by Graham Nash
Allan, Tony, and Bobby had sussed out what was happening and were gathered around me, trying to listen in. Especially when I said, “Where are you staying? Oh, at the Ritz. And when would you like us to come? Oh, right after the show? Okay, see you then.”
The Everly Brothers! Man, I must have sleepwalked through our performance at the Palladium. We did “Stewball,” “The Very Last Day,” a couple of our hits—a nice little show. But my mind was definitely on that suite at the Ritz. How could I concentrate, knowing the Everly Brothers were waiting? These guys were my heroes; I’d learned how to sing from their records. Everything I knew and loved about harmony came from them. The minute we finished, Allan, Tony, Bobby, and I grabbed a couple of guitars and made a beeline for the Ritz.
I knocked on the door to their room, it opened a few seconds later—and there was Phil Everly, ushering us in. Don was there, too, and I could see their two Gibson acoustics leaning on either side of a chair. Man, this whole scene was surreal. Of course I’m trying to be nonchalant, trying to be cool, but it’s taking everything I’ve got. It’s the Everlys … their suite at the Ritz, which was pretty posh … they want to hear us sing … my fucking head was spinning. They had no idea that Allan and I were the two kids they met on the steps of the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Later we told them and they said they remembered, but who the fuck knows. Didn’t matter. That night, we were all just a bunch of musicians sitting around, playing songs and shooting the shit.
Did we have any songs for the Everly Brothers? Are you kidding me! We had tons of ’em. We were constantly writing. So we ran down about fifteen of them—“Hard, Hard Year,” “Fifi the Flea,” “Don’t Run and Hide,” stuff like that. And instead of choosing one or two, they took eight. “We want that one, that one, that one, that one …” It didn’t occur to me until later just how much our songs suited their voices. They were custom-made for Everly Brothers harmonies, rich and resonant and loaded with pop ingenuity. Those guys knew what they were doing when they called us in.
We sat around with them all night, drinking tea and talking. They even played a few Everly Brothers songs for us, and I got up the nerve to ask Don a mechanical question that’d been haunting me for years: “How the fuck do you play the beginning of ‘Bye Bye Love’?” Those opening bars had changed my life, and I’d never managed to duplicate them entirely. When you hear them, it sounds straightforward enough, a few dominant chords that compress the rhythmic tension and give it that gut punch. Don demonstrated it a few times, but I suspect he may have double-tracked himself on the record because I’ve never been able to re-create that sound. Nothing’s ever as easy as it sounds. There’s always a master’s trick, some little snag you can barely make out that alters the texture of the chord. Crosby claims they used an open tuning and just barred across the neck, but if so, that’s not the way Don played it for me that night.
In any case, they invited us to their recording session. It was May 16, the very next day, at Pye Studios in Great Cumberland Place. The album they were making was called Two Yanks in England, and the session was remarkable for a multitude of reasons. First of all, so many great records had recently come out of that place: the Searchers’ “Needles and Pins,” “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the Spencer Davis Group’s “Keep on Runnin’.” Now the Everlys were going to cut eight of our songs there, and with us singing on them—fuck yeah! And then there were the session guys assembled for the gig: some kids named Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Reggie Dwight on piano (he now goes by Elton John). They were all kids breaking in as session players, and for twelve quid you could have had them for days.
So there we were at Pye Studios, Clarkie and me, fresh from hearing “Bye Bye Love” at a school dance to standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel in a bloody rainstorm to helping the Everly Brothers make an album with our songs, in just eight and a half years flat. Nice little arc, wouldn’t you say?
