by Graham Nash
We nailed that track in one session. You can hear the confidence in our voices in the way we pounced on those lyrics. The harmonies surge forward from the opening notes, building right to the crescendo that segues into the verse. It’s a nicely polished performance. And then we had the solo played by a steel-drum busker whom Ron Richards found on the street, that little calliope flourish that winks at the whole affair.
The Hollies had developed into a good little band. We’d become professional, efficient, and could always recognize a potential hit when we heard one. We could turn out hits like this in our sleep, again and again. We had the formula down pat (eventually we had seventeen top-twenty records in the six years I was in the Hollies). But I was tired of the routine. Sure, we could write a hit single to order, but the mechanics of it no longer intrigued. I was bored with the moon-and-June rhymes, singing about schoolboy crushes and forbidden sex. There were deeper things to be thinking about, other horizons to cross. I was listening to more intricate songs, like “Over Under Sideways Down,” “Itchycoo Park,” “Somebody to Love,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Under My Thumb,” “Hey Joe”—the radio that year was full of great songs. Their construction, lyrically and musically, showed off how far rock ’n’ roll had come, and they served as a blueprint for where I wanted us to go, but we hadn’t evolved like the Beatles had. Our material was fairly simplistic: We wrote pop songs. And the rest of the guys liked it that way. Me? I was smoking dope, opening myself up to new frontiers, growing creatively.
I’d been working on a few things intended to take us in a different direction. One particular number, “Sleep Song,” threw the Hollies a powerful curve. In it, I wrote: “And when I awake, I will kiss your eyes open / Take off my clothes, and I’ll lie by your side.” They freaked when they heard it. “We can’t sing that. It’ll never sell.” Hey, different strokes. Except that poetry and mature experiences seemed to be outside their scope. My lyrics offended their provincial sensibilities and sent out signals that mine were on a different trajectory.
That summer, we were at Abbey Road, in the midst of recording our fifth album, Butterfly. The Beatles were in and out of the studio, putting the finishing touches on a long-awaited album, and in the course of things I became pretty friendly with their manager, Brian Epstein. He gave me three gifts that rearranged my chromosomes: a 16 mm movie of the Beatles at Shea Stadium and another they’d made to promote their single “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The final gift was an advance copy of Sgt. Pepper’s. From the opening notes, I knew it was an incredible piece of work. Listening to it, there was wonderment, envy: “I wish we’d have been that smart.” Musically, I was overwhelmed. I played it repeatedly for days, soaking it up. I knew every note, understood how beautiful it was, felt the power of the individual songs, and was stunned by the composition as a whole.
A few days later, my old friend Allan McDougall, BMI’s publicity guru, called and wondered if he could bring the Turtles by my place. They were arriving from the States only that afternoon, and he thought a visit with me would help to acclimate them, get them into the groove. They’d been on a plane all night and were feeling pretty fucked up, but they weren’t as fucked up as I was about to get them. I had a hash pipe that was eighteen inches long with a nice silver bowl that gave a good draw. At one point, after we’d been smoking it about an hour, I said, “You guys think you are high?” They said, “Yeah, we’re totally fucked up.” I said, “Well, good, because I want to play you something.” And I threaded a reel of tape on the machine; it was the yet-unreleased Sgt. Pepper’s album. I knew the album would wipe the floor with them. Very few had heard it, and everyone was anticipating it. Without telling them what I was going to play, I said, “Listen to this.” And I turned it up loud! It was obvious from the first few bars that it was the new Beatles album, and the Turtles, Mark and Howard, duly shit their pants. They went directly from my place to Jimi’s with news of what they’d heard. It was their first time in the UK. Welcome to England, baby!
ON SUNDAY MORNING, June 25, 1967, I was awakened by a phone call at my house in Kynance Mews … not my favorite way of waking up, but still I sleepily answered. It was Paul McCartney, and I was awake immediately. Paul invited me down to Abbey Road Studios, where he and the boys were about to put on a live show for the whole world. Using the BBC and the Telstar satellite system, the Beatles were going to be singing a song, representing the best that Britain had to offer, to millions of viewers. The show was called Our World and John Lennon had written a special song for the occasion, “All You Need Is Love.” Later that evening everyone gathered in Studio One, the big room at EMI. It was going to be the very first live worldwide television show—broadcast to about 400 million people.
I walked in with my friends Gary Leeds from the Walker Brothers, Allan McDougall, and my wife, Rose. Everybody was dressed to the nines in their finest hippie outfits: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Marianne Faithfull, Jane Asher, Pattie Harrison, and many Beatle friends were there awaiting what was obviously going to be an incredible event. George Martin, who wrote the score, had the room set up like a live set with an orchestra conducted by Mike Vickers, who wrote some charts for several of the Hollies records. The Beatles played on a small stage set up to the right of the classically dressed musicians. The song started with the French national anthem and blended in two other Beatles songs, “She Loves You” and “Yesterday.” You can even make out a Glenn Miller tune, “In the Mood,” part of a Brandenburg concerto, and “Greensleeves,” which was supposedly written by King Henry VIII. What a fantastic thing to be a part of, and I’m still thankful for Paul’s kindness. You can actually hear me whistle during the fade of the record. It was such a special time in England—that hazy, crazy summer of love.
TOWARD THE END of summer, I was ready for a break. Rosie and I needed some time away from the madness and set our sights on a holiday to Morocco. I was drawn there basically by my fascination with the exploits of the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Those were a couple of interesting cats, smoking dope all day, creating poetry, having a blast, living life, and I wanted to see if I could tap into that. Rosie’s girlfriend, JoAnne, came with us. She was a really lovely lost soul from Manchester who lived with us on and off, so it seemed agreeable to take her along.
To an Englishman like me, that African sun was a joy. I couldn’t get enough of it. The women practically had to pry me off the beach in Tangier. Otherwise I haunted the cafés in the medina in Casablanca, drinking mint tea and people watching, once again just soaking it all in. My attempt to score a little grass got buggered by a cab driver who mixed it with too much other shit. But I was high enough just toking on that incredible country.
After Casablanca, we decided to catch a train to Marrakesh. The train was positively archaic, rickety and run-down, but coolly atmospheric. We climbed aboard with three first-class tickets and found ourselves sharing a compartment with two older American ladies whose hair was dyed blue. An incredibly stuffy scene. I got completely bored and thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.” So I walked to the back of the train into the third-class compartment, and it was like Bedlam in there, totally insane. It was packed with people in djellabas and turbans, all smoky and hazy, with ducks and chickens and goats running around, people cooking on little stoves. Snake charmers, too. Just so fucking fabulous! The scene was way more exciting for me than the tea party at the front of the train, so I hung out in there for an hour or two, taking it all in. Then I went back to my first-class compartment, pulled out my guitar, and wrote “Marrakesh Express.”
I just started playing and zoned. Words, melody—everything came at once. And I knew, the minute I finished it, that I’d turned a corner in my songwriting. It was an artistic breakthrough, more mature. Not about love, but about expanding your world. It was impressionistic, lots of black-and-white images. The characters were adult. It focused on travel to exotic, undiscovered places—and it was about dope.
&nbs
p; That song excited the hell out of me. I thought, Now there’s a hit song of a different beast. It was so different from what the Hollies were used to doing. The tone of it was smart and experiential, progressive. A step in the right direction. We could deliver it without compromising our ensemble approach. It was bound to transform us from a pop band to a rock band. At last, I thought, we’d finally come of age.
When I returned to London and played them the song, the Hollies didn’t hear it at all. It didn’t conform to their sensibility of what a hit song should sound like, and they didn’t want to do it. We went around and around with it before they agreed to give it a try. There was a session at Abbey Road that went absolutely nowhere. The Hollies cut an awful track of it that I hope no one ever hears, but it gave me a clear view into our widening divide.
That picture was brought sharply into focus with our next single, and a specific moment when I started to separate from the Hollies. While we were off playing a gig in Split, Yugoslavia, I had written a song called “King Midas in Reverse.” It was an introspective song about how my life was in turmoil. My marriage with Rose was starting to come apart (no real surprise considering the double life I was leading). I was outgrowing the band I loved and had spent my youth with. I was smoking dope while they were still doing their eight-pints-a-night thing. Turn and face the strange, ch-ch-changes. So the song was about a king who thinks everything he touches turns to gold, when it’s really turning to shit.
The Hollies made a great record of “King Midas in Reverse.” They liked the song, liked what it had to say, and it made us stretch in the studio. We laid down a really interesting track, starting with the opening riff on the bass strings of my guitar, and from there it took off into the stratosphere. We were actually on the road playing gigs and unable to finish it all at once, so in our absence Ron Richards added a full orchestra and sound effects and all kinds of interesting shit. The finished track he played for us was incredibly psychedelic. When I heard it, I was ecstatic, and so were the rest of the guys. It was innovative, a huge leap forward. I thought it signaled a real transformation. Once we put it out, the doors would be wide open again and the Hollies could do anything.
We had a lot of faith in that record. Its release on September 1, 1967, was greeted with a chorus of stunning reviews. Lots of ap- proval focused on our evolution, how we’d grown as a band. But it wasn’t the hit that we’d all expected. It was a commercial failure. It stalled in the top thirty instead of cracking the top ten, the first of our singles to do that in two years. In retrospect, I think “King Midas” was just too weird, not the kind of song listeners expected from the Hollies. It was more of a Graham Nash record with the Hollies on it, and that sound was still a few years off.
The worst backlash from the record was what it did to my relationship with the Hollies. Afterward, they no longer trusted my judgment. I suggested any number of songs to pursue as a follow-up, but they backed away from all of them. It was as if my miscalculation with “Midas” had cursed our hit-making prowess. Rationally, they knew that it wasn’t my fault, but their minds were made up. And I literally gave up trying. Who wants to fight?
Another development contributed to our alienation. Just before “King Midas” was released we’d gone back to the States for a short swing of college gigs in the Midwest. A low-key bus tour, but nothing like the bus tours today, with built-in living rooms, kitchens, and wall-to-wall sound. This was on a regular Greyhound bus, with upright seats. There was hardly enough room to pull out a guitar, or anything else, for that matter. The saving grace was that Cass Elliot was on the road with us. She came along to keep me company, which was much appreciated. What I needed more than anything was a good friend who understood where I was at and could help me put it in perspective.
When we got to Chicago, at the Astor Towers, Cass came up with an interesting suggestion. “Do you want to take acid?” she asked.
I was game, willing to try anything. So she called her buddy, Spanky McFarlane, a kind of Cass character with the band Spanky & Our Gang. She sent us to a club called Mother Blues on Rush Street to score. Cass had done her share of acid taking and was the perfect partner for my first trip. We went back to the hotel that afternoon and dropped. Then we ordered fresh strawberries from room service and put Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” on a small portable record player. Cass had given me a black enameled cane with a silver head on it, and I remember spinning it on my finger and seeing it turn into a musical nymph. What an intense experience, an utter delight.
It reinforced my feeling that I was just a speck, a grain of dust, and if you looked at the universe from that perspective, everything in the world was fucking meaningless yet incredibly meaningful. Acid really opened me up. It opened a door that was probably already there and put me in my place. An amazing drug. I think one of the reasons kids don’t do it so much today is because I’m not sure society wants to look at itself anymore.
In any case, Cass and I were sharing the bed. I think she had hopes of seducing me behind the acid, but I wasn’t going for it. She stroked my hair and asked, “Is this the way you want our relationship to be? Just platonic?” And I said yes. Friends, but good friends—no, great friends—nothing more than that. I’m sure it was difficult for her to hear. I loved her, but I couldn’t will myself to be attracted to her. Afterward, I remember leaning over the bed and saw that the strawberries had turned into a plateful of hearts. And then a ringing … it was coming from the nightstand next to the bed.
The phone. It was Rod Shields, our road manager. “So are you ready to go?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ready to go? For what?”
Seems we had a radio station interview at WLS, with teenage fans of the Hollies. Somehow I got it together and did the interview, although on a rubber phone that dissolved into a rubber conversation. I was high the whole time, but thankfully I must have had it together, because no one seemed to realize I was out of my gourd.
Taking acid caused another crack in my widening rift with the Hollies. I was the only one of us experimenting with drugs, and it was obvious the effect it was having on the band. Once you start becoming more self-aware, more deeply attuned to your feelings and surroundings, you become more open to new experiences. Drinking beer didn’t give the other guys a similar sensibility. Their perceptions about life were different from mine, and the more beer they drank—and the more dope I smoked—the wider the division between us grew.
Nowhere was this more evident than in our attitudes toward music. I started writing a lot of material on my own, deeper songs that were more intimate, more mature. A lot of it had to do with pushing myself after hearing Crosby’s songs. I wanted to go there, where he’d gone, and beyond, if possible. The Hollies weren’t interested in hearing what I’d done. They wanted another hit single. So Allan and I went over to Tony’s flat in Chelsea and decided to crank one out.
We knew how to do it. Invent a situation, put a great little lick to it, give it a Hollies twist with vocal harmony, run it all through the Cuisinart: hit single, nothing to it. But it was getting old. And it never got older than the song we came up with. We cobbled the first name of Allan’s wife onto the last name of mine and came up with “Jennifer Eccles.”
White chalk written on red brick
Our love told in a heart
It’s there, drawn in the playground
Love kiss hate or adore
Puppy love in the schoolyard again. I thought we’d grown up a little, that we were past that shit. But we were back to bopping around, singing: “I love Jennifer Eccles / I know that she loves me … la-la-la-la-la-la-la.” It sounded like bubblegum, something Herman’s Hermits might have done. The Hollies were better than that. But I went for it, which pissed me off big-time. I was angrier at myself than I was at them.
Listening to the radio around that time you heard “Magic Bus,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” even “I’ve Got to Get a Message to You,
” which is where pop should have gone. And we’re singing “I love Jennifer Eccles / I know that she loves me.” It was fucking embarrassing. We were just repeating ourselves. We’d run out of steam.
The Hollies cut “Jennifer Eccles” in January 1968, then left for a tour in North America before it was released. We were doing the same old shit, Hollies songs, and my heart wasn’t in it at all. I hoped my ambivalence didn’t show. The last thing I wanted was to let those guys down. There was so much history between us—good history. But I’d be less than truthful if I didn’t admit that I was sleepwalking through this tour. My head was in a really weird place. I was trying to figure things out: how to reenergize myself and the band, what I wanted, where I was headed.
I was turning all of this over when we rolled into LA a few days later. Crosby kidnapped me from a hotel we were staying at on Wilshire Boulevard and took me to a party at Peter Tork’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Peter was winding down his service with the Monkees and was very much a part of the scene. His parties were legendary, days-on-end affairs with great Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon characters, plenty of music, sex, dope, the whole enchilada. I was looking forward to checking it out. Plus there was someone there Croz wanted me to meet.
The house was at the top of the Hills overlooking the city. We banged on the front door, the usual cloud of smoke drifted out, and suddenly we were in a living room filled with all sorts of people jamming. My eye went right to a kid pounding the shit out of the piano, playing a fabulous boogie with Brazilian overtones.
“Wow! Who’s that?” I asked, half listening, not wanting to miss a note.
David smiled. “That’s the guy I want you to meet—that’s Stills.”
I knew all about Stephen Stills. I was totally into Buffalo Springfield. Allan Clarke had given me their album, which I’d carried throughout our tour of Canada. I practically played the grooves off that record. The word on the grapevine was the group was about to break up. The problem, apparently, was with their lead guitar player, Neil Young. He often turned up late for gigs, or not at all. He didn’t show at Monterey Pop, flat-out refused to play an important showcase on The Tonight Show, all of which frustrated the hell out of Stephen. He’d had enough of Neil’s shit. Besides, Stills was a guitar virtuoso in his own right and wanted the lead guitar position of the Springfield for himself. Looking back, it’s doubtful Neil ever wanted to be part of a band. Here’s an illustration that’ll put it in perspective: David and Stephen saw A Hard Day’s Night and knew exactly what they wanted to do. Neil didn’t give a shit about A Hard Day’s Night. He saw Don’t Look Back (twice) and took that as his role model. Neil always wanted to do what Dylan did: be an individual, a great songwriter, an interpreter of his own music. You couldn’t do that in a group, a lesson I’d learn about Neil much later in the game.