The song and the moment that made Graham Nash form a supergroup: “The world fucking changed”
I’ll admit something we all think about at least once in life.
There are times, not always, when I find museums slightly pointless. Wandering around echoey corridors feigning interest in a topic for the means of self-aggrandised culture, only to forget most of it when you leave through the exit sign. But then you get moments, or relics that provide that window in time and all of a sudden, the significance of one moment in history washes over you.
If I were to walk into a music museum and pick up a pair of headphones that played the very first moment Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang together, I think I would feel that emotion in abundance. Sure, I can and often do listen to that very first line on ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ where the three share that very first line, but the real magic existed in that moment behind closed doors.
It’s especially weighty in its greatness given the context. Laurel Canyon in 1968 was quite simply the place to be for any songwriter with a guitar. In the dense Californian hills, the richest voices of Americana sang together in the gardens of their various Los Angeles villas, making up one of the most incredible musical communities of all time. Everyone from Crosby, Stills, and Nash, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell all resided there. And it was in fact the latter, the great Joni Mitchell, that we have to thank for our favourite three-part harmony.
While Mitchell was dating Graham Nash, one-third of the transatlantic group, she invited him over for dinner, where he would eventually meet his new musical collaborators. Initially, they were male voices in the garden. “I wasn’t happy about that, but it was David and Stephen,” Nash admitted.
But in keeping with the free and easy outlook of Los Angeles’ musical community, the group welcomed one another with one hand providing a warm handshake, and the other holding a guitar that would change music.
Nash explained, “They were having dinner with Joni. At one point, David goes, ‘Hey, Stephen, play Willy [Nash’s nickname] that song we were just doing,’ and they were doing a song called ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’. I say: ‘It’s a great song – play it again.’ They play it again. I say: ‘That’s really a great song – do me a favour and play it one more time’, and the third time I added my high harmony and the world f**king changed from that moment. And that’s what Joni was the only witness to.”
When you talk about truly sacred moments in music history, this is undoubtedly one of those. A moment that lives beyond the modern obsession of documentation and instead lives in the memory of four people who are so inextricably linked in music iconography that all we can do is simply imagine. I once said if there were museum headphones playing this moment, I’d likely never take them off, but in the spirit of music purity, I’m now glad that there aren’t.
