Wild Tales

by Graham Nash

  There were other symptoms that contributed to that name. In Houston, Texas, during a rare day off, I was chatting on the balcony of our hotel with Russ Kunkel, our drummer. We went into the living room of my suite to catch the evening news—Walter Cronkite said: “Singer Mama Cass dies in London.” Holy shit! We’d lost Cass. I never saw that one coming. Nor had Russ, who was married to Cass’s sister, Leah. It was shocking to both of us—and to learn of it that way was devastating. We were all heartbroken. Words cannot describe it. She’d meant so much to me. I loved that woman in ways I never fully understood or expressed. It seemed unbelievable that she was gone.

  Cass’s career had been on an upswing of late. She’d had a big hit with “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and was in the midst of headlining a week of sold-out shows at the London Palladium. We were thrilled for her. She was finally getting to do what she’d always wanted: be a cabaret-type star. She had made it, at last. But after one show, she went back to Keith Moon’s apartment and died. The official story was that she had eaten a sandwich and choked during the night, but that was the same official story we got about Jimi, so it was probably drugs. Ironic that she had been the first to turn me on, and I know there were times she’d done heroin with Crosby. But last I heard, she was doing fine. I’d been pulling for her, my longtime muse.

  Afterward, Russ and I went back out on the balcony to commiserate about Cass’s death and one of those incredible things that always comes up in my life happened: A giant butterfly flew slowly by. A butterfly, Cass’s favorite image. Russ and I both whispered, “Cass!” Spooky how those things occur.

  And sometimes our political past caught up with us. No doubt CSNY was branded a political band. We were flamethrowers in the best democratic sense. We’d always intended to be in front of audiences, speaking our minds. We wanted our songs to make people think, and over the years we’d given fans a whole smorgasbord of them: “For What It’s Worth,” “Long Time Gone,” “Chicago,” “Military Madness,” “Immigration Man,” “Ohio,” and “Teach Your Children” to a certain extent. All four of us followed the Watergate hearings like a soap opera, outraged that the administration’s leaders were lying to the American people and screwing with the Constitution. I think that everybody knew Nixon was somehow involved. And, of course, the famous eighteen-minute gap on the Oval Office tapes—we knew it was a lie, just another cover-up. In response, I wrote “Grave Concern,” in which during the guitar break were overdubs of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Nixon saying: “I don’t recall.” “I don’t remember.” “I wasn’t even there.” “I’m not a crook.”

  We’d already fired up the cannons when we went out on tour. As Dylan said, “The battle outside was ragin’.” Everyone knew what was going on. So on the evening of August 8, 1974, we were laying it on thick at the Roosevelt Raceway, where fifty or sixty thousand people had come to hear us sing. We’d heard rumblings that Nixon was on the verge of resigning. We had a television backstage so we could watch the proceedings. The four of us were huddled around that set during intermission, when we learned that he had resigned. I went onstage and delivered the news. “Guess what, folks? He’s gone!” We didn’t have to say who. Everybody knew. Huge cheers erupted through the crowd. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own. No more. Justice—finally!—and vindication. Time to celebrate. It’s the essence of who we are as a band. We didn’t let this shit go by. We had to say something.

  The mood swings on that tour were dizzying, mad. Through it all, I tried to stay loose and sane the best I could. Ping-Pong became a regular diversion. Mac Holbert, our tour manager, and I would play behind cocaine for five hours at a clip. And Bill Graham would challenge me before every gig. He was a powerful man, ridiculously competitive, but so was I, and often our games would be brutal contests of the will. I had incredible respect for Bill. He was a great character. And I knew his personal story—that his family perished in the concentration camps and how he’d walked halfway around the world to avoid the Germans. He’d built and supported the San Francisco music scene and had a certain amount of integrity—emphasis on certain—because his edges were rough when it came to business. He’d scale the house and say, “We have forty thousand people in here tonight” when the place held sixty thousand and we knew damn well every seat was filled. That happened time and again during that tour. I wonder who made out on the missing twenty thousand ticket sales?

