Graham Nash on His Musical Journey and Living in the Now

Graham Nash might have just turned a well-seasoned 81, but the former Hollies and Crosby, Stills and Nash anchor isn’t wallowing in moribund mortality. His old bandmate David Crosby recently passed away, as did his longtime friend David Lindley, both of which hit him particularly hard. But fretting about the hour of your own pending demise will get you nowhere, he sighs. “Because you never really know. And obviously, I realize that I’m probably coming to the end of my life, although I hope to be around for at least another 20 years. So that’s why my new solo album is called Now, because it reflects exactly what I’m feeling now.”

And he seems to be entering a busy Renaissance period, having recently re-teamed with Hollies vocalist Allan Clarke on that artist’s own comeback effort I’ll Never Forget, providing harmony vocals on almost every track and duetting on “Buddy’s Back,” a rollicking Buddy Holly tribute they co-wrote. The dedicated shutterbug also has a new coffeetable book out, A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash, and he still maintains a posh fine-art digital publishing company called Nash Editions. And at this point in his career—which he’s celebrating in concert on a current “Sixty Years of Songs and Stories Tour”—the English-born artist has garnered almost every award a musician can earn, including four honorary university degrees, two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions (for CSN and The Hollies), and even a rare OBE, or Officer of the Order of the British Empire, presented to him in 2010 by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

But Now is where his heart truly lies, Nash swears. All told, it’s a cheerful, spiritually-uplifting work, with several love songs, odes to his wife Amy Grantham. There are CSN-echoing folky numbers like the album’s latest single, “A Better Life,” as well as more political screeds, like “Stand Up, “ “Golden Idol,” “Stars and Stripes,” and a life-celebrating “I Watched it All Come Down.” And along with his Clarke collaboration “Buddy’s Back,” there’s even a wisdom-dispensing Letters to a Young Poet-styled cut aptly dubbed “Follow Your Heart.” That’s how Nash says he’s navigated his own existence, and the method seems to be working well for him so far. But again, knock wood, he’s not taking anything for granted, “because you just never know.” Sounding bright and chipper, Nash spoke to Paste from New York last week.

Paste: You’re calling from New York. And you live there now?

Graham Nash: I’ve lived here for eight years, and I wish I’d have been here 20 years ago. It’s an incredible city, and one of the things I love about it is, well, obviously the museums and the art schools, etcetera, but I love to hear four or five different accents before I get my coffee. I just think this is an incredibly fantastic place, and I think it was Alexander Hamilton that decided that politics belonged in Washington, and New York is there for making money. From over here, and it doesn’t matter what your religion is, doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is, you’re here to make money in New York City, and it’s been that way ever since. I just finished reading a book called The Island at the Center of the World, and it’s about Manhattan from 1600 to the present day.

Paste: Looking back on your diverse career, it seems like the main thing you set out to do was just keep yourself amused.

Nash: Yeah. You know, I’m incredibly grateful to be a musician, and I’ve been a musician since I was 13 years old. But I’ve been a photographer longer than that, and in my book, the portrait of my mother I took when I was 11. So yeah, this is a wonderful life, and I’m very grateful to be experiencing it. Because, you know, when you get to be this old, as old as I am, I do occasionally look back at my life and I realize what an incredibly lucky man I am. You know, to have been there at the beginning, learning skiffle, learning rock and roll, and then seeing the British Invasion, being a part of that, and then joining David and Stephen and that whole madness, and then with Neil Young? My life has been just fantastic.

Paste: I’m one of those guys who always acknowledges CSN, CSNY, all great stuff. But the Hollies!

Nash: Ha! Funny! Yeah, The Hollies were a good band. And Allan Clarke and I started The Hollies in December of 1962. And basically, The Hollies were me and Allan, and we had been singing together for many years, since we were six years old and in the same school and in the same class, singing “The Lord’s Prayer” and stuff like that. So me and Allan could sing, and then we were doing a show in Manchester at a club, and we did pretty well, but this kid came up to us and he said, “You know what? You guys need a bucking!” And I said, “What? What the fuck is a bucking? I don’t know what the hell that is!” And he said, “No—Pete Bucking. You need Pete Bucking! He can play every solo you know, every solo you’ve loved. He can play it. And he has…a Stratocaster!” Well, we went to see Pete Bucking, and he took out his Fender Stratocaster, and he played every bloody solo that we loved, every Gene Vincent solo, every Bill Haley solo, and so yes, we needed a Bucking. So now we had two voices and two rhythm guitar players and a lead guitar player, and the guy that said we needed a Bucking was a drummer, and so we had a drummer. Then we got a bass player, and we were just five kids who had escaped from having to do what your dad did, and what your grandfather did. And in the North of England around then, it was either go down to the mill and make cloth, or go down into the mine and dig coal—those were the only two jobs, you know? And luckily, my mother and father really recognized my passion for music, so they encouraged me to do that, instead of slapping me upside the head and saying, “Get a real job!”

