Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash

  But David’s concern always pivoted back to music. Coincidentally, I had a gig booked nearby, at Rockefellers, a club in Houston. I was beginning a solo tour with three other guys: a ménage-à-tech, Bill Boydston playing patterns on a drum machine and playing keyboards, and Hugh Ferguson on guitar. I asked Crosby, who was turning forty-five that night, if he wanted to come to the show and sit in with me on “Wind on the Water.”

  Rockefellers was a tiny club, and it was packed that night with maybe three hundred people. Everyone knew that Croz was out of jail, and since I happened to be playing near the prison, the possibility existed that David might show up. So at the appropriate moment, the lights went down and a tape of “Critical Mass,” David’s a cappella sig- nature intro to “Wind on the Water,” came on. Crosby, in the dark, had already crept toward the mike. He had to push a curtain aside to come from the back onto the stage. With the dressing-room lights behind him—it was like seeing the silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock— he was immediately recognizable. And the place erupted, they went crazy, fucking nuts. Crosby had a fantastic grin on his face. He was so happy to be there, to be free, to have paid his debt to society—to have all that shit behind him to some extent. A dark, dark period in his life was ending, and a brighter one was poised to begin.

  AT THE END of 1986, Neil kept his promise to sing with us again. However, first he wanted to make sure all four of us could handle it. “We should be physically able to take on the job of setting an example for an entire generation that could be halfway to the fucking grave,” he said. “They have to see that we can go through all this shit and come back stronger and sharper than we were before. No matter what has happened to them in their lives, no matter how many good friends have died, how much shit they’ve piled on themselves, how many losses they’ve endured—if we can be so strong after everything we’ve endured, it would be like fresh water running over the entire audience.”

  So Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young re-formed to do two benefits. The first was as part of the bill to raise funds for the Bridge School, which Neil and his wife Pegi had recently founded for kids stricken with cerebral palsy, from which both of Neil’s sons suffered. Then two acoustic shows—with us headlining—for Greenpeace at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara, one of the truly great places to perform. The four of us hadn’t played in a long time, and it was exhilarating sharing the stage together again. Especially acoustic, which is when the songs really live.

  At the Bridge School concerts, there were two handicapped kids at the back of the stage. Susan noticed that a young boy started to cry, and the little girl next to him slowly put a hand out to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. When Susan described that moment to me, I was so touched that I wrote “Try to Find Me.”

  I’m in here with a lonely light

  But maybe you can’t see me.

  But I’m here with my mind on fire,

  Do your best and try to find me.

  Right after that we began working on a new CSNY album, our first studio record together since recording Déjà Vu in 1969. All of us had been writing new songs. I brought “Don’t Say Goodbye,” about a rough patch that most marriages go through and that I’d hit with Susan when I was panicked that she might be leaving me; “Clear Blue Skies,” which I’d written earlier in Hawaii; my song “Heartland,” and “Shadowland,” written with Rick Ryan and Joe Vitale. Neil had “In the Name of Love,” “This Old House,” “Feel Your Love,” and “American Dream,” which became the title of the album. Stills brought “That Girl,” “Driving Thunder,” and “Got It Made,” and David contributed “Nighttime for the Generals” and “Compass.” We had songs.

  We all went up to Neil’s ranch, just south of San Francisco, to record. He has a full studio there, along with multiple houses. I’d been with him the first time he saw that property in 1971. We were looking for real estate together and saw about five places, most of which weren’t very interesting. But the minute he laid eyes on this spread he was immediately sold, especially after seeing hundreds of red-winged blackbirds on the lake. Utterly beautiful, of course, with giant redwoods, and very isolated, the way Neil liked it. You have to go up Highway 1 to Skyline Drive and then find a little road that gets smaller and smaller until there is only room enough for one car on it. If someone’s coming toward you, you’ve got to pull off into the undergrowth and pray they can squeeze past. It’s a couple of miles to the main road—and God forbid you forget the milk! The buildings are ranch style, funky, and there’s a large barn in which Neil had recorded some of his Harvest album. I remember the day that Neil asked me to listen to the record. No big speakers, but a boat. That’s right, he asked me to get into a small boat and he rowed us both out into the middle of the lake. Once there he asked his producer Elliot Mazer to play the record. Neil was using his entire house as the left speaker and his huge barn as the right speaker. What an incredible record it was, and after the music stopped blaring, Elliot came down to the shore of the lake and shouted, “How was that, Neil?” and I swear this is true, Neil shouted back, “More barn!” That’s Neil, no doubt about it

