Most of us know a bit about Graham Nash. We may not have realized he was a big part of the Hollies, but we liked them along with so many other British bands that followed the Beatle Invasion.
We may have heard that he left the Hollies just as we may have heard that David Crosby had left the Byrds and that Stephen Stills had been part of the defunct Buffalo Springfield.
We know about their nervousness at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair–“Thank you. We needed that. This is the second time we’ve ever played in front of people. We’re scared shitless.”
For CSN (and later Young) Graham Nash wrote many of their best-known songs such as “Marrakesh Express,” “Our House,” “Teach Your Children, ” “Just a Song Before I Go,” and “Wasted on the Way”.
Over the years, Graham Nash and David Crosby often worked together as a duo and like many couples had had several falling outs. Crosby Stills and Nash also occasionally reformed (sometimes with Neil Young as well).
In 1979, Nash co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy [MUSE] which is against the expansion of nuclear power.
He is also a well-respected photographer. (2013 Rolling Stone article with some of his photographs)
Graham Nash was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1997 and as a member of The Hollies in 2010.
Nash performs at the 2014 Goldman Prize ceremony in San Francisco.
Graham William Nash OBE
Below is a short piece from CBS News in which Nash spoke about the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey.
Below is a long interview with Graham Nash from the Library of Congress in which he spoke about his autobiography “Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life” (2013)
Nash released his sixth solo album, This Path Tonight, on April 15, 2016. He continues to tour and you can see those dates at his site.
A Life In Focus
And in October 2021, he published A Life In Focus which Google books described, “In this curated collection of art and photography from his personal archive, Graham Nash’s life as a musician and artist unfolds in vivid detail. Best known as a founding member of the Hollies and supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nash developed a love of photography from the time he was a child. Inspired by his father, Nash began taking pictures at 11 years old and would go on to take his camera with him ever since–on tour with the Hollies and later CSN, among friends at Laurel Canyon and abroad. Many of his photographs depict intimate moments with family and friends, among them Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young. Nash’s playful and observant.”
Still Going Strong!
In April 2016, Nash released This Path Tonight album…
Marty Balin (photo from http://imgbuddy.com/marty-balin.asp)
Born Martyn Jerel Buchwald in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 30, 1942, parents Joe and Jean Buchwald raised Marty in in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin
In 1962 Marty renamed himself Marty Balin and began recording with Challenge Records, releasing the singles “Nobody But You” and “I Specialize in Love.”
Balin was the lead for the folk music quartet called The Town Criers, followed by a brief stint with the Gateway Singers in 1965.
On July 25, 1965, Dylan famously “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival. Deciding to do the same but getting refusals from the folk clubs, Balin opened the San Francisco Matrix night club on August 13, 1965 featuring his new band Jefferson Airplane. The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Big Brother and the holding Company, and Steve Miller all performed there. The Airplane and the Matrix helped create the San Francisco scene.
In August 1969, the Airplane famously played their sunrise set at Woodstock.
Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin
For personal, personnel, and musical reasons, Marty left the Airplane in April 1971. In a 1993 interview with Jeff Tamarkin of Relix Balid said “I don’t know, just Janis’s death. That struck me. It was dark times. Everybody was doing so much drugs and I couldn’t even talk to the band. I was into yoga at the time. I’d given up drinking and I was into totally different area, health foods and getting back to the streets, working with the American Indians. It was getting strange for me. Cocaine was a big deal in those days and I wasn’t a cokie and I couldn’t talk with everybody who had an answer for every goddamn thing, rationalizing everything that happened. I thought it made the music really tight and constrictive and ruined it. So after Janis died, I thought, I’m not gonna go onstage and play that kind of music; I don’t like cocaine.” (click >>> Relix interview)
Balin joined Airplane’s reconstructed Jefferson Starship in 1975 and remained with them until 1978. Afterward, he returned to his solo career, though he did join the band for reunions in 1989 and 1996
In 1996, Jefferson Airplane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Grace Slick was absent due to medical reasons). Most in jackets and ties, they performed “Volunteers” with Balin on lead vocals.
The above recording is Richie Havens on the Voice of America. He performed the song, Freedom, while explaining the cultural significance of Woodstock and his own performance there.
Richard Pierce Richie Havens
Doo-wop
Richie Havens. Doo-wop. Gospel. Drop out. Greenwich Village. Open D tuning. Mixed Bag. Just Like a Woman. And though he didn’t write the words, no one ever say them better (Jerry Merrick’s “Follow”)
The rising smell of fresh-cut grass,
Smothered cities choke and yell with fuming gas;
I hold some grapes up to the sun
And their flavor breaks upon my tongue.