Paste: And you often sang lead back then, too. You sang “Carrie Anne,” right?

Nash: Yes, I did, and I got used to doing that particularly early.

Paste: I still can’t quite follow the synapse of how the almost Merseybeat sound of The Hollies transformed for you into the folkier approach of CSN. They seem like a world apart.

Nash: Yeah. They were a world apart. And I recognized that. So at the end there, when I was playing with The Hollies, I had written a song called “Marrakesh Express,” and I thought it was a decent song. And I played it for The Hollies, and they tried to do a track with that. And somewhere in the bowels of the tape files of EMI in Abbey Road, there’s a version of The Hollies playing a version of “Marrakesh Express,” and it sucks. So they weren’t really into it, is my point. And the last show I ever did with The Hollies, December in 1968, Crosby was there. It was at the London Palladium, and I played Crosby “Marrakesh Express,” and I told him that the rest of The Hollies didn’t like this song. And he said, “Wait a second—what? That’s a really decent song! And I know what we can do with that—come on over!” So I went over to New York, and I wanted to spend a few days with Joni Mitchell, who was my girlfriend at the time, and I got to Joni’s house and there were other voices in there, and I didn’t like that. But it was David and Stephen, and they were having dinner with Joni. And after dinner, David said, “Hey—play him that song we were doing!”

So here’s what was happening. The Buffalo Springfield had just broken up, David had been thrown out of The Byrds, and they were trying to get a duo together, kind of like The Everly Brothers, but with the songs that they had written. But it was Cass Elliott, our friend from The Mamas and the Papas, who really intuitively knew what their two voices would sound like with me. So let’s go back to that night at Joni’s—David says, “Sing him that song,” and it was a song called “You Don’t Have to Cry,” which was on the first (CSN) record. And they got to the end of it, and I said, “Whoa! What a fabulous song! Do me a favor—sing it again.” And they looked at each other, they shrugged, and they sang it again. And they got to the end of it a second time, and I said, “Alright. Bear with me now—I’m not crazy. Sing it one more time, and I’ll add my harmonies.” So only a few seconds into that version, we had to stop and laugh, because it was ridiculously wonderful. I mean, The Hollies and Springfield and The Byrds—they were good harmonies then. But this sound that me and David and Stephen sang, when we put our three voices around one microphone? It was just unbelievable, absolutely. So I knew then that I would have to go back to England, and I would have to leave The Hollies and leave all my equipment, and come to America and follow that sound. I’m a musician—what would you do if you sounded like that?

Paste: So when you first touched down again, dod you go to L.A.? And how was the scene back then? Like culture shock?

Nash: It was culture shock. It was very different on the West Coast. But we actually went to Sag Harbor here in New York to rehearse the first record. And I thought it was gonna be an acoustic record, because we’d sung all these songs acoustically, and they sounded fabulous. But Stephen’s idea was to make a slightly rock ’n’ roll record, with drums and bass. So we were in Sag Harbor in New York, rehearsing that, and that’s how that started. Then we went to L.A., where everybody wanted to know what was going on, and we managed to keep people out of the studio—no musicians’ unions, no record people, nobody. And we did get visited a couple of times, with Ahmet Ertegun who brought Garth Hudson from The Band to listen to what we were doing. But we knew. We had an album that sounded to us like it would be a hit.

Paste: It was odd. I was recently watching this suspenseful Netflix series called Keep Breathing, about a girl who survives a wilderness plane crash and has to fight to survive, and “Our House” is woven throughout the soundtrack, even though her house is not very fine at all. So it’s curious, the continuity of songs over time, when they no longer mean what the composer originally intended, years, decades later.

Nash: Yeah. Definitely. But you know, a good song goes a long way. Again, it’s been a fabulous life, I’ve gotta say.

Paste: And “Teach Your Children Well”? Is that even an educational consideration anymore? Or is an algorithm doing the job now?

Nash: Ha! Very funny! But this A.I. stuff is getting very interesting, isn’t it?

Paste: Pretty soon, you’ll excitedly enter the studio to cut a new song, and HAL the mixing desk will say, “I’m sorry, Graham. I can’t do that.”

Nash: Yes. “I’m not starting the tape machine, Graham.” But do you know why the 2001 [computer] was called HAL? It was one letter away from IBM! But hey—what can you do? It’s happening. And when we get a few years into the future, who knows what A.I. is doing, because once they create machines that will create themselves, and get some kind of consciousness? They will overtake human beings immediately. Like Skynet. It’s going to get weird, isn’t it?

Paste: But weren’t you kind of ahead of the cyberpunk curve when you worked with Iris technology years ago, digitally reproducing, and reimagining, your own photographs?