  All of us settled in at the Red House, as it was called. We were doing great, happy to be alive, David and Stephen in good shape. Neil always takes care of himself, eats well, exercises. We were all getting along like a house on fire. The couple of sessions took only two or three weeks, interspersed between April 24 and September 16. No ego problems other than a lot of strong opinions. Neil wanted to do it, wanted to be there, and that was a big problem out of the way. Besides, we were at his house, so he couldn’t run away. But, then, neither could we. A pretty clever strategy.

  The opportunity to make music with Neil is always enticing. He always was and remains an utterly brilliant musician. When we play with Neil, I expect the unexpected. We make a different kind of music with him than we do with Crosby, Stills & Nash. It’s got a harder edge; there is tension and darkness in it. He pushes us into a different direction. And when you write for CSNY, you push back harder, hopefully giving him something to bite into. I never wanted to be in a band that demanded the same solo as the night before, the same one you played on the record and on the last four hundred shows. I’d rather stand there with my mouth wide open, and that’s what I got when Neil joined the group. As difficult as our relationship sometimes is, it was hard to argue with what he brought to the mix.

  Even though we were getting along, musically I felt we were walking on eggshells. Croz was used to dominating a recording session, he was usually unflappable, and now it seemed, at times, that he was taking a backseat, letting the rest of us call the shots.

  Stephen was a little fragile, too. He didn’t feel that he had great songs to offer. “Got It Made” was a decent number, but he didn’t have a lot of what I considered CSNY songs. I thought Neil indulged Stephen a little too much.

  Music was changing a lot at this point. There was still a ton of disco on the airwaves, a lot of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. New wave and electronica were each attracting their niche. But I have to say that none of it influenced us as we were making American Dream. We didn’t take any notice of that stuff. We just did what we do, made our music the only way we knew how. We weren’t following any trends.

  David, if a bit fragile in the sessions, was straightening out his life, to my utter delight. He devoted himself entirely to Jan. It took all of us by surprise when he dropped the big one: that he and Jan were going to get mar … mar … mar … C’mon, Croz, say it! Married. Yeah, you heard that right: Crosby getting married, three words I never expected to use in the same sentence. But it was cool. Jan and David had come back from the dead. They were a team, inseparable. They held on to each other for dear life.

  Don’t get me wrong, we gave him a lot of shit about it. There was a stag party where things got pretty raunchy. The usual shit—guys getting drunk, a couple of scantily clad ladies. Lots of unrepeatable roasts and toasts directed at David. The wedding was the next day, May 16, 1987, at the Church
of Religious Science in LA, where Susan and I had gotten married ten years earlier. In fact, Susan and I decided to renew our vows, making the event a double wedding.

  When I first married Susan, she gave me ten years. She was perfectly clear about her intentions, saying, “At the end of those ten, if I still like you I’ll renew.” It wasn’t a joke or said lightly. She’s an incredibly strong, independent woman. When those ten years were up, if she hadn’t been happy, she’d have been gone in a shot—and I knew it. Even though we had three kids together. If I wasn’t pulling my weight, she was out of there. And I always worried about it. Was it going to last? Would there be any magic left? I didn’t know. So it was a relief when she decided to re-up with me. And Jan and David were generous to share their ceremony with us.

  It was a memorable affair, with equally memorable company. Stills and Jackson, of course—even Neil turned up—with guest appearances by Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Paul Kantner, and Warren Zevon. The reception was in the yard of our house in Encino, during which we all jumped into the pool with our clothes on. Silly shit.