  When it was over, the entire tour made close to $12 million, but David, Stephen, Neil, and I only got $300,000 each. That left $10.8 million unaccounted for, by my arithmetic. Where did all that money go? Plenty of people took their cuts off the top, plus any side deals they had going, while we picked up the tab for all the decadence. We were having too much fun at the time to take notice, but it caught up with us later on.

  It could have been the perfect situation that all bands dream of: four great musicians at the top of their game, playing to adoring audiences in sold-out arenas across the country. But it wasn’t, because we fell for the rock ’n’ roll bullshit in a big way. We fucked it up. Crosby was right: the Doom Tour, indeed.

  chapter

  12

  AFTER THE FINAL SHOW AT WEMBLEY STADIUM IT WAS obvious to me that relationships were being reshaped, as were the dynamics within the group. Neil invited me and my girlfriend Calli, Joel Bernstein, Leslie Morris, Sandy Mazzeo, and Ranger Dave (David Cline) to head out on the road with him, with no real destination in mind. Neil’s mode of transport was his newly acquired 1934 Rolls-Royce, which he immediately named “Wembley.”

  Our first stop was the coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. We were all so pleased to be out of the chaos and frustrations of the tour that it was easy to fall into a familiar pattern: We smoked a lot of hash and hung out, deep into our own creative proclivities. Leslie and Calli and I were drawing, Joel was photographing the moments, and Sandy and David were making sure we were all taken care of (including Wembley). We were very comfortable in each other’s company and I remember watching Neil write the first draft of a new song, “Daughters,” in the oddly named Boston Hotel. The cover of my first book of photographs, Eye to Eye, was taken in a photo booth in the arcade in town.

  After a few days, all of us (with Wembley in the hold) flew across the North Sea to Rotterdam and then drove through the cold driving rain to Amsterdam, where we settled in at the equally oddly named Memphis Hotel. During our stay there Neil wrote “Deep Forbidden Lake” and “Vacancy.” It was fascinating to me to watch his creative process. I learned much about just being open and spontaneous while writing. I must confess that I never felt closer to Neil than I did on that road trip. I got a further glimpse into just how complicated a human being he is, and I also realized how much I admired and respected him.

  Playing my Fender Stratocaster during a CSNY show in Norfolk, Virginia, August 17, 1974 (© Joel Bernstein)

  Neil continued to write, on a typewriter, as he and Sandy had done throughout the tour, about all that was happening. Calli and I and our friend Constant Meijers visited Constant’s painter friends Karel and Mathilde Willink. That visit definitely started me thinking again about painting, and my inner thought processes helping to wipe out all the negative feelings about what had happened in the last few months.

  When Calli and I returned from Europe, Stephen, Croz, Neil, and I reconvened in my living room in San Francisco to discuss the possibility of resuming the Human Highway album that we’d abandoned a year and a half ago. Crazy, eh? Yeah, I thought so too. But we decided to record in my small home studio in the basement. Man, it was crowded but functional. Things didn’t go so well, however. Neil walked out on us rather quickly. Something was not right with him but we didn’t know what it was. It shocked the three of us that once again things seemed to be falling apart before we even got going. I was feeling down and Stephen wasn’t doing much better. After Neil left, Stephen asked me to put a vocal on a song of his, “My Angel.” He was pretty out of it at the time, and he wanted me to sing a minor set
of changes through a major chord, but my body refused to do it. I came to the chorus and I couldn’t get it. It didn’t work. I just couldn’t do it, which didn’t satisfy Stephen. He insisted I try again. I got so pissed at him that I just quit, and I walked out after many, many tries.

  Stephen was so upset that he went to my tape closet and took a razor blade to the master two-track of a demo I’d done with Joel Bernstein on guitar of my song “Wind on the Water,” slicing it in half.

  I went nuts. All that work—and he’d destroyed it in a fit of rage. I ran up to my bedroom at the top of the house and called down to the CSN tour manager, Mac, in the studio. “You have to throw Stephen out of the fucking house!” I insisted. It put Mac in a precarious position, because he was a key part of the glue that was supposed to hold the unit together. In the meantime, I was incensed, getting crazier and crazier. I had just mixed that tape and now the master was gone. When you fuck with a master tape, it is fucking with the gods. Calli got me to lie down and listen to some calming music. The track she put on was Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind.” Not so calming, really, but it helped to bring me out of my funk. I didn’t speak to Stephen for months after that.

