The one songwriter Graham Nash calls the greatest of all time: “No one comes close”
Graham Nash has worked with some of the greatest names the world has ever known. Across an impressive career, his list of collaborators reads like some of the best songwriters in pop music history. It means his thoughts on who might be the best of all time are worth noting.
Whether it was with the Hollies, his solo work or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Graham Nash always remained a singular voice that helped to define the counterculture movement.
Bob Dylan opined that he was one of the finest singers of his generation; there is no doubting that he could pen a ditty, and the number of breakup songs he has been on the receiving end of is testimony to the fact that he certainly had charm, too. In his playing days, he was, in short, the complete package.
In fact, he was such a consummate musician that it seems he was fated for the spotlight all along. As he writes in his memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life: “I guess music was my religion, even though we had little of either in the house. There wasn’t much singing and certainly no records – we couldn’t afford ’em!” Nevertheless, everything he heard made an impression on him as the future wafted over from America and the pop culture boom crackled through on Radio Luxembourg.
As he told Louder Sound, one of the first anthems that moved him was the same track that helped to stir The Beatles into action. “The first record I got was Be-Bop-A-Lula by Gene Vincent,” Nash recalled. “I swapped it for some toast that I was going to have for lunch at school. Thank you, Freddie Marsden. The reason I joined Capitol Records was because of this record. I told them that I would join if they let me hear the original 2-track recording of it. They let me hear it once… then I joined the company.”
This anthem vitalised the youth of the day, hoping to go about things in a different way to their war-scarred parents. So, while early rock ‘n’ roll might have defibrillated the counterculture movement, once the children of the revolution were shocked into action, it was depth that they were craving. The timeless ways of folk came the fore, and one performer dishes out more profundity in that arena than just about anyone else.
”How fortunate I feel being alive at the same time as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni, James Taylor, Paul Simon… so many wonderful writers. But no one comes close to Bob Dylan in my humble opinion,” Nash declared when championing his game-changing 1963 record The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as his favourite.
Arguably one of the most defining albums of the decade, Dylan’s sophomore effort is regarded by many as the peak of his talent. For us though, it ranks below some other notable LPs. It was, however, the first album to properly ascertain Dylan as a wondrous talent.
The record does possess a few covers, as many records of the time did, but it was Dylan’s own wry songwriting that confirms this as one of his greatest records. Original songs such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’ confirmed that the songwriter was in a league of his own as he demonstrated not only a witty pen, sharp tongue and quizzical eye but a deft touch too.
As if to assert the point, Nash added: ”’Blowing in the Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’… what incredible pieces of poetry. I believe that he was well honoured by the Nobel Prize.”
Indeed, we would’ve been waxing lyrical about The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan had only one of those masterpieces featured on the record, but to have such an awesome string of them in 1963, when nobody else was writing like that, is an exhibition of true genius.
Nash writes from the same page himself, as he once opined: ”When I was born in 1942, World War II was still going. And I began to realise when I became a young adult that if we don’t teach our kids a better way of relating to their fellow human beings, the very future of humanity on the planet is in jeopardy.”
