Wild Tales

by Graham Nash

  There was a forty-five-minute lesson on how to be received by the Queen. I was cautioned not to turn my back to her or touch her or even start a conversation. It was a different story if she talked to me first, but that would have been a rare occurrence. And I knew to look out for a subtle gesture of hers: If she moved her hand slightly to the left after she shook my hand, it was a sign to move away and take my leave. But that didn’t happen when we eventually came face-to-face.

  “Good morning, Your Majesty,” I said, ignoring the conversation rule. “You look stunning this morning.”

  Don’t worry, I wasn’t throwing her a line. She looked fantastic: an eighty-four-year-old woman, sharp as a pin, with a great twinkle in her eye, just the way I like them. She had an emerald on her jacket the size of an egg, and I knew damn well it didn’t come from Tiffany. After a few pleasantries, I said, “I must tell you, Your Majesty, this is a tremendous honor you’re bestowing on me. My mother and father are both dead, but they would have been incredibly proud to find me standing here with you.”

  She said, “That’s very nice. And how are the Hollies?”

  Whoa! Hold on a second. The Queen of England is asking me about the Hollies?

  “I’m sure they are all fine, Your Majesty,” I said. “But I’m sure you realize that I haven’t lived in England for forty-odd years. And quite frankly, Your Majesty, I didn’t realize anyone was watching what I was doing to receive this honor.”

  She looked me right in the eyes, took hold of my hand, and said, “Well, now you know.”

  Imagine that.

  I had taken some of my mother’s ashes to Buckingham Palace and sprinkled them in the garden just prior to the ceremony. She would have been thrilled. I’m still astounded that I was honored by the Queen.

  I’ve had two interactions with President Obama. The first one was a fund-raiser Jackson Browne and I did in San Francisco during his initial campaign that raised $7 or $8 million. Obama had delivered a speech at the Fairmont Hotel and came backstage afterward to thank us for singing. He was incredibly charming, sophisticated, and down-to-earth, with a wonderful smile. Before he left, I said, “Would you be interested in knowing what I thought the three most important words of your speech were?”

  “I’d be very interested,” he said.

  “It was at the point when you mentioned something rousing, and the audience began shouting, ‘You can do it! You can do it!’ You held up your hand and said, ‘Wait a second. Not me—us!’ Those were the three most important words. If you keep that in mind, you’ll become president of the United States.”

  I was reminded of that occasion when I met him again, a couple weeks before the second election, in 2012. My managers got a call from the Obama people saying that the president had personally asked if David and I would sing at a high-tech fund-raiser for him in Silicon Valley. Naturally, we agreed to do it. Both Croz and I are great fans of the president, even though we have our disagreements. But this time it was different—no cell phones or cameras were allowed. The entire event was cloaked in layers of security. Still, Obama was very kind to us. He introduced us by saying, “It’s not often you get a couple of Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to come strum their guitars for you, but they are here now tonight.” We did “Just a Song Before I Go” and “Teach Your Children” for about fifty people at $38,000 a plate. And they complain that our ticket prices are high!

  I never performed for George W. Bush, and wouldn’t have. I disliked the man intensely. I thought he was a dunderhead, without intellect. And his father made certain that Dick Cheney was chosen as his VP. In my opinion Cheney’s one of the most evil men on the planet. Anyone who would vote against every environmental and equal-rights issue, as well as voting to keep Nelson Mandela in prison, is not of this earth and doesn’t deserve my support.

  IN 1994, considering what we’d been through together, it was gratifying to watch David’s rehab trajectory, but physically he seemed to be falling apart. I knew David was under a mountain of stress. The IRS was on his back again, money was tighter than tight, and on top of it all he was battling diabetes and hepatitis C. During one of our sets, Stephen and I couldn’t help but notice that David was playing out of rhythm; very unlike him. After we finished the show, he collapsed in excruciating pain and was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where the diagnosis was dire. “Your liver is shot,” they told him. “You’re dying—and soon.”

