Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash

  “You want to be an American citizen?” he said. “Then, here, eat this.” And we polished off a couple of hot dogs and Cokes.

  I consider myself very lucky to be in a country where I can speak my mind as freely as I do. What an incredible country this is! But I have to admit that the America I live in today is not the country I set out to join, it’s not the country that I fell in love with, and that’s a shocking thing for me to say. I fear America has become a police state, with a military that uses heat weapons against suspected enemies, a police force that pepper-sprays protesters exercising their inalienable rights (I told you I did my homework), and a justice system that fails to treat its prisoners humanely. So I will continue to speak out against what I consider objectionable and to crusade for justice and equality, only now I do it as an American citizen. God help me—God help us all.

  With Jackson Browne at Abalone Alliance concert, January 29, 1979

  chapter14

  AT THE START OF 1979, I TURNED BACK TO WHAT I deeply loved: making music, expressing myself through song, photography, art, and activism.

  I did a number of benefits with Jackson Browne for an antinuclear group called the Abalone Alliance. They were to protest and shut down the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s power plant near San Luis Obispo. Since my dinner with Jacques Cousteau, I was totally opposed to nuclear proliferation and its potential to annihilate the planet. It didn’t make sense to me, what with all the inherent risks and dangers. We knew about the problems at the plants: how they have pipes that crack and stretch from leaks, releasing radiation into the atmosphere and ocean. We knew that containment domes, after thirty or forty years, get brittle and tend to crack. It was time to rally public opinion and to take a stand.

  This was the first time I’d ever led a band myself. A kick-ass collection of musicians: Russ Kunkel on drums, Tim Drummond on bass (one of my favorite rhythm sections ever), Craig Doerge on keyboards, and maestro David Lindley on many stringed instruments. I’d never been onstage before without someone to play off of, whether it was Clarkie, the Hollies, or Crosby, Stills, or Young. Carrying a show on my own was a very gratifying experience. It enabled me to place a different value on who I was and what I’d accomplished.

  I went on to do more No Nukes shows with Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, John Sebastian, John Hall, and others, in California. One concert, on the steps of the nation’s Capitol on May 6, also included Joni and Dan Fogelberg; it was the first large-scale antinuclear demonstration after the partial meltdown of one of the reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States. (By May 1983, solar-power technology had advanced to the point where I could perform in San Luis Obispo at the first benefit concert at which the electricity for sound and lights was provided by a solar-powered generator, nicknamed the Solar Jenny, that had been put together by Tom Campbell.)

  On a clear day from my kitchen in San Francisco, I could see the Faralon Islands, just off the coast. I learned that, to get rid of nuclear waste, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would take barrels of the stuff and throw them off a ship, close to those islands. But the barrels were watertight and didn’t sink, so they shot them with rifles until they went under. Later, someone sent me a picture of some giant mis-gened sea anemone, some weird distortion of the normal growth pattern. The radiation was affecting the way plants grew, a very bad scene, so I wrote a song called “Barrel of Pain.”

  I can see the sea begin to glow

  I can feel it leaking down below

  I can barely stand it

  What you’re doing to me.

  And in the morning will you still feel the same?

  How you going to keep yourself from going insane?

  With glowing children and a barrel of pain

  I don’t want to hear it!

  My music was becoming more topical and uncompromising. I’d always been committed to taking a public stand, but it was time, I decided, to turn up the heat. The nuclear madness was a direct threat to my family and me. Singing was the best way I knew to put myself on the line.

  I wanted to record “Barrel of Pain” as soon as possible. There were also other songs—“Innocent Eyes,” “Love Has Come,” “In the Eighties,” “Out on the Island,” and a number of songs I was working on at the time. While I was collating the material, Joel Bernstein brought a photo to my attention that he had taken while we were vacationing on Kauai. I’d been standing on the lip of Waimea Canyon, a miniature Grand Canyon on the island, holding an old bright-green plastic Imperial Flash Mark II camera I’d been fooling around with. The lens wasn’t that great, but when you got lucky it took really interesting blurry pictures. Joel took a panoramic photo with his Linhof Technorama 6 × 17 against that dramatic background. When we checked out the proof sheets, there was a double rainbow that I’d not been aware of in the sky behind me. A gorgeous picture. At that moment, I decided to make an album to fit that photo, Earth & Sky.

