A Conversation with Graham Nash – HuffPost 9.25.13

Mike Ragogna: Hi Graham, how are you?

Graham Nash: I’m doing good. I think we’ve spoken before.

MR: Yes, and thank you very much again for that interview.

GN: You’re very welcome.

MR: Your new book Wild Tales, to me is like the who’s who and the what’s what of the music business. You’re like Kevin Bacon. We can play Six Degrees of Graham Nash now.

GN: Yes indeed, oh boy. I think that’s one of the things that publishers really like. They like that it’s my voice, that it feels like I’m sitting in your kitchen talking to you and I was as honest as I could be.

MR: Absolutely. Graham, you’re in the heart of at least a half-dozen important music or otherwise “scenes” including Liverpool at the time of your group The Hollies and The Beatles, Laurel Canyon in LA when that became a happening, the anti-nuclear assembly of artists… So even if you think it’s cosmic, what is your explanation? How do you rationalize all this?

GN: I think that the universe is out to support me. It’s out to reward positive thinking and positive actions. I thoroughly believe in karma and I’ve been an incredibly lucky man all my life because that’s what I expect form the universe. That may be incredibly naive, but it’s very simple to me. I go out and try to do the best I can at every single thing I do. Will I make it a hundred percent? Probably not, but am I trying? Absolutely.

MR: Now this isn’t the type of question that’s evoking ego, but I’m really curious if you had any inkling or feeling deep down that maybe you were supposed to be a contributor, maybe something bigger than “Graham Nash” when you were little?

GN: Absolutely. Since I was ten years old and my father introduced me to the magic of photography and gave me a camera, I started to express myself visually and I knew from that moment that I was a little different from most of my friends.

MR: In the book, you reveal some interesting things that happened in your life like what happened to your father over the camera he gave you, and also in school, how you were punished unfairly. Do you think that was the beginning of your social consciousness?

GN: I think so. I think that was my recognition of a fair universe and an unfair universe and what happened to my father was unfair to me. He didn’t kill anybody, he didn’t wipe out fourteen people with a machine gun on the tube, he didn’t do anything that was that drastic. People had to survive after World War II. It was very bleak in north England after World War II. I don’t know if you know what rationing is, but you had to have a coupon to get butter or milk or bread or, more importantly, toffees and candy!

MR: I guess music is one of the great things in your life that got you through the poverty in your household and the post-war environment.

GN: Yes, music, absolutely, without question, put me in a direction that you can say saved my life, although to me, my life was already safe.

MR: Well, you’d already been given a close friendship with Allan Clarke, and the two of you were able to develop together musically.

GN: I know, isn’t that an amazing story?

MR: Why don’t you go into that? I could recite your book back to you, but it’s best in your words.

GN: I absolutely loved my friendship with Allan Clarke. We discovered girls together, we discovered music. Girls are probably the reason we got into music in the first place. My relationship with Allan was brilliant and then he kind of took a strange turn when I heard me and David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] sing together and I wanted that above everything and my relationship with Allan wasn’t very good for about ten years there. But in the last few years, we have become the friends we were all those years ago.

MR: Deep down, I guess you can’t kill those kinds of roots no matter what you do.

GN: No, it’s true.

MR: Given the way you and Allan sang together, what kind of coincidence was it that you met The Everly Brothers early on?

GN: Are they coincidences or is it just fate? Kismet? What is that? Why me? I often think that, I go back to Salford, where I come from, and half my friends are still in the same job and still hating their job and consequently hating their life, and I have to wonder, what was it about me that made me make the decision to become a musician and how fortunate I was that my mother and father really supported me in my choice, which in the late sixties, was an insane choice. Nobody thought you could make money as a musician. “Are you kidding? That’s a hard, hard life and you should go down the mill or mine where your father did and where your grandfather did. If it was good enough for them, lad, it’s good enough for you!” But my mother and father never let me go for that and I’ll be forever grateful.

MR: And I guess no matter what they could have done to stop you, had they been those kind of parents, you had already been affected by the wonderful strains of rock ‘n’ roll coming over from the States.

GN: Radio Luxembourg, the American Top 40, what a magical place that was on Sunday evenings.

MR: I also wanted to also bring up The Everly brothers because of the irony of the Pie recordings, and you having met them within only a span of six years earlier.

GN: I know, amazing, from meeting them on the steps of the Midland Hotel to recording with them in the studio. You know, there’s going to be an eBook of Wild Tales and I wanted desperately to try and find the cassette I had of me singing with The Everly Brothers in 1992 and yesterday I found it in my archives.