  Somehow, Croz managed to finish the rest of the tour. And in the middle of everything, Jan learned she was pregnant, a condition they’d been trying to achieve for ten years. Their progeny would carry on the requisite hijinks, but David’s future was exceedingly doubtful. He needed a liver transplant. Fast. Except you can’t just pick one up at livers.com. He needed a matching donor, hard to come by—and it was a race against time. Every minute counted. Croz was slowly becoming poisoned, fluid was building up in his abdomen, ammonia in his brain. I worried that this time his luck wouldn’t hold. How many lives can this cat have? By now, it was way past nine.

  Out of the blue, a liver became available, but the chances of Croz surviving the transplant were slim to none. His internal systems were failing. Gary Gitnik, one of the distinguished doctors at the UCLA hospital, lived just around the corner from me, and he called and said, “It’s time.” He and I rushed to the hospital at four o’clock in the morning to see David just before surgery, to wish him luck, of course, but also to say good-bye. It was one of the most difficult hours I’ve ever spent, cracking jokes to keep David’s spirits high while struggling to hold my own emotions in check the best I could. How do you come to terms with the possibility of losing your best friend? The fear of it scared the hell out of me. As orderlies were about to wheel David into the operating room, I got up close to him, looked him right in the eye, and said, “Hey, if you leave me here with Stills, I’ll fucking kill you.” Croz went into that operation laughing—and trying not to.

  Only a bear like Croz could have come through that ordeal. It was touch and go, but he survived the worst of it. Even so, he wasn’t out of the woods and required lots of bed rest in order to recover. News of his transplant had lit up the wire services, and he was deluged with flowers, gift baskets, and get-well wishes from around the world. Hospital attendants carted bulging sacks of mail into his room. The outpouring from fans was heartfelt and touched him greatly. It was impossible for Croz to read all the mail, but one letter he opened from a man named John Raymond pinned him to the wall. It said:

  We’ve never met, but my wife and I raised a boy that you gave up for adoption thirty-two years ago. We want you to know that he was raised well, in a very loving and caring home, and that he’s very, very talented … I would never intrude upon your privacy except that the news of your health is so ominous that as one dad to another, I could not keep quiet about our son.

  Our son. The words stunned Croz. He had a grown son he’d never met. That in itself wasn’t news to David. He’d always known that a kid existed somewhere out in the ozone, the result of an affair he’d had in 1961, while playing the coffeehouse circuit. He’d behaved badly at the time, just bailed on the mother, who reluctantly gave the child up for adoption at birth.

  James Raymond. When Croz finally met him, the elements didn’t compute. The guy was … normal. And handsome. Emotionally stable, confident, and multitalented; a professional musician with a gorgeous voice who was making a good living working with bands. He and Croz even shared a love of the same jazz pianist, McCoy Tyner. Talk about genetics. “Here’s what you need to know about me,” James told him during their initial visit. “I’ve never been hurt, never been hungry, nobody ever beat me up.” His adoptive parents happened to be wonderful people who had raised him with love. Oh, yeah—and just in case this fatherhood business was freaky to David, he had to prepare himself for yet more news: James’s wife was giving birth to their first child that very day. Croz was a new father and a grandfather, both at once.

  Croz loved the news of his ju
st discovered son; it rejuvenated him. He and James hit it off big-time. They bonded in so many different, important ways: over music, certainly, but so much deeper and stronger than that. They became songwriting partners—and friends. As did James and I. We’ve written several songs together, and he’s become a full-time member of the CSN band. And when Jan and David’s son, Django, was born a few weeks later, the Crosby clan had much to celebrate.

