Modern Recording and Music April 1983 Vol, 9 No. 4 GRAHAM NASH Few groups, with the exception of such giants as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and a handful of others, can legitimately claim to have had such an impact on the course of contemporary music as CSN. Consider: the CSN alliance was formed back in 1968 and the world was jolted the following summer by such acoustic gems as “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “Marrakesh Express.” From that time on, there have been various musical projects involving the three originators, and sometime collaborator Neil Young, Crosby/Nash pairings, even solo efforts by the individual members. The group took a breather and put out “CSN” back in 1977 (wasn’t that the year that Punk and New Wave were billed as the Second Coming?), and it immediately shot to the top of the charts. Another five year layoff and “Daylight Again”, a smash Top 10 lp featuring two Top Twenty singles “Wasted on the Way” (Nash) and “Southern Cross” (Stills). How does a group like CSN make that kind of longevity work? Simple, explains group spokesman Graham Nash. A dedication to good music, extraordinary vocal harmonies and a clever blend of acoustic and rock melodies. The music industry takes its cues from them, not the other way around. Modern Recording recently caught up with the ever-busy Graham Nash for an inside analysis. MR&M: Let’s start from the beginning. Were you involved in producing the first CSN lp? GN: There are only three people who have ever produced a CSN lp... MR&M: The three of you? GN: The three of us, right. Why should I take the time to explain to you what we want, when I can go right to the machine and do it? There’s no point. Besides, we have never really known what it was we wanted till the end. We have always gone at it blindly, and we’ve always ended up with a nice concept. That’s been our history; we’ve always skated through. I’ve never found anybody who could tell the three of us what to do; I’ve never known anyone who could control the three of us together. MR&M: Is one of you more technically oriented that the other? GN: It’s a question of, how much do you want to concentrate on the technical stuff and how much do you have to concentrate on the music? What we need is a great engineer - an engineer that can just do what it is we need. But in terms of choosing songs, making arrangements, the programming, the order, the album cover, - we’re the only ones who could do any of that. Give us a good engineer, and we can do it. Halverson helped us alot with the first album. He did a great job, a wonderful job. It was one of the first albums he ever made. MR&M: Where was it done? GN: At Wally Heider’s, right here in Hollywood on Selma. I pass it by on my way home everyday......and I still think of that little room, and how much of my own personal history is tied up in it. MR&M: When did Rudy Records open? GN: God years ago, I don’t know, ‘78 or ‘79. MR&M: Is it something that you, or the three of you, worked on? GN: No, it was purely my idea, my dream. I used to live in San Francisco and had a studio in my basement. I got very upset because I wasn’t using it all the time, and I realized that there were some musicians who would give their right arm to have a studio like that at their beck and call. When I’d finished my stint living in San Francisco, and decided to marry Susan and move down to Los Angeles, I had all that equipment, so I brought it down. At the same time I decided I wanted to take the equipment out of my house in San Francisco, I found this beautiful building down here (LA). Or atleast Mac Holbert found it. Mac said, “There’s a great building over here - come and check this out. It used to be a Spanish restaurant.” We went, and it was just fabulous, so we leased it, moved all our stuff in, and there it was: Rudy Records. MR&M: Is it used primarily for your own projects, or is it...? GN: No, it’s a public studio. I own it, but anyone can call up and hire it, lease it, use it. MR&M: Do you have any personal equipment preferences? GN: No, I guess it becomes, generally, what you’re used to. MR&M: Being English, do you like Tannoy? GN: I’m not crazy about Tannoy. I am crazy about Studer. I think they make damned fine machines! They’re a little weird to edit on, they’re a little weird to punch in on, but I did all my early recordings with the Hollies on a 4 track, 1 inch tape Studer machine. I’ve got a distinct preference for MCI when they can be maintained. We have Susan Rogers who works at the studio. She’s an excellent engineer and takes care of all the equipment. It sort of spaces a few musicians that a woman is doing the job, but I can’t find a man to do it better. She’s just fabulous at it. So, if it’s all carefully maintained, I like MCI stuff. It works when I want it to work, I can punch in and out; it’s a perfect setup for me. I’ve got an MCI board, and a couple of MCI 24 tracks, and I’m happy, thank you. MR&M: Do you have a studio at your home in Hawaii also? GN: No, I like to go to work. I’ve done that one before. Now, I might get a little 8 track, just to lay some demo’s down and stuff, but I certainly won’t put a full-blown studio there, no. MR&M: What about the revolution that’s taking place now in other areas of technology, say home computers? GN: I think if I weren’t interested in this, I’d be a fool. I, personally have not had that much time to delve into it in the past few years; but I’m going to make the time, because if I don’t, I won’t be able to talk with my children in five years. Right now, though, my children don’t even have a television in Hawaii. But they know how to grow bananas, and they know where avocado’s come from, and they know how to avoid the ocean when it’s really rough. They know all the stuff they’ve got to know before they even begin to think about computers. MR&M: I noticed your little boy has a performance credit on Earth and Sky (Nash’s most recent solo LP effort). GN: He played harmonica on “Magical Child,” for which he got paid double scale. Triple scale, actually, now that I think about it. What happened was that the song was written for him, because Jackson was my only child at that time, and he was down in the studio when I was putting the harmonica solo on it. I gave him the “G” harmonica. He could play it - blew in and out several times. MR&M: How old was he then? GN: Two MR&M: Can you tell me about the Hollies reunion LP? GN: It’s already happened! It’s 95% percent done. MR&M: How many of the original band members? GN: All of them. I’m not interested in rehashing a fake. The very fact that Alan Clark and Tony Hicks and Bobby Elliot were still there, making good music, made me decide to get into it. I wanted to do two things: make fine music with people with whom I’d made fine music in the past, and finish some unfinished business with the Hollies (I didn’t think we’d pushed ourselves hard enough). I wanted to give history a twist by the tail. And more importantly, I wanted to be at the beginning of something, in the middle of something, and at the end of something all at the same time. MR&M: Where was the album done? GN: Rudy Records, right here in Hollywood. MR&M: The Hollies project is something you produced as well? GN: It’s a strange situation. A lot of it was done the same way the Hollies have always done it; me, Alan, and Tony doing it. A lot of the tracks they had done before they brought them over and put the vocals on, so I did a lot of it, and they did a lot of it. In fact, I’d probably admit that they did most of it. MR&M: How much of it was your writing? GN: None of it. None of it was any of our writings. These were all somebody else’s tunes. MR&M: Why? GN: Because I’ve always believed that the Hollies were one of the finest interpretive bands around, that we could take a song like, “Just One Loo” from Doris Troy and turn it into a Hollies records. People think we wrote “Bus Stop,” but we didn’t. It would have been very easy for me to say, “I’m coming back, and I want six of my tunes on there” - but we’re not into that; we never were. We’re only into, “Do you want to do this tune?” Joe Blow did it, but who cares. MR&M: When you’re preparing to record an lp do you generally rehearse ahead of time before going into the studio? GN: We’ve tried that, you know. Rehearsal time in your home is a lot cheaper than $150. an hour in the studio. But there are certain times that you’ve written a song that day and you’ve got no time to rehearse it. Then you try to work it out in the studio. It all depends; it happens both ways. I’ve rehearsed a song till I’m sick of it, then gone in and recorded it that way, or I’ve written a song that morning and gone in and recorded it. It’s happened every way. I’ve made records from the bass drum up, from the vocals down, any way you look at it. I’ve made ‘em in every way, with an orchestra, with one or two people; I’ve made records almost every way you can think of. MR&M: In various CSN and CSNY projects that have taken place, has there been much consistency in how they’ve been produced? Have they mostly been a series of tracks laid upon tracks, or have some been more “live” than others? GN: Yup to all of it. CSN and CSNY have done all that. We’ve rehearsed and recorded it, and we’ve had a song that didn’t exist an hour before and recorded it. There’s been stuff where we laid track upon track; and there’s been stuff where everything was live; we’re done it every way. It’s been twenty years for me now - wow! MR&M: There seems to be a trend these days - largely because of economics - to just go in and do it in a couple of days, or maybe a week or two as opposed to the long, extended three and four month projects. GN: I don’t mind how it’s done, as long as we get a fine result. The recent CSN album took eighteen months, the Hollies album took three weeks. I cut my first album with the Hollies in one afternoon. We did our set twice, chose the best, and that was it. Cost us about $40. dollars. Daylight Again cost $800,000 to do. I’ve done it any way you want to think about it. There’s no way I can say, “Hey, this is they way to do it.” You can only follow emotion and follow your heart. MR&M: The question you’re probably asked more than any other these days is, to what do you attribute your longevity in the business? GN: It can only be the music. When you look at the three of us, we’re not sex gods, you know. MR&M: Well, it depends..... GN: We do put out the music we think is our finest effort. We don’t care what anybody else thinks about it. No one. We don’t care what the record company thinks about it, we only care what we think about it. A lot of people think, “Big Deal.” But when we’re all dead and gone in the next day or next 100 years, I want the music left. That’s one of the things I say to all the media people who say, “Crosby’s fat and bald and losing his hair...” They miss what we’re really there for, which is the music. My reply to them is that, that’s all I care about. When we’re dead and gone, I want people to understand that there were a bunch of guys who tried to make music that would help people deal with the insanity of this world. The songs that we write are written from our hearts, they’re usually about something that’s happened to everyone we know. I can only put it down to that fact that the music itself - and there’ve only been three albums in fourteen years - is as special as we believe it is. You must realize that I had twenty-one Top Ten records before I ever met David and Stephen. It’s been a long time for me. The same thing has always applied: I always try to make the best music I can. MR&M: What have your compatriots in the Hollies been doing during the last decade or so? GN: Their last three records here were Number One; they have not been without hits. In the last five or six years, they’ve played nightclubs and venues in Europe to keep the money rolling in and make a living. Fortunately, I’ve never had to do that. That gives me a great deal of artistic freedom, because when you’re forced to go on the road, you start to close up, and freeze up, and it’s just dreadful for you. I’ve been very, very fortunate in this country. What I believed about this country was true: if you’re willing to work your ass off, you can get somewhere here. MR&M: How do you mix career with family? Do you purposely make your tours shorter, and be more selective as to where you go? GN: No. I have a wife and family who understand that there are occasions where daddy has to go away and work. They have a great understanding of it; my children aren’t the kind who cling to my legs as I try to get out of the door. They say, “Okay, see you in a couple of days, give us a call.” They’re very rational about it. I seem to have struck a very interesting balance. See, my wife understands that I don’t have a “career”; I am me. Whatever I do is me. So it’s not like, You have a career, and you’re a father, and then you’re your own individual being. I am everything to my family. My kids enjoy what I do, and so far we’ve managed to strike a balance between all those things. MR&M: Getting back to the music, what about your original songs? Take “Cathedral”; was the experience true, of your standing on the tombstone and looking down? GN: Yup, ‘fraid so. Slight poetic license - it was 1798, but it didn’t rhyme - but I thought I could take that much liberty. Yes, its a true story. I went to Winchester Cathedral in Salisbury and went through it... It’s a true story, but then, all the stuff we write is true! Where the hell else would we get it from? I spent ten years with the Hollies creating songs out of nothing. (singing) -”Oh, she’s holding her right leg over her left knee, and she’s twisting her ring, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh.” I did all that. Now I want to write songs that help people, that give an indication of how I feel about things, so that they can say, “Hey, he’s full of it,” or “Hey, he’s got something there,” or, “Boy, I went through that last week.” There’s a link between us all that’s undeniable. I think our music helps people to be less lonely, and I think our songs help people to understand that as crazy as the world is, it can be dealt with and after a careful search, you will find most of the answers you’re looking for. Not in our music per se, but generally, you know. MR&M: When did your songwriting really take off? Was it with CSN? GN: I think it finally started to expand in the direction I wanted it to during my last year or so with the Hollies, when I started to write things like “Right Between the Eyes” and “Lady of the Island.” That’s when I thought it showed a glimpse of where I wanted my song writing to go. MR&M: What are some of your own favorite songs that you have done? GN: I don’t have any favorites; I know the ones that seem to be other peoples favorites, but I don’t have any favorites. I like it when I’m on the edge like when we were at Carnegie Hall, when David and I were doing a concert. Someone on the side of the stage whispered, “Stephen is here,” so I said to David, “As soon as we finish this tune, you go out and deal with Stephen, I’ll stay here and keep the audience occupied, and you bring him out and we’ll tear the house down.” Well, I started to talk, and kept talking and talking, and there was no David or Stephen, so I said to myself “Fuck it,” and went to the piano and started banging about on the black notes, and wrote a song called “Black Notes” and it was on the record! That’s the kind of stuff I like. MR&M: There seems to be a strong, continuing interest expressed by you in your music for political cause, from the very beginnings. GN: That’s just a word, you know; we’ve never thought of ourselves as a ”political” group at all. When you chain and bind a man to chair, that’s not politics to me, that’s bullshit! When you shoot four students down at Kent State, that’s not politics - that has to be spoken and screamed, against! So, we’ve never seen ourselves as a political group at all; we've seen ourselves as a reflection of humanity, because what happens to us probably happens to every other person on the planet. MR&M: Can you differentiate between your work with the group and your solo work? When you record with the group, it’s still credited as a Nash or a Stills or a Crosby song. But aren’t there the kinds of collaborations that other groups have had, where two actually get together and put their heads together to write one song? GN: Oh sure, there are a couple like that on “Daylight Again”. I wrote “Turn Your Back on Love” with Stephen and Michael, and I’ve written a lot with Crosby for instance. We can all specifically remember times when I have needed a verse, and Stephen says, “Hey da da da da da dum,” and I say, “Thank you,” and never give him credit - as I’ve done for him. If you add two lines to a