Wild Tales

by Graham Nash

  Crosby, naturally, told them to calm down. “We never worried about coming together because of external forces that we had no control over,” he told a journalist. “We’ve just tried to concentrate on the music and let everything else fall where it may.”

  I sure as hell wasn’t worried. The new album was a smash, and our shows sold out in a matter of hours. Were we still relevant? Are you kidding! Ninety percent of the acts in the world would have killed for the type of demand we were creating. We still attracted our share of heads and hippies, but they were older hippies who brought their kids. College students always seemed to discover us, no matter what era they were at school. And as for the music, old and new, I defy anyone to pack three or four hours with the songs or intensity we were putting out. Stephen seemed more relaxed without Neil hovering over him. As a guitar player, he was a monster. Crosby was in decent enough shape. All three of our voices were as tight as they’d ever been.

  Those were some of the most satisfying shows of my career. We kicked ass, big-time. The megavenues—Madison Square Garden in New York and the Forum in LA—were huge successes, with standing ovations before we ever sang a note. Everywhere we went, the crowds were incredible. Those audiences were on their feet from the first note to the last encore, and even when someone yelled out “Where’s Neil?”—which occurred like clockwork every night—it failed to put a dent in the all-out rave. Considering the size of those arenas, mostly twenty-thousand seaters, they were pretty intimate affairs. We did a lot of rapping with those audiences, talking about the songs, current affairs, things that were on our minds. It was a special connection we had with our fans, an almost personal rapport that few bands were able to pull off.

  Toward the end of summer, before the second leg of the tour, Stephen arranged a visit to the Oval Office for us. Turns out he was a Jimmy Carter fan. He thought Jimmy was “cool.” Hey, to each his own. It seemed like a bit of a farce, considering who we were. How many times had we trashed the government from the stage? When you took our politics into account, it’s a wonder they’d let us set foot in Washington, let alone the White House. But we had a couple of dear friends who worked there in some capacity, and when the tour rolled into DC, a meeting was set.

  Five of us went: Stephen, David, and me, along with another guy and Harlan Goodman, our managers at the time. John had taken a joint with him, and when no one was looking he took a hit by the open window. I was pretty nervous about the whole deal. It was the White House, for God’s sake, just a tad out of my comfort zone. And all of a sudden, the president of the United States came striding through the door, holding his hand out to me. Imagine that! I’m the kid from the Salford council estate, and here comes the leader of the free world. You can’t make this stuff up. But Jimmy Carter was incredibly friendly. He knew our music and was a big Allman Brothers fan. I couldn’t help recalling that great Saturday Night Live sketch with Dan Aykroyd as Carter talking someone down from acid. “Just put on some Allman Brothers music. You’ll be fine.” Of course, his chief interest was in getting us to do a benefit concert for him, which was never going to happen. Trust me on that. Still, it was an experience I’ll never forget.

  When we went back on the road to play eighteen more shows, something had changed. It’s hard, even with some distance, to put my finger on what had taken place, but something had shifted in the chemistry of the band. We weren’t communicating the way we had been at the outset of the tour. Individually we’d turned inward, and it became evident onstage. Our voices were still strong, but there was no joy in the delivery. Everything felt forced. We were phoning it in.

  This affected me more than the others. I was having such a great time singing with Stephen and Croz. Every night, I couldn’t wait to get onstage, to feed off the audience’s love and harmonize with my friends. It was the best high I ever got. For the three or four hours we were out there in front of a crowd, there was nothing like it. But the tension between us was palpable. It was insidious, it cut through everything good. After the intermission at one show, I was in tears. David and Stephen came offstage arguing about the length of a chord. It was ridiculous, not even an issue, but they needed some petty grievance to tear into each other. Really! The length of a fucking chord! Everything we’d worked so hard to achieve: It was dissolving in front of my eyes. Something in me snapped. I grabbed both of them and put them up against a wall. “Don’t you know that you’re fucking blowing it here?” I cried. “You guys are arguing about the length of a chord. What the fuck does that matter! We’ve got twenty thousand people out there waiting for us. For us! We’ve got to go out there and be good!”