  As it happened, David and I both had deals to make solo albums for Columbia Records. So in February 1979, I booked time at Britannia Studios in LA and assembled a fabulous band: Danny Kortchmar, Tim Drummond, Chocolate Perry, Craig Doerge, David Lindley, Joe Walsh, and two drummers, Joe Vitale and Russ Kunkel. For vocals, there was no one better than Crosby, who agreed to come down and give me a hand.

  I hadn’t seen David in a while. He’d been holed up in Mill Valley, spending time with Jan Dance, the lovely young woman he’d met at Criteria Studios in Miami. So when he showed up at Britannia, I wasn’t prepared for his appearance. He looked horrible—pale, sweaty, dirty, suspicious, slit-eyed, covered in sores. “A staph infection, you know.” Yeah, right. I’d heard that one before. It was obvious to me he was heavily into freebase. I could see how it was dragging him down. Jan was a mess, too. Just two years before she’d been this adorable, sweet creature with a lively disposition, but those features had practically disappeared. What had happened to Nancy Brown was now transforming Jan. Nancy had managed to escape. She’d finally bolted from David’s clutches to get some help. Jan had obviously taken her place. It was sad—and infuriating.

  From the beginning, things went badly. David kept nodding out during breaks, then he’d disappear, presumably to hit the pipe. He didn’t seem to be working hard enough, and it was showing up, especially in the playback. His voice was rough, husky; our harmonies were strained. I couldn’t vibe him out, I couldn’t anticipate him anymore. The communication between us had stopped.

  I tried broaching the subject with him, explained that the music was suffering, but he blew me off. “Hey, I’m fine,” he insisted. “I’m on top of it.” End of discussion. And I tried pleading with Jan to get him some help. I told her that David was in shitty shape, killing himself. If he was incapable of turning it around, she needed to do something about it. I’d help them in any way I could. I was watching my friend’s drug addiction destroy everything great that we shared—our love of music, to keep playing and change people’s lives. Our careers! It was going down the drain.

  Look, I was no Boy Scout. I was snorting, but drugs weren’t a problem for me. I didn’t have an addictive personality, especially when it came to cocaine. I’d done my share, taken enormous amounts. There is a Polaroid picture I have of a rock of cocaine that was bigger than the eight ball sitting next to it in the shot—and Tim Drummond and I finished it in three days. So I’ve been there, I’ve been out of it at times, but I could walk away from it. And if coke wasn’t around I didn’t go searching for it, and that’s the situation Crosby was in. He needed drugs, and he needed the money to pay for them.

  David and drugs were always spiritually intertwined. But lately the drugs had become seriously problematic. Ever since Christine’s death he’d been more and more drug dependent, slipping into a state he called “cocaine psychosis,” the paranoia that comes with being too high most of the time. He was so heavily into cocaine that most of Croz’s waking moments were spent figuring out how to
score, where and when to get it, how much he had left, and how much to share with his friends. Behavior like that puts you in a lot of freaky situations. Like this one: David sold his Mercedes for crack. Yes, the very car he’d had since the afternoon he and I both bought Mercedes together. The guy he sold it to promptly OD’ed, and David broke into the guy’s house—while the body was still in the bed—and stole his pink sales slip back. Freaky. Then he had the balls to resell the car to someone else. Like I said: freaky.

  He was broke and constantly on our managers’ backs: “I’ve got to find more money. You’ve got to sell this. Find money. I need money fast.” We’d made a lot of dough, millions upon millions. But he’d gone through it all. All of it. It was inconceivable to me. But it was all too real.

