From left, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, and David Crosby, photographed by Henry Diltz in West Hollywood in 1969 for the cover of *Crosby, Stills & Nash,* their debut album (later nicknamed the “Couch Album”).

The singer Cass Elliot in Laurel Canyon, 1968. The neighborhood was the “ideal setting for musicians to co-mingle [and] cross-pollinate,” Diltz writes.

*Top,* getting ready for a CSN&Y concert in Minneapolis, 1970; *above,* Crosby, Stills, and Nash in Big Bear, California, 1969.

Nash with Joni Mitchell on the road to Big Bear, 1969. “Joni and I had a great love affair,” Nash once told Diltz.

Crosby in Minneapolis, 1970, *top,* and in Agoura Hills, California, 1966, *above.*

Stills plays his Gretsch White Falcon guitar at home in Surrey, 1970.

*Top,* CSN&Y perform at Balboa Stadium, in San Diego, 1969; *above,* an outtake from the “Couch Album” photo shoot, 1969.

Live from Laurel Canyon

A new book of photographs by Henry Diltz chronicles the story of the band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, America’s own Beatles

By Mark Rozzo

“The feeling was just pals hanging out,” the photographer Henry Diltz says of the February 1969 shoot that yielded the cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the first album by one of the world’s first supergroups. “Those were my friends—the people I hung out with and smoked grass with.” Thanks to Diltz’s indelible photograph—three guys on a ratty couch on the porch of a little white clapboard house—that record became forever known as the “Couch Album.”

It also fixed David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash in the public imagination as a trio of friendly neighborhood rock gods (from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies, respectively) who had a supernatural ability to bring front-porch intimacy to stadiums and arenas and festivals—including Woodstock, where they played their second-ever live show, joined by Stills’s old Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young, in front of, oh, about 400,000 people. “We were scared shitless,” Stills said of the occasion.