Wild Tales

by Graham Nash

  I couldn’t wait to get over there. I was packed and ready to go weeks in advance. Except, as it turned out, international travel was outside of our expertise. We got to Heathrow, ready to roll, only to discover our visas weren’t in order. You had to prove to American authorities that only you could do the job you were being hired for before they let you into the country. Somehow our handlers had overlooked that proviso. So we checked in to the Aerial Hotel at the airport, where we would be quarantined while they sorted it out.

  Getting those visas stamped went right down to the wire. The Paramount gig was in five days’ time, and after four days being cooped up in that airless room I was getting a little nuts, to say the least. Finally, with no time to spare, the visas came through and we took off for New York.

  No need to tell you it was worth the wait. America was everything it was cracked up to be—and more. We arrived fairly quietly, not like the Beatles, no press corps waiting, no entourage. We took care of ourselves, carried our own luggage. When we landed, we got shoveled into the most enormous taxi I’d ever seen; it had like three doors on each side. The driver kept turning the radio dial and there were hundreds of stations, all playing rock ’n’ roll, news, R&B, pop, classical, whatever you wanted. You could find it in an instant. We were used to the BBC’s despotic monopoly of the airwaves, listening to whatever they wanted us to hear. Choice was never a factor. “You don’t like Rosemary Clooney, too fucking bad. That’s what we’re playing at the moment.” Not in New York. Spin the dial, you got the Ronettes, the Four Seasons, Gene Pitney, Sam Cooke, Dion, Nat King Cole, the Impressions, Jackie Wilson, the Beatles … It was a musical banquet, and we gorged ourselves on it all the way into the city.

  We barely had time to check in to the hotel before soundcheck, but my head was spinning from the glitzy cityscape. Walking along Broadway gave me the chills. It was just like in the movies. The lights and the people were insane. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Camel billboard that blew gigantic smoke rings into the air. And right across from it, just north of Times Square: the Paramount, in all its gaudy glory. This wasn’t some shithole in Hoboken. It was the big time, and cavernous: 3,500 seats, with marble columns, a crystal chandelier like they had on the Titanic, a grand staircase, and balconies layered one on top of the other like a New York skyscraper. I immediately climbed to the top of the theater, the very last seat in the last row of the house, and stared down at that empty stage, contemplating who had played on it and how I had gotten there. I thought: If only my parents could see where I was sitting. They’d never even made it to London, and here I was, about to play the Paramount in New York.

  The gig was the Soupy Sales 1965 Easter Show, with one of those Caravan of Stars–type lineups—the Hollies and eleven other groups. Half of the acts were less than forgettable, just schlock tacked on to pad the bill. But there was enough starpower to keep us interested: Shirley Ellis, Dee Dee Warwick, the Exciters, and King Curtis and the Kingpins. Bobby Elliott, a stone-cold jazz fan, was thrilled to meet Ray Lucas, who was King Curtis’s drummer. But for me the payoff was playing opposite the headliner, Little Richard. That fucker was one of the greats, up there in the pantheon. I’d cut my teeth on “Long Tall Sally” and “Lucille” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” They were twenty-four-carat rock ’n’ roll hits. Fifty years later, I still get off on them. Richard hadn’t had a hit in seven or eight years, but no one gave a shit; he and his band still brought down the house.

  The Hollies were ready to show America our stuff. I remember telling the stage manager, Bob Levine, “Our show is about forty-five minutes,” and he went, “Yeah, well, that’s not happening.” What? “You’re gonna do two songs.” What? “That’s right, two songs—for five shows a day.” What? “That’s the long and short of it, baby.” They packed those screaming teenagers in there, trotted us out like beauty-pageant contestants, then right out the revolving door again—five times a day. The first show was at 10:30 in the morning. Try getting it up at that time of day. We played “Stay” and “Mickey’s Monkey” over and over and over and over. And we didn’t finish until nine at night, so when we walked out of the Paramount onto the street, Times Square was lit up like a Roman candle. We’d be rubbing our eyes just to get ’em to focus. What?