A FEW WEEKS LATER, “Bus Stop” was released and it exploded, the biggest hit we’d ever had. It even cracked Billboard’s top ten, which was a new, heavyweight milestone in our career. There was plenty of press and back-to-back gigs. The Hollies were doing something like 260 shows a year. It was everything we had hoped for—and more. One tricky aspect in the “more” column was fans. They’d turned up the heat in the last few months. Not as wild as Beatlemania, but a pretty hot scene. Man, those girls were fucking crazy. They’d grab anything they could get their hands on. Yeah, that too. At some shows, we had to make our getaway in small aluminum trailers normally used for food deliveries—five grown men crushed into a space not big enough for a dwarf. Another night, after the Poll Winners gig at Albert Hall, Tony Hicks nearly died when a fan grabbed his knitted tie and wouldn’t let go. It was an ugly Isadora Duncan scene. The tie kept tightening and tightening until Tony had just about passed out. It would have been curtains had Rod Shields, our road manager, not managed to cut the tie, which probably saved Tony’s life. It was bedlam. The Hollies got pretty good at moving as one. You never wanted to get separated. That happens, and you’re dead meat. We’d learned that lesson on the Stones tour, where it was really fucking crazy. If they couldn’t get to the Stones they would go for the next guys, and we were the next guys. Human shields for the Stones. Not my career goal.
But the momentum kept building. Our next single, “Stop! Stop! Stop!,” came out in October 1966, and same thing: top-ten hit. The three of us—Allan, Tony, and I—wrote it in a cab heading to Top of the Pops about that Turkish belly dancer we fell in love with in New York and not being able to touch her. A stunning-looking woman who knew how to work it. Apparently, we couldn’t get her out of our minds. We owe you that record, babe. And you, Morris Levy.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” wasn’t an obvious single at the outset. It took us some time to figure out how best to configure it. You can’t just launch into the verse without some kind of lead-in, and the way that song was constructed, it was difficult to figure out an intro. Credit Tony with solving that problem. He came up with the banjo riff that imitated a balalaika, and that gave the record its inimitable sound. He’d done the same magic for “Look Through Any Window” and “Bus Stop,” with those unforgettable guitar riffs at the beginning of each. Tony was an incredibly tasteful guitar player; his playing carried the rest of the band. The singing was usually Allan and me, but Tony’s riffs on guitar and banjo helped give the Hollies their musical identity.
We really hit the mark when it came to our next record. Tony, Allan, and I wanted desperately to write a monster A-side. So far, our biggest hits were Graham Gouldman songs, and, hey, you take ’em where you can get ’em. But we thought we were good enough writers to land the big fish. We knew the combination, how to come up with a universal theme, the right type of hook. So we went through a shitload of ideas until inspiration struck. I’m not sure which of the three of us came up with fun fairs. We had all been to them as kids: pulling ducks out of the water, a ring around a bottleneck, winning goldfish. We thought a love affair was pretty much like going round and round and round on a carousel. And before we knew it, the song just took shape. It was all there—the words, the tune, there was no stopping it. And Tony and Bobby wrapped it in an exceptional arrangement.
You ask me, “On a Carousel” was one of the Hollies’ best songs. It’s a pop song with an infectious chorus, but flirts with gorgeous shifts in rhythmic texture. The transition to “Horses chasing ’cause they’re racing / So near yet so far-r-r-r-r” features a hook that keeps the melody from becoming predictable. Tony’s barblike accents that echo the phrase “on a carousel” demonstrate his subtle virtuosity. And the lyric captures the essence of young love without the usual moon-and-June clichés. We knew it was a hit from the get-go.
After “Carousel,” it felt like we were on an express train. You couldn’t avoid that fucking record. It exploded out of the box and ran right up the charts, so the gigs got better, as well as the money. This was the first
time I’d made any serious dough. We’d made plenty steadily over the years, but after “Carousel” the bank vaults opened. Sometime around its release we got a check from Columbia for $250,000. A quarter of a million big ones! That made an impression. In retrospect, I handled it pretty well. I wasn’t used to having a lot of money, so I wasn’t a big spender. Okay, I did treat myself to a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, but a secondhand Rolls, which I bought from one of my dearest friends, Ronnie Stratton. We took it for a test drive down to London and when we came out of a show, it was covered in lipstick: I LOVE TONY, I LOVE GRAHAM, I LOVE ALLAN, all over the car. Otherwise, I sent money home. I tried to help my family as much as I could. One of my mother’s dreams was to have her own pub, so I bought her one, the Unicorn in Pendleton. She ran the place and sat at the end of the bar regally, like Queen Elizabeth. But I didn’t buy a lot of extravagant things because that kind of stuff never meant anything to me.