Nash: That’s right. And the first printer that we used, which was an Iris printer, is now in the Smithsonian Museum. Isn’t that wild? Like I said, I’d been a photographer longer than I’ve been a musician. So I had one of the earliest Apple computers, and they had a thing called ThunderScan, where you could very crudely scan an image. So I was playing around with the images, but I couldn’t get them off the screen. I tried photographing them, I tried everything—I couldn’t get them off the screen. Then a friend of mine who was a scientist in San Francisco, said, “Have you ever heard of inkjet printers?” And I said, “No—what’s that?” And he said, “oh, you’ll hear!”

Anyway, the first three years of my shooting photography here in America, which included Woodstock and everything, a guy was gonna make a book on Joni Mitchell, and he knew that I had shot pictures of Joni, and he asked if he could use them And I said, “Yeah,” but I didn’t have the discipline to take those Joni negatives out of my collection—I just sent him the whole box. And I never saw them again. And you know what a proof sheet is, right? When you have a whole roll of film, you get a proof sheet of all the shots, with one little square representing a picture. So one night at my house, I told a guest the story of losing all my negatives, and he looked at my proof sheets and said, “Well which of these tiny squares do you like?” So I said, ‘I really like this one I shot of Crosby.” And he said, “Yep. Alright. Would you give me that?” And I thought, “Fuck. Am I gonna lose my proof sheets now?” But I trusted him, and two days later, he brought me a 24” x 20” image of Crosby that knocked my ass off! It was fucking fantastic! And I said, “Wow! I didn’t think you had a darkroom that could do. Images this big!” And he said, “I don’t have a darkroom. It’s not a photograph—I scanned your proof sheet, hi-res, and I printed it on an inkjet printer.” And I said, “You’ve gotta show me this bloody Machine!” So I went down with my friend Mac [R. Mac Holbert, former CSN tour manager and its IT specialist] who started Nash Editions with me, to see this machine,

And it looked like a washing machine, and it had a lid that you lifted and a circular dish that you put a sheet of paper on, and it spun about a million miles an hour, and these four print heads sprayed the image onto this piece of paper. And the printer was $124,000, but I bought one immediately. And not only that, but I voided the warranty in the first 10 minutes, because I wanted to force this machine that was printing these images to do what I wanted it to do. And so, quite honestly—and technically—I needed to separate the print heads, away from the revolving tube, so I could stick a paper around that. So I took a Hoover vacuum cleaner and added parts. I just forced this machine to do what I wanted it to do. But it made great prints! And we got it to print on everything, and one day, we got it to print on a sheet of thin tin. We got it attached to the drum, but it set it off and shot the sheet of tin out so fast, it stuck in the wall opposite to the studio—it would have decapitated anyone, if they’d been standing in front of it. So yeah, that first printer is now in the Smithsonian. So there are lots of machines out there, but I believe that Nash Editions was the very first to be able to make portfolios for photographers. And I do check—every time I go to different cities, I go to their art schools and art galleries and I look at their digital prints, because if things are even one pixel off, everything’s out of whack. So Nash Editions is still making great prints, to this day.

Paste: Someone came up with a new thing called Instapet, where you submit a dozen photos of your dog or cat, and Artificial Intelligence then compose a hundred or so crazy images of them in outer space, all sorts of crazy imaginary scenarios.

Nash: Awesome! I wonder…what is art going to be like in 50 years? It’s going to be wild, isn’t it? And don’t forget, there will be proto human beings, because there are human beings that even now have a small chip embedded in their elbow so they don’t have to put their password in. So I’m 81 now, and I hope I’m gonna be alive for at least the next 20 years to see what incredible improvements are coming.

Paste: Do you paint, too?

Nash: Well, Not exactly, but I can fiddle around. But it’s my wife who’s the artist in my family. Amy Grantham is an incredible artist—you should check out her work at amygrantham.com

Paste: And it sounds like some songs on Now are about her, like “Right Now.”

Nash: Yes. And “Love of Mine,” and the last track on the album, “When it Comes to You,” is about her, and “It Feels Like Home” is about her. Hey—what can you do?

Paste: And “Follow Your Heart” sounds like sage-like advice to your kids.

Nash: Yes. Yes, indeed. And my advice would be, I think you need the courage to open up your heart. Obviously, I want to tell the truth. And as a musician, you’re surrounded by word images, and right now, I have about 20 or 30 pieces of music in the back of my head, that don’t have lyrics yet. But if I get a lyric where the rhythm of the lyric meets a piece of music that I have in my head, then I’ve got a new song. Then I start to find a title, and I’m off writing. And I try to write about the truth, and that’s what’s going on with this record. And I called it Now because this is who I am, right now. And I don’t think your art will ever go away. It’s not going to go away. That’s another reason why I called it Now—because even at 80, when I made this record, you can still kick ass. You can still do your work, you know?

Watch a full Crosby, Stills & Nash performance from the Cow Palace in San Francisco on Nov. 26, 1989, from our archives: