Wild Tales (12 page)

In early 1966, my dad was in the hospital for some ailment or other. The Hollies were about to begin a European tour, but just before leaving I went to visit him, to give his spirits a boost. He was at Hope Hospital, where my sisters had been born, but after canvassing the ward I was unable to find him. That place was ghastly, overcrowded with beds twelve deep on either side, and I walked up and down the rows like a commander inspecting the troops. Finally, I spotted a figure the color of an orange. Something was going horribly wrong with my dad’s liver that was making his skin turn a hideous hue. He looked awful, so diminished, considering what a strapping guy he’d always been. I visited for a while, offered a few words of love, and promised to get back as soon as the tour was over in ten days’ time.

A few days into the tour, we were playing in Copenhagen when I got a call from Rose. “Your dad’s taken a turn for the worse,” she said. “I think you’d better come home.” I explained that we’d be home in three or four days, but she insisted. “No, it’s bad. You’ve got to come home right now.”

It was pretty late at night, and I couldn’t find a commercial flight from Copenhagen to Manchester, so I hired a two-seater plane to fly
over the North Sea. Rosie was there to meet me at the airport and just said, “He’s dead.”

I was in complete shock. I knew my dad was sick, but I never thought he was going to die. He was only forty-six, hard to imagine, twenty-two years older than I was then. His death changed my life in so many ways. It’s why I believe, to this day, that you have to make every second count.

T
HINGS CHANGED MUSICALLY
as well in 1966, as the Hollies’ star kept shooting skyward. We were in a groove. We continued to have one chart hit after another. Our fourth album was already in the works, and every one of our live shows was absolute bedlam, screaming teenyboppers, kids jumping over balconies, girls attacking us on our way out of the halls. The only stumble, if you can even call it that, was a cover version we did of
“If I Needed Someone,” the
George Harrison standout from
Rubber Soul.
I thought we made a damn good record of it. It was perfectly suited to our voices, with a smart three-part harmony that gave the song a soaring melodic virtuosity. Too bad George didn’t share our enthusiasm. In his wisdom, he felt compelled to give a press interview, in which he called our version rubbish. “They’ve spoilt it,” he said. “The Hollies are all right musically, but the way they do their records they sound like session men who’ve just got together in the studio without ever seeing each other before.”

Sometimes, even Saint George didn’t know when to keep his snarky views to himself. He felt as though he owned the fucking song and no one else had a right to interpret it. It wasn’t as though the Beatles had never done cover versions in their career. I should have reminded him of toss-offs like “A Taste of Honey” and “Mr. Moonlight.” Or his own anemic version of “Devil in Her Heart.” I guess I also should have taken my own advice and kept my mouth shut, but two weeks after his outburst, I was still seething. So I
spoke with a reporter at
NME
and fired back: “Not only do these comments disappoint and hurt us, but we are sick and tired of everything the Beatles say or do being taken as law.”

In those days, tweaking a Beatle was like blaspheming the pope. But who the fuck cared. I was getting sick and tired of their holy status, the way they said whatever was on their minds, no matter whom it affected, right or wrong. All of London was in their thrall. And if you didn’t know Popes John or Paul, or at least drop their names in conversation, you might as well take the next train back to the provinces, over and out.
Keith Richards said it best in
Life:
“The Beatles are all over the place like a fucking bag of fleas.” They were a great band and I loved their records. Every English group owed them a huge debt, but I had no intention of kissing their asses. (George and I became great friends later in life.) Besides, last I looked, the Hollies were holding down places on the same top ten as the Beatles, so pardon me if you don’t like our fucking record but keep it to yourself, if you please.

Although we remained friends, George’s outburst kind of cursed the record, and it stalled at number twenty-four—not a complete washout, but not our usual success. Pretty rare for the Hollies at this stage of the game. For obvious reasons, we needed to follow up with a killer single. There were plenty of things we’d written that were ready to go, but nothing that was a surefire hit. We kept coming up with songs like “When I Come Home to You” and
“Put Yourself in My Place,” decent album cuts, but ultimately rejected as singles by
Ron Richards, who didn’t think they were commercial enough to get instant airplay. We still hadn’t reached the point where we could crank out our own singles. Thankfully,
Tony Hicks was committed to trolling the Denmark Street publishing houses, and he fished another winner out of their files. He picked up a little gem called
“I Can’t Let Go,” written by Chip Taylor, who’d had a smash with “Wild Thing” by the Troggs and later “Angel of the Morning” and
Janis Joplin’s classic “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder).” The song had a great hook we could work, and a verse with just the right touch of rejection:

We made a classic Hollies record with it and shot right back onto the top ten, where it lodged all through the spring of 1966. You couldn’t avoid “I Can’t Let Go” if you listened to the radio. That March, we did a tour of Poland with Lulu. We opened in Warsaw, got into the Hotel Bristol, dumped our bags, turned on the radio, and the first thing we heard was “I Can’t Let Go.” That was mind-blowing, to start with. Then, a few minutes later, there was a tremendous commotion in the street below our window. I glanced out onto the square and saw a cordon of tanks, with troops massing on all sides and machine guns blazing. Holy fuck! We’re in the middle of a revolution here. Assume the position, Nash. Save your skin! I was just about ready to dive under the bed when I got a closer look at one of the generals. Seemed to me he looked a lot like Peter O’Toole. In fact, that fucker
was
Peter O’Toole. In a Nazi uniform. They were shooting a movie called
Night of the Generals.
Hey, no need to tell the rock ’n’ rollers in the hotel. Let ’em sweat it out behind the Iron Curtain.

The vibe wasn’t that much better once we hit the stage. Lulu opened for us, and she was great, a ballsy, brassy, sexy Scot who could really belt it. “To Sir, with Love” was screaming up the charts, so the crowd was waiting for her and turned on the juice. Halfway through her set, a young kid ran up the aisle with a small bouquet of flowers for her, only to be intercepted by the cops, who beat the living shit out of him. And we were powerless to do anything about it. This just added to my rapid politicization. I naturally despise bullies and people who utilize power over others. And as far as the cops go, I distrusted them mightily since the incident with my father. The cops in Poland were bullies and fascists, which cast a pall over our visit there. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against Poles, who were incredibly kind. In fact, I remember making love to
an exquisite and quite adventurous Polish girl on that tour. But the police-state undercurrent creeped us out.

After Poland, I was ready for a little democracy on the half shell and welcomed another trip to the States. We got a tour there, about fifteen dates, playing ballrooms and doing some television stuff. I couldn’t wait to get over there again and soak it all in.

First time over I’d been overwhelmed by New York, but this time around it felt more like home. Even better. You could lose yourself there, be whoever you wanted, no questions asked. “Hey, buddy, you want a girl?” “How about a boy?” “A chimpanzee?” I wasn’t into boys or chimpanzees, but at least they were available if the urge arose. New York was one-stop shopping and incredibly discreet. Nothing like London, where everybody knew your business.

I hit the streets five minutes after we landed.
Zoom!
Right down to the Village. Just walked around, trying to soak up as much as I could. It was great. Nobody knew who I was. The club scene was amazing. It seemed like there was
jazz on every corner. I hit the Vanguard and the Blue Note, caught shows with Mingus, Miles, Dizzy, and Gerry Mulligan. I went over to the Gaslight and saw the Spoonful. On Bleecker Street, I had my nose pressed against the glass outside the Village Gate, checking out the schedule, when I noticed some action behind me in the window’s reflection. A group of guys dressed like freaks were lingering by a building on the other side of the street. I recognized them immediately—the
Byrds, one of my favorite American bands. McGuinn, Clark, Hillman … and the guy in the cape and weird leather getup,
David Crosby. Suddenly, they all walked into this head shop. Now, I don’t presume to know what they wanted in such a place! But I didn’t have the balls to introduce myself. “Hey, I’m in the Hollies. Love the band, man. ‘Tambourine Man’ is a great record.” No one in America really knew who we were. Or if they did, they didn’t really give a shit. Besides, Crosby intimidated the hell out of me. He gave off this don’t-fuck-with-me vibe and seemed so unapproachable. I figured there was no point in knowing a guy like that.