  We deserved this, and we savored every minute of it. There’s no question that we had come through the madness. CSN, not just David, had gone off the rails, and for a while it seemed certain we were headed over the cliff. Smart money was betting we’d self-destruct again, but somewhere in the insanity we turned the mothership around. Don’t ask me how. David’s going to jail? Possibly that sparked things. My quitting cocaine? It certainly helped. Stephen’s coming to terms with his magnificent talent, no longer being intimidated by Neil, as he’d been in the past? All of this figured into the turnaround. Huge relief. From here on out, we stopped trying to live life to the extreme and, at long last, were looking to live life well.

  “Croz alone, 1984” (© 1988 Graham Nash)

  chapter17

  WHOEVER THOUGHT, AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE, I’d be turning my attention to fine-art photography.

  In 1970, when Déjà Vu was released, Mac Holbert was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz and had gone on a field trip to Verde Valley in Sedona, Arizona, living in a tent with a bunch of pals. At the time, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were on the cover of Rolling Stone. These college kids had a copy of the issue, and, while smokin’ it and getting a little drunk, started arguing about whether or not we’d sold out. Mac, who was a devoted fan, defended us, which only aggravated the situation. Things escalated, as those things tend to do, so at some point, he packed up and left and thumbed a ride back to San Francisco. On the way, he got picked up by Steve Cohen, of all people—the guy who handled our stage lighting. Steve was on his way back from Woodstock with my guitars in the van, and Mac came with them and stayed in my life for over forty years.

  I liked Mac immediately. He was a bright, artistic kid, funny and self-assured. Great attention to detail, very grounded. Loved photography, played a damn good game of Ping-Pong. I took him under my wing, introduced him to everyone, who felt about him much as I did, and eventually Mac became the tour manager for Crosby, Stills & Nash, as well as one of my best friends.

  One evening in 1988, Mac and I were having dinner with David Coons, who worked at Disney (and later got an Oscar for developing the software that created the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast). A brilliant man who to this day can’t find the bathroom in my house. David spotted a green Kodak photographic-paper box sitting on my desk and asked what was in it. My explanation requires a little backstory. CSN’s art director, Gary Burden, was doing a book on Joni and wanted to use some of my photographs. He knew I’d lived with Joni and that I’d have some pretty interesting shots of her. Without having the discipline to go through my 35 mm negatives, I simply scooped up everything I had from my first years of shooting images in America—David, Stephen, Neil, Joni, Cass, Woodstock, everything—and gave them to him. Of course, I never saw them again. “But I put them on the Greyhound bus,” Gary insisted. “You mean you didn’t get them?” So this green Kodak box contained all that remained of my work: the proof sheets from those treasured negatives, which were themselves missing.

  “Are there any images on them that you really like?” David Coons asked. After I pointed out a favorite shot of Crosby, he said, “Would you lend me the proof sheet?”

  Damn! I thought: Am I going to lose the proof sheet, too? But he convinced me that he’d take special care of it, so I let him have it, with misgivings.

  Ten days later, I got it back along with a twenty-by-thirty-inch print of Croz that knocked me on my ass. It stunned me. It was beautiful: the black-to-white relationship, the texture of the three-hundred-pound cold-press Arches museum-quality paper. I happen to be a great lover of surfaces and of old photographic processes—Bromoils, carboprints, dry plates, daguerreotypes, platinum prints, the works. I wasn’t sure which process David had used, but the result just killed me.

  “I didn’t know you had a darkroom that could make prints this big,” I told him.

  “It’s not a photograph,” he said.

  I got indignant. “Of course it is. I ought to know—I took it.”

  He said, “No, it’s an ink-jet print.” It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. “At Disney, to make proofs of images of people, we use a 3047 printing machine, developed by Iris Graphics, out of New Bedford, Massachusetts.”

  I was astounded. “You mean to tell me this image was printed by a machine?” It seemed impossible—sacrilege.

  Mac and I went to take a look at this … machine. It was blue and looked like a low-rise refrigerator but had a slope on one side, with a window so you could see into it. On the other side of the glass was a huge spinning drum. When it slowed and finally stopped, a man removed an image of a bride holding flowers, but it was … a photograph.

