them on to Stephen, encouraging him to release them. The rest is music history, as made by Stephen Stills on JUST ROLL TAPE.