  Even with all that, doing the show wasn’t a grind. We were thrilled to be there, especially watching the master, Little Richard, five times a day. The guy was unreal. An incredible showman. He’d pound that piano as if it were a tough piece of meat and throw his head back and wail. And that band of his kicked ass, especially his guitar player, a young, skinny kid with fingers out to there. One night I was standing in the wings as Richard came off the stage and he was livid, his eyes bugging out like a madman, screaming like a motherfucker at that poor kid. “Don’t you ever do that again! Don’t you ever upstage Little Richard!” They got in the elevator, slammed the gate, and I could still hear him ten floors above, taking this kid’s head off. “You hear me, motherfucker! Fuck you—playing your guitar with your teeth!” He was called Jimmy James then, but you don’t need me to tell you it was Jimi Hendrix. Probably the only guy who could steal the spotlight from Richard.

  New York, New York. I was in love with the place, and it kicked off my lifelong romance with the States. Every night, after the last show, the guys and I would head out onto the street, not knowing what to expect out there. It was a different town in those days, still something of an asphalt jungle. None of us ever went anywhere on our own. The Hollies stuck together out of camaraderie—and for protection. If anything were going to happen, you’d have to fuck with the five of us. The first day I got to New York, I’d opened the newspapers and there were like eight fresh murders on the front page. I remember reading about one guy who had been killed for a fucking quarter! So we were pretty cautious out there on our own. Walked all over Times Square, past all the girlie shows and tittie bars. There was a great record store on Forty-second Street where I bought Lord Buckley records and Lenny Bruce records and Miles Davis records. We didn’t have access to that kind of edgy stuff in London, and that store was like hitting the jackpot. It was an adventure just walking into that place. Afterward, we’d lug all the shit we bought over to Tad’s Steaks for a great dinner—$1.98 for a steak and a baked potato. Right around the corner from the Paramount was a little coffee shop, which was the first time I ever had corned beef hash with an egg on top. And if we felt flush, we headed to Jack Dempsey’s bar for a bowl of Hungarian goulash. Just fantastic!

  We were getting the royal treatment. We stayed at the Abbey Victoria on Seventh Avenue and it was the first time we each had our own room. Very posh. I couldn’t get over how the taps turned on in the bathroom and hearing the phone ring like it did in the American movies and getting take-out food. Take-out food! There was no such thing in England, not even a hamburger stand. There was a black-and-white TV in the room and I watched Johnny Carson every night.

  That is, if I wasn’t already otherwise engaged. I have to hand it to American girls: They taught me a few things about sex that were outside of my advancing experience. It was obvious that American girls liked to fuck much more than their English counterparts. They were freer spirits and more experimental. English girls were shy. You know that play No Sex Please, We’re British? Well, that about sums it up. Trust me, it was a lot of work to get an English girl’s knickers off. So I was a willing and dedicated student. My education started with Goldie and the Gingerbreads, the first all-female rock ’n’ roll band signed to a major American label. They had a nice little groove. A lead singer with a big, throaty voice—Goldie Zelkowitz, who later changed her name to Genya Ravan and fronted Ten Wheel Drive. But I only had eyes for Ginger, the drummer, a fabulous creature who had all the right moves. She showed me what English women had only hinted at. Ginger couldn’t wait to get her knickers off for me. And talk about playing rim shots! Yeah, there was a lot to learn about American women.

  One night, before we wrapped up the gig, Morris Levy decided to take
us out to dinner. He’d caught our show a few times and obviously liked what he’d heard because he’d staked us to a few hours in a New York recording studio, where we laid down demos for about twenty-five Hollies songs. I suspected it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart (a muscle insiders claimed had been left out of Morris’s body), and that something else was going on. He had something up his sleeve. Now, at dinner, he was laying it on thick. We went to a pretty posh place, the Roundtable, a Turkish restaurant with a tasty little belly dancer with a bare midriff down to there, whom we later wrote “Stop! Stop! Stop!” about. Nothing like a little navel-gazing to soften us up. Somewhere between dessert and coffee, Morris played his card. In an effort to expand his business interests, Levy offered us $75,000 for our music publishing. Now, in 1965, that was a lot of money. Twenty-five grand each for Tony, Allan, and me. We weren’t making anything that approached that sum. You can’t imagine how tempting it was to take it. But having dinner with Morris Levy was one thing; getting into bed with him was another altogether. We’d heard stories … how he put his name as writer on all the records Roulette released, how at one point he owned the phrase “rock ’n’ roll” and held the mortgage on Alan Freed’s house, how … nah, better not go there. But we heard other things that scared the shit out of us. (He’d have cut off my dick and put it on a keychain had he discovered I was sleeping with his secretary, Karen.) So we weren’t willing to sign with him, even for seventy-five grand, even though he was very kind to the Hollies. Later, he was eventually convicted of extortion and went to jail, so our intuition saved us from making an early mistake.