  All of these events contributed to David’s steady recovery. Discovering a long-lost child, raising a new child, and being a child at heart have served him well. But music, I’m convinced, was his most potent cure-all. When we sang together, I could actually see the mending process. And we sing together as much as humanly possible. In between the big CSN and CSNY tours and the ongoing benefits, we perform as Crosby/Nash every chance we get. It’s easier when it’s just David and me, because I’m bonded to David. We think alike, complement each other, and enjoy a trust that knows no bounds. To put across songs like “Carry Me” or “Cathedral,” to stir those quiet pools of emotion that lie within everybody, you have to go there yourself. We can’t fake it—and that requires trust. When David gets to the middle of “Guinevere” and talks about Christine being here for such a short day, I’m right there with him. The same with “Carry Me,” about his mother’s death. It doesn’t matter how many times we sing those songs; at some point our emotions take over, and, brother, let me tell you that it generates something sacred. Whatever that might be, Croz and I have it with each other, whether it’s intuition, tone of voice, or something much deeper and indefinable.

  POLITICS HAS ALWAYS been a staple of any CSN show. We continue to talk to our audiences about the big, important issues, trying to educate people and get them to act on their beliefs. World peace, children, and the environment remain at the top of our list. Recently James and I wrote a song, “Almost Gone,” crusading for Private Bradley Manning, the soldier imprisoned for providing classified military documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Whether or not you agree with what Manning did, his treatment—some say torture—by his jailers was inhumane. America cannot treat its prisoners with such brutality, and I’ve been saying so, and singing about it, every chance I get.

  When David and I did a tour of Europe in 2011, the only real news that we could get was, strangely enough, through Al Jazeera. They were giving you the straight stuff, nothing slick, which was very different from the American and European reporting. And that’s where we first heard about the Occupy movement. Because of who we were, David and I were right there with those guys. We really supported what they were doing, and we talked about it onstage every night in Europe. And every single night, the audience reacted with a round of applause. It kind of shocked us. We never thought the Europeans would be that interested. So we vowed that the moment we got back to the States we’d go down to Occupy Wall Street and lend our support.

  Within two days after that tour ended, we went down there with our acoustic guitars and James Raymond. There were no amps, no microphones. It was very much like the Brandenburg Gate show. We didn’t care. We did four or five songs and talked to the crowd. Hundreds of people were there, a cross between Woodstock and the benefit shows that we’ve done throughout the last several decades: like-minded people who were intent on doing what they could to make the world a better place. We thoroughly understood what they were trying to do, and we wanted to support their endeavors. We did “Long Time Gone” and a song of David’s called “They Want It All,” about the corporations that want everything, which came from a statement that David Koch, one of the world’s truly bad guys, had made when someone asked him why he wanted so much profit. He said, “I want my share, which is all of it.” And of course we ended with “Teach Your Children.” It was very, very heartfelt.

  I’ve also been revisiting “Military Madness” in our recent shows. In the last verse, I’d usually sing something topical, like “I hope George Bush” or “I hope Obama” or whoever is president at the time “figures out what’s driving the people wild.” But I’ve taken to substituting Ted Nugent’s name instead. To me, he has a very disturbed point of view. Say what you will about his so-called hunter mentality, but when you publicly call Hillary Clinton a bitch and Obama a piece of shit, you’ve gone too far (and shown your true colors). Ted and I don’t agree on a lot of things—especially the NRA and their ridiculous claim that the Second Amendment provides for the right to own a gun. As I read it, I believe that the Second Amendment provides for a militia to be armed. I’ve never known a hunter who needed an assault rifle with a hundred-round clip. In too many cases, people have a gun on their hip instead of a cell phone. There is a gun for every 2.6 people in America, which is crazy, really scary. When I was growing up, I never saw a policeman with a gun. Or a private citizen. It was unheard of. The English had different ideas about violence than Americans had, but they’ve become more similar in the last few years, thanks in no small part to the false war on terrorism. It’s just a smoke screen, an excuse to militarize the world. Every year, billions of dollars are being made by the worldwide war machine.

  I can tell that our political opinions disturb a small fraction of our audience. They either don’t want to hear it or don’t want to get involved. And some people just flat-out disagree with our positions. Fair enough. Everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion, even if it occasionally disrupts our shows.

