Wild Tales (37 page)

On our way back to London, we stopped in Winchester, first at the Great Hall to see where the fabled Round Table of King Arthur and his knights was kept. Now, I knew that it was probably bogus, more mythical than real, but that myth has tantalized English schoolboys for four hundred years, so I wanted to see it. As I approached the building, there was a man standing in front of me dressed in something resembling a beefeater’s outfit, holding
a small tray in his hand. On the tray were small horn beakers of water and little squares of bread.

“Here ya go,” he said, pushing it toward my face.

Now, I was peaking, so I didn’t quite grasp his intention. “What do you mean, ‘Here ya go’?” I asked.

He gazed into my eyes and said, “Don’t you know it’s just okay to
be
?”

On acid, it was the most profound thing that anyone had said to me
in my life.
Don’t I know it’s just okay to be? All this posing as a rock star, musician, famous hippie, millions of seats, hit records—
it meant nothing
, if you could just
be
.

From there, we took the five-minute walk to
Winchester Cathedral. Leo and I made our way to a side chapel with an aboveground grave resting on a huge marble plinth, where one of England’s early kings was buried. As we entered the church, the sun had been blocked by clouds, but it eventually appeared, shining through the stained-glass windows, which, on acid, was a mind-blowing effect. I started to walk down the nave toward the cross of Jesus. I was still peaking, and I felt a strange, unworldly presence at my feet. It stopped me in my tracks. I looked down and my legs began wobbling. I was standing on the grave of a soldier who died on my birthday, February 2, but in 1799. I’m not sure if it was real—I was on acid, what did I know from reality? But that’s what I
think
I saw, and it became part of my song “Cathedral.” I found out later that, in fact, I was not hallucinating. Someone sent me a photo of the actual grave. Go figure.

I wrote the song during the ongoing experience. Afterward, I realized that if I was going to criticize religion, I’d better have every fucking word right. It’s a serious song and I wanted to be sure of what I was saying, which is why it took me six years of intermittent work. Obviously, I was writing other songs in the meantime. But I kept coming back to that song, remembering a “cobweb on a face” and a cleaning lady trying to swish it off with a cloth. All those
images came floating back to me:
flying in Winchester Cathedral / sunlight pouring through the break of day.
How, walking down the aisle,
expressions on the face of the Savior made me say, “I can’t stay.”
And feeling like I wanted someone to
open up the gates of the church and let me out of here!

After we recorded “Cathedral” at the beginning of February 1977, I took a break to visit my mother, who wasn’t well. She was never a very healthy woman, suffering from mitral stenosis, the blocking of the mitral valve. In 1953, she had one of the first heart operations in the north of England to try and correct it. To get to her heart, the doctors had to break every rib, lift her left arm up, cut through tissue, poke around and clean out the valve, put the heart back in place, sew her up, and make sure the ribs were in the right place. It was a big operation, easily life-threatening. I remember sitting in French class in Salford Grammar when someone knocked on the window, signaling our teacher, Mr. Chadwick, out. They had a long conversation before Mr. Chadwick walked back into class and said, “Graham”—his face was solemn, and I was sure my mother hadn’t made it—“your mother’s okay. She made it through.” Here it was, nearly twenty-five years later, and she was still grappling with the operation’s aftereffects.

While I was there, I took a walk around Manchester and found myself standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel, in the very spot where
Allan Clarke and I had waited for the
Everly Brothers in 1960. It was snowing, blustery, a typical north of England day, almost like a Lowry painting. I stood there watching people come and go well into the evening, and goddamned if they didn’t look exactly the same as they had when I was a kid. Bundled up in their overcoats, with their red noses and flat, dead stares. I thought, There but for the grace of God. That’s me, if I had not had the instinct or made the decision to get out of there. I would have been one of those people hating their fucking lives, pissed off at their bosses, trying to find a bus, breathing toxic air from the industry around Manchester. I felt relieved, thankful that I’d been fortunate enough to enjoy experiences that weren’t
available to someone like my father. I immediately went to the hotel and wrote “Cold Rain” and finished it on the plane back to Miami.

Crosby often tells people, “If you really want to know about Graham Nash, listen to ‘Cold Rain.’ That’s who he is.” When I sing,
Wait a second, don’t I know you? / Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?
I’m talking about myself.
You seem to be like someone I knew / Yes, he lived here but he left, when he thought that there was more.

Usually, with my songs, Crosby has heard them in advance of a session. But this time I came to the party with
“Just a Song Before I Go,”
“Cathedral,” “
Carried Away,” and “Cold Rain” without playing them beforehand, so I think they may have impressed him more than hearing dribs and drabs up front. They were four fine pieces of music, if I say so myself. I felt like I’d come a long way since writing “Hey, What’s Wrong with Me?” with Clarkie. Working with Stephen and David made me stretch as a writer, trying to be as profound lyrically as I thought their songs were. Writing, I discovered, was basically a muscle that needed exercise. If I’d have been a plumber for thirty years, I’d have been a fantastic plumber.

When I got back to Miami, things started getting weird. No surprise. Our routine was the same: getting up late, having lunch, and recording from five o’clock to four or five in the morning. But drugs started to get in the way. David’s drug taking was a full-blown obsession. He and
Nancy Brown were not in great shape. In fact, they were both quite a mess, doing an ounce of coke a day. Nancy looked terrible. The drugs were destroying her. She had gone from being an extremely beautiful woman, knocking everybody on their ass, to looking like a witch, with sores covering her body. And it was hard to get David to concentrate. He was getting up later and later, avoiding the sunlight.

Croz had always been able to handle drugs better than anyone I’d ever met, but by the time we got to Miami they’d gotten the better of him. I’m a pretty tolerant man. I’m also pretty private, and what David does with his private life is his business. But it now affected the music and our studio time. We’d head into a session waiting for
him to show. “Where’s David?” “He’s in the bathroom.” “Where’s David?” “He’s doing business.” He and Nancy were holed up for hours in their room, not communicating with the rest of us. Fortunately, we were rich enough to have Criteria on hold twenty-four hours a day, so it didn’t matter when we went to the studio or when we finished. But in an effort to bring some sort of efficiency to the process, we needed everybody to be awake at roughly the same time. And drugs were definitely interfering with that.

David was deteriorating before my eyes. Like Nancy, he was covered in sores, but he kept telling me it was a staph infection. Because he’s an expert on every disease known to man, I believed him. But it wasn’t staph. It was a result of massive amounts of cocaine. I heard he’d spent a small fortune on coke that year.

Somehow, we were able to hold everything together in the studio. We scraped those sessions together into a cohesive piece of work. At one point, while we were mixing
“Shadow Captain,” the assistant engineer looked out the window and noticed a shadowy figure lurking about out. He said, “Hey, there’s somebody pissing in the bushes.” We wanted to see who it was, so we ran outside to discover—
it’s fucking Neil Young
! He’s back, and he’s pissing in the bushes.

“I was just down here, man, recording in Fort Lauderdale, and thought I’d pop in.”

Uh-huh. There was no room for Neil on this album, but we invited him inside to hear what we’d done, and I could tell he was pretty impressed. Still, it was a long way to come just to check out our scene. Even today, I can’t tell you what he had in mind. Neil Young is a weird cat. I remember a bunch of us were playing poker in his living room one day. He came in, took a look around, and got so pissed about not knowing half the people there that he
walked out the window.
It was only four feet off the ground, but four feet is a long way to go when you walk out of a window. He kind of stumbled when he landed and continued walking down the path toward his lake. Like I said, Neil is a weird cat, and he’s never changed. That’s the beauty of it, I suppose.

D
URING THE MIXING
of the album, we took a break for a week and sailed to Bimini, in the Bahamas, just to air things out. We rented a boat from a sailing friend of David’s, a beautiful vessel: the
William H. Albury
, a schooner like the
Mayan
, but bigger and fancier. Right off the bat we ran aground, but the rest of the trip was an all-out hoot. We got high, went diving, and almost lost
Joel Bernstein, who had come along to shoot an album cover. He’d been chasing us around the studio for a couple weeks, trying to frame an image that showed us off at our best. Unfortunately, Croz looked like shit in Miami, but out on the water he’d recovered his glow. The boat was the perfect setting to get a cover shot. Stephen was wearing a knitted cap from the Cousteau Society, David was in a T-shirt, and I had on a dark red top, all three of us trying to look our coolest. Joel pounced. He got a shot of us on deck, looking like serious hippies. “Yeah, I think that’s the one,” he said. Then, a moment later, we burst out laughing—also a great shot. So the first run of covers depicted the serious side of CSN, and when that sold out we replaced it with the laughing pose.

In spite of everything—or perhaps because of it—the album came together at the very end. There was a lot of last-minute conflict: between David and Stephen, David and me, me and Stephen. The same old shit. But so what! What went on between us was nobody’s business. All the public needed to know was: What the fuck does the music sound like? And it was a fine, fine record, one of our best. Called simply
CSN
, it came out in June 1977 to superb reviews and just as superb sales.

Of course, we had to tour to promote the album, but before we left, I married Susan, on May 4, 1977, at the Church of Religious Science on Hollywood Boulevard. I knew then what I know even more now: that she was too rare and beautiful a person not to have in my life. Okay, I’ll admit it: I was wildly attracted to her, but Susan meant so much more to me than the physical charge she put out.
She was wisdom, the voice of reason, my emotional anchor. She kept me grounded. I don’t know how many times she said about one of my partners: “This guy’s a little weird right now, but you’ve got to be forgiving. Don’t fly off the handle. It’s not going to get you anywhere.” Somehow she enabled me to function in my own crazy way. She understood and supported my idiosyncrasies, how I’m often not there, even when I’m present, off in my own little world. Instinctively, she knew to drive the car when I was daydreaming, spacing out, thinking about songs, looking at images, checking out girls. She loved me enough to let all of that slide. I’d never met anyone like her, then or since.

C
ROSBY
, S
TILLS
& N
ASH
toured all summer and through the fall of 1977, the first time we ever appeared in concert as a trio. It was a turbulent time in the music scene.
Frampton Comes Alive!
dominated the charts and would sell an unheard-of ten million copies.
Disco was taking over the pop airwaves:
Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, and
Saturday Night Fever
(to which, believe it or not, Stephen contributed, laying down those inimitable percussion parts).
Reggae was a brand-new force to be reckoned with. Elvis Costello and the Attractions were ushering in new-wave rock, David Bowie was poncing about with glam and Eno. Critics were trying to determine where we fit in. Who, they wondered, would come to our shows? Would the music be fresh, or nostalgia? Were we still relevant?

Crosby, naturally, told them to calm down. “We never worried about coming together because of external forces that we had no control over,” he told a journalist. “We’ve just tried to concentrate on the music and let everything else fall where it may.”

I sure as hell wasn’t worried. The new album was a smash, and our shows sold out in a matter of hours. Were we still relevant? Are you kidding! Ninety percent of the acts in the world would have killed for the type of demand we were creating. We still attracted
our share of heads and hippies, but they were older hippies who brought their kids. College students always seemed to discover us, no matter what era they were at school. And as for the music, old and new, I defy anyone to pack three or four hours with the songs or intensity we were putting out. Stephen seemed more relaxed without Neil hovering over him. As a guitar player, he was a monster. Crosby was in decent enough shape. All three of our voices were as tight as they’d ever been.