  If CSNY was on a downward slope, as Croz and I felt it was, we were determined not to follow. We loved singing together and enjoyed each other’s company. There was never any bullshit between us, no competition. We’re only competitive in wanting the best from each other. Okay, he was doing way too much cocaine, more than was good for any three human beings, but then so was I. We were a matched set of bookends. But it was clear that we wanted to make music together. We had plenty of songs left over from the aborted Human Highway album. So Croz and I had a record to make.

  Our former business manager Jerry Rubinstein had become president of ABC Records and offered us a two-album deal. We felt Jerry would take care of us. Ahmet would, too, but we’d been with Ahmet for six years and he wasn’t the force at Atlantic that he used to be. Plus, David and I wanted to separate ourselves from everything that had to do with CSNY, including our record company. So we signed with ABC.

  David and I sifted through our material. He had “Carry Me,” one of my favorite of his songs. I had “Wind on the Water,” and I was writing like a crazy person. “Take the Money and Run” was, of course, a paean to our well-padded tour partners. And there was always something to write about Joni. When we were still a couple, I’d spent some time with her in British Columbia, where she had a little stone house on a beach. It was a place where she was indeed bouncing off boulders and running on the rocks, so I wrote “Mama Lion” to capture that snapshot.

  In the midst of this creativity, I got invited to a birthday party for David Geffen in Beverly Hills. It was an incredibly swank, borderline decadent affair: lots of chicly dressed people, a lavish array of food. I took a good look around and flashed on an upcoming benefit I was doing in support of Cesar Chavez’s boycott of the lettuce and grape industries. At that time, I had a hundred-acre parcel of land just north of Santa Cruz, from which I could see the braceros working in the fields. The bosses prohibited them from using long hoes, because you could rest on them. Not cool. I had also driven with Leo to the food store of the compissanos in Delano, and there was nothing in it aside from a few cans of beans. So I went straight home from Geffen’s party, with the juxtaposition of those two worlds in mind, and finished “Field Worker” the very same night.

  I also wrote “Cowboy of Dreams” around that time. David and I had given Neil a present of two black swans for the lake on his ranch. I don’t know where we got them, but they were stunning creatures—and they were immediately eaten by coyotes. Those are the birds in that song. But there were other messages woven throughout. Crosby and I have been influenced by those announcement boards outside churches that include inspirational sayings on them. On one, Croz had seen: “If you smile at me I will understand, because that is something everyone does everywhere in the same language,” which David used for “Wooden Ships.” I spotted one that said something about coming together as a nation, which became incorporated into “Cowboy of Dreams.” But the song was also my take on Neil, about how insane it was to be so wary of this man and so attracted to his music at the same time. He scared me because I could never count on him. Once, when I was playing “Cowboy” for my friend Larry Johnson, we talked about the relevance of a key line: And I’m tired of the heartache and scenes / with the cowboy of my dreams. He said, “Tired? Aren’t you really scared of this shit?” So I changed it to: And I’m scared of the heartache and scenes …

  Making the album Wind on the Water was a pleasure from start to finish. It was one of our finest efforts. David was in excellent session shape and the band were consummate pros, the Jitters again. You work with guys like that, the sky’s the limit. It’s amazing what they contribute to the creative process. They played right there in the same room with us, so it was like mimicking a live performance. We all fed off each other. The energy it created was inspiring. One afternoon, at Village Recorders in Westwood, we cut four masters in the same session: “Margarita,” “Wind on the Water,” “Carry Me,” and “Mama Lion.” Very little overdubbing, maybe on a couple of the choruses, but the lead vocals were pretty pure. Four masters in one day—in our world that’s unheard of.