  That’s what happened in 2006, when CSNY went back on the road. It began with a phone call from Neil to David and me. “Hey, fellas,” he said in that all-too-familiar twang, “want to come over to the hotel and listen to my new record?” That’s an invitation we’ll rarely refuse. He was staying at the Bel-Air hotel in LA, and when we arrived I expected to be ushered into his suite to hear Living with War through a set of big-ass speakers. Not this time. Nah, this was Neil. He wanted us to listen to a CD on his car stereo—new songs that he’d just finished recording. So we got into Neil’s car, driving up through the canyons, smokin’ it, listening to his incredible, heartfelt music. It was political and powerful, no punches pulled. The way I interpreted it, Neil’s songs argued that the powers that be in this wonderful country of ours generate an industry for war and profit with companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and KBR. At the end of listening to the CD, David and I looked at each other and said, “We’re in. We want to help you say this.”

  Neil, as always, was pretty smart about it. He is an incredibly popular artist with a huge fan base, but he realized that CSNY saying these things would attract a larger, more diverse audience to hear what the songs were saying. He wanted to get his message across to as many people as possible, and our involvement would pump up the volume.

  That was the crux of the 2006 tour, and quite frankly I’d never experienced people walking out of a CSNY concert before. At least 10 percent of the audience walked out every night, especially in Atlanta and places across the South. They didn’t agree with us that George W. Bush was the worst president ever, or that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, and all the other neocons had lied us into the Iraqi war. They deplored the way we criticized the Bush administration. What really pissed them off was a song of Neil’s called “Let’s Impeach the President,” which came almost two and a half hours into the show. We’d start to hear catcalls, then see a gradual exodus. But 10 percent is not a majority of the audience. And, for God’s sake, if you buy a ticket to a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert, what the fuck do you expect? At least, the way I see it, we were waking people up. The people who left our concerts were expressing their opinions, even if those opinions showed they despised us. No matter what they thought, I agreed with their right to say it. Truthfully, I realized there were still plenty of people in the South trying to figure out why the North won the Civil War.

  When it comes to such notions, I just don’t have the time. Time is the only true currency we have. Even if Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined their billions, they couldn’t buy an extra se
cond of time. I was reminded of just how precious a commodity time is before we left on the Living with War tour with Neil. On the last day of 2005, I got a call from my lawyer, Scott Brisbin, in LA. New Year’s Eve—strange time for him to be talking business, I thought. But I could tell by his tone that something was horribly wrong. God, not Crosby, I prayed. Nearly as bad: Gerry Tolman, my friend and manager of fifteen years, was dead—he’d crashed his Porsche 911 coming off the Ventura Freeway in a rainstorm. Gerry gone, it was too hard to believe. So young and vital. I was heartbroken. I dealt with the terrible news by writing “In the Blink of an Eye” on New Year’s Eve, a song that was only performed once, at Gerry’s funeral.

  There’s no way to turn back time when a tragedy like that happens. The way I see it, you’ve got to make every minute count, even when it comes to something as fleeting as songwriting. I’m not interested in wasting your time or singing you a song that I don’t believe will move you or make you think. I really don’t have a minute to waste.

  My life has become a battle against time. I have so many pursuits that bring me pleasure that, often, I feel like an air traffic controller, trying to give each its rightful space. I am constantly writing. If CSN or CSNY isn’t recording, then I’m working on my own material. Always writing. Because songs drive me crazy. If they are on my mind and unrecorded, I need to get them out of my system. I can’t rest while some speck of lyric or melody is rattling around inside my head. It’s like a form of foreplay when you just need to come; otherwise the experience is too frustrating. And even in my seventies—my seventies, holy shit—I can still get it up for a song. James Raymond and I, with some help from Marcus Eaton, wrote a new song called “Burning for the Buddha,” about the 128 Tibetan monks who have immolated themselves as a response to the tensions between China and Tibet. When I saw the first image of a burning monk it was his protest against the Vietnam War and it appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world. No longer. Those sorts of actions now are ignored. Quite honestly, we’ve been conditioned to think more about the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass. Surprisingly, though, the song goes down rather well.