  Another night, in Oakland, in the middle of “The Lee Shore,” some glitch in the equipment sparked feedback from Stephen’s guitar that cut right into David’s searing vocal. Stephen just shrugged, which Croz took the wrong way. He assumed Stephen was stepping on his spot, and that touched off even more tension. Things got really ugly onstage, so much so that the audience could tell.

  We all seemed to be at one another’s throats, and for no good reason. One night, after a welcome day off, we were hanging out at a hotel bar, just letting it rip, drinking ourselves into oblivion. Everyone was there, the crew, our ol’ ladies. We got so shit-faced that around two in the morning Susan and I ripped off our clothes and jumped into the pool, stark naked. Soon everyone followed suit: Stephen, David, the entire gang. There must have been twenty of us in there. It was one big skinny-dip. I don’t know who started the singing, but we all chimed in. And that was the incident that broke the tension. It just disappeared, from that night forth. The rest of the tour was a flat-out pleasure.

  In an interview that Stephen did with Crawdaddy, he managed to nail exactly how we interact. “We make up for each other’s stupidities,” he told them. And I suppose he was right. The three of us were thorny little fuckers. We’d been together for practically ten years, through our unstable twenties, in the spotlight for all of that time. All three of us were complicated, intense, headstrong, talented, unpredictable—qualities that came with risks. Add money, women, drugs, and alcohol to the mix, it’s a wonder we weren’t in high-security lockdown. No question, CSN was a rocky marriage. Maybe that’s the key, what gave us our edge. Who knows?

  I loved Croz and Stephen without question, yet spent many a night swearing off them for good. The older we got, the longer we were together, the more difficult our relationships had become. David’s addiction had become precarious and Stephen infuriated me to no end. Whenever I thought things were heading toward a meltdown, something would remind me of their better sides. Like Croz’s humor and generosity. He never failed to come through in a pinch. And Stephen—just when I was ready to give up on him for good, he’d deliver something straight from the heart. For instance, in late 1977, after we finished the CSN tour, I needed a vacation from Stephen something fierce. I can’t put my finger on any one reason; it was an accumulation of things, the usual bullshit. Susan was pregnant with our first child, and I wanted to be away from, well, our stupidities. I really had to pitch in at home. We were living in Susan’s old house, at 1508 Sanborn Avenue in LA, and there were thirty-two cement steps up to the front door. One night, the doorbell rang. It was Stephen Stills. He’d made an entire lamb dinner for two, with potatoes, carrots, mint sauce, the works, handed it over, and left before we could even thank him. And that summed Stephen up in a nutshell. Regardless of how many drugs he’s taken or whether he’s straight, whether he’s crazy as a loon or totally sane, it comes down to the fact that he’s a damn good man.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to put some distance between us. The tour had worn us down so much that, in January 1978, when we attempted to make a new album at Criteria, the session disintegrated into an unstructured jam. The material felt forced—there weren’t enough good songs for an album—and our energy level was pretty low. Some of this could be attributed to me. I was distracted by the birth of my son, Jackson, in February 1978, and wanted to be at home with Susan. And Croz was flirt
ing with his old buddies McGuinn, Clark, and Hillman about the possibility of launching a Byrds reunion.

  I was also looking for a more suitable place to live. I was fully committed to raising a family, but not in the middle of that crazy fucking scene. I was also worried about the world’s dwindling water supply. When I lived in San Francisco, there were billboards everywhere that said: SAVE WATER—SHOWER WITH A FRIEND, which started me thinking about my relationship to the environment. We were doing a number on the Columbia River, diverting it and turning it into mud. San Franciscans were upset about how they were bailing out Los Angeles: “Why are we sending all our water reserves down to this desert?” So I projected thirty or forty years into the future and decided that water was going to be more precious than oil. If I was going to move my family to a new locale, it needed to have certain criteria: a stable government, an abundant water supply, and places that would accept my credit card.

