Classic Rock Revisted, Review: Graham Nash - Wild About Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

Rating: 4.5

Anytime I’ve had to deal with Graham Nash, it’s been a pleasant experience. He never seemed like the type of rocker who ever threw TVs out of the Continental Hyatt House or was a groupie-izer, and he always seems to have those polite English manners. He claims to have a temper that builds slowly, according to his long-awaited biography Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, but I have never seen any anger out of him in the few times I have hung around him—even if fans were bothering him with dumb questions about what certain CSN&Y songs were about.

The book candidly covers his entire life and it’s interesting to find out that he was from a working class Manchester family that kept a “stiff upper lip” and rarely showed affection. Looking back, Nash still seems shocked about his dad going to jail for a year for giving him a camera that turned out to be a “hot” item (it was actually stolen by Nash’s aunt and his father took the blame), and how Nash’s family barely had food on the table during this time. Later on, while in the Hollies, Nash was riding around his hometown on the upper level of a double decker bus and saw his mom kissing a strange man but kept his mouth shut about it. Years later, while being interviewed for an in-depth article on The Hollies, an interviewer shockingly notified Nash that his sister Sharon had a different father than he did.

I admit to being a bit of a rock and roll “gossip groupie” so before reading the book in chronological order, I looked in the index to see what he had to say about his famous romance with Joni Mitchell which inspired the rock and roll classic, “Our House” about their humble home together in Laurel Canyon. I always heard that he stole Mitchell away from band mate David Crosby—who had discovered her singing in a Florida coffeehouse. According to Nash, Croz and Mitchell’s affair was long over and they had remained friends. As a matter of fact, early on in CSN’s career, they jammed in Mitchell’s house and valued her commentary on their music. Nash was madly in love with Mitchell but the romance ended when he did not want to marry her. His descriptions of her make the famed Laurel Canyon-based songstress seem like a flawless “otherworldly” person whom excelled at everything she set out to master although they did have many arguments.

Nash also had a year-long romance with Rita Coolidge but why that ended isn’t exactly clear; it seems like their career duties pulled them apart and it’s interesting to note that before their first date, Stephen Stills hijacked Coolidge by saying Nash couldn’t make it! Also on the romance front, Nash was the unrequited love interest of Mama Cass and in a gentlemanly way, he told her he would like to be “great friends” with her for life but that he was not interested in her as anything more than that.

As a classic rock fanatic, I wanted to hear all about the evolution of The Hollies, a harmony-based group from Manchester that drew inspiration from the Everly Brothers. They were just a bunch of kids kicking around the neighborhood but the real nucleus of the group was Nash and Alan Clarke. Nash and “Clarkie” attended late 50s and early 60s “package shows” with and developed a voracious appetite for American rock and roll with. (Nash and Clarke became friends when they were six and still remain great friends to this day; the musical magic is still there as The Hollies performance during their Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Induction was so precise, clear and crisp that you could close your eyes and pretend it was 1965.) The Hollies started having hits only six months after forming and Nash’s first experiences on tour with them in the States circa 1965 are really wonderful. Nash and company flew to NYC with eyes wide open. He says he will never forget how huge The Paramount Theater in Times Square was and how they played at least five shows per day as part of a 60s package tour. He later walked around the city and marveled at the diversified neighborhoods and also recalls having dinner with the corrupt Morris Levy, who wanted to sign The Hollies in America. The Hollies had heard about Levy’s thug-related operations and wisely decided not to sign with him.