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Graham Nash on the drugs that shaped and shattered his career
English folk-rock legend Graham Nash found his footing in the 1960s with The Hollies, a group that focussed on a pop-rock sound highlighted by hits like ‘The Air That I Breathe’, ‘Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)’ and ‘He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother’.
After a fervent rise to global popularity, Nash founded the publishing company Gralto Music Ltd alongside Hollies bandmates Allan Clarke and Tony Hicks in 1965. By the end of the decade, the company would be famed for having signed a young Reginald Dwight (AKA Elton John), who contributed to some of The Hollies’ later recordings.
Having broken into the American consciousness in the mid-60s, Nash fell in love with the Newport Folk Festival dream girl, Joni Mitchell. He became close with David Crosby and Stephen Stills through his new partner, and by 1968, the three had formed the highly successful supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash, which would welcome Neil Young into the fold for a term from 1969.
As Nash mingled in the post-hippie era’s music elite, he fell increasingly under the spell of a doomed infatuation with Mitchell while his dependency on drugs and alcohol span out of control. In an eminently revealing and unrestrained interview with The Irish Times earlier this year, Nash revealed that some drugs were the devil on his shoulder while others were more angelic in nature.
The 80-year-old singer-songwriter opined that much of the joy in his life is compounded by the way marijuana allows him to fixate on the beauty of the world rather than the darkness in the corners. “I’m glad that I got to know marijuana when I did. It changed my life completely,” he said. “I get up every morning, and I’m glad I’m alive.”
The interviewer then asked whether LSD also had a positive impact on his life and career. “It did,” Nash replied. “I took less than a dozen trips in my life, but I realised with the first one that here we are, this ball of mud whizzing at 67,000 miles an hour through space, on one of trillions of planets. I understood when I took acid that everything is meaningless. And because of that, everything is completely deeply meaningful.”
Later in the conversation, Nash discussed the tempestuous road he travelled alongside Crosby and Stills. As the trio (quartet while briefly joined by Young) grew popular into the early ’70s, Nash said they “were in heaven,” but sadly, this didn’t last very long. Where cocaine might have served as an alternative to coffee when pulling all-nighters in the studio or partying late into the night, it quickly became a problem within the band.
“When we first started, there were no egos,” Nash explained. “I think that came from all the cocaine we snorted. That’s what brought egos into it. There were an enormous amount of drugs being taken. I’d get high in the morning and snort in the afternoon, and I’d keep going till 3-4am.”
The interviewer then asked whether he thought their music would have been different sans drugs. “I don’t know,” Nash admitted. “But we may have been able to make more music if we’d not been quite so stoned”.
Nash then noted the exact moment he decided to stop taking cocaine forever. “10th of December, 1984. We had finished a tour, and there was the tour-end party. I walk into this room and see all these people smiling, and the smiles never made it to their eyes. It was only a mouth. And I realised I must look like all these people because we were all snorting coke. I stopped instantly and never went back.”