  I knew just the place.

  In 1969, Joni and I had gone to Kauai, the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, to visit our friend, the folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie. Later during our stay, I drove from her place in Kappa’i to Hanalei, with its incredible Bali Ha’i scenery, beach, mountains, waterfalls—paradise. Average rainfall at the peak of Mount Waialeale, the extinct volcano that is Kauai, is about 450 inches a year. Needless to say, water was never going to be a problem. I fell for the usual tourist urge: I must buy something here. Then I left and promptly forgot about it, until later, when land there was ten times the price.

  In any case, I went back to Kauai with Susan, knowing it might be where I’d eventually settle. We were at the Ebert house on Hanalei Bay, later owned by Michael Crichton. I was getting stoned with the Ebert boys, playing Ping-Pong, and falling in love with the island. In the course of a game, I mentioned that I was interested in buying some land on the island. One of the guys said, “Talk to Jack the Fisherman—talk to Fat Jack.”

  It took me a while to locate Jack Ewing, a character right out of the movies. Big guy, six feet tall, 280 pounds, just like my dad. He said, “If you’re interested in property, I’ll see you at eight o’clock in the morning.”

  “Are you kidding!” I said. “I’m a musician. I haven’t been up at eight in the morning unless I was still up from the night before.”

  “Too bad. I’m a fisherman. Eight o’clock or no deal.”

  Let me tell you, eight o’clock in the morning was pretty interesting. If you’ve never seen it before, you ought to give it a try. Once.

  Jack showed Susan and me a beautiful acre on the beach, but I didn’t want to live close to the ocean. It left me too vulnerable to the elements and to the public. Instead he took us up into the Wainiha Valley, drove a mile in, and … it was spectacular. There was only a funky little house, just a shack, really, not more than five hundred square feet, no glass in it, just screens. But gently rolling hills, lots of trees, plenty of privacy. Nothing around it as far as the eye could see. Jack got out of the car, whipped a papaya off a tree and sliced it in half, whipped a lemon off another tree, squeezed it on the papaya, and handed it to me. God, what a mouthful! There were dozens of types of fruit on the land, which came to slightly over four pristine acres. I wanted it desperately.

  “Is there anybody else interested in this property?” I asked him.

  Turns out one of the Beach Boys was in the process of closing a deal for the land with the owner, a champion surfer named Joey Cabell. The offer was for eighty grand down and payments for another 170 grand spread out over a few years.

  “How about I give you all $250,000 immediately?” I proposed.

  I bought that place within an hour of seeing it. A lot of dough, but the best money I’ve ever spent.

  I immediately brought my family to live in this place. For years, we lived in that tiny shack. The kids slept in the garage on the cement floor. What did they know? It was paradise. They had everything they needed. And we still had the house in San Francisco and Susan’s rental on Sanborn, in LA. All three of my kids—the two boys, Jackson and Will, my daughter, Nile—were born at the Sanborn house, where I cut each of their umbilical cords. But they went to school primarily in Hanalei. Later we traded the Sanborn house and the San Francisco house for a home in Encino, where we lived on and off for the next twenty-five years. I had to be in LA, which is where my managers, the musicians, and the studios were, so we wound up splitting our time between Encino and Kauai. But ask any of us Nashes where we live, and all of us will pipe up: Hawaii.

  MONTHS WENT BY before I had any contact with my partners. Stephen was off doing what he always did—playing and jamming with the best musicians available. Without David and me, he turned up the juice, veering from harmonies to roots rock, which is where he felt liberated. And Croz was often at sea, on the Mayan. For some reason, it became harder to get in touch with him; he was often unavailable when I called, a symptom I found particularly ominous. Our lives were so bound together, inextricably so. “Unavailable,” I feared, meant wasted on drugs.