  But, even so, it was cool meeting Morris. He was a gentleman thug, a great white, one of the early record sharks who put out a slew of legendary artists: Duane Eddy, Buddy Knox (check out “Party Doll,” a brilliant rockabilly hit), Lou Christie, Frankie Lymon, Dave “Baby” Cortez, and Joey Dee and the Starlighters (who in 1966 changed their name to the Young Rascals). A few years afterward, he went on a tear with Tommy James and the Shondells, so say what you will about Morris Levy, he knew a hit when he heard one and got it on record.

  Man, we soaked up American culture like sponges. I loved it instantly. On the plane back, I remember being thrilled that we’d held our own with all the acts on that show. The other bands really dug the Hollies. We’d put tremendous energy into those two songs and we had done it. Now it was time to go home and raise our game to the next level.

  THE LOCAL MUSIC scene was on fire when we got back to London. The Beatles were still undisputed kings of the top ten, but the Rolling Stones, whom we toured with in early 1964, had finally pushed their way onto the international charts. So had the Kinks and Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five, and a few of our fellow Manchester bands—Herman’s Hermits, whose lead singer, Peter Noone, had worked the clubs with us, and Freddie and the Dreamers, whose lead guitarist, Derek Quinn, had been one of the Fourtones.

  The tour we did with the Stones that year was a chilling experience. Hollies shows were pretty wild, but those Stones gigs were something else. Mayhem to the nth degree. The first time we played with them was in Scarborough, on the east coast of England, and that joint was jumping before anyone hit the stage. They were rough and loud—and fantastic. Different from the Hollies. There was a certain earthiness to the Stones. This was before Mick became Mick, before he started strutting and dancing. Didn’t matter. They had that sound, that attitude.

  At the time, Brian Jones was already separating himself from the group. It had been his band at the start, but Mick and Keith had taken over, and you could tell that Brian was looking for a way out. He traveled with us, instead of with the other Stones, so it had come to that. The end for him was near.

  Sometime afterward, when the Hollies were recording at Abbey Road, we learned the Stones were in a studio over on Denmark Street. In those days, sessions were pretty loose affairs, nothing like today, with all the paranoia and security. So Allan and I went over there to see what they were up to.

  It was just a closet of a studio, about as big as my kitchen, and pretty crowded with all of us jammed in there—the Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, and an intense little guy in wild red leather cowboy boots who turned out to be Phil Spector. They’d just finished making “Not Fade Away” and were working on the B-side, “Little by Little.” It was basically a throwaway, as most B-sides were, but they’d left a track open for percussion, so we all just started banging away on bottles and clapping. So for a few seconds, Clarkie and I were Stones sidemen.

  We’d already toured with the Dave Clark Five in late 1964 and often, to my ears, we blew them off the stage. I didn’t hang out with Dave—and I didn’t particularly like him. He was aloof and condescending, just a mediocre drummer; Mike Smith was the standout musician in that band. They thought they were the Beatles—and they weren’t. Their songs just didn’t cut it.

  The Dave Clark Five tour might have been a slog had it not been for the third act on the bill. The Kinks had just released “You Really Got Me,” and we loved the shit out of that song. All those power chords ripping through the intro, and Ray’s nasal honk. It was obvious that record was going to be a smash, so we begged the promoters to put them on the tour. Lucky thing, too, because those guys were rascals. The Davies brothers were actually talking to each other then, and they were prodigious talents, lots of fun. They had a unique sound that was rough, raw, and edgy. And they were working-class lads, like us. Loved to join us for a few pints and raise a little hell. On the last night of the tour, the Dave Clark Five were in the middle of their big number “Bits and Pieces”—tits and wheezes—when Eric Haydock and Pete Quaife, the Kinks’ bass player, took a huge bolt cutter to the stage power and cut those fuckers dead. Served ’em right.

