The album Graham Nash considers the “high bar” of his career
It is difficult to think of many artists who have had quite as extensive and illustrious a career as Graham Nash.
In fact, if you can think of any others, it is not unlikely that they performed alongside the Blackpool-born songwriter at one point or another. Selecting one true career highlight for Nash, then, must be a particularly tricky task.
For the vast majority of songwriters, establishing a band either as successful or as massively influential as The Hollies would be the end goal of an entire career. Yet, for Nash, the 1960s pop heroes were just a starting point. Not only was he the driving creative force behind the chart-topping outfit, but it soon became clear that his ambitions extended beyond the confines of singing songs written for him by other songwriters.
It was only when The Hollies visited the US in 1966 that Nash’s future career path started to emerge, crossing paths with future bandmates in the form of David Crosby and Stephen Stills, two respective titans of the emerging counterculture scene thanks to the pioneering sounds of Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds. Two years later, Crosby, Stills, and Nash were officially a trio, and Nash’s Hollies-era was quickly vanishing from the rear-view mirror.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash, while often a rather conflict-ridden band to be a part of, did allow Nash to exercise the full extent of his songwriting talents over the course of the group’s extensive discography. According to the songwriter himself, his time with the group also allowed Nash to experience his apparent career peak, in the form of the band’s multitude of legendary live performances.
The pinnacle of the group’s performing career inarguably arrived in 1974, when they embarked upon a tour that was equally as groundbreaking as it was disastrous: the ‘Doom Tour’. An incredibly extravagant outing that typified the respective band members’ otherworldly reputations of the time, the tour saw them performing in the kind of colossal venues which are standard in the modern age but were virtually unheard of back in the mid-1970s.
“We knew it was something special,” Nash later recalled of the tour during a chat with Bob Ruggiero. “No one had done a tour like that, in that many big venues. But I felt we were up to the task. We could all play and sing, and there were four of us. With four intense egos!” Inevitably, the band members clashed on a multitude of occasions over the course of that fateful summer tour, most often revolving around the enduring rivalry between Neil Young and Crosby.
On the other side of the spectrum, though, those colossal shows showcased the extent of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s power at that time, not to mention their unparalleled knack for live performance. “It was an absolute labor of love. And we set a high bar both musically and graphically,” the songwriter continued.
Aside from a multitude of scratchy, second-rate bootleg releases, though, those live recordings didn’t see the light of day until 2014, when the group announced their CSNY 1974 box set, allowing audiences both young and old to revisit the golden period of the band’s career, when their performances were at their absolute peak in terms of passion and skill.
As an album, the live recordings are certainly not without their faults, of course, but the songwriting mastery at the heart of the band is always what shines through. It would appear, at least according to Graham Nash, that it was all downhill from there.
