Musicradar.: Book excerpt: Graham Nash's Wild Tales - A Rock & Roll Life

The Crosby, Stills & Nash superstar opens up in a captivating new memoir

Joe Boss

 

In his highly compelling and marvelously detailed memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, published September 17th by Crown Archetype, two-time Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee Graham Nash recounts his nearly six-decade-long love affair with music and an astonishing career that has seen the singer-songwriter and guitarist ride the crest of the British Invasion with The Hollies before settling in Los Angeles, where he made history with the formation of Crosby, Stills & Nash.

 

In Chapter 1, presented below, Nash paints a vivid picture of how CSN began to come about in 1968, during a tumultuous time in his life when both his marriage and his relationship with The Hollies were ending.

 

You can order Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life by Graham Nash at the Random House online store and on Amazon.

 

November, 1968

 

It always comes down to the music. I had a tune running through my head as my flight touched down a few minutes late at LAX. All my life I've had music in my head, but that night the tune (the theme from the TV series 77Sunset Strip) was doing battle on my behalf, helping me fend off the other shit that was rattling around in there. For the past few months, my well-ordered world had been turned upside down, and throughout the long flight from London everything seemed to gang up on me. There was no escaping it in that crowded cabin. With few distractions, I'd taken stock of the difficult choices on my holy mess of a plate.

How's this for starters: I was contemplating leaving my country, my marriage, my bank account, and my band—all at once! Any one of those would have been enough to put a grown man in the hole, but I was close to running the table. My band, the Hollies, and I had come to an impasse. We had grown up together, spent many years making music, writing songs, drinking and larking about; we'd had a fantastic string of hits, incredible success— but from where I stood we were growing apart. I'd moved on, I was headed in an exciting new direction, and my heart and soul weren't in the Hollies anymore.

 

The same with my marriage. My wife, Rosie, and I had been drifting for some time. We both knew things were coming to an end. In fact, during the last six months, we'd been seeing other people. Now she was off in Spain chasing another man, and I was on my way to Los Angeles to visit a woman who had captured my heart.

 

I was also in love with LA and the States. I'd known it from the moment I first set foot on American soil. It was the Promised Land, and I was drenched in the Hollywood scene— the music, the sun, the palm trees, the attitude, the looseness. The way people there asked me, "What do you think?" In En gland, nobody ever asked your opinion of anything. You learned to keep your business to yourself, to mind your p's and q's. In America it seemed like there were no rules, everything was up for grabs, and I loved the freedom of it. I wanted all of it for myself.

 

No doubt about it, my life had gotten complicated. I was at a hell of a crossroads. There were plenty of unanswered questions. My plight became more apparent as I got off the plane and headed to the taxi stand. There was no point stopping for baggage. I had my guitar. That was it; that was all I had come with. Nothing else mattered. I was in America. I was going to see my new girlfriend, to be with Joni.