In December, I went out one night to Blaises, in the West End of London, to see a kid from America whom Linda Keith told me about: Jimi Hendrix. I sat directly behind John, Paul, and George. We were all stunned by his music; it was so primitive, so wild, so unbelievably rock ’n’ roll. A few months later, in March 1967, the Byrds came to England for a short promotional tour to support their new single, “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star.” This was the first time they’d been to the UK since 1965, when the promoter fucked up by billing them as “America’s Answer to the Beatles.” Utter blasphemy. It was absurd to make that kind of comparison. They’d gotten trashed by everyone all over London, the press, audiences, women, stray dogs—everyone except for the Beatles themselves, who sympathized and were incredibly kind to them. I remember catching the Byrds on the opening gig of that tour at Blaises, the same place I’d seen Jimi Hendrix for the first time. They came out and … they were smoking cigs onstage! The Hollies would never have done that. We wouldn’t have dared; we’d have gotten crucified for it. And they weren’t particularly good. Their equipment was shitty. Two guys plugged into the same amp. No one was happy, onstage or off.
But this time around, all was forgiven. They were major stars trailing a ton of hits: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “All I Really Want to Do,” “Eight Miles High,” “Renaissance Fair.” The Beatles invited Crosby to visit them at Abbey Road during a Sgt. Pepper’s session. The Byrds’ hotel was a hoity-toity affair called the White House in the north of London. I knew the place. It was full of blue-haired ladies and old fuckers in tuxedoes, the last place you’d expect to trip over a guy like Croz. So I gave David a call and said, “You’ve got to get out of that place. You can’t smoke dope in the White House. Come stay with me.” And he did. It was great to see him again.
Since our introduction in LA, he’d sent me a tape of stuff he was working on, including “Déjà Vu.” Quite frankly, I’d never heard anything like these songs. I was used to writing in the standard pop format—an intro, first and second verse, go to the chorus, maybe do a bridge, do the last chorus and get the fuck out of there and get paid. I was trained to do that by the Hollies, and we were good at it. But “Déjà Vu” was a completely different beast. It was jazz-oriented; it never repeated itself. There was no first or second verse, no chorus. It just kept moving forward. I was completely blown away and, as a songwriter, quite humbled. I played Croz a couple sketches of my songs, and he was very encouraging. But I knew, at that point, musically he was miles ahead of me.
Crosby wasn’t happy with the Byrds. They were refusing to put his songs on the albums, and in return David was behaving badly. He was being a dick, refusing to show for rehearsals, staging hissy fits, and acting out. (Little did I know, David had a PhD in acting out.) There was already talk about the Byrds getting rid of him.
Despite all that, he was the same ol’ Croz I’d met with Cass. His irreverence and musical ability were extraordinary features. What amazed me most was the incredible amount of dope that this kid could smoke and yet still function. Still bright, still funny, still able to maintain his train of thought, still philosophizing, while I was still laughing at that fly on the wall. The guy was fucking immune to it all.
One morning soon after he arrived at my place, I woke him up with tea and muffins and said, “I’ve got to go to a press conference with the Hollies. Feel like coming along?” He was game. The event was in support of an artist named Keith, who’d had a hit with “98.6” and had just released a single of our song “Pay You Back with Interest.” It was over at Pye Studios, where we’d recorded with the Everly Brothers, so it was familiar and comfortable turf. Crosby dressed for the occasion, in a cape with leather doodads and Borsalino hat.
The place was full of press, the usual guys who covered these events and asked the same meaningless, idiotic questions. Right off the bat, a reporter came up to us and asked some fucking stupid question like “What color are your socks?” or “What did you have for dinner last night?” Normally, the Hollies would have answered those questions. We were used to photographers saying: “Go stand in the doorway and put your elbows in your ears.” And we’d do it, we played the game. That’s the way things were done in England. But Crosby turned on the guy and said, “Hey, fuck off! Ask him a decent question.” And the room went silent. He generated more publicity with those few words than the entire press conference.