MR: Congratulations!

GN: So I’m going to talk to Phil a little later today and ask him permission to use it in the eBook. How could I be anything but incredibly kind to The Everly Brothers? They were so inspirational to me, and had such a wonderful musical partnership. I feel pretty sure that because I’ve been so kind to them in the book that that they’ll give me permission to use “So Sad,” which is the song I sang with them in Toledo, Ohio in 1992.

MR: There was another duo in your life, and I think this ties into your social consciousness. You were embraced by Simon & Garfunkel. Is it fair to say it’s possible you had seen, maybe even unconsciously, the paradigm for being able to meld the two things you loved, becoming aware of conditions around you and your love of music?

GN: But I also learned something apart from that. I also learned how it would be to have one guitar and two voices singing great songs from the herd. I’d seen Peter, Paul & Mary earlier in the mid-sixties at The Albert Hall in London, so I knew. But I learned from Paul and Arthur the power. Paul Simon is an incredible writer and an incredible guitar player and, of course, Arthur has the voice of the angels. So it was very inspirational to me to see one guitar and two voices move an audience so greatly.

MR: Yeah, and that was something that you took into all the configurations of your groups. Some of the most touching material you do live or even on your recordings is one or two guitars and you guys singing together, harmonizing.

GN: That’s right, the power of the song. No amount of adding drums and bass and orchestras and timpani and effects can make a bad song into a good song. You have to start with a good song. If I can play you a song on my guitar sitting in your kitchen that moves your heart, then it’s a decent song to be played.

MR: I want to bring in a couple of things from later on, especially your life with Joni Mitchell. One interesting Joni story that I never knew to be true–I believe the urban legend version of how Crosby, Stills, & Nash got together was allegedly in Cass Elliot’s kitchen–but really, it was in Joni’s house.

GN: Yes, it was absolutely in Joni’s. David and I see it incredibly clearly. The very first time we ever played was in Joni’s living room.

MR: However, Cass did introduce you to David Crosby?

GN: Oh yes, she was incredibly important in my life. Like I say in the book, she was very much like Gertrude Stein, who in Paris in the twenties and thirties, would have gatherings at her house with different disciplines–with psychiatrists, with architects, with artists, with composers–and they would all sit around and they’d be bullsh**ting all night and doing whatever it is that they did to get high, whether it was a glass of sherry or whether it was absinthe, whatever it was. Cass was very much a Gertrude Stein character and incredibly important in my life. That’s why on every single release that we’ve had on the last twenty or thirty years, I’ve dedicated it somewhere in the artwork to Cass.

MR: Beautiful. One of my favorite paragraphs in the book is how you describe how Cass wanted to be a little bit more from your friendship but you told her no, adding something to effect of, “We’re not going to be just good friends, we’re going to be great friends.”

GN: Yes, we weren’t going to be lovers, but we were going to be great friends. I think in a certain way that took a great deal of pressure off of her.

MR: Now another crowd that you’re in the middle of is The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Poco with Richie Furay, etc. Like I said, you must be Kevin Bacon in your spare time.

GN: I tell you, when I looked down at the manuscript when I finished it, I looked at it and this is what I said, this is completely true. I looked down at the manuscript and I said, “Holy s**t. I wish I was him.”

MR: When you’re Crosby, Stills, & Nash and you’re experiencing all that success as a trio, you then become Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young thanks to Ahmet Ertegun.

GN: Yeah, we had completed the first Crosby, Stills & Nash record, and on that record–which is why he is called by me and David Captain Manyhands–Stephen played the majority of the instruments apart from the drums. He played the bass, he played the B-3, he played rhythm guitar, he played the lead guitar, he did a lot of work on that first one. So when we realized after we finished it that it would probably be a popular record, we knew that we would have to go out and play live. But with Stephen having played a lot of the instruments, how do we do that live? We needed another guitar player. Well, the process was that maybe we would get an organ player to play B-3, so I think Stephen and Dallas [Taylor] went to England to talk to Stevie Winwood about joining up, but he was busy with Traffic, et cetera. We knew that we would have to have another musician to play some of the parts that Stephen had played on the first record. When Ahmet, at dinner with David and Stephen suggested that we get Neil Young, Stephen was appalled, really, because he knew that Ahmet knew what he and Neil had gone through in Buffalo Springfield and how painful it had been for him. He didn’t have a particularly great relationship with Neil at that point, so he was appalled that Ahmet would recommend that Neil join and I was appalled too because we had just spent a couple of months creating what was a fabulous record, the first Crosby, Stills, & Nash record, so I didn’t see the need for another voice. I saw the need for another musician but not necessarily for another voice because four-part is very different from three-part. And I told the boys, “I don’t know who this f**ker is! I don’t know whether I can talk to him, whether he’s going to be my friend, I need to talk to this guy before we make this monumental decision.” So, as I said in the book, I had breakfast in The Village with Neil and he impressed me greatly with his vision, with what he wanted, with what he thought he could bring to the band, and after that breakfast meeting, as far as I was concerned, he was in.

MR: The one thing I always was confused about was the chronology of what went on behind the scenes with Human Highway, the aborted album.

GN: We went to Hawaii all together, Neil had rented this beautiful house on the beach, a big, old, rambling house where the was room for all of us. David had his boat, The Mayan, docked not two hundred yards away in the bay, and we set about rehearsing what was going to be the Human Highway album. We had that song and we had that song title as the title of the album because we thought, “We’ve done 4 Way Street, we’re on this traveling through the universe mindset,” so Human HIghway sounded like an incredible album title, which I still think it is. We rehearsed the entire album, and then, for some reason, and I don’t think anyone can remember, maybe Neil, I should ask him, what happened. Why didn’t we go straight back into the studio and record this album? It was insane. We ended up not talking to each other, we ended up not making music together and the Human Highway album never got made.

MR: Yeah, and it’s interesting because this is a period following what you lovingly called “The Doom Tour.”

GN: Ah, yes, ’74. But I’ll tell you something about 1974. I am probably twelve mixes from the end of a thirty-three song box set of CSNY from 1974. I must tell you, we’ve spoken before, but you don’t know me to the point where my friends know that I don’t brag. I’m not a braggart at all, but having said that, this music on the CSNY 1974 disc will f**king knock you on your ass.

MR: I heard about it from Rick Gershon over at Warner. Sounds fabulous.

GN: It is fabulous. I went recently went all the way to Madrid, in Spain, where there was a meeting of the heads of every Warner Brothers company in the world. I took seven tracks and they just flipped out.

MR: Wow. Were there songs from that tour that you were rehearsing live before you were to go into the studio?

GN: Yes.

MR: Ah, this is going to be brilliant.

GN: Yep. Wait until you hear this album. It’s incredible. And as a producer, I want to put you in the best seat in the house. I want you to be in the tenth row, right in the middle sonically, and I don’t want you to move from that seat for thirty-odd songs. It’s making it as a complete show, because our shows were often four hours long.

MR: Did you also film that performance?

GN: No, but one thing that did happen is that this was the very beginning of video screens in basketball arenas. In 1974, nobody had them except this one place, The Capital Center in Washington DC. They had that technology and they recorded one night and we have it. I’m right now in the middle of working with the video to bring it up to modern standards. I just finished work on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” which is a Neil Young song that he wrote for me, and it’s unbelievable on the video. Technically, it’s a little crude because that technology was a little crude in 1974, as I said, it’d never been done. But I think that if we put it into the historical context then people will forgive the fact that it’s a little funky and be in the moment itself.

MR: Now that you mention it, did Neil write that song for your breakup with Joni?

GN: Yes, he did.

MR: Ah. I always was fascinated by that period, how revealing you and Joni were about your relationships with virtually every song on your first album and some of Joni’s Ladies Of The Canyon material.

GN: Yeah, she was a wonderful, great part of my life and I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to spend a couple of years with this woman.

MR: It seems like you have continued your beautiful relationship with her over the years.

GN: I have and I’m grateful for that. I treated Joni with great respect and great love because not only do I think she’s a genius musically, but look at the way loves. Come on. [laughs]

MR: [laughs] Which now brings me to your photography. Do you think being able to see the world through the camera lens added to your particular brand of creativity?

GN: I knew that when I was ten years old. In my book Eye To Eye, the first portrait in there is one I took of my mother when I was ten and a half years old, and I realized from that moment that I see slightly differently from most people.

MR: Your photos in that book seemed more revealing than most.

GN: Everything I show you or play you or sing for you has to have a reason to exist. I don’t want to waste your time, Mike, we don’t have much time left. Even if you were twenty years old, and you’re not, of course, but even if you were twenty, you’d never know what life is going to throw at you, so I don’t want to waste your time. So every song that I write and sing has to have a reason to exist.

MR: And going back to reasons for existing, there’s your socially conscious activism. Look at all the causes, et cetera, that you’ve been associated with, such as your anti-nuclear efforts.

