Overview:
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member will perform on September 27 and 28.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
—“Woodstock,” Joni Mitchell via Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, 1970
Back to the garden, indeed. On September 27 and 28, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Graham Nash will once again perform at the outdoor site that helped to make Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crosby Stills, Nash & Young household names when he revisits the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival.
“It’s a very special place, and it brings up a lot of memories,” Nash says via phone about the former farm of Max Yasgur, where the group played one their very first high-profile concerts to half a million people, a record turnout for the time. “I still haven’t seen the entire Woodstock movie, but I thought we did pretty good. I like going back there on my own these days to check out the wonderful museum they have there now.”
Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England, in 1942, Nash was raised in Salford, a suburb of Manchester, the city where he and singer Allan Clarke cofounded the Hollies, whose 1966-1967 US hits included “Carrie Anne,” “Bus Stop,” “Look Through Any Window,” and “On a Carousel.” “It really was an amazing time,” he says about the British Invasion era. “It seemed like there were great new groups coming out all the time. Of course, there were the Beatles and the Stones, and you also had us and Herman’s Hermits, the Kinks, and so many others.” But despite the heady heights of the Hollies, by the end of the decade he would be onto something else.
Nash first met David Crosby when the latter’s band the Byrds toured the UK in 1966. In spring 1968, burnt out from the Hollies’ relentless road schedule, he visited the Los Angeles area, where he reconnected with him and, at Monkees member Peter Tork’s house in Laurel Canyon, met Stephen Stills, who’d recently left the Buffalo Springfield. A few months later, at a party-turned-jam session at his soon-to-be romantic partner Joni Mitchell’s nearby house, Nash, Crosby, and Stills decided to try some harmonizing. Immediately it was clear to all how special their vocal blend was. “My life changed in an instant,” recalls Nash, who was 26 at the time. “I’d been a musician since I was 13, and I know magic when I hear it. I realized right then and there that I had to leave the Hollies and follow this sound.”
The sound quickly led to a deal with Atlantic, and the label in May 1969 released the trio’s quadruple-platinum-selling debut, Crosby, Stills & Nash, which that year spawned the Top 20 hits “Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Adding Stills’s ex-Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young to their lineup to become Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, they toured mainly smaller venues before their immortal Woodstock Festival slot and the recording of 1970’s chart-topping followup, Déjà Vu. That album boasted three more Top 40 singles: “Teach Your Children,” “Our House” (written by Nash about his and Joni Mitchell’s concurrent domestic bliss), and Mitchell’s composition celebrating the landmark festival and the consciousness it had spawned, “Woodstock.”
In the wake of the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings the group rush-recorded Young’s response to the tragedy, “Ohio,” another Top 20 hit. But intraband tensions that year saw the splintering of the group, which across the subsequent decades would reunite as CSN, CSNY, and other configurations to record more hits (1977’s “Just a Song Before I Go,” 1982’s “Wasted on the Way”) and tour amid its founding members’ pursuing various musical projects and releasing their own albums. Nash’s first two solo efforts, 1971’s Songs for Beginners and 1974’s Wild Tales, both reached the Top 40 albums chart, and he briefly rejoined the Hollies during the 1980s and ’90s. Filmmaker Bob Zemackis is presently readying a CSN documentary and, according to Nash, a four-LP box set of the band’s music is also in the works.
Another artistic area in which the OBE (Order of the British Empire; “for services to music and charitable activities”) recipient has thrived is photography. As a child he developed an early fascination with the medium, and his cash-strapped father, wanting to encourage his son’s budding interest, bought him a camera from the black market—and went on to serve a year in prison for refusing to give police the name of the seller. Perhaps poetically, Nash would go on to become a preeminent photo collector; receive an honorary scholar title from photography institution the George Eastman House; help pioneer new forms of fine-art photo printing; and publish books of his own writing and images (the most recent is 2021’s A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash). “I’ve always loved the act of creation,” says the lensman, who is currently selecting photos for another book project. “I get a very similar charge from taking pictures to the one I get from playing music for an audience—that column of energy, where I get to plug myself into what’s happening.”
Coming of age as a countercultural artist and activist during the turbulent 1960s, Nash remains staunchly committed to social justice, composing songs about ecology, prison reform, immigrant rights, and anti-war stances, among other issues. “In the early ’70s we thought Nixon was crazy, but Trump is far more devious,” says the songwriter, who in 2011 performed at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York with his late friend and collaborator Crosby and has appeared in support of multiple causes. “People need to learn as much as they can about what’s going on and get out and protest. When people take to the streets, the politicians start to take notice. The 3.5% rule says that it only takes that amount of the population protesting to bring about change. In the upcoming election Democrats need to win with such big margins that the win is undeniable. I believe we can do it.”
Graham Nash will perform at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel on September 27 and 28 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $147.87-$390.