His whole attitude was different from ours, but I instinctively knew that this was where I wanted to go. I was twenty-five and fed up with acting like a little moptop, no longer happy with being played for a fool by the press. It was time to move on, especially in the image department. And now I had a role model—of a sort. Crosby was a guy who seemed to be more in control, even though he was out of control. I loved his whole take on things.
AFTER DAVID LEFT, the Hollies set out on a package tour of the UK with Brian Poole and the Tremeloes and the Spencer Davis Group. In the few short years since our emergence on the scene, the quality of music had risen exponentially. Both bands were great onstage. They knew how to duplicate the high level of their records without losing the edge. Plus, everyone had learned to perform—to pace their shows, to make sure the sound was perfectly balanced, and to excite the crowds. Bottom line was: You had to be good. You couldn’t get by anymore just by shaking your ass. Word got around if bands couldn’t cut it onstage. The kids weren’t gullible. You know: We won’t get fooled again.
The Tremeloes were enjoying an amazing resurgence. They’d suffered serious blowback when word got out that Decca had chosen them over the Beatles in 1963. That was a hard one to live down. Then their lead singer, Brian Poole, left the group in 1966. Seems that a change of scenery was just the thing, because since then they’d had a string of three gold records: the Cat Stevens song “Here Comes My Baby”; “Silence Is Golden,” the old Four Seasons hit; and “Even the Bad Times Are Good.”
The Spencer Davis Group kicked serious ass. Spencer was a nice cat, and not a bad musician. But everyone knew that Stevie Winwood was the power behind that band. He was an enormous talent: a voice that mimicked Junior Walker’s sax, same musical sensibility as the Mar-Keys. Only eighteen years old. Helluva combination. The last night of the tour in London, Dave Mason came backstage in a pair of foppy knee-length English riding boots. Stevie introduced us and told me he was leaving Spencer Davis to form a new band with Dave, Chris Wood, and Jim Capaldi. Gonna call themselves Traffic. I wonder if they ever got off the ground?
The pressure was always on the Hollies to stay on the charts, and as “Carousel” wound down its incredible run we struggled to come up with a follow-up single with the same kind of infectious groove. Tony had been playing with a melody influenced by the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was a three-chord progression dressed up with a strangely affecting refrain, but he couldn’t put a lyric to it. As a placeholder, he kept singing, “Hey, Mr. Man,” which not only didn’t cut it but didn’t spark any ideas. We tried forcing the issue, latching on to different parts of it as a springboard, bu
t nothing doing. It wouldn’t give.
Sometime that spring, we were rehearsing for a tour at Albert Hall. Marianne Faithfull was on the bill. We’d known her since she was sixteen, an insanely stunning woman. She was brilliant at image, pretty good voice. When she did “As Tears Go By,” it was frail, vulnerable, projecting exactly the vision that stroked my Catholic schoolgirl fantasy. More than a few nights I went to sleep with her on my mind. Anyway, she turned up wearing a white blouse and gray schoolgirl’s outfit. She was fabulous at playing that game. Man, it worked on me. The sight of her raised my fucking blood pressure, and gradually “Hey, Mr. Man” morphed into “Hey, Marianne … what’s your game now, can anybody play?” But we chickened out. We didn’t have the balls to sing, “Hey, Marianne,” so we made up a name that we’d never heard before: Carrie Anne.
Needless to say, Ron Richards loved it. He could smell a hit a mile away and designated it as our next single. Listening to it today, you can hear its pull. The verses paint little tortured scenarios about the eternal conflict sparked when someone young and innocent confronts the sophistication that comes with growing up. The singer feels left behind when his childhood playmate takes on overt sexual appeal. He realizes she has to play the field a little bit, and for that he’ll be rewarded: She’ll be back once she’s gained experience. Even so, his lament is downright painful: You’re so, so like a woman to me / So like a woman to me … His attitudes are constantly shifting. The distance between heartache and resentment narrows: When the lesson’s over, you’ll be with me … Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the crowning touch is the irresistible chorus—Hey, Carrie Anne, what’s your game now, can anybody play?—which weaves the scenes together in our signature three-part, right up to the dramatic climax, leaving her name echoing over the end.