Fire And Ice recounts the stories behind four famous rock albums made in 1970

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Backstage at the PNE Coliseum in Vancouver, Joni Mitchell was giggling and holding hands with James Taylor, her shybut-hunky new boyfriend. It was the afternoon of Oct. 16, 1970, and the times were a-changin' once again.

The Beatles were calling it quits, Simon & Garfunkel had agreed to part, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were in the process of tearing their band to pieces after 18 months as "the American Beatles."

In the midst of the superstars' acrimony, a new musical category — Soft Rock — was taking root.

That October night, Mitchell would bring the little known Taylor on stage at the benefit concert she was playing to raise money for a new pro-environment movement. Taylor, who projected a lost innocence that made women swoon, performed several songs from his new album SWEET BABY JAMES.

Among the enthusiastic audience were Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson, who were in town shooting the movie Carnal Knowledge. Garfunkel's acting career was the main reason he and Paul Simon had ceased to be Simon & Garfunkel after their hugely successful BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER album.

The concert raised $17,000 for Greenpeace, an impressive sum at the time. By the end of the year, Taylor would be hailed as the Father of the Singer/Songwriters.

Mitchell had glommed on to Taylor at the Mariposa Festival outside Toronto that summer. She had just dumped Graham Nash, sending him a telegram that read, "If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers." Nash was so devastated, he could barely bring himself to perform Our House, a song he had written for Mitchell.

Meanwhile, Mitchell was showing her homemaker side, knitting Taylor a sweater vest, which he wore with pride. But Taylor's moodiness and his heroin addiction were too much for her, and the affair sputtered and died.

In Fire And Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970 (Da Capo Press), David Browne, a former editor with Rolling Stone magazine, unearths the musical, cultural and political shifts that made the year so significant in pop history. Browne tells the story through the year's bestselling albums: LET IT BE by The Beatles, CSNY's DEJA VU, Simon & Garfunkel's BRIDGE OVER TOUBLED WATER and Taylor's SWEET BABY JAMES.

Even those who lived through it will be impressed by Browne's research, which shows what a dark time it was.

Homegrown terrorism was on the rise in the U.S. The Weathermen and other radical offshoots of the anti-Vietnam war movement were responsible for more than 4,000 bombings from January 1969 to spring 1970. There were 20 bombings a week in California alone over that period. In New York, explosive devices were set off at three buildings on Wall Street, as well as Macy's department store and the RCA Building, among other targets.

After four students taking part in a demonstration at Kent State University were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard, young people were in need of the "reassuring hug quality," as one critic put it, that made Taylor's songs so right for the times. Kent State was also responsible for CSNY's chilling Ohio, written by Neil Young, which closes with David Crosby wailing "how many more?"

As Browne shows in this engaging book, CSNY could be the biggest dopeheads ever to strap on electric guitars. Nash himself called the band "The Frozen Noses," a reference to the mounds of cocaine the foursome ingested in making DEJA VU, their first album.

On tour, the band pretty much defined ego-tripping. For their week of shows at the Fillmore East, they demanded a Persian rug be placed on stage. To the stagehands' fury, the rug was installed. Nobody dared say no to CSNY.

CSNY were sloppy on stage, and the tempo of their songs often speeded up as the drugs kicked in. Nash and Crosby made the wisecracks and the dope jokes. Young and Stills struck gunfighter poses as they traded off solos. The solos were worked out so that each played the same number of bars, exactly. It was the only way to avoid screaming arguments.

After the depressing LET IT BE, the Beatles began releasing Solo Albums — another new category. None of these were anything like as good as the music they made together. On Dec. 31, 1970, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr received written notice that they were being sued by Paul Mc-Cartney for excluding him from his "proper share" of the partnership — a fitting way to end a tumultuous year.