by Graham Nash
I felt relieved not to be part of that scene. Instead, David and I tunneled into and completed Whistling Down the Wire, which was released in July 1976. It was a softer album than our previous rec- ords, without the obvious hit singles, but it showcased where we were at in a fine, effective way. I was extremely happy with it. And our subsequent performances, to support its release, were unusually energetic; we were in a terrific groove. Our onstage work with the Jitters was particularly dynamic. Lots of free-form jams, variations on old standards like “Déjà Vu,” and yet still intimate, an informal, personal affair. The show took on new life every night. Great way to work. I was enjoying myself again.
On August 10, before heading off to Europe, we began a three-night gig at the Greek Theatre in LA. It was one of those hot-ticket shows where everybody turned out—people we’d worked with, musicians we admired, friends, lovers, the music-business cognoscenti. I was dreading the possibility that Stephen might show up. At the time, he was really down on his heels. His marriage to Veronique had broken up, his band had disintegrated. The guy was watching his life come apart at the seams. Even so, I didn’t want to see him. I was still fuming about the master he’d taken a razor to and his part in wiping our vocals in Miami. Before the show began, I pulled Susan aside and said, “If you see a guy in a football jersey trying to get backstage, keep him the fuck away from me.” Stephen was a big-time Colts fan and had taken to living in the team jersey. I didn’t want him anywhere near us that night. David and I had earned our moment in the spotlight—it was our night to shine.
But, sure enough, on the third night, Stephen managed to talk his way backstage. During intermission, I caught sight of him in the crowd as he walked toward the stage. It was one of those tense, potentially explosive moments: What happens now? Part of me wanted to turn and make tracks, but he seemed kind of sheepish, out of sorts. I couldn’t ignore him. The guy is just too much a part of my life. We’d made too much great music together. So—fuck it. I grabbed him and gave him a hug. And pretty soon Crosby joined the embrace—a threesome, just the way David likes it.
Croz and I went out and finished the show. We ended with “Wooden Ships,” took a few bows, and left the stage to thunderous applause. A few minutes later, we wandered back onstage, this time with Stephen in tow, and sang an acoustic version of “Teach Your Children.” I hated to admit it, but it felt great singing that way, in a trio, just like that fateful night at Joni’s. There’s something so magical and irresistible about it. I’m a sucker every time.
Meanwhile, instead of keeping Stills away from me, Susan pulled him aside and invited him back to our place for dinner. Smart woman. She thought he seemed shy and sweet, not the two-headed monster I’d made him out to be. In fact, it was Susan’s version of Stephen who showed up that night. He was easygoing, agreeable, the Stephen Stills it was easy to love. We got mightily drunk, talked well into the night, deciding once again to put the old group back together. Here it was the summer of 1976, and we hadn’t made a record as CSN since 1969. It was time—time to see if it worked, to see if we still had the magic. Just the three of us: Crosby, Stills, and Nash. We were headed into the studio.
God help us one and all.
chapter13
IN DECEMBER OF 1976, CROZ AND I VISITED STEPHEN in the studio at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. He was recording songs of his like “Run from Tears,” “See the Changes,” and “Dark Star” with his engineer Michael Braunstein. As usual, David and I weren’t just observers, we got right in there and tried to put down several new songs. I’d written “Just a Song Before I Go,” “I Watched It All Come Down,” “Mutiny,” and “Carried Away.” David brought “In My Dreams,” “Jigsaw,” and “Anything at All” to the party. We all decided that maybe we had enough songs together to start a new CSN record. We ran down Stephen’s “See the Changes” in our old formation, Crosby, Stills & Nash singing around one mike, and it was all there. Everything we knew how to do instinctively coalesced in that inimitable three-part blend. All the pieces fell into place. We decided to move everything—lock, stock, and barrel—to Criteria Studios in Miami. Off we went again.
I knew damn well what Neil brought to the equation, but without him the session had a more collaborative feel. The vocals were easier to negotiate with three. There was none of the tension that prevailed, for better or for worse, none of the gamesmanship that gave CSNY its edge. Sure, there’d be plenty that we’d miss by Neil’s absence, but the advantages were stacking up for doing it this way.
The situation in Miami was certainly a bonus. We booked in with a company called Home at Last, two lovely young women who rented out semipalatial, multibedroom homes to bands recording at Criteria so that everyone could stay together. We had a fabulous Spanish-style villa just a short drive from the studio. The women got the groceries, did the cooking, changed the beds, cleaned the house. All we had to do was show up and go to the studio. And that made it a very attractive setup. The studio was also a contributing factor. Criteria was an out-of-the-way outpost for the West Coast music scene, which meant we could work undisturbed. And the guys who worked there constantly—Ronnie and Howie Albert—were great engineers and producers. All the elements were on our side.
(© Henry Diltz)
Of course, nothing was more powerful than the music we brought with us. Croz’s “Shadow Captain” was a monster of a song, lyrical dreamlike poetry set to Craig Doerge’s fine music, and “In My Dreams” was another of David’s beauties. While his stuff was typically image-laden and descriptive, Stephen’s songs were unusually personal and confessional. He was in tip-top shape as a writer, but an emotional mess, and it all came tumbling out in the music. “I Give You Give Blind” and “Run from Tears” are so fucking powerful. And “Dark Star,” about his relationship with Joan Baez, was achingly self-revealing.
Forgive me if my fantasies might seem a little shopworn
I’m sure you’ve heard it all before
I wonder what’s the right form
Love songs written for you have been going down for years
But to sing what’s in my heart seems more honest than the tears
I hadn’t heard Stephen operating at this level in some time. He was on top of his game, churning out great rock ’n’ roll tracks, gorgeous arrangements, heart-wrenching vocals. And he wasn’t drinking, which kept him focused on the music.
I’d also had a run of good luck where songwriting was concerned. A few weeks earlier, I’d been on vacation in Hawaii. Leslie Morris was with me, and in an effort to score some grass we met up with a dealer named Spider at his house near the beach. This was around one in the afternoon, and I had a four o’clock flight back to Los Angeles. Spider was a cheeky little bastard. He said, “You’re supposed to be some big-shot songwriter. I bet you can’t write a song before you go.”
“Oh, really,” I said. “How much?”
“A hundred bucks.”
I finished “Just a Song Before I Go” in a little under forty minutes. Turned out to be the biggest hit Crosby, Stills & Nash ever had, on the charts for twenty weeks. The original lyric I’d scribbled on school composition-book paper is currently in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I also brought “Cathedral” to the session, which I’d begun writing back in 1971, around the time we played the Royal Festival Hall. After that gig, Leo Makota, my road manager, and I decided to drop acid around six in the morning. We hired a 1928 Rolls-Royce and a driver because neither of us had any business being behind a wheel. Two hippies tripping. “Let’s go see Stonehenge!”
Back then, you could actually touch the rocks, embrace them, which I did, perhaps excessively so. The site still had an anything-goes policy. And so I lay on the grass, on acid, in the middle of Stonehenge, for hours (although maybe it was twenty minutes). It was an incredible trip. My big revelation was that I was as insignificant as a speck of dust in this vast universe of ours. Acid can be good for perspective.
On our way back to London, we stopped i
n Winchester, first at the Great Hall to see where the fabled Round Table of King Arthur and his knights was kept. Now, I knew that it was probably bogus, more mythical than real, but that myth has tantalized English schoolboys for four hundred years, so I wanted to see it. As I approached the building, there was a man standing in front of me dressed in something resembling a beefeater’s outfit, holding a small tray in his hand. On the tray were small horn beakers of water and little squares of bread.
“Here ya go,” he said, pushing it toward my face.
Now, I was peaking, so I didn’t quite grasp his intention. “What do you mean, ‘Here ya go’?” I asked.
He gazed into my eyes and said, “Don’t you know it’s just okay to be?”
On acid, it was the most profound thing that anyone had said to me in my life. Don’t I know it’s just okay to be? All this posing as a rock star, musician, famous hippie, millions of seats, hit records—it meant nothing, if you could just be.
From there, we took the five-minute walk to Winchester Cathedral. Leo and I made our way to a side chapel with an aboveground grave resting on a huge marble plinth, where one of England’s early kings was buried. As we entered the church, the sun had been blocked by clouds, but it eventually appeared, shining through the stained-glass windows, which, on acid, was a mind-blowing effect. I started to walk down the nave toward the cross of Jesus. I was still peaking, and I felt a strange, unworldly presence at my feet. It stopped me in my tracks. I looked down and my legs began wobbling. I was standing on the grave of a soldier who died on my birthday, February 2, but in 1799. I’m not sure if it was real—I was on acid, what did I know from reality? But that’s what I think I saw, and it became part of my song “Cathedral.” I found out later that, in fact, I was not hallucinating. Someone sent me a photo of the actual grave. Go figure.
I wrote the song during the ongoing experience. Afterward, I realized that if I was going to criticize religion, I’d better have every fucking word right. It’s a serious song and I wanted to be sure of what I was saying, which is why it took me six years of intermittent work. Obviously, I was writing other songs in the meantime. But I kept coming back to that song, remembering a “cobweb on a face” and a cleaning lady trying to swish it off with a cloth. All those images came floating back to me: flying in Winchester Cathedral / sunlight pouring through the break of day. How, walking down the aisle, expressions on the face of the Savior made me say, “I can’t stay.” And feeling like I wanted someone to open up the gates of the church and let me out of here!
After we recorded “Cathedral” at the beginning of February 1977, I took a break to visit my mother, who wasn’t well. She was never a very healthy woman, suffering from mitral stenosis, the blocking of the mitral valve. In 1953, she had one of the first heart operations in the north of England to try and correct it. To get to her heart, the doctors had to break every rib, lift her left arm up, cut through tissue, poke around and clean out the valve, put the heart back in place, sew her up, and make sure the ribs were in the right place. It was a big operation, easily life-threatening. I remember sitting in French class in Salford Grammar when someone knocked on the window, signaling our teacher, Mr. Chadwick, out. They had a long conversation before Mr. Chadwick walked back into class and said, “Graham”—his face was solemn, and I was sure my mother hadn’t made it—“your mother’s okay. She made it through.” Here it was, nearly twenty-five years later, and she was still grappling with the operation’s aftereffects.
While I was there, I took a walk around Manchester and found myself standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel, in the very spot where Allan Clarke and I had waited for the Everly Brothers in 1960. It was snowing, blustery, a typical north of England day, almost like a Lowry painting. I stood there watching people come and go well into the evening, and goddamned if they didn’t look exactly the same as they had when I was a kid. Bundled up in their overcoats, with their red noses and flat, dead stares. I thought, There but for the grace of God. That’s me, if I had not had the instinct or made the decision to get out of there. I would have been one of those people hating their fucking lives, pissed off at their bosses, trying to find a bus, breathing toxic air from the industry around Manchester. I felt relieved, thankful that I’d been fortunate enough to enjoy experiences that weren’t available to someone like my father. I immediately went to the hotel and wrote “Cold Rain” and finished it on the plane back to Miami.
Crosby often tells people, “If you really want to know about Graham Nash, listen to ‘Cold Rain.’ That’s who he is.” When I sing, Wait a second, don’t I know you? / Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? I’m talking about myself. You seem to be like someone I knew / Yes, he lived here but he left, when he thought that there was more.
Usually, with my songs, Crosby has heard them in advance of a session. But this time I came to the party with “Just a Song Before I Go,” “Cathedral,” “Carried Away,” and “Cold Rain” without playing them beforehand, so I think they may have impressed him more than hearing dribs and drabs up front. They were four fine pieces of music, if I say so myself. I felt like I’d come a long way since writing “Hey, What’s Wrong with Me?” with Clarkie. Working with Stephen and David made me stretch as a writer, trying to be as profound lyrically as I thought their songs were. Writing, I discovered, was basically a muscle that needed exercise. If I’d have been a plumber for thirty years, I’d have been a fantastic plumber.
