The current seventh solo album by Graham Nash is not yet old, so the listener has a lot to do: he should build a better life for future generations and explain to the singer in the very next song why the Maga tourists are so willing to listen to their Idol follow: “Tell me why?” “You’re on the wrong side of the law,” Nash warns the blinded. And as one still wonders about the appellative gesture with which Nash constantly demands action here, it is also striking how discouraged the broad mass of musicians has become in the face of the great upheavals.
“Now” is the name of the new Nash album, and right from the opening song he throws himself into the moment. No doubts, no brooding, no despair – he is here and now. Anyone looking for nostalgia will find it in the sound, in the sawing of the bottleneck solo, in the classic, guitar-centric band web. And further along in a sugar-sweet, seductive guitar-twang song called “Buddy’s Back.” Mature people don’t have to google to know which buddy played guitar like that.
Time to hit the rewind button to go all the way to the beginning of the tape. You can see Graham Nash jerking back across the Atlantic, because even if he seems so American, he wasn’t originally one at all, but a boy from Manchester who went through the turmoil of the first school bands and then founded the first earth-shattering band – as a bow in front of that buddy: The Hollies. They signed the record deal with Parlophone in 1963. Labelmates were the beatles. In the wake of the beat revolution, the Hollies worked their way towards hip psychedelia over the years, finding gems like “Dear Eloise” and hit singles like “Carrie Anne”. With the vocal setting of the intro, the latter number is already striving for feelings like they do Beach Boys had in America.
Pop history isn’t fair. And had the competition not been so fierce in those British years, who knows how the Hollies would be remembered today. Although the band was doing well in 1968, Graham Nash saw a different future for himself than he had in California with David Crosby of the Byrds met. Together with Stephen Stills from Buffalo Springfield and sometimes with sometimes without Neil Young, a group formed here in which lifestyle and hope for a better future condensed into intoxicating vocal arrangements and a guitar sound that strove to the fringes of consciousness.
One of the central Crosby, Stills, Nash & YoungGraham Nash wrote a song in the days of the Hollies: “Teach Your Children”. The hell of the fathers shall not become the hell of the children and fear shall no longer have power over them. The path to the current album is remarkably clear. From song to song, this one appears more upright and sympathetic.
Graham Nash, Wednesday, September 6, 8 p.m., Circus Krone