The 1969 album Graham Nash wanted nothing to do with: “Just awful”
The Hollies were born out of something truly original – it was the swinging sixties, after all. But when that vision started to stray, Graham Nash intrinsically knew it was no longer the place for him.
To be fair, after six years of constantly being on the road with the band, his comment, “I can’t take touring any more. I just want to sit at home and write songs. I don’t really care what the rest of the group think,” made it clear where things stood at that point. But while touring was one issue, it was a Bob Dylan covers album that ultimately pushed Nash over the edge.
After years of creating a slew of their own original hits, it was easy to see Nash’s perspective that the band suddenly turning to imitate a great was a bit of a cop-out. At the time, it seemed that he was the only one who felt that, though. The label told him it was a great idea, and the rest of the band were up for it, so he was resigned to the choice of following the crowd.
Or, at least that’s how someone with less of a backbone would proceed with that situation. Nash was never one of those people, if it wasn’t clear enough already. Sure, he kept up the act while it was all still hypothetical, but as soon as push came to shove, he knew it was time to jump ship from The Hollies, with Dylan to thank for the courage to take the leap.
To be clear, it wasn’t as if Nash had some sort of scathing personal vendetta against Dylan, or anything near it. He respected the man just as much as any other musician, “But an entire album of Dylan covers?” he scoffed. “Something about it sounded cheesy.” As it turned out, he actually wasn’t wrong to have his reservations about the whole project, either.
“Once we got into the studio, everything went wrong,” he remembered with a wince. “The guys decided to make Dylan swing. The arrangements whitewashed the songs, giving them a slick, saccharine, Las Vegasy feel. They emasculated them, obliterated their power.” And the worst offence out of all of them?
“We did a version of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ that sounded like a Nelson Riddle affair. It was a hatchet job, just awful,” Nash said. With that, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that the founding father of The Hollies would be continuing with the album, as well as the band as a whole. It was the signal to set out on pastures new – and how seismic they would become.
As such, the Hollies Sing Dylan record was completed and released with Nash no longer in tow, which was absolutely for the better, in his opinion. Of course, the naturally big elephant in the room was the fact that he was the only member of the group taking LSD, while the rest were only getting drunk on the more legal substances of life.
It goes a long way to explaining why he thought the band’s Dylan-esque efforts were “saccharine”, possibly because the rest of the Hollies were the only ones clean and sober enough to actually appreciate them. But nevertheless, by the time Crosby took flight in the direction of David Crosby and Stephen Stills, he was never looking back.
