You can always boot (and pin) older kernels, that should not prohibit the rest of the upgrade.
Again, I don't see how installing the old version first would help: If the new version doesn't work on the added node, you can just take your time to resolve the issue there. If it works, you can migrate your VMs and upgrade the existing nodes one by one. If there are issues on the existing nodes with the new version, you can take your time to resolve these, because the guests are running on the new node.