  We also did a tour with Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, a Norfolk band that we loved playing with. They had a sixteen-year-old lead singer, Terry Reid, who became a dear friend of mine and a future songwriting partner. That kid had a great set of pipes. Terry, of course, turned down Jimmy Page’s offer to be the lead singer for his new group after the Yardbirds disbanded, a band that he’d call Led Zeppelin. Hey, shit like that happens all the time.

  In any case, in 1965 things were happening at lightning speed on the rock ’n’ roll scene, and the Hollies shifted gears, heading into the fast lane.

  Around this time, we got a call from our old friend and manager, Michael Cohen, the guy who owned the Toggery, where I had worked selling clothes. “This neighbor of mine says her son writes songs, and she’s driving me fucking crazy,” he said. “Every time I meet her, she asks if you’ll listen to his stuff. Look, I know he’s probably awful and it’s an imposition, but I like this woman. We’ve been neighbors a long time. So would you do me a favor? Just go down there and see what this kid’s about.” Michael was always a decent guy, so we said, “Sure, leave it to us. We’ll get her off your back.”

  So we go over to the address he gave us—a semidetached house in one of the better neighborhoods in Manchester—to meet this so-called songwriter, a fifteen-year-old Jewish kid named Graham Gouldman. Now, we’re the Hollies—and we know we’re the Hollies, so we’re not going to make it easy on him, kid or no kid. We’re sitting in this posh, middle-class living room, slipcovers on the sofas, nice art on the wall. I threw Mr. Songwriter one of my best stony stares and said, “Okay, kid—give it your best shot.”

  He picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing: “Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say, ‘Please share my umbrella …’” And it’s fucking fabulous! Tony, Allan, and I are cutting glances at each other, and … we know this is a hit song. We know what we can do with it, too, putting a Hollies spin on the tune.

  We were pretty excited, ready to rush out of there and get our claws into this song, when I said to him, “Uh, before we go … got anything else?”

  Before the words were out of my mouth, he started singing, “Look through any window, yeah, what do you see? / Smiling faces all around …”

  We just
stopped and stared. “Okay, kid—that’s two. We’re definitely taking those two. No question about it.” I shrugged out of my coat and sat down again. Obviously, we weren’t leaving the house so fast. “One more time, kid—anything else in your songbag for us?”

  He said, “Well, I do have another, but I’m afraid I promised it to my friend Peter Noone.” And he launched into “No milk today, my love has gone away …”

  Talk about being blown away. This fifteen-year-old kid wrote those amazing songs—I think they were the first three songs he’d ever written! It was incredible hearing them. And he eventually wrote “For Your Love” and “Heart Full of Soul” for the Yardbirds, “Listen, People” for Herman’s Hermits, and later he started the band 10cc. Nice little career, wouldn’t you say?

  Before we even got back home, Tony had put a gorgeous twelve-string riff to the intro of “Look Through Any Window.” The song was made to be sung by voices like ours. All the harmonies were right there, and in no time we turned it into a Hollies song. We recorded it in less than two hours and knew we had an instant hit on our hands. Same thing with “Bus Stop.” We cut it in even less time, an hour and fifty minutes flat. Tony Hicks and Bobby Elliott arranged it. Tony added that fabulous guitar intro, and we laid down the entire lead vocal and harmony just once. Reduced it to two tracks before putting on another set of vocals, followed by the solos—Tony, Allan, and me. In the can.

  “Look Through Any Window” came out in September 1965 and shot right into the top ten. It also broke into the top forty in the States, which put us on the map there once and for all. The residual buzz from our performance at the Paramount in New York, coupled with a hit single, launched the Hollies into the forefront of the rock scene. We were frontline troops in the British Invasion, right up there with the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, and the Yardbirds.