Graham Nash
On “Bus Stop”:
“We had a manager called Michael Cohen and he owned a tailor shop in Stockport in the north of England that I actually worked at at one point. And he came to us one day and said this neighborhood woman keeps driving me crazy, she says she has this son who writes songs, would you do me a favor? Go and pat him on the head, and encourage him, and get her off my back (basically). So we go down to this house, there’s this 14 or 15 year old kid there, and he’s got a guitar ... and we were The Hollies, we’d had a couple of hits and we were full of ourselves. And we said ‘okay kid, what have you got?’ He picks up his guitar and goes, ‘bus stop, wet day, she’s there I say please share my umbrella’ …. We knew immediately that we could make a great record of that. So we said, okay, well, yeah great, we’ll take that song’ and we get up to leave. And then one of us said, ‘um … have you got anything else?’ He said, ‘yeah, I have this song and it goes like this ‘look through any window, yeah…’ so that was two that we wanted. And we said okay, one last time, ‘anything else?’ He said, ‘aaah .. I wrote this song this morning for my friend Peter Noon who’s singing with this new band Herman’s Hermits and it goes, ‘no milk today, my love has gone away....’ This young kid had written three fantastic pop songs. That was a very interesting moment in our lives.” The boy was Graham Gouldman who went on to form 10CC. On Neil Young, (the strangest of my friends): “The man is totally committed to the muse of music, and he will do anything for ‘good’ music. And Sometimes it’s very strange: I was at Neil’s ranch one day, just south of San Francisco, and he has a beautiful lake with red-winged black birds, and he asked me if I wanted to hear his new album, Harvest, and I said ‘sure, let’s go into the studio and listen.' Oh no, that’s not what Neil had in mind. He said, ‘get into the row boat.’ I said, ‘get into the row boat?’ He said, ‘yeah, we’re going to go out into the middle of the lake.’ Now I think he has a little cassette player with him, or an early digital format player, you know, so I’m thinking I’m goanna wear headphones and listen in the relative peace of the middle of Neil’s lake. Oh no! He has his entire house as the left speaker, and his entire barn as the right speaker. And I heard Harvest coming out of these two incredibly large speakers, louder than hell, it was unbelievable. Elliot Mazer who produced Harvest, came down to the shore of the lake and shouted out to Neil, ‘how was that Neil?’ And I swear to God, Neil Young shouted back, more barn!’ On how adding Neil Young changed Crosby, Stills & Nash: "It's more difficult to sing four-part [harmonies]; you've got to start shifting parts around and stuff. Neil brings a darker edge to our music, and I don't mean that in a negative way. ... It's more intense. That first album of Crosby, Stills & Nash is kind of summery: lots of palm trees in it feeling, a cool-breeze-through-the-canyons kind of music. Actually, Jimi Hendrix, when asked what he thought of Crosby, Stills & Nash, looked at the interviewer and said, 'That's Western sky music.' And I thought, 'Wow. That's brilliant.' The point is that Neil brings a different kind of musical intensity to the band, and the music of Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is very, very different." - Graham Nash, (Fresh Air, October 2013) |