“My body wouldn’t do it”: The 1975 song too hard for Graham Nash to sing
The 1960s will forever be one of the golden ages for vocal harmonies.
As much as people love to incorporate some two-art harmony today or have the odd dual lead vocal in a track, the Summer of Love was the prime time for anyone who was interested in vocal arrangement in rock and roll, whether that was The Beatles gelling together on Sgt Pepper or Brian Wilson creating the round-robin vocal sound on ‘God Only Knows’. And while Crosby, Stills, and Graham Nash might not have been the best vocal band in many people’s eyes, they were the first everyone went to when looking at what harmonies could do.
What separated Crosby, Stills & Nash from many of their contemporaries was how organic their harmonies sounded. Rather than feeling polished or overly arranged, their voices blended with a looseness that gave the music warmth and emotional immediacy.
Despite each of them being fantastic at their craft, no one could listen to one of their albums without noticing the immaculate harmony vocals. From the first time the supergroup got together, they knew they had something special when they sang together, and listening to everyone lock in on ‘Deja Vu’ is a good indication of where bands like the Eagles got their sound from in the 1970s.
Their vocal interplay also helped redefine the possibilities of folk-rock during the era. Harmony singing was no longer simply decorative background texture but became central to the emotional and melodic core of the songs themselves.
“I’m very good at what I do, but I couldn’t do it. I kept getting halfway through the phrase, and it just sounded so horrible to me that I had to stop.”
Graham Nash
That didn’t come without some intense work ethic, either. Every one of the members had been honing their craft in their own acts, and since David Crosby had built his career on vocal harmonies with The Byrds, he was never going to settle on anything less than perfection whenever he was working outside of his old band.
Although their records could sound immaculate, that was simply masking some of the tension going on behind the scenes. Each of them saw their supergroup as an offshoot of what they were doing naturally on their own, and when things started going haywire, each member had their own set of demons that they had picked up.
Despite being one of the driving forces in the group, Stills was dangerously close to becoming a rock and roll casualty half the time he played. He had been the instrumental force behind their debut, but when the band tried to get back together in 1973, the guitarist started becoming less and less reliable once he started getting loaded and wreaking havoc everywhere he went. And that wasn’t limited to outside the studio, either.
According to Nash, one of Stills’s demands for one of his songs was for the rest of them to sing technically impossible melodies, saying, “I remember at one point, Stephen was so high — in my home studio, we were working on one of his songs called ‘My Angel’ — and he asked me to sing a major melody through a minor set of chords. Instinctively, my body wouldn’t do it. I’m very good at what I do, but I couldn’t do it. I kept getting halfway through the phrase, and it just sounded so horrible to me that I had to stop.”
If we’re thinking about music theory here, being both major and minor at the same time might not have been the hardest thing in the world. The blues has always been about mixing major and minor tonalities, but if Stills was insistent on making the song intentionally weird, putting a major melody over minor chords would have made for the musical version of toothpaste and orange juice when someone heard it.
So while the band could operate to the best of their ability, this should have been the major flag that their usual approach wasn’t working any more. They had their moments in the sun in the early 1970s, but at this point, it was time for them to cool out and spend some time away to recharge their batteries.
Although the band would reunite in various forms throughout the following decades, the early 1970s remained the period when their harmonies felt truly untouchable. For a brief moment, they captured a vocal magic that few groups have managed to replicate since.
