On 81-year-old Graham Nash’s new album Now – a title emphasising his existence as a contemporary artist – there is I Watched It All Come Down, “making music, playing it loud”.
And he did.
Blackpool-born Nash, a longtime Angeleno with little trace of an American accent, was in that wave of British Invasion bands in the wake of the Beatles when the Hollies – which he co-founded with Manchester schoolmate and lifelong friend Allan Clarke – swept up the charts with Just One Look, Here I Go Again, I’m Alive, Bus Stop and a string of top-five hits elevated by the band’s three-part harmonies.
But when his songs were rejected for being too complex for their pop audience – his 1967 slightly delic King Midas in Reverse just scraped into the British top 20 – he chafed.
Escape came unexpectedly in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon – at the home of either Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas or Joni Mitchell, the story changes – when he sang with David Crosby and Stephen Stills.
Their magical harmonies connected and, joined by Neil Young, the second performance of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was at Woodstock. But seeds of internal dissent were there from the start.
“We had to put Crosby’s name first, otherwise he’d be impossible to live with,” Stills told me in 2007. “Of course, once we put him first there was no living with him.
“We didn’t like each other like all good bands are supposed to, but it was much harder to pull away. We didn’t want to be married to a band because basically you either killed each other off or just became so dissolute and self-destructive that you couldn’t work.
“But we did all that anyway.”
That same year, Crosby told me, “That [tension] was a good thing and that’s worth it to put up with [Stills]. I’m very good friends with Nash and love him dearly.
“I care about Stephen too, but he and I disagree about a whole lot of things. He may not be as straight about it as I am, but he doesn’t deny it.”
But Stills’ passion for edgy rock’n’roll added flintiness which fuelled their creativity.
Until Crosby’s death in January last year at 81 – after a lifetime of drugs, health issues and shooting his mouth off – there was still tension between him and Stills. Nash was caught in the crossfire, too.
To borrow an image from This is Spinal Tap, Nash was sometimes the lukewarm water between the fire and ice of Crosby and Stills. Crosby’s death was hardly a surprise, “He didn’t take good care of himself,” says Nash with polite understatement, but they had been in touch, and he set up a chat time: “But the call never came. Two days later, David was dead.”
“He was my best friend, my partner for many years and what we were arguing about in those final years is completely meaningless.”
His favourite photograph of them together is him and Crosby singing at a microphone in CSN days. “It reminds me how I’m going to miss David. I choose to remember only the good music and the good times.”
A happier current image is his former partner from the Laurel Canyon years, Joni Mitchell, at the Newport Folk Festival last year after more than a decade away and a brain aneurism in 2015.
“I saw Joni when she was awarded the Gershwin Prize [last January] and asked if she had any new paintings or songs. She said, ‘No … not yet.’
“When she said that I knew she was in there and thinking. We almost lost her, and it was wonderful to see her coming back.”
Nash himself is happy, the first line on the Now album is, “I used to think I would never love again, I’d be all on my own,” one of many songs about his wife, Amy Grantham, whom he met in 2016 and married three years later.
There has always been a direct uncoded quality to Nash’s lyrics – “our house is a very, very fine house” – and he admits, “I’ve always wanted to reach the heart as quickly as possible, engage you immediately.”
On the album there is Buddy’s Back about Buddy Holly and the early days of the Hollies, who took their name from him. It offers a further clue to his unadorned lyrical style.
“The Hollies loved Buddy Holly. He was a very simple and direct writer, and basically one of us. He wore a tie, a suit and glasses. He wasn’t like Elvis.
“Me and Allan [Clarke] used to stand in front of a mirror and pretend to be the Everly Brothers or Buddy.
“I wrote Buddy’s Back for Allan’s new solo album and, of course, for mine.”
A constant thread in his work has been responding to political issues: Military Madness on his first solo album Songs For Beginners in 1971 was about his father taken off to World War II and young men going to Vietnam; Chicago from the same album addressed 1968 anti-war protests and the trial of the “Chicago Eight”; Soldiers of Peace was on the 1988 CSN&Y reunion album, American Dream.
Don’t get him started on Donald Trump and the Republicans, dealt to in Golden Idol on Now. He sees democracy in the United States as fragile and under threat, and that Trump and his followers – “Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, all these people” – are going to be around for a long time.
“We thought Richard Nixon was bad,” he laughs bitterly, “but this is worse. I don’t believe Nixon wanted to end democracy.”
It’s an issue he circles back to in our conversation but concludes, “We have to be optimistic; we have to feel tomorrow will be better than today.”
So, the measured, respected photographer, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer (twice, for the Hollies and CSN) and rather earnest Graham Nash from Salford – who lived through pop frenzy with the Hollies, stood on stage at Woodstock, endured the cynical Nixon era, saw too many wars, wrote his autobiography Wild Tales and now rails against Republicans – really did watch it all come down?
“Yeah, it’s been amazing life, hasn’t it?” he says, as if surprised by it himself.
Graham Nash and his band play the Civic Theatre in Auckland, March 1, and the Isaac Theatre in Christchurch, March 3.
