Start Cassandra with Gossip disabled ?

[Biscuit Ninja]

We run an 8 node Cassandra v2.1.16 cluster (4 nodes in two discrete 
datacentres) and we're currently investigating a problem where by 
restarting Cassandra on a node resulted in the filling of 
Eden/Survivor/Old and frequent GCs.

http://imgur.com/a/OR1dk
This hammered reads from our application tier (writes seemed okay) and 
until we determine what the root cause is, we'd like to be able to start 
Cassandra with gossip disabled.

Is this possible?
Thanks
.bN