GN: I’m trying to make the world a better place for me! It’s completely selfish. And I want to make the world a better place for my kids and therefore a better place for you and for your kids. I want to make it better.

MR: But I also think you’re being modest, because maybe the same person trying to make it better for himself wrote “Fieldworker” for Cesar Chavez and “Wind On The Water” about the hunting of whales.

GN: Wait until you hear my new song with James Raymond.

MR: Oh?

GN: It’s called “Burning For The Buddha” and it’s about the hundred and twenty-eight Tibetan monks who have burned themselves to death in the past year alone because of what’s happened between the Tibetan people and the Chinese government. Not an easy subject to write about, but I’ve done it and it’s gone down fantastically well.

MR: This is meant to be complimentary, Graham, but it seems you can’t help yourself.

GN: I can’t! I can’t help myself, I have to shoot off my mouth and thank God I live in a country where I can speak my mind. Half the stuff that we have been involved with in terms of our political agendas, in another country, we would have never been able to get away with it. Didn’t the Chinese execute an activist because of her outspoken issues, and they were mainly women’s issues? She was a woman author and they just executed her.

MR: We do have a lot of political hot topics right now, especially Syria with the “Invade, not invade” question.

GN: Indeed, and the last political song I wrote with James was “Almost Gone” about Bradley Manning. Have you ever seen my video of that?

MR: No, I’ve got to go check that out.

GN: Go to YouTube and type in “Almost Gone Nash.” You will come to the video and enjoy. It’s brutal.

MR: Have you had theories about what we as a culture should be doing, where we should be looking, what we need to tweak?

GN: Yes. It’s very obvious to me that on a basic level, we have become slaves to oil. We have painted ourselves into a corner. It’s obvious that there’s only so much oil in this planet. As it is a finite planet, there has to be finite air, finite water, it has to give up at some point. But we have based our entire economy and entire workings on oil, and I think that is one of the reasons why we definitely have to go into alternative energies and use the sun and the wind and the geothermal and alternative energy sources if we’re smart. We are controlled completely by the oil companies, of course. They want to sell every last drop of oil that they can probably squeeze from this planet, but it will come to an end at some point.

MR: How do you deconstruct that humongous machine of power and influence?

GN: You have to take care of it yourself. I live in Hawaii, and I have lived there for thirty-five years. I have a small compound there and Susan and I are wanting to build a house for each child because the world is getting crazy and we wanted them to be secure. I had a pool house, I put solar on the roof and built the next house with that solar, put solar on that house and built the other houses with the solar. Right now, I’m talking to you from Los Angeles. I have a small house here with solar all over the place. I have a biodiesel eight year-old Volkswagen that I drive with biodiesel. I’m trying my best to do it myself and if everybody does it themselves, then the power distribution will be taken out of the hands of the power companies and into private hands.

MR: You would think they would want to see the wisdom of what you said, about finite amounts of energies in existence, and switch to trying to control alternative energy sources.

GN: It’s amazing, you know? I think about people like the Koch brothers. Don’t they have children? Don’t they have grandchildren? Don’t they know what they’re doing to the environment with their maniacal quest for more billions? Don’t they know what’s going on? Of course, they must know. The oil companies must have hundreds of scientists researching the future.

MR: Yeah, but the sad thing, Graham, is you see the Koch brothers and people such as Rupert Murdoch intentionally spreading disinformation to maintain their status and power. I think one of the results is you get a global community crazier than we’ve ever seen before.

GN: That’s true, because people are beginning to realize what the process of bread and circuses is, started by the Romans two thousand years ago: Give the people something to eat and give them something to look at and we can control them completely. Right now we’re much more interested in the size of Kim Kardaschian’s ass than we are about the Afghanistan war. We’re much more interested in Justin Bieber’s f**king monkey than we are about the hundred and twenty-eight Tibetan monks who burned themselves to death.

MR: Wonderfully said. It’s great you recorded “Angel” with Jason Mraz, another artist with an eye on the energy and the environment.

GN: Oh, wait until you hear it. It’s fabulous. This acoustic album with Jimi Hendrix music is going to be a great piece.

MR: This seems like a random question when asked at this point, but what advice do you have for new artists?

GN: I never give advice. I’m trying to deal with my life for f**k’s sake. But if I had any advice, it would be to only act from your heart. I think we instinctively know what is good and I think we instinctively know what is not. I think that we should take that knowledge and only operate from our heart, which, of course, controls the mind instead of the other way around.

MR: Beautifully said. Let’s end it there. Graham, as always, thank you so much.

GN: You’re very welcome, Michael.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne