Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash

  “Okay.” Aw fuck!

  We took our time provisioning the Mayan. Lots of food and water were stowed on board. A steady supply of weed and a bottomless reserve of coke. And a crew that rivaled the one on Gilligan’s Island: Leo Makota and Steve Cohen from the CSNY road crew, singer-songwriter Ronee Blakley and her boyfriend John Haberlin, our friends Bobby and Gay Ingram from Coconut Grove, and Anita Treash, a friend from Big Sur who paired up with Crosby. I certainly wasn’t going to be of any use. I’m English. I knew about Francis Drake, but in no way was I anything resembling a sailor. Of course, David and I both had our guitars, with grand intentions to write songs galore on the open sea. And Joni planned to come down for part of the trip, so there was going to be plenty of music in the air.

  Once we boarded the Mayan, David’s ghosts were tamed. He was transformed on that boat. All the pain and anguish began melting away as he slipped into the role of an emotionally healthy person. Captain Croz. Man, he was in his element, pulling up sails and coiling the ropes, navigating through treacherous shoals. He needed to deal with the ocean every minute of the day, never knowing if it would do something he didn’t expect. It could turn nasty at any moment. A storm could come in suddenly, with forty-foot waves, and you’re like a cork floating on the ocean. Amazingly enough, we didn’t have any lifeboats, but I trusted Croz. He was as confident and comfortable with the boat as he was with his guitar and music. He put everything he had into it. It was heartening to see him come around like that, taking the edge off a perilous couple of months. The Mayan saved David’s ass, no doubt about it.

  We left Fort Lauderdale on January 23, 1970, and sailed through the Windward Passage, between Cuba and Haiti. It was fabulous weather, warm and sunny. We all had our watch, which was four-hour stretches. David always took the dawn and the sunset watches, more salve for his weary soul. In the Caribbean, we sailed over to Jamaica, which is when things started getting wild.

  The Jamaican authorities didn’t like the long-haired hippies with this beautiful boat. Something about it felt wrong to them. They assumed we were running drugs from Jamaica back to Miami. Croz told them, “Hey, man, we don’t need to smuggle weed. We’re rich rock stars.” But that didn’t wash. So when we docked in Kingston, we were kept on board while the police confiscated our passports. I started arguing with a Jamaican cop. “That passport’s the property of the Queen of England. Don’t you know blah, blah, blah … ” I got fucking righteous. Silly shit, in retrospect. A team of eight men—five from customs, two from immigration, and a cop—searched the boat thoroughly, in the hold, everywhere. They never found anything, because our stash was in a milk carton in the refrigerator. I’m not sure where David had stored the firearms, a couple pistols and a few rifles that were kept in a guitar case, but they missed those, too. Shit, man, this was Jamaica, where they’ve got some of the best pot in the world. Why were they looking for our stash?

  Eventually they realized who we were. A police check reported our identities as famous rock ’n’ rollers, so after a week they returned our passports and sent us on our way with no apologies. Of course, their suspicions weren’t totally wrong.

  As we sailed toward the Panama Canal, my sea legs kicked in. David taught me a lot of basic boating knowledge, which sails did what, from bow to stern. He said, “Notice how the wind is coming from such-and-such direction. You need to pull up a staysail so that it will catch the wind and take us in that direction.” And I have to admit that I enjoyed it. It was an incredibly different feeling. I started acting and doing as I thought sailors did, like carving a whale on a piece of wood in scrimshaw fashion.

  There were incredibly peaceful nights, great sunsets, the ladies cooking dinner, the lobster and fish we just caught, and the dope we were smoking and the music we were making. Idyllic! And incredibly therapeutic. We sang every day. Nothing like it in my lifetime.

  Joni met us just outside of Panama, and that altered the dynamic. I knew she was coming, and it was anything but pleasant. Some kind of argument broke out, with Joan yelling that I hated all women. Coming from anyone else, I would have dismissed such an irrational remark, but from her I had to think about it, and it hurt, for sure. In the end it was nothing more than a way to strike out at me. She really knew how to get to me. She had come to Panama to have a nice sail with David and me, but things had turned too ugly between us. It got pretty tense. So she decided to leave us and fly back to LA. I must confess that I was somewhat relieved.

  Moving through the Panama Canal was a thrilling experience. It was banked on either side by a lush rain forest, with parrots and monkeys swinging through the trees. At the western end of the canal, David went ashore to arrange for Joni’s flight home. Some drunken asshole in a bar started giving him grief about hippies, and wondering why David wasn’t in Vietnam, defending his country. He hated that guys who looked like us had this beautiful boat. Turns out the guy was the FBI’s head of security at the docks. So he intended to stick us with a lot of regulations that would normally be forgiven. This guy pissed David off so much that Croz said, “I wish that fucker would drop dead.” Be careful what you wish for. The next day, when David went back to pay our fuel bill, we learned the guy had had a heart attack during the night and was dead.

  Talk about bad juju. Nothing like a curse to spook the shit out of us. Fortunately, Croz had scored some Panamanian Red while ashore, which took the edge off the news as we sailed up the west coast of Central America and Mexico, trying to recapture the previous spirit of the trip. We were off the coast of Guatemala, on Crosby’s watch, when suddenly he cried out, “Willy! Holy fuck! Look at that!” I squinted to see where he was pointing, and there was a whale. It was the biggest animal I’d ever seen in my life. Now, we were still smoking a lot of dope, so who knows? But I could swear it was at least one and a half times the size of the Mayan, maybe a hundred feet long, with a blowhole the size of a table. And blue—a rare, near-extinct blue whale. The sound it made when it took a breath made my heart stop. Then a whoooosh, with steam spewing out. Dolphins played off its nose, making it all the more surreal. Another day I saw a bird, two or three feet tall, standing on the ocean. “Hey, Croz,” I said, “how is that possible?” Now, we were pretty fucked up, but not all that trashed. As we came around, I realized the bird was standing on the back of a giant sea turtle.

  Anyway, after we saw the whale I started writing “Wind on the Water.” It’s not so much a song about a blue whale as it is a portrait of Crosby. At the time, he was taking a lot of heat from critics; he was an easy target. “Over the years you have been hunted, by the men who threw harpoons … ” It was David I was talking about in that first verse. “Over the years you swam the ocean, following feelings of your own … ” Later, I segued into the issue about the shoddy treatment of whales, how they were slaughtered to make lipstick and eye shadow, but the song served a dual purpose. I also wrote “Southbound Train,” “Frozen Smiles,” and “Man in the Mirror” during the voyage. And I wasn’t alone in my productivity. David wrote “Where I Will Be,” an incredibly sad song, and “Whole Cloth.” The songs were dark, because our lives were dark.

  It was a long journey, past Costa Rica and Honduras. Coming up the coast was an unusually hard slog, and we were battered by waves seemingly the size of skyscrapers. At one point, when we got caught in a storm, I watched David physically pick up the anchor, which must have weighed 250 pounds, and throw it overboard to keep us from drifting toward a giant rock face. That saved our ass. I had to trust Croz with my life, literally. We had taken that hairy route because the only other option was to go from Panama all the way out to Hawaii, in order to catch a wind that would blow us to San Francisco. But Déjà Vu was about to be released, and we knew we needed to get back into the business end of things. Otherwise, no one would be around to promote the record. I’m sure Geffen and Elliot and Ahmet were freaking out. So we decided to power right through.

  From Cabo San Lucas it was all upwind, so the boat ran on power, motoring the last leg
of the trip. The wind was in our faces all afternoon long as we hit it head-on, pushing to get home. Just outside San Diego, we ran out of fuel and tacked up into San Diego Harbor. David delighted in cutting off the engine and sailing into port, dropping the sails, knowing how the inertia would steer the boat so that we pulled up to the dock slowly, perfectly. We were pretty full of ourselves. We had brought the Mayan three thousand miles without a scratch. As we prepared to tie up to the dock, another boat full of blind-drunk newspaper people with hookers on board rammed into the Mayan and ripped out the bowsprit. We’d come all that fucking way! It’s a good thing our guns were stowed, out of Croz’s reach. Man, they scattered like rats off that boat. Luckily, we’d been in the process of filing our papers with customs and immigration, so the feds witnessed the entire incident and ID’d the culprits, making them pay up.

  Everything was different when we hit dry land. At home, things between me and Joni were still fragile and tense. During the sessions and touring for the Déjà Vu period, she’d recoiled from all of the cross-pollination with the four of us, getting too sucked into our scene. Our last fight in Panama hadn’t helped. It began to disturb her that her life and career were so intertwined with ours. She just needed a break from everything. Immediately.

  A week or two later, while I was busy laying a new floor in Joan’s kitchen, a telegram arrived from her, from Matala, Crete. It said: IF YOU HOLD SAND TOO TIGHTLY IN YOUR HAND, IT WILL RUN THROUGH YOUR FINGERS. LOVE, JOAN. And I knew at that point it was truly over between us.

  I was brokenhearted. Joan had affected me on a very deep level. She had every quality I found attractive in women—amplified to the tenth degree. She was not an ordinary woman, but rather complicated and philosophical, a musical genius, a great lover, and a wonderful companion. With Joni, it went deeper and wider and higher—and consequently lower. I sank into an impenetrable gloom.

  I decided to move out of the Laurel Canyon house as fast as I could. I didn’t have much there, just a few things in the closet. I didn’t want to be there when Joni got back from Greece. What was I going to say? What could I do—try and convince her to reconsider where we were at? No, it was over, and I wanted out.

  My San Francisco house wasn’t ready for occupancy, so I checked in to one of the bungalows at the Chateau Marmont, a prestigious showbiz hotel at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, where some incredibly wild scenes were always under way. I kept to myself for the most part, trying to nurse my broken heart. I had to deal with it, and my way of making sense of the situation was to write—so I knocked out three songs: “Simple Man,” “I Used to Be a King,” and “Stranger’s Room.”

  After I got that telegram from Joan, and knowing that she thought I might want to hold her down if we married, I tried to say what was really in my heart.

  I just want to hold you

  I don’t want to hold you down.

  I hear what you’re saying, and you’re spinning my head around,

  and I can’t make it alone.

  I came up with those lines first and put them together using the idea that my approach to love—and life, in general—is a simple one. I wasn’t the same kind of deep thinker that Joan was. Even though I’d spent years educating myself about photography, politics, beat poetry, art in general, and, well, the world at large, when you scratch the surface I’m a pretty simple man. It’s most obvious in my music. Simple constructions seem to have a powerful impact. The band always laughs because any song of mine can be learned by them in thirty seconds flat. I don’t use complicated chords or intricate word patterns. I couldn’t possibly write things like “Guinevere” or “Déjà Vu.” “Our House,” for example, is a very simple concept. So the verses of “Simple Man” evolved from who I was, and what I was feeling.

  I am a simple man, so I sing a simple song.

  I’ve never been so much in love and never hurt so bad

  at the same time.

  In “I Used to Be a King,” King Midas (in reverse) was the king I used to be, where everything he touches is supposed to turn to gold but doesn’t. Yeah, I know, it’s somewhat self-pitying, but that’s where I was at. At least three songs came out of the breakup blues.

  There was really no place for me to settle in at that point. During the Déjà Vu sessions I’d lived variously at the Chateau Marmont and the Caravan Lodge Motel, and before that at Joni’s in Laurel Canyon. A battalion of workers overseen by Leo Makota and Harry Harris were still in the throes of tearing my house in the Haight apart. But with few viable options, I moved in, living in a sleeping bag on one of the floors. I also needed wheels, a way to get around. The whole time I was with Joan, I never had a car. She was my full-time ride in LA. So Croz and I went to a Mercedes showroom in San Francisco, where I had my eye on a posh new model, the 6.3 liter.

  David walked around a blue one on display while I looked over an identical car in maroon. Two scruffy long-haired hippies ogling a gleaming Mercedes—you gotta know the salesman wasn’t particularly thrilled. The vibe I was getting from him was: Don’t even touch that fucking car. So I walked right over to this pencil dick and said, “I think my friend is buying the blue one—and you can wrap this baby up for me right now.”

  David was feeling better; he was ready to rock. The music and the Mayan had literally saved his life. I wanted to rush right into the studio and start cutting a Crosby-Nash album. It’s not that we decided we could do without Neil and Stephen. From the get-go, we designed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to be a mothership, where we could all come together, make music that would keep the ship afloat, and then branch out and play with anyone we wanted. To this day, we operate much the same way. So we knew that we didn’t have to ask Stephen and Neil if we could make a record. Besides, Stephen was in England recording a solo album, and Neil was recording tracks for After the Gold Rush. Frankly, I was glad the two of them weren’t around. I’d just been through a couple of weeks of binge drinking and a seven-week sail with David. I didn’t care much about Stephen and Neil at that point. Croz and I were both in great shape, tan and trim, clear-eyed, all those good things. We were closer than ever. We had the songs, as well as the love and trust of each other. Working together just made good sense.

  Before we could get started, however, Déjà Vu was released on March 23, 1970, although “released” is a bit of an understatement. It exploded out of the box, with two million advance orders. Promoters immediately jumped on the CSNY bandwagon. A tour was proposed that was every bit as immense as the market for the LP seemed to be. We’d be performing at arenas, with huge advances. And we’d be self-contained, not leaving anything to chance, which meant carrying our own PA system, speakers, monitors, microphones, the works. It was ambitious as hell, and wildly lucrative. All four of us were ready to rock.

  Stephen came back from England, ostensibly to sing on After the Gold Rush, but also to edge back into the fold. Living abroad had done a real number on him. He’d jammed with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. He’d played on Ringo’s single “It Don’t Come Easy.” And he’d done twenty-five sessions in twenty-seven days, working on his own album, on which he played an incredible variety of instruments. So his ego was the size of Uranus—and, no, the pun is not unintentional. He was also pushing the limits of cocaine madness.

  Driving to rehearsal one afternoon, he was distracted by the sight of a cop in his rearview mirror and veered into a parked car, fracturing his wrist. So, suddenly, the tour was on hiatus while Stephen took most of April off to recuperate in Hawaii.

  Then, in May, a real-life drama threw us a wild curve. I can’t remember where I was when I first heard about the students shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio, but I know damn well where Neil and David were. They’d been hanging out together in a cabin in Pescadero, in Northern California, that was owned by Steve Cohen, the guy who did our lights. The two of them went out for a drive through Butano Canyon, smoking a fat one and grooving on the redwood trees. In the meantime, Steve Cohen had been to the market for groc
eries and came back waving a magazine with John Filo’s legendary image of the girl kneeling over the body of a dead fellow student. Croz looked at it with mounting dread before handing the magazine to Neil, who grabbed a guitar, walked out into the woods, and came back a half hour later with a stunning new song, “Ohio.” He didn’t modify or polish it. The final song was what came right out of him. Croz immediately called me and said, “We need to be in the studio right now.”

  “What is this all about?” I asked him.

  “It’s a song we’ve got to cut immediately,” he insisted. “Round up the guys and book us into Record Plant. Neil and I will get down there right away.”

  The next night CSNY were in Studio Three, with Bill Halverson poised at the controls. We cut “Ohio” very quickly but also needed something appropriate for the B-side. Eventually, we decided on “Find the Cost of Freedom.” Recording it was an amazing moment in our career. We sat on four chairs facing each other in a square, doubled the voices, and had a master track finished in less than a half hour.

  Coincidentally, Ahmet Ertegun happened to be in Los Angeles. He was in the studio that night right after we’d finished recording, and understood what we were doing as soon as he heard playback.

  “Listen, man, we want it out now,” we told him. “This is too big a deal. The country has started shooting its own children. Things have spun out of control.”

  “But you’ve got ‘Teach Your Children’ going to number one,” he said.

  “Pull it!” I told him.

  He was incredulous. “Graham, you’re going to have a number one hit!”

  “I don’t care. Pull it.”

  Very few record guys would have honored that request. But Ahmet was an extraordinary cat. He took the tape with him, caught the red-eye back to New York, and personally pushed it through the machinery, getting it out in two weeks’ time. The single went out with a cover of the Bill of Rights (an unused mockup had four bullet holes through it).