  Plenty of friends rallied to the cause. Carole King came by to help out on a couple songs, playing organ on “Bittersweet,” and we recorded several things of hers—“I’ll See You in the Spring” and “I’d Like to Know You Better,” both of which are still in the can. James Taylor played acoustic guitar and sang on “Wind on the Water,” and Jackson Browne provided backup vocals on “Love Work Out.” And we repaid favors for years by singing on James’s recording of “Mexico”; “Breakaway” for Art Garfunkel; “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” and “Free Man in Paris” for Joni; “All the Pretty Little Ponies” for Kenny Loggins; “Every Woman” for Dave Mason; Elton John’s “Cage the Songbird”; and Gary Wright’s “Love Awake Inside.” Most of our friends were making great music, and we seldom turned people down. If the song was great, David and I loved singing backup vocals. We were good at it. It was in our genes. And in the years that followed, we sang together on “Another Day in Paradise” for Phil Collins, Bonnie Raitt’s “Cry on My Shoulder,” Michael Hedges’s “Spring Buds,” “She’s Becoming Gold” for Marc Cohn, “These Old Walls” for Jimmy Webb, and Carole King’s recent live version of “You’ve Got a Friend.” And in 2012 we sang with John Mayer on “Born and Raised,” and most recently, we sang with Jason Mraz on Jimi Hendrix’s “Angel” for an acoustic album of Jimi’s songs.

  WHILE WE WERE making Wind on the Water, David and I shared a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, the same bungalow in which John Belushi later died. Arthur Garfunkel lived right next door. The Chateau happened to be a wonderful place to live. You never knew who was going to be at the pool, which star would appear when the elevator doors opened. One day, I got on the elevator with no less of a legend than Groucho Marx. I was paralyzed. Couldn’t say a word, not even “Good morning, Mr. Marx.” The Chateau was one of those places. It let people be who they wanted to be. It’s the place where rock ’n’ rollers went when life wasn’t treating them so well, which is where I felt I was at the moment. Sure, I was making an album with a guy I considered my very best friend. But my life, for the most part, was unending chaos. I was thirty-three years old, constantly on the go, living here, there, and everywhere, in a dysfunctional relationship with Mr. Stills and Mr. Young, and doing way too much cocaine. Living at the Chateau brought this all into focus, and truth be told, all of it, including the drug use, had begun to feel old.

  David and I tried to make the best of our arrangement. We concentrated on the music we were making, keeping the Chateau’s distractions at bay while coordinating our crazy-quilt schedules. David ate earlier than I did. He’s a breakfast person, and I’m not. Breakfast, for me, comes around noon. So I would walk over to Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, where one of the Bo
wery Boys—Huntz Hall—ate every day. One day, I slipped into a booth there with Leslie Morris, who had once worked for Elliot Roberts but was handling our affairs. Sitting at a table adjacent to us was a very lovely, interesting-looking woman, whose beauty and energy captured my attention. She was a blond beauty, wearing a pale-blue sweater, and she had an incredible light in her eyes. Naturally, I wanted to talk to her. She was sitting with a coke dealer named Skip who I didn’t know, but Leslie did. One wave of her hand and I had an immediate in.

  The woman’s name was Susan Sennett, and she fascinated me from our introduction. She was an actress, one of the two “college girls” who moved into Ozzie and Harriet’s house after David and Ricky had moved out, in a TV show called Ozzie’s Girls. I laid the usual rock ’n’ roll number on her: “I’m a musician, we’re making an album and staying at the Chateau.” She was completely unimpressed; it didn’t mean a thing to her. She didn’t have a clue who either CSNY or I was. This made her even more intriguing, so I invited her to visit us at the Chateau the next day. Because I wanted her—desperately.

  Skip smiled through it all. He saw the whole thing going down, but couldn’t derail it. Nothing could. I was determined.

  I spent most of that night trying to figure out how to make myself a little more attractive to this woman. At Schwab’s, she had explained that she’d just been to an Asilomar conference on self-exploration, on the Monterey Peninsula. Aha! Now I knew what to do. I’ll get up in a tree, I thought. (Don’t even attempt to follow this reasoning.) So fifteen minutes before she was supposed to show up, I climbed into a tree outside our bungalow at the Chateau. It was quite fascinating up there, overlooking Hollywood. It reminded me of the peace I’d found in the tree in Ordsall Park all those many years ago. I’d smoked it heavily and was feeling pretty good about everything. And, believe it or not, this stunt actually worked. I could feel that she was attracted to me as soon as she arrived. The next day, I invited her to a session at Village Recorders, to show her what I do. Afterward, she said, “Would you like to come home with me?” Are you kidding? I was already packed.