verse, you don’t expect credit for writing it. If you write the chorus and the verse, you say, “Okay, let’s write this together,” and it becomes a dual effort. We’ve helped each ourselves out with one-liners for years. MR&M: Is your approach to writing fairly structured? GN: I think most things are that way. I think the universe is that way. I think life itself is that way. It’s in a constant state of decay. Most things have a beginning, some kind of middle, and then they finish. What can I say? But I don’t have any particular structure. When I was with the Hollies, we could always write a song that was exactly 2 minutes and 51 seconds. That was the ideal time for a single at that point, right before the news. I don’t know how we did it! It took me years to get out of that; I think “Wind on the Water” was my first long song. The first long song that was longer than three minutes. There are so many levels in song writing that one has to deal with. A lot of people have criticized my work for being too simple, and I say, “What is too simple?” I’m not interested in talking to people who come from MENSA - I’m interested in talking common, simple people’s language. I’m not interested in “Lollipop”; I’m only interested in putting you on a trip, because the songs, and my wrenching them out of my soul, put me on a trip. When I write a song that affected me like “Cathedral,” I want to get it on record, so that when you play it, you can understand what I’m talking about. I’m interested in affecting your soul. MR&M: You as a group have seemed to manage to escape the pressure from the label to pop your records out, one a year. GN: No, we haven’t. We’d had tremendous pressure. We have been under pressure from the record company, but they’ve been smart enough to realize that there are certain people (and groups) they can’t push. We have been one of them. We have had all the contractual obligations that every other recording group has had - we have a deal for six records; we’ve made three of them. We keep changing our contract; there’s nothing they can do about it. They can only be glad when we do it. They have been very forgiving, they have been very understanding. They have had the opportunity to kill us to sue us for millions for non-delivery of product. But Ahmet Ertegun is smart! He knew from the beginning that these were three crazy people that had to be handles slightly differently than any other rock stars. MR&M: Look at the pay-off though, in quality. GN: Ahmet understands that. He was recording Ray Charles in the 40’s for God’s sake. He was recording Aretha when Columbia couldn’t do anything with her. He's a very smart, musical man, and fortunately he has not applied the kind of pressure he legally could have. And look what’s happened. I wouldn’t record a CSN album for anyone else, and I don’t think David or Stephen would, either. He has shown faith in us. Elvis Costello is a case in point of someone putting three albums out in two years, and they were all right. But I’ve seen it go the other way, too; I’ve seen people being forced to put records out, and as you say, the quality just declines. You know why? It’s hard to wrench that stuff out of your system if you’re a writer. MR&M: Do you have any favorite CSN or Graham Nash lp’s? GN: Yeah, I do; the next one! Really. When we did “Daylight Again,” and wrote all those songs, and rehearsed them, and mixed them and mastered them, we were sick of them! So we’re on to the next one. MR&M: Will there be a next one fairly soon? GN: Fairly soon. MR&M: There seems to be such momentum building up..... GN: Yes, there is. I would love to take advantage of the momentum, but I’ve long since passed trying to plot a path through all of this. There are certain pressures one can bring to bear that sway you one way or the other, but I’ve long since passed saying, “Oh yeah, in April there’ll be another album.” “April of what year?” is what I say now. I personally would like to record in the summer and put a record out by September - if it’s good enough to come out. And any CSN or CSNY album that has come out has passed the “Us” test first. If it didn’t pass us, it wouldn't come out. MR&M: (It seems that) the public hasn’t been fickle towards you, as they have towards other groups, perhaps in some cases unfairly. GN: You know why? I think the music’s good. I think the kids know we are trying our best - I mean the people who are into music, whether they’re 80 years old or whatever. In Omaha, Nebraska, I saw a 68 year old woman sitting next to a 15 year old kid. Three rows back - and it’s loud three rows back. She never moved. She had so much grey hair and wrinkles, had to be over 60. We had some amazing sights on this tour. It really encouraged us to believe that we are doing something right. You never know; there’s no instruction books with rock n roll. MR&M: In terms of future projects; do you have any plans to do any producing of someone other than yourself? GN: Can’t stand it. There are people I’d love to produce, but I can’t stand it. MR&M: Why? GN: It’s not my music. And if I spend four months producing someone else’s music, it’s four months I can’t spend on my own. It’s that selfish. I love being in the studio, I love being able to create, and for the first several weeks of any project I’m doing, I’m wildly into it. Then I realize that I’ve got no time to go upstairs when I’ve got a melody in my head and start putting it down, because I’m in the studio at four. Then I start to dislike the fact that it takes away a great deal of time. And now that I have three children and a beautiful wife, I dislike it even more.