  One evening at the studio, we were working on “Barrel of Pain.” While Stanley Johnston and the other engineers were setting up and balancing the sound, the band eased into a warm-up jam. That was our usual way of kicking off a session. Someone starts a riff, another musician joins in, the drummers know what to do—and it begins to cook. We had a great jam going, it was rocking like mad. Crosby’s pipe was sitting on one of the amps, and because the jam was going so well, the amp was shaking … and the pipe was slowly but surely moving toward the edge. Both Stanley and I could see what was happening. And sure enough, at a certain point when the band hit a particular chord, the pipe fell off and shattered.

  David got very upset about his broken pipe and stopped the jam, trying to put the pieces of the pipe back together. He was angry because it meant he couldn’t get high that day, and he needed the crack to stay awake.

  I shot a look at Craig Doerge and saw the disbelief on his face: What happened to the music? Which is when it all came clear to me. It’s the moment I realized that drugs were more important to David than music. He was in deep shit. And I’d had it, I had to do something. “Fuck you, I’m done,” I told him. “This is not making me happy at all. This sucks. I can’t work with you anymore.”

  I wheeled away from him, but before I did, I pulled Jan aside and told her: “If I were you, I’d get that son of a bitch to a doctor right now.”

  I was hurt and angry. Resentful that this fucking drug was more powerful than our music. Up to now, the music always saved our asses, but not this time. This was a tumultuous event in my life, moving away from Crosby like that. I was strong, but it terrified me. I figured that my relationship with David, on a musical level, was probably over. It was the end—of Crosby/Nash, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the end of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The mothership had a huge, gaping hole in the hull.

  Crosby was in much deeper trouble than I thought. I learned that after the blow-up, when he’d left the studio, he refused to let Jan drive him home. Instead he sped off in his Mercedes, up into the densely packed hills, with Jan desperately pleading with him to slow down. Inevitably, he nodded out at the wheel and plowed into the back of a parked car. No one was hurt, but when Jan insisted they get out and find the owner, David refused and took off. That’s the kind of nightmare he was living. There was nothing else that I could do.

  I SPENT THE NEXT couple of months finishing Earth & Sky, keeping my distance from Stephen and David as best as possible. I loved making that album. All the songs were close to my heart. In the middle of the session, I moved my home studio from the basement of my house in San Francisco to LA, a beautiful old Hollywood place called Crossroads of the World, on Sunset Boulevard. The space had previously been a restaurant that failed. The minute I saw it, I knew it would make an incredible studio, so I leased it, added soundproofing to the walls and ceiling, redid the floors, built a control room, and moved all my equipment down there. I asked Rick Griffin, the well-known underground artist, to design the logo, a silhouette of Leo Makota’s dog Rudy howling, with the name rudy records coming out of its mouth. Stanley Johnston and I finished and mixed Earth & Sky there.

  While Columbia Records was working on the album, I got proofs of the cover back from their art department, with Joel’s double-rainbow image on it. And there at the end of the rainbow was … a bar code! I couldn’t believe it. I’d made the entire album on the strength of that photograph. I picked up the phone and called Walter Yetnikoff, the president of Columbia at the time.

  “Good record you made, kid,” he said.

  “Thanks, but I have a problem, Walter.”

  He grew impatient. “Oh, yeah? How can I help? What, what, what?”

  “You know what’s supposed to be at the end of a rainbow?” I asked. “A pot of gold—not a bar code. Physically, I can’t look at this cover. Tell you what, for my next record, the whole fucking front cover can be a bar code, but I’d appreciate it if, this time, you’ll give me a break.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line while he thought about my request. Then he said, “Don’t give me that artsy-craftsy shit.”

  That soulless little fucker. It was the worst possible response he could have made.

  “Artsy-craftsy shit? Talk to you later, Walter.” I put the phone down, picked it up again, and called my lawyer, Greg Fischbach. “Get me off Columbia,” I instructed him. “I don’t care where I land. I know this sounds crazy, but I’m not going to record for any label that puts a bar code at the end of my rainbow.”

  It didn’t take long before we got an offer from Capitol Records. They were delighted to get a Graham Nash album that was already finished and ready for release. In addition, they were willing to forgo a bar code. Before making the deal, however, I had one more requirement.

  I told Greg, “I’ll sign with Capitol if they let me listen to Gene Vincent’s original two-track of ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula.’ ”

  Now, as a record maker, I would be furious if anyone passed our master tapes over a playback head, because every time you do so, you lose clarity. It may not be evident until the twentieth time, but it breaks down. Take my word for it. In retrospect, I should not have asked Capitol to accommodate me, and they probably should have refused. But there it was, “Be-Bop-a-Lula” in the 1950s tape box, right at my fingertips. I listened to it at the Capitol Towers, in their beautiful studio, with giant speakers turned up fucking loud. I wanted to hear that song. And it sounded—fantastic! One of the greatest records ever made. Two-track, live. Are you kidding me! Brilliant stuff. So I signed with Capitol, put out Earth & Sky, and it didn’t have a bar code at the end of the rainbow.

  Croz was having a more difficult time. He, too, had left his deal at Columbia and found a home, as I had, at Capitol Records. But David wasn’t in any condition to record. His voice was too ragged. It was impossible getting him to concentrate in the studio. He was too out of it. The engineers convinced him to sing next to them at the console to avoid the walk from the studio to the control room, otherwise he would detour into the bathroom to hit the pipe. He’d also negotiated a ridiculous deal. David desperately needed money for drugs, so the record company advanced him a large cash sum, using his house as security. In the end, everything fell apart. The band asked to have their names taken off the project, and Capitol eventually refused to put the record out.

  I didn’t know what to do. Jackson Browne tried to help him with meager results. He literally stood over David at Warren Zevon’s piano in Montecito, trying to coax Croz into finishing a new song called “Delta.” Jackson wouldn’t let him get up or hit the pipe until it was complete. Turns out it was the last song that David wrote—for years.

  JACKSON AND I interacted in other meaningful ways. In 1979, he and Bonnie Raitt called, wondering if I’d be interested in assisting with a new cause of theirs. They were working with my old Guacamole Fund friend, Tom Campbell, putting together a coalition of musicians to bring awareness to people about the nuclear industry. The movement was called Musicians United for Safe Energy—MUSE. James Taylor and John Hall were already part of their artistic nucleus. They asked if I would join the board of the new organization and I immediately accepted.

  It was time to get more serious about
the state of the environment. Everything was deteriorating at such an alarming rate—the atmosphere, our oceans, wildlife, water supply. Everyone is aware of these issues today, but back then people were basically ignorant about the dangers and long-term consequences of nuclear power. Our goal was to bring them to the world’s attention. Musicians had clout. Kids would listen to us. Even if they only came out for the music, we knew our message would ultimately get through.

  Jackson and I warmed up with our first collaborative effort at the Hollywood Bowl on June 14, 1979. It was called Survival Sunday and raised a ton of cash for grassroots antinuke groups across America. Bruce Springsteen turned out, along with Bonnie, John Sebastian, John Hall, and an appearance by Stephen, who only days before had done a benefit for Greenpeace in San Francisco.

  Then, at the end of June, we turned up the heat. There had been a partial nuclear meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power plant in March, which released small amounts of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere. This was catastrophic, a call to arms. A core group of us met in my room at the Chateau Marmont and decided to stage a five-night benefit at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It was an insane event to try to pull off, but we dreamed big. We wanted to make a huge impact. But to fill five nights, we needed some big names. Everyone at MUSE leaned on their pals, and we managed to attract a stellar lineup. By early September, we’d filled four nights with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Peter Tosh, Chaka Khan, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Nicolette Larson, Poco, Gil Scott-Heron, Raydio, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, and, of course, me.