Stephen Stills and Graham Nash Reunite at FireAid

Stephen Stills and Graham Nash performed together for the first time in nearly a decade at the Kia Forum’s FireAid benefit. They broke out the 1970 CSNY classic “Teach Your Children,” backed by the Los Angeles rock band Dawes.

“So pleased to be here, particularly with the great band Dawes, and my partner for so many years, Stephen Stills,” Nash told the crowd. “There’s a very large community here in Los Angeles, home of many, many musicians. Whenever Los Angeles gets into trouble, the musicians are right there. And I’m proud to be one of them.”

Prior to “Teach Your Children,” Stills played the 1967 Buffalo Springfield protest anthem “For What It’s Worth” with Dawes and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell. Stills wrote the song in response to a disturbance that broke out on the Sunset Strip when the city of Los Angeles tried to impose a curfew on young people, but it took on a new meaning in the aftermath of the fire.

The song was a regular part of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash live repertoire, but the group dissolved in 2015 after years of acrimony. Prior to FireAid, the only time Stills and Nash played together after the split was the 2016 funeral of their longtime engineer Stanley Johnston, where they sang “In My Life” with photographer Joel Bernstein. There have been several occasions, however, where Stills played with Neil Young. The most recent one took place at the Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, California on Oct. 5 in 2024.

“I don’t think that me and Stephen and Neil will ever play together again,” Nash told Rolling Stone last year. “There’s no heart there. David was the center of it all, as crazy as he was. And my God, he was crazy. But he was the heart of this band. And that’s why I think that if Stephen and Neil and I ever played together, people would be missing Crosby. We would be missing Crosby. It just would be a much colder scene.”