When I got back to Miami, things started getting weird. No surprise. Our routine was the same: getting up late, having lunch, and recording from five o’clock to four or five in the morning. But drugs started to get in the way. David’s drug taking was a full-blown obsession. He and Nancy Brown were not in great shape. In fact, they were both quite a mess, doing an ounce of coke a day. Nancy looked terrible. The drugs were destroying her. She had gone from being an extremely beautiful woman, knocking everybody on their ass, to looking like a witch, with sores covering her body. And it was hard to get David to concentrate. He was getting up later and later, avoiding the sunlight.
Croz had always been able to handle drugs better than anyone I’d ever met, but by the time we got to Miami they’d gotten the better of him. I’m a pretty tolerant man. I’m also pretty private, and what David does with his private life is his business. But it now affected the music and our studio time. We’d head into a session waiting for him to show. “Where’s David?” “He’s in the bathroom.” “Where’s David?” “He’s doing business.” He and Nancy were holed up for hours in their room, not communicating with the rest of us. Fortunately, we were rich enough to have Criteria on hold twenty-four hours a day, so it didn’t matter when we went to the studio or when we finished. But in an effort to bring some sort of efficiency to the process, we needed everybody to be awake at roughly the same time. And drugs were definitely interfering with that.
David was deteriorating before my eyes. Like Nancy, he was covered in sores, but he kept telling me it was a staph infection. Because he’s an expert on every disease known to man, I believed him. But it wasn’t staph. It was a result of massive amounts of cocaine. I heard he’d spent a small fortune on coke that year.
Somehow, we were able to hold everything together in the studio. We scraped those sessions together into a cohesive piece of work. At one point, while we were mixing “Shadow Captain,” the assistant engineer looked out the window and noticed a shadowy figure lurking about out. He said, “Hey, there’s somebody pissing in the bushes.” We wanted to see who it was, so we ran outside to discover—it’s fucking Neil Young! He’s back, and he’s pissing in the bushes.
“I was just down here, man, recording in Fort Lauderdale, and thought I’d pop in.”
Uh-huh. There was no room for Neil on this album, but we invited him inside to hear what we’d done, and I could tell he was pretty impressed. Still, it was a long way to come just to check out our scene. Even today, I can’t tell you what he had in mind. Neil Young is a weird cat. I remember a bunch o
f us were playing poker in his living room one day. He came in, took a look around, and got so pissed about not knowing half the people there that he walked out the window. It was only four feet off the ground, but four feet is a long way to go when you walk out of a window. He kind of stumbled when he landed and continued walking down the path toward his lake. Like I said, Neil is a weird cat, and he’s never changed. That’s the beauty of it, I suppose.
DURING THE MIXING of the album, we took a break for a week and sailed to Bimini, in the Bahamas, just to air things out. We rented a boat from a sailing friend of David’s, a beautiful vessel: the William H. Albury, a schooner like the Mayan, but bigger and fancier. Right off the bat we ran aground, but the rest of the trip was an all-out hoot. We got high, went diving, and almost lost Joel Bernstein, who had come along to shoot an album cover. He’d been chasing us around the studio for a couple weeks, trying to frame an image that showed us off at our best. Unfortunately, Croz looked like shit in Miami, but out on the water he’d recovered his glow. The boat was the perfect setting to get a cover shot. Stephen was wearing a knitted cap from the Cousteau Society, David was in a T-shirt, and I had on a dark red top, all three of us trying to look our coolest. Joel pounced. He got a shot of us on deck, looking like serious hippies. “Yeah, I think that’s the one,” he said. Then, a moment later, we burst out laughing—also a great shot. So the first run of covers depicted the serious side of CSN, and when that sold out we replaced it with the laughing pose.