We were staying at the Holiday Inn on West Fifty-seventh Street. A few days into our stay, I took a phone call from the concierge. “Mr. Nash, there’s a man in the lobby who would like to talk to you. He says his name is Paul Simon.” Now, the Hollies had just recorded “I Am a Rock” and did a pretty decent job of it. Paul liked it enough that he wanted to meet us. “Arthur and I are recording over at Columbia Studios,” he said. “You feel like coming down to the session?” Are you kidding me! This was Simon and Garfunkel, for God’s sake. They were putting together the
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme
album and working on “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” with a news bulletin mixed in with the music. Brilliant stuff.

I learned a lot watching Paul and Arthur record. They weren’t just gorgeous singers, they were into the whole recording process. Nothing in that studio escaped their attention. One time, they said, “Hey, do you know this trick?” They would speed the track up and hit the snare drum in rhythm. Then, when they slowed it down, it produced a sound like
pch-oooooewe pch-oooooewe.
Brilliant. Another time, I watched their engineer, Roy Halee, take sixteen faders down at Paul’s last breath at the end of “Hazy Shade of Winter.” I’d never seen or heard anything like it before. Imagine how that looked to a rock ’n’ roll star who once wasn’t allowed to come within ten feet of the board at Abbey Road. The Hollies weren’t allowed to touch the faders. If we wanted more of a kick drum, I first had to go to
Ron Richards, and then to an engineer, who would bring up the kick drum. In America, everything was so hands-on. I couldn’t take my eyes off what they were doing in the studio.

Later that week, Paul and Arthur invited me to accompany them to a gig at Texas A&M. On the plane down, I got a deeper understanding of who these men really were. They were far more worldly than I was. They talked about American politics, what was going on in Vietnam, about McNamara, about Dylan and his harmonica. Paul was reserved, but an intellectual Jewish guy who didn’t mind saying what was on his mind, with very strong opinions. I’d never met anyone like him. He and Arthur were both political, very outspoken.
It wasn’t like that in England. The freedom to express yourself was so foreign to me—and so damn attractive. And the shows they did, with just one guitar, were stunning. Simon’s guitar work mesmerized me. Add to it those voices and those songs. I couldn’t take my eyes off their stage presence, and how the audience reacted to them. Their timing was incredible. Everything about them was turning me inside out. It was a whole new ball game for me.

Before we parted company, I asked Paul what he was listening to. He told me about a record called
The Music of Bulgaria
, which was a live recording of the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic made in concert in Paris in 1955. The music originated in the fields—in this case, the ladies who worked farms in Bulgaria, cutting down huge sheaves of wheat. To alleviate the everyday tedium, they would sing together, usually solo or two-part. In the early fifties
Philip Koutev had put together the National Ensemble, comprised of the winners of local, regional, and national competitions. Koutev featured a women’s choir, for which he extrapolated these two-parts to many parts, producing a cappella harmonies unlike any I’d ever heard before: five-, six-, seven-part harmonies. As a lifelong student of such singing, it made my head spin.

I asked Paul where I could get this record, and he said, “I happen to have an extra one right here,” and he handed it over. I took it home, and it instantly became my favorite record of all time in terms of musical harmony. In my London apartment, I had an incredible sound system: two Brunell tape recorders in each corner. And when I played this record, the music went from the turntable into the first tape recorder, then through the second tape recorder into the speakers, so that everything was a microsecond off—but brilliantly so. I would get loaded, get a couple brandies and Coca-Colas under my belt, and play this record
—loud.
I would lie in the middle of the floor listening, and that’s how I turned people on to it.

I must have given away at least three hundred copies over the years. So in the early nineties, I got a call from Nonesuch Records
to tell me that the Bulgarian Choir was going to do a short tour of America. Would I be interested in flying to New York to introduce them to the world’s press? I said, “Absolutely, I’m there.” There was a media event at the old Americana Hotel, where I got up and told the story of how Paul gave me the record and how, for thirty years, Croz and I had tried to spread this music throughout the world. Afterward, their translator came up to me and said, “Mr. Nash, the ladies would like to say something to you,” and they all gathered around me. I was expecting something in pidgin English: “Thonk yu, Meester Nosh, for takink and showink us to Amerka.” Instead, one of the leaders of the choir counted off, and they burst, in perfect harmony, into the end of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
“Do-do-do-do do / do do / da-do-do-do.”
It completely floored me. It was such an honor that this choir that I had revered for so long had learned that song and was singing it back to me.