  Mac and I looked at each other and said, “Did we just see that?”

  I’d been putting off an exhibition of my photographs that Joni helped arrange at the Parco Gallery in Japan because I couldn’t supply what the curator needed: fifty images (no problem) in editions of twenty-five each (no problem) blown up to a size of three feet by four feet (big problem). The minute I saw the Iris printer, that problem was solved. It could easily print the show for Tokyo.

  I got hold of Al Luchessi, the CEO of Iris Graphics, who happened to be in LA at the time. He explained how his printer was about to revolutionize the way companies advertised. “Say you want a Toyota brochure printed,” he said. “You’d normally take the information to a printing house. They’d have several printers half the size of a room, which they’d have to shut down, clean, and re-ink in the process until Toyota was satisfied enough to sign off for a million copies.” By scanning the images into a computer and programming the Iris to print them, it took about forty minutes and cost $100 instead of taking three days and costing $7,000. The companies understood the economics very quickly.

  Mac and I could barely contain ourselves. We saw the potential immediately. I took Al Luchessi aside and told him that we were sure he could make more money printing fine art than he could printing advertising. I already knew he could get high-grade paper stock through the machine because of the image of Crosby that David Coons had printed.

  So I shelled out $126,000 and bought the machine instantly.

  Mac and I carted it back to my house in Manhattan Beach, and Mac and Coons voided the warranty within the first ten minutes because we were fucking with the insides, forcing it to do what we wanted it to do. The machine spits out millions of dots of ink; each nozzle on the four print heads—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—is about one-seventh the width of a human hair. When you put fine-art paper through the machine, it throws off a lot of microscopic lint, each piece of which looks like a tree trunk to the minute printer nozzles. First we cut off the arm that was holding the printer heads close to the print drum, moving them back to allow even thicker paper to go through. Then we borrowed a piece of tubing from the Hoover of Mac’s wife, Ruthann, to create a vacuum system that would suck off the lint b
efore it reached the print heads. The last step was having the brilliant David Coons rewrite conversion software from color to black-and-white.

  It took no time to print the show for Tokyo, all fifty images, and they were gorgeous.

  It seemed a shame to let that machine sit idle while CSN was on a tour in Australia, so Mac invited a master serigrapher named Jack Duganne to play with it until we got back. The process for printing serigraphs is tedious and expensive. The artist often has to print the work a hundred times, overlapping layers of ink until the colors and images are right. But the Iris reduced the processing time by 50 percent, which made the job much more profitable. At some point, Jack received an image from a Chinese artist that he scanned and printed the same size as the original and sent it back to the artist as a gift. She was somewhat insulted, thinking that Jack hadn’t liked the image, so she tore it up, believing it was the original. But of course it wasn’t; Jack still had the original. That’s how good our prints were getting.

  Charlie Wehrenberg, an artist friend of mine from San Francisco, suggested we turn this into a business, becoming a fine-art press, printing the individual images of artists in many visual media. Steve Boulter, of Iris Graphics, and David Coons helped us realize the dream. Presto, Nash Editions was born. It was a hell of an undertaking, necessitating that I pump almost $2 million into the new company. So in 1990, I auctioned off most of my incredible collection of photography at Sotheby’s for $2.6 million, the highest ever paid for a private collection, giving Nash Editions the cash infusion it needed.

  Convincing artists to utilize the technology was somewhat more difficult. They came to it slowly and with great suspicion, as did collectors, curators, and gallery owners, who initially balked at displaying the prints we made. Once, while I was in San Francisco, I walked into the Vision Gallery. I was about to have an exhibition of my work there and I wanted to show them a couple of my images. The lady who managed the place loved them. “The blacks are like velvet,” she said. “You must have a wonderful darkroom.” “They’re not photographs, they’re ink-jet prints,” I explained. Clang! She immediately hated them. It took me an hour to convince her that it wasn’t how you got them on paper—it’s what you see, the entire experience. Do you like them? Do they affect you or not?