ON A BITTERLY COLD AFTERNOON three weeks before his 83rd birthday, Graham Nash strides crisply up to a Ukrainian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, walks in and takes a seat at a window table like a native of New York – which he nearly is. Born in Blackpool, armed with an accent and can-do attitude forged in post-war Manchester, the singer first came to America with the Hollies in April, 1965, landing in New York to join a pop-music revue at the Paramount Theatre hosted by the children’s TV host Soupy Sales and featuring Little Richard with a then-unknown Jimi Hendrix on guitar. Three years later, Nash formally settled in Los Angeles to start a group with two new friends, ex-Byrd David Crosby and Buffalo Springfield guitarist Stephen Stills, that the three simply named after themselves.
Yet for the last decade, Nash – who became a US citizen in 1973 and a full-time solo artist after the exhausted dissolution of CSN in 2015 – has lived in New York with artist Amy Grantham, his third wife. Their apartment is two blocks from the restaurant. “It was always lovely to come here,” Nash says of his adopted city, his accent still intact, over a plate of fried eggs with chips and a couple of lattés. “Once you became popular in Manchester, you want to do the same thing in London. But after London, where do you go? New York was it. I loved it immediately.”
Over two afternoons at the same table, Nash reflects vividly and candidly on his American experience; the turbulent, parallel passage with CSN and the periodic CSNY with Neil Young; his painful estrangement from Crosby after the group broke up, fuelled by the latter’s rash, often hurtful outbursts in interviews and on social media; and the daily pangs of loss since Crosby’s death in 2023, as the two were on the verge of reconciliation. “I think of David,” Nash says, “every time I drive through Van Cortlandt Park [in the Bronx]. Don’t forget: It’s David Van Cortlandt Crosby.”
Nash is frank about the belated liberty he enjoys as a songwriter and performer: two well-regarded albums, 2016’s This Path Tonight and 2023’s Now; three tours with his current group in 2024 and three more set for this year, including UK dates with opening act Peter Asher, who nearly signed the newborn CSN to Apple Records. “I’m much happier alone,” the singer declares. “I don’t need anyone’s opinion. I have the freedom to do whatever I want without having to ask three other people if I can do this.”
Henry Diltz
The peacemaker: Graham Nash, February 1969 – “I followed the magic of the music I heard.”
Credit in here
Nash is king: (clockwise from left) Graham with the Hollies at Sunday Night At The London Palladium in the early ’60s; the Hollies (from left) Nash, Bernie Calvert, Bobby Elliott (in hat), Tony Hicks, Allan Clarke, 1965; Nash gets close to Joni Mitchell, Big Bear Lake, California, 1969.
ITV/Shutterstock, Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo, Henry Diltz (2)
He also has the health to carry on: going meat-less for nearly seven years, exercising three times a week and meditating twice a day. Between road trips, Nash – an avid photographer since childhood – has been working on a follow-up to his 2021 volume, A Life In Focus: The Photography Of Graham Nash. And he is, as he puts it, “a huge collector of interesting objects.” Pressed to expand on that, he brightly replies, “I just bought the master tapes for Bob Dylan’s first record” – privately held by a Columbia engineer since the November, 1961 sessions.
“It’s like being near the tip of a flame and not getting burned,” Nash explains. He recalls a photograph he bought at an LA gallery by the legendary New York photojournalist Weegee of two women “watching their tenement building burn. They had two copies, one pristine, one not. I wanted the one where Weegee wrote on the bottom, ‘I cried when I took this picture.’ I want to touch the flame.”
What were your first impressions of this city in 1965?
It was silly things like the way the phone rang, hash browns. When we got to the Paramount, the tour manager said, “Are you hungry? What do you need?” Hamburger, maybe? Ten minutes later, there’s a hamburger from Jack Dempsey’s [a Broadway restaurant owned by the legendary boxer]. I remember that Times Square sign for Camel cigarettes with the smoke blowing out.
Did you see a future for yourself here?
Very much so. In England, if you weren’t John, Paul, George or Ringo, who are you? People in this country wanted to know my opinion. I remember the Hollies were at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street, and Paul Simon came to see us. We had already done Simon And Garfunkel’s I Am A Rock [on 1966’s Would You Believe?], and they liked our version. Paul invited me to the studio with him and Arthur to listen to a few things. There was one called 7 O’Clock News [TV news reports set to the Christmas carol Silent Night on 1966’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme]. To be asked my opinion about important music they were creating was fantastic to me.
But you ultimately chose Los Angeles as your next home.