  In the meantime, I pursued plenty of personal projects, trying in earnest to be a good husband and father. Things other than music were becoming more important to my life. It was inevitable that I turned my attention elsewhere. My love of photography gave me hours of pleasure. The collection of important images I had amassed was considered museum worthy, with over two thousand photos by Diane Arbus, Edward Steichen, Peter Emerson, Weegee, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, W. Eugene Smith, and Paul Outerbridge, among many others. I was thrilled to be at both ends of the history of photography, from my collection of daguerreotypes to the first digital studio. In 1978, I curated an exhibition of my archives at the University of Santa Clara and published a companion catalogue, The Graham Nash Collection. I also became an American citizen.

  I loved the States from the moment I set foot in it. At the time, the country made absolute sense to me: land of the free, home of the brave. The people, its customs, the lay of the land: I wanted to become part of it and to make it a part of me. I’ll never stop being English—that aspect of me was stamped from the womb. (I still can’t go to the beach without turning lobster red.) But the American way of life held such a carefree appeal. Everything about it suited me to a tee.

  There were other reasons for my becoming an American citizen. I’ve always thought of myself as a fair person. Hard as it may be, I try not to be hypocritical. So if I was going to mention how great the people are in the States, while continuing to criticize the government from the stage—as I did with “Chicago” and “Immigration Man,” and as Crosby did with “Long Time Gone”—it seemed only just and honorable that I did it as a citizen. I also wanted to vote, to exercise the rights and privileges of everyone else. I owned property in three states. Heaven knows I’ve paid my share of taxes, so it was time to put my mouth where my money was.

  The process was easy. I hired an immigration lawyer out of DC and did all my homework, took and passed the requisite tests. So on August 14, 1978, Crosby’s thirty-seventh birthday, I joined fifteen hundred other immigrants in the audience section of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. It was a stage I had played on several times in my life. In fact, Crosby and I had done a famous show there together in 1971, which became a bootleg called A Very Stony Evening. Oh, we’d been stoned all right, feeling no pain. But this time, I was extremely nervous. I knew that I had passed, but until the moment when the officiator instructed us to stand and said, “I now pronounce you American citizens,” I was sweating it out. And I must confess, when the crowd broke out singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I was deeply moved. It meant that much to me. I had made it! I let out a deep breath and gave Susan a kiss. Stephen had also come, for moral support, and afterward he took us to celebrate at Pink’s, an amazing hot dog stand but not exactly gourmet cuisine.

  “You want to be an American citizen?” he said. “Then, here, eat this.” And we polished off a couple of hot dogs and Cokes.

  I consider myself very lucky to be in a country whe
re I can speak my mind as freely as I do. What an incredible country this is! But I have to admit that the America I live in today is not the country I set out to join, it’s not the country that I fell in love with, and that’s a shocking thing for me to say. I fear America has become a police state, with a military that uses heat weapons against suspected enemies, a police force that pepper-sprays protesters exercising their inalienable rights (I told you I did my homework), and a justice system that fails to treat its prisoners humanely. So I will continue to speak out against what I consider objectionable and to crusade for justice and equality, only now I do it as an American citizen. God help me—God help us all.

  With Jackson Browne at Abalone Alliance concert, January 29, 1979

  chapter

  14

  AT THE START OF 1979, I TURNED BACK TO WHAT I deeply loved: making music, expressing myself through song, photography, art, and activism.

  I did a number of benefits with Jackson Browne for an antinuclear group called the Abalone Alliance. They were to protest and shut down the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s power plant near San Luis Obispo. Since my dinner with Jacques Cousteau, I was totally opposed to nuclear proliferation and its potential to annihilate the planet. It didn’t make sense to me, what with all the inherent risks and dangers. We knew about the problems at the plants: how they have pipes that crack and stretch from leaks, releasing radiation into the atmosphere and ocean. We knew that containment domes, after thirty or forty years, get brittle and tend to crack. It was time to rally public opinion and to take a stand.