Graham Nash had already charted a series of hits with the Hollies when one day in 1968 he got together with friends at Joni Mitchell’s house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles.
Steven Stills, whose group Buffalo Springfield had recently broken up, informally played a new song with David Crosby, who had recently left the Byrds. Nash asked to hear it twice, then joined in. The trio could hardly believe the sweet blend of voices they created.
Crosby, Stills and Nash — with the on-again, off-again participation of Neil Young — formed a volatile partnership that produced several songs now indelibly woven into American cultural memory of the 1960s and ‘70s.
Eight years after the final dissolution of the group, and a year after Crosby’s death, Nash, 82, is touring behind his first solo album in seven years. He plays the Pageant on Thursday.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke with Nash about his deep catalog of songs and the perspective he brings to his solo performances today.
Jeremy D. Goodwin: You were in a band, the Hollies, that was good enough and popular enough to eventually be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — and you dropped it in a heartbeat after you first sang with Stephen Stills and David Crosby. What did you hear that made a leap like that make sense to you?
Graham Nash: Magic. David and Stephen and I first sang together in Joni [Mitchell’s] living room. They were trying to get, like, an Everly Brothers thing together as a duo. David said to Stephen to play me the song they were doing. So they, in two-part harmony, played “You Don't Have to Cry.”
They got to the end of it. I said, “Do me a favor. Play it one more time.” They looked at each other, they shrugged, and they sang it one more time. It got to the end and I said: “I'm pretty decent at what I do. Do me a favor. I'm not crazy. Play it one more time."
When they started [and I joined in], 45 seconds in, maybe a minute into the song with three-part harmony, we had to stop and we had to laugh. We had never heard a blend like that when we put our three voices together as one voice. That was the magic that created it. And I knew that I would have to go back to England and leave the Hollies and come to America and chase that magic sound.
Goodwin: You’ve been a part of several artistically and commercially successful collaborations. Now it’s just your name on the album cover and the marquee. How’s life as a solo artist?
Nash: It's fantastic, actually. I have a tremendous amount of freedom. There are not three of us or four of us trying to figure out whose songs we're going to do. I know exactly what I need to do. I want my audience to know two things. One, I want to be there. I want to be there actually singing for them. I don't want to phone it in. I don't want to do it half-assed. I want to be there. And secondly, even though I have sung lots of those songs that they want to hear, you know, “Teach Your Children” and “Our House,” etc., I'm going to sing it with the same passion I had when I wrote the songs. And I think my audience deserves that.
Goodwin: You’ve described “Now” as your most personal album. How so?
Nash: I usually find myself either being in love or totally pissed off with something, and the age when I made that record, I was 80. I didn't think I would ever be able to fall in love again, and I did, and it was a tremendous feeling. And I married the woman that I was in love with.
On the other side of the glove, there are songs like “Golden Idols,” which talk about Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA Republicans and “Stars and Stripes,” which is a song about how Donald Trump destroyed the truth with his idea of alternative facts. There are no alternative facts. Either something happened or it didn't.
Goodwin: You’ve been singing about politics for a while, whether it’s the police in Chicago or something else.
Nash: Yes, indeed. “Chicago” is another one. One of the things that's amazing to me, although I did it deliberately, I always want to write songs that are relevant right now and will be relevant in 20 years from now. And songs like “Immigration Man” and “Chicago/We Can Change the World” and “Military Madness,” they're all still here. Those songs are still relevant today.
Goodwin: There are a couple of full-circle moments on the new album. There’s the track “Buddy’s Back,” which you recorded with your old partner in the Hollies, Allan Clarke.
On the 1982 song “Wasted on the Way,” you’re singing as a barely 40-year-old man, looking at his life and saying, ‘Things are great, but I keep thinking about the things I didn’t do, the chances I didn’t take.’ That song came out 42 years ago. Would you make some of the same observations today?
Nash: I would. I really wrote “Wasted on the Way” about the four of us [in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young] and how much time we had wasted, how much love we had wasted amongst each other. We were four very strong individuals with good voices and writing ability. And it was very difficult to get, to get one decision out of the four of us.
I wish that we had done more. I wish we had made more music. I wish we had made more love.
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