Nearly 30 years into his partnership with David Crosby and Stephen Stills, Graham Nash has become the keeper of the flame, the bearer of the torch, the one who cares enough to make sure things are done properly. Maybe Nash's name should've been the one in the middle, because he's been keeping Crosby and Stills from killing one another for years now. He certainly helped steer Crosby away from a reckless suicide.
The one–time member of the Hollies been Crosby's Siamese twin and most vocal cheerleader since the days of "Guinevere" and "Long Time Gone," and he staunchly stood by his corpulent cohort when everyone else had run away screaming because of Crosby's rampany and destructive drug abuse. When the Croz was released from a Texas prison in 1985, Nash's house—a very, very, very fine house—was the first place he went.
Nash's high harmonies and sweet, simplistic songs have always offered the perfect Yin to Crosby's dark, complex Yang—and they've recorded and performed as a duo since 1971, after Crosby, Stills & Nash and Deja Vu had already made household names of the trio (and, of course, with addition of Neil Young, the quartet).
Recently, Nash pulled together Another Stoney Evening from tapes of a '71 Crosby/Nash show at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, and its exotic, quixotic songcraft serves as a reminder of just how brilliant—how damn moving—they were in their salad days. Released on the independent Grateful Dead Records, it's intended as the first in a series.
Of course, Crosby, Stills & Nash as a group are still together and still doing decent box office, just as there are still the occasional Crosby/Nash concerts.
Nash and his wife Susan, married 21 years, have three children—and yet the legacy is also Graham's baby. He's the one who added the extra tracks to the CD reissue of Four Way Street, and he assembled CSN, the four–disc box set, in 1994 (over the objections, as you're about to read, of Young and his manager, the estimable Elliot Roberts).
Since 1989, Nash and a partner have operated Nash Editions, a digital fine art press that distributes prints by artists including David Hockney, Francesco Clemente and Jamie Wyeth. And LifeSighs, his acclaimed one–man stage show, will soon make a reappearance in several major cities.
Graham and Susan have homes in California and Hawaii. Annual Christmas guests at the couple's island home included drummer Russ Kunkel and his wife, Nicolette Larson.
Graham was one of the visitors in Nicolette's hospital room the day she died last November. "She was only in hospital a week," he says sadly. "It was massive liver failure, that put her in a coma, and that gave her a brain hemmorhage. A terrible thing."
Not surprisingly, Nash was the man behind two February concerts in Santa Monica, benefits for the UCLA Children's Hospital, with a special pediatric endowment fund set up in Larson's name.
Along with Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt and others, the bill included Crosby, Stills & Nash, as harmonious as ever even though Neil Young, who'd promised to attend, was a no–show.
The beat goes on.
Goldmine: Tell me about Another Stoney Evening. I, for one, thought it was great to go back there.
Graham Nash: When I was pulling together the box set several years ago, I took the opportunity to get all our tapes archived professionally. I went into everybody's tape vaults and put 'em all in chronological order, and put 'em all into a database. So I see there the multi–tracks for the Dorothy Chandler show. And I know that the bootleg called A Very Stoney Evening was supposed to be the Dorothy Chandler show. I check it out—it's not the same show. So I go 'Shit! Where did that come from?' It was obviously an audience tape.
Well, we still haven't found the multi–tracks—we think it was one of our shows at Berkeley—and I said, why don't we just bootleg ourselves? When we listened to the multi–tracks, it was a great show. And I remember it being a great show. Because David was very sick that night. He had a temperature of, like, 105 or something really out there. He was going to cancel the show and I said 'We can't cancel the show, it's L.A., it's our gig.' So we did the show, but he was pretty spacey, and we were very high at the time, also.
Why is it out on Grateful Dead Records?
In the meantime, Crosby, Stills and Nash have left Atlantic because we are extremely upset that they're taking no notice of us, and not servicing us, and not putting any energy into CSN, who have made them millions and millions of dollars over the years. And I understand the new kid on the block theory, 'cause we were there at one point. But I also understand people selling millions of records in their latter life as recording artists.
We'd left Atlantic, and we were looking for alternative ways of marketing our music—checking into the net, mail–order, direct response and all those other ways of making sales. And Stephen Barncard, who mixed it with me, said why are we re–inventing the wheel here? He said that Grateful Dead Records had a database of 30,000 loyal Deadhead fans, and they would love to do it. So we did—and it was the first piece of non–Dead material that Grateful Dead Records have put out, and they've been very good so far.
In those days, what did you get out of a Crosby/Nash show that you didn't get from the other thing?
The ability to make a left turn whenever I wanted. You gotta understand, with Crosby, sometimes he appears very spaced to people, but he's unbelievably focused. So if I say 'Hey David, you want to do 'Triad'? he'll give it a shot. He's got great courage and so do I. Two years ago, we did a show at Westbury Music Fair back east, and we asked them 'OK! What do you want us to play?' And we did the entire two–and a–half–hour show from requests.
Crosby and I never stayed to the hits, which is probably one of the charming things about Crosby/Nash: You never really knew what to expect.
What do you and Crosby give to each other that others can't?
I think what I provide for him is stability and accuracy. I am so linked, psychic–ly, with David, that if we're in the middle of a song and I know that he's gonna fuck up the next line, I can make the same mistake so it comes out correct to the audience. I've done that so many times, and he looks at me with his walrus smile and I know that that's very valuable to David.
What he gives to me is an unbelievably unique musical framework. There's nobody I know that plays music like David. It's completely foreign to me. I can't play those jazz chords. That's not me; I'm much more simple than that.
He's been straight a long time now. Are there days when you, his friend, can't even remember what what he was like during the worst period?
I have this ability to take everybody as 'How are you today?' And he's been clean and straight for 11, 12 years, and that's how I remember him now. I mean, why would I want to go there? It's so painful. Why would I want to pull those negative images and keep them in my mind?
If I want to, I can remember every fucking moment of his madness. But I don't want to do that. I'd rather see him as he is now, strong, trying his best, still exploring musical avenues that baffle me.
What about his liver transplant? Were you amazed that he came out of it in full vigor?
No, I knew he would. He's a Leo, and he must be on his 12th life. He's a hard fucker to kill, this guy. (Laughing) God knows he's tried.
We're approaching the 30th anniversary of CSN. Are you suprised to still be doing it after so long?
Frankly, yes. It was such an amazing sound right off the bat that I knew that when you put that kind of sound with the kinds of songs we had then, if that was the tip of the iceberg it was going to go on for a few years. But 30? I don't think so.
It's no secret that there's no love lost between Crosby and Stills. What's your relationship like with Stills?
I'm a little more compassionate with Stephen than David is. I know all our weaknesses, and all our strengths. And what I do is try and concentrate on the strengths.
It's true, David and Stephen have butted heads many, many times. I'm the kind of person that wants to smooth out everything because we've got a job to do. And I know that some of that tension adds to the music; I also know that once it goes over the edge, then no music gets made.
That's why I wrote 'Wasted on the Way.' We've made a lot of music in 30 years, but there's a tremendous amount of music that never got made. How about the Human Highway album? Never got made. It was fucking great; we knew exactly what the 10 tracks were. I'm looking at the fucking cover right now, hanging on my wall.
The point being that yes, tension gets in the way, but I don't want it to stop forward motion.
Since sales aren't there for CSN, and haven't been the issue for some time, wouldn't it have been easier to say 'Let's just do Crosby/Nash, have fun, and not have this other thing to worry about?'
Yeah, it's true, but think about what you're saying. There'd be no CSN sound again. And that's painful to me. I can't accept that.
I'm a pretty logical man. So I go 'Well, maybe we're not doing it any more.' But the After the Stormrecord, I thought that deserved a better shot than Atlantic gave it. So if the record company isn't putting any effort into it, I can't take all the blame.
So maybe if it's not paying the rent we should just do what we want. But I want to do CSN. Because it's an incredibly special sound.
Yes, I want to do Crosby/Nash too, because that is very special in its own way, too. But I don't want to kill CSN.
Do you have to talk Crosby into it: 'Let's hook up with Stills again'?
Yeah. It's not David's favorite thing, I'll be honest with you. But once the opening bars of whatever the first song is, David's off his trip. And he's getting into it, because music takes over.
I've seen Crosby feeling so shitty 10 minutes before a show—liver bothering him, got a cold, can't do it, fuck, man ... and the opening bars happen, and he's right there. And for 2 and a half hours he's forgotten his trip with Stephen, and he's forgotten the fact that he's not feeling great. And he's flying.
Does it bother you that you're not selling records in today's market?
It does, because I'm a communicator. And I want to sell millions of records, not for the monetary gain, but for the fact that people are listening to our music and being helped by our music. And that's my biggest pain here.
The first duo album, Graham Nash/David Crosby on Atlantic, came out briefly on CD a year or two ago.