The first time Graham Nash met Jerry Garcia
Although they never became the closest of friends, Graham Nash and Jerry Garcia had some notable interactions that changed the course of both men’s careers. As two of the most prominent figures in the psychedelic folk explosion of the 1960s, it seemed almost predetermined that Nash and Garcia would eventually cross paths. When Nash joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash in 1968, he eventually made his way down to Los Angeles to live with Joni Mitchell. But for a brief time, both he and David Crosby called San Francisco home.
Crosby became friendly with the members of the Grateful Dead around the same time, eventually getting them to help him record his debut solo album, 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name. While CSNY were recording Déjà Vu at Wally Heider Studio, Garcia happened to be in the other room. Garcia was practising his pedal steel guitar, likely for his appearance on either Brewer and Shipley’s Tarkio or It’s A Beautiful Day’s Marrying Maiden (sessions for the Dead’s Workingman’s Dead wouldn’t begin until February of 1970, four months after the recording of ‘Teach Your Children’).
“We had done the track to ‘Teach Your Children’, and Stephen thought because he and Neil played guitar all the time that we should have something different,” Nash recalled about Garcia’s involvement to Variety. “David [Crosby] said, You know, Garcia’s in the next studio and he’s been playing steel guitar for a couple of months, let me ask him.’ ‘Sure!’ The Dead were next door recording… American Beauty, was it? [sic] And David asked him and he loved the idea; he had never played pedal steel on record before.”
“So he set up his pedal steel and we played him the track, and as I do with most musicians, I said, ‘I’m not gonna tell you what to do. Feel it and play it,'” Nash explained. “So he played the first [take] and I said ‘Fantastic! That was just stunning. I’m shocked that someone who’s only been playing pedal steel for less than half a year could play so beautifully,’ because it was heartfelt and well thought-out in a very spontaneous way.”
Despite Nash’s enthusiasm for Garcia’s first take, Garcia insisted on giving the track another go. “He said, ‘I kinda fucked up a little in a couple of places, can I do a second take?’ ‘Go right ahead’ — I would never stop him from trying to make it better,” Nash said. “So he played it and we got to the end, and I said, ‘Yeah, it’s perfect, but it doesn’t feel like the first track you played, when you didn’t have any fucking idea what you were gonna do!’ So he laughed and said fine. I knew that ‘Teach Your Children’ had a chance of being a hit, but when Jerry put his pedal steel on there I was convinced it was gonna be a hit.”
‘Teach Your Children’ became one of CSNY’s biggest chart songs, topping out at number 16 in 1970. Garcia never asked for any compensation for his appearance on the track, but Nash nevertheless felt that he owed something to the guitarist. Whether it was immediately following the ‘Teach Your Children’ sessions or after the recording of Nash’s 1971 debut album Songs For Beginners, Nash repaid Garcia by gifting him a Fender Stratocaster, later known as ‘Alligator’ that Garcia used frequently throughout the early 1970s.
“I never paid him money for his part on ‘Teach Your Children,’ but I did give him a vintage Fender Strat, which he immediately stuck an alligator decal on, and that became his ‘Alligator guitar’ for many years,” Nash recalled. “I’d bought it in ’67, I believe, when I was on tour with the Hollies. We stopped in a pawn shop in Tucson, Arizona and it was cheap and I bought it — and it just sold for $470,000!”
Check out ‘Teach Your Children’ down below.
