Wild Tales (15 page)

My lyrics to “Immigration Man,” 1971
(© Joel Bernstein)

Photo from the cover of my boxed set,
Reflections
, Surrey, England, March 1973
(© Henry Diltz)

The
Mayan
(© Graham Nash)

Sculpting Crosby, Miami, 1977
(© Joel Bernstein)

Tokyo, November 1975; the joint was rolled in a copy of the
International
Herald Tribune.
(© Joel Bernstein)

N
OTHING WAS THE SAME WHEN
I
GOT BACK TO
L
ONDON
. My head, for one thing, was turned inside out, and I began looking at my life in an entirely new way. Meeting Paul, Cass, and Croz put a whole new spin on things. I loved the guys in the Hollies, but they were
 … content
—satisfied with the type of material we were doing, grateful to play the role of happy, bouncy pop stars, comfortable with their parochial north of England sensibility
 … content.
They wanted nothing more than what they already had, whereas I was ready to devour the world. I had been turned on by my encounters in the States, just turned on in general. Smoking dope had had a profound effect on me. It jolted my curiosity onto an entirely higher plane. The Hollies, on the other hand, were strictly pub guys; they had their eight pints a night to get their jollies. I felt like we were starting to drift apart.

Professionally, things couldn’t have been better. As soon as we got back, we landed a truly important gig, appearing on
Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
This was the show that everyone in England stayed home to watch, like
The
Ed Sullivan Show
in the States, a revolving door of acts from across the spectrum: opera singers, ventriloquists, sword swallowers, comedians, dogs that barked to “God Save the Queen,” circus clowns, and the occasional tatty rock ’n’ roll group. It was the show where the term
Beatlemania
was coined, so we knew its power as far as our career was concerned.

Incredibly, our bass player,
Eric Haydock, didn’t want to play it.
He claimed to be suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result of our trip to the States.
Nervous exhaustion!
We were workingmen from the north of England. That tour was a spa vacation to guys like us. What he really had was a gorgeous girlfriend stashed away in Manchester. He wanted to be with Pam, and that was the dodge. Eric flat-out refused to do the Palladium. He was done with us, which was a complete shock. Who the fuck do we get to play bass on such short notice? Klaus Voorman, who that year created the seminal album cover artwork for the
Beatles’
Revolver
, was an excellent bass player. Best of all, we all knew him and he was willing to step in at the last minute. So at least the Palladium show would go on.

That Sunday night—May 15, 1966—Pete Seeger was headlining, and I was looking forward to hearing his set. We’d finished soundcheck around four o’clock and were hanging out in the wings, waiting for Pete to go on, when the phone rang backstage. Our road manager, Rod Shields, picked it up.

“Yes … yes … he’s right here. Hold on.” Rod cupped a hand over the receiver and waved the phone in my direction. “Graham, it’s Phil Everly.”

Wanker. He knew how I felt about the Everlys. No way I was falling for that one. “Hey, fuck off, Rod. Don’t do this to me now.”

“No, honest, man
—it’s Phil Everly.
”

I shot him a sly, knowing grin and decided to play along. Taking the phone, I said, “Nash here.”

“Hey Graham, it’s Phil.” And I couldn’t help but recognize the
voice
, the voice I grew up on, with that thick, gorgeous Kentucky accent.

“Hi, fantastic. What can I do for you, Phil?”

“Don and I are in town. We’re about to make an album here in England, and we wanted to know if the Hollies had any songs they haven’t recorded yet?”

Allan, Tony, and Bobby had sussed out what was happening and were gathered around me, trying to listen in. Especially when I said, “Where are you staying? Oh, at the Ritz. And when would you like us to come? Oh, right after the show? Okay, see you then.”

The Everly Brothers!
Man, I must have sleepwalked through our performance at the Palladium. We did “Stewball,” “The Very Last Day,” a couple of our hits—a nice little show. But my mind was definitely on that suite at the Ritz. How could I concentrate, knowing the Everly Brothers were waiting? These guys were my heroes; I’d learned how to sing from their records. Everything I knew and loved about harmony came from them. The minute we finished, Allan, Tony, Bobby, and I grabbed a couple of guitars and made a beeline for the Ritz.

I knocked on the door to their room, it opened a few seconds later—and there was
Phil Everly
, ushering us in. Don was there, too, and I could see their two Gibson acoustics leaning on either side of a chair. Man, this whole scene was surreal. Of course I’m trying to be nonchalant, trying to be cool, but it’s taking everything I’ve got. It’s the Everlys … their suite at the Ritz, which was pretty posh … they want to hear
us
sing … my fucking head was spinning. They had no idea that Allan and I were the two kids they met on the steps of the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Later we told them and they said they remembered, but who the fuck knows. Didn’t matter. That night, we were all just a bunch of musicians sitting around, playing songs and shooting the shit.