With eager tongues we taste our strife
And fill our lungs with seas of life.
Come taste and smell the waters of our time.
And close your lips, child, so softly I might kiss you,
Let your flower perfume out and let the winds caress you.
As I walk on through the garden,
I am hoping I don’t miss you
If all the things you taste ain’t what they seem,
Then don’t mind me ‘cos I ain’t nothin’ but a dream.
Richard Pierce Richie Havens
Lighthouse
Richie Havens was a lighthouse for the sixties’ rough seas. After a February meeting in 1969, Woodstock Ventures, the quartet of John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Michael Lang, frolicked, staggered, and romanticized its way to August 15, 1969. 500,000 cultural refugees arrived in Bethel, NY with bated breath and found a place to harmoniously exhale.
Richard Pierce Richie Havens
Woodstock
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a tumultuously peaceful gathering, an acoustic jewel set athwart the 1960’s cultural maelstrom. The decade embroiled, alienated, and divided American families, friends, and neighbors. It was the decade of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, murderous violence against an expanding civil rights movement, scores of race riots, thousands of casualties in an escalating Viet Nam War, draft card burnings, anti-war demonstrations, patriotic exhibitions, protest music, student radicalization, assassinations, war atrocities, the Stonewall riots, a burgeoning drug culture, a growing ecological sensibility, a generally anti-establishment attitude by many young people, and the founding of the Black Panther Party, the National Organization for Women, the American Indian Movement, and the National Farm Workers Association.
Only months away were Altamont, the Mayday Tribe’s attempt to shut down Washington DC, the invasion of Cambodia, six students shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State, the takeover of Alcatraz, the Weatherman bombings, 200,000 Post Office workers striking, and the Beatle break-up were. The Grateful Dead would play 143 more shows within the year; 1,891 before Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995.
Richard Pierce Richie Havens
Keystone
Richie Havens was the accidental opening act, but became the exposition’s keystone in its arch of apprehensions, anticipations, and hallucinations. He continued to be more than one generation’s underpinning for 44 years.
After a half century of loving performances and a life dedicated to seeking peaceful solutions, Richie Havens died on April 22, 2013 at age 72.
Thank you Mr. Havens for being so much to so many. As you wrote in “Three Day Eternity”
If you could only see the thousands
Of the days I’m standing in between
All because you hold my hand so tightly
As we both walk and we laugh.
Richard Pierce Richie Havens
Bullet-points
A quick incomplete bullet-point summary of his life:
Richie Havens
born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on January 21, 1941.
joined street-corner doo-wop groups when he was about 12
at 14 he joined the McCrea Gospel Singers.
dropped out of high school.
in his late teens migrated to Greenwich Village, where he wandered the clubs working as a portrait artist.
in his early 20s he discovered folk music and he was soon playing several engagements a night at clubs like Why Not? and the Fat Black Pussycat.
developed an unorthodox guitar tuning so he could play chord patterns not possible with conventional tunings.
signed with the influential manager Albert Grossman and got a record deal with the Verve Forecast label. Verve released “Mixed Bag” in 1967, which featured “Handsome Johnny,” which he wrote with the actor Louis Gossett Jr.; “Follow,” which became one of his signature songs; and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.”
In 1971, he released the only single that would put him in the Top 20, a rendition of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.”
In the mid-1970s he founded the Northwind Undersea Institute, an oceanographic children’s museum on City Island in the Bronx. He later created the Natural Guard, an environmental organization for children, to use hands-on methods to teach about the environment.
His music had a new burst of popularity in the 1980s, and he found success as a jingle writer and performer for Amtrak, Maxwell House Coffee and the cotton industry (“The fabric of our lives”).
He acted in a few movies, including “Hearts of Fire” (1987), which starred Bob Dylan.
Memorial
One of Richie Haven’s final requests was that his ashes be spread on the Woodstock field. On August 18, 2013 there was a special celebration at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that preceded the fulfillment of that request.
DJ Dennis Elsas was MC and many of Richie’s old and young friends spoke or performed. Among them were, Dayna Kurtz, Michael Lang, Joel Rosenman, Walter Parks, Sajoy Bandapadhyay, Guy Davis, Jose Feliciano, Danny Glover, John Sebastian, John Hammond, and Lou Gosset, Jr.
The featured image of this post is of that event and you can follow this link to see other pictures of the celebration.
