Creativity Quote by Stephen Stills

There’s a particular kind of American confidence embedded in the casual logistics of that sentence: one year passes, then it’s L.A., then it’s “try to get a band together.” Stephen Stills isn’t mythologizing the move; he’s tossing it off like a practical errand. That understatement is the point. In the mid-60s imagination, Los Angeles wasn’t just a city, it was a circuit board for ambition, a place where talent got wired into visibility if you kept moving and kept meeting people.

The phrase “try to get a band together” carries a deliberately modest verb for what was, in reality, a high-stakes gamble. Stills frames artistry as assembly, not revelation: find the right bodies, the right harmonies, the right social chemistry. It’s a reminder that the era’s “genius” often looked like networking before the word turned corporate. You hear the subtext of restlessness, too: a year is enough time to learn a scene’s limits and decide the next scene might be bigger.

Context matters because Stills’ career arc helped define the L.A. band-industrial complex: musicians circulating through clubs, couches, and contacts, forming and reforming groups (Buffalo Springfield, then Crosby, Stills & Nash) at the speed of opportunity. The line captures the pre-branding moment when identity wasn’t a carefully managed narrative but a series of bets placed in public. Not destiny, not a master plan; just motion, and the faith that a song can be built out of whoever shows up.