The 1971 song Graham Nash grew to resent playing: “A pain”
Graham Nash didn’t get into the music industry by trying to make simple pop songs every time he performed.
He had a unique knack for something a bit more cerebral, and if he wasn’t going to get what he wanted out of The Hollies, Crosby, Stills, and Nash was the perfect incubator for him to create some of his greatest works, like ‘Marrakesh Express’. But certain songs should only exist in their own time and place, and Nash felt that a handful of his tunes shouldn’t have to be played anymore.
But when you look at CSN, chances are many of the biggest songs in their discography were going to come from Nash. He was the one who was able to write a brilliant pop song, and since Neil Young was going to do whatever the hell he wanted and David Crosby was reaching for new sounds whenever he made a record, it wasn’t out of the question for Nash to write a simple tune like ‘Teach Your Children’ or a scenic love song like ‘Our House’.
When you think about the supergroup’s music, though, they weren’t always known for singing about peace and love. For all of those sweet harmonies, they could get cutthroat when they wanted to, and Nash was always willing to put his political views in his music. He was ready to kill his single as soon as Young came out with ‘Ohio’ after the Kent State shootings, and even when the band were taking a break from each other, Nash was the one who was still fighting for everything he believed in.
His solo records were still some of the softest albums that he made, but on a record like Songs for Beginners, he was still willing to put his neck on the line on tunes like ‘Military Madness’. You have to remember that this was the middle of the Vietnam War, and even though there was no shortage of people singing about how war was meaningless, Nash was willing to dig a little deeper with this song. He was practically getting into the mind of what a soldier was supposed to be doing, and it’s not really a pretty picture.
‘Fortunate Son’ did have a sarcastic smile on its face, and even John Lennon liked to speak in more broad strokes, but Nash didn’t bother messing around. He wanted to get to the root of why people would bring themselves to kill another man, and given that Nash would be preaching the same message decades after the fact during the Iraq War, he was more than a little bit pissed off seeing his song hold up after so long.
Anyone would have been happy to write something timeless, but the thought of people still blowing each other up half a world away wasn’t exactly what Nash wanted to resonate with people, saying, “I’m proud that my music has lasted this long, but it’s a pain in the ass that I have to keep on singing, ‘Military Madness’. There are more wars now than there were when I wrote that, and I wrote it about my father going off to World War II! It doesn’t seem as if we’ve learned anything. Amazing. It’s an amazing country, this. It’s mad. Totally mad.”
Granted, Nash could probably be singing this in the present day as well. As long as there are power-hungry leaders in the world, there will always be those who are willing to kill for what they want, and while Nash’s song isn’t that threatening from a pure musical perspective, the lyrics hit with the same blunt honesty that you would have heard out of Black Sabbath in the early 1970s.
There are probably countless people who are still talking about musicians keeping their mouths out of politics and entertaining their audiences, but that was never how Nash thought about his music. He wanted his tunes to be a reflection of society, and if he could talk about his sympathy for soldiers on ‘Shadowland’, he could be more than a little bit angry at politicians who sent young men off to war for nothing.