Did we have any songs for the Everly Brothers? Are you kidding me! We had tons of ’em. We were constantly writing. So we ran down about fifteen of them—“Hard, Hard Year,” “Fifi the Flea,” “Don’t Run and Hide,” stuff like that. And instead of choosing one or two, they took
eight.
“We want that one, that one, that one, that one …” It didn’t occur to me until later just how much our songs suited their voices. They were custom-made for Everly Brothers harmonies, rich and resonant and loaded with pop ingenuity. Those guys knew what they were doing when they called us in.

We sat around with them all night, drinking tea and talking. They even played a few Everly Brothers songs for us, and I got up the nerve to ask Don a mechanical question that’d been haunting me for years: “How the fuck do you play the beginning of ‘Bye Bye
Love’?” Those opening bars had changed my life, and I’d never managed to duplicate them entirely. When you hear them, it sounds straightforward enough, a few dominant chords that compress the rhythmic tension and give it that gut punch. Don demonstrated it a few times, but I suspect he may have double-tracked himself on the record because I’ve never been able to re-create that sound. Nothing’s ever as easy as it sounds. There’s always a master’s trick, some little snag you can barely make out that alters the texture of the chord. Crosby claims they used an open tuning and just barred across the neck, but if so, that’s not the way Don played it for me that night.

In any case, they invited us to their recording session. It was May 16, the
very next day
, at Pye Studios in Great Cumberland Place. The album they were making was called
Two Yanks in England
, and the session was remarkable for a multitude of reasons. First of all, so many great records had recently come out of that place: the
Searchers’ “Needles and Pins,” “House of the Rising Sun” by the
Animals, “You Really Got Me” by the
Kinks, and the
Spencer Davis Group’s “Keep on Runnin’.” Now the Everlys were going to cut eight of our songs there, and with us singing on them
—fuck
yeah! And then there were the session guys assembled for the gig: some kids named
Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Reggie Dwight on piano (he now goes by
Elton John). They were all kids breaking in as session players, and for twelve quid you could have had them for days.

So there we were at Pye Studios, Clarkie and me, fresh from hearing “Bye Bye Love” at a school dance to standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel in a bloody rainstorm to helping the Everly Brothers make an album with our songs, in just eight and a half years flat. Nice little arc, wouldn’t you say?

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, “Bus Stop” was released and it exploded, the biggest hit we’d ever had. It even cracked
Billboard
’s top ten, which was a new, heavyweight milestone in our career. There
was plenty of press and back-to-back gigs. The Hollies were doing something like 260 shows a year. It was everything we had hoped for—and more. One tricky aspect in the “more” column was fans. They’d turned up the heat in the last few months. Not as wild as Beatlemania, but a pretty hot scene. Man, those girls were fucking crazy. They’d grab anything they could get their hands on. Yeah, that too. At some shows, we had to make our getaway in small aluminum trailers normally used for food deliveries—five grown men crushed into a space not big enough for a dwarf. Another night, after the Poll Winners gig at Albert Hall, Tony Hicks nearly died when a fan grabbed his knitted tie and wouldn’t let go. It was an ugly Isadora Duncan scene. The tie kept tightening and tightening until Tony had just about passed out. It would have been curtains had Rod Shields, our road manager, not managed to cut the tie, which probably saved Tony’s life. It was bedlam. The Hollies got pretty good at moving as one. You never wanted to get separated. That happens, and you’re dead meat. We’d learned that lesson on the Stones tour, where it was really fucking crazy. If they couldn’t get to the Stones they would go for the next guys, and
we
were the next guys. Human shields for the Stones. Not my career goal.

But the momentum kept building. Our next single,
“Stop! Stop! Stop!,” came out in October 1966, and same thing: top-ten hit. The three of us—Allan, Tony, and I—wrote it in a cab heading to
Top of the Pops
about that Turkish belly dancer we fell in love with in New York and not being able to touch her. A stunning-looking woman who knew how to work it. Apparently, we couldn’t get her out of our minds. We owe you that record, babe. And you,
Morris Levy.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” wasn’t an obvious single at the outset. It took us some time to figure out how best to configure it. You can’t just launch into the verse without some kind of lead-in, and the way that song was constructed, it was difficult to figure out an intro. Credit Tony with solