“Very Sophisticated”: the artist Graham Nash called more advanced than any of their peers
Whenever people bring up anything associated with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the harmonies usually rank pretty high. Outside of the brilliant songs they wrote together and the unconventional chord structures they used for a lot of them, hearing every one of their vocals blend into a massive choir felt like hearing the sound of bright sunshine coming out of California. Graham Nash may have been the resident Englishman in the group, but he admitted that Brian Wilson was why they could reach higher as a vocal band.
Outside of The Beatles, The Beach Boys were one of the only groups really concerned with those overlapping harmonies in the early 1960s. The Rolling Stones had harmonies when the time called for them, but considering how grimy their music was, they never concerned themselves with making symphonies and focused more on Keith Richards’s riffs before anything else.
In Wilson’s case, harmonies were half the reason he got into music. Taking his cues from artists like The Four Freshmen, the best Beach Boys tunes involved him layering different harmonies on top of each other to create this incredible synthesis of voices, especially once he started moving into complex songs like ‘Good Vibrations’.
Once he conquered one part of his craft, Wilson wasn’t suddenly about to stop. Although he was known as the master of songs about cars, surfing, and sunshine, Pet Sounds became his opportunity to stretch the limits of pop music. The Beatles had started making amazing music on Rubber Soul, but Wilson’s songs like ‘God Only Knows’ deserve to be celebrated along the same lines as Beethoven’s greatest work.
Nash was already in the trenches with the Fab Four when he was in an early version of The Hollies, but he knew that Wilson was the true innovator of his generation, saying, “He was way advanced of what anybody was doing at that point. And I think The Beatles recognised that and I think every harmony group in the world recognised that there was some different thing going on – something very sophisticated.”
That sense of vocal harmony isn’t captured much better than on a song like ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’. Aside from being one of the most vulnerable tracks that Wilson ever composed, hearing the isolated tracks of different voices bouncing off one another feels like a stroke of genius from someone with a fire in their heart.
It’s not hard to see where Nash took those ideas and ran with them once he left The Hollies. On the CSN version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’, some of the best moments of the song feature every member singing in unison to create this wall of vocal parts, with Nash filling in Wilson’s shoes by taking the high vocal part on every track.
Whereas most people would consider Wilson a genius for what he brought to the world, he never thought of it that way. He was just a man looking to make the world a better place through the power of music, and somewhere along the way, he turned in the kind of songs that could make people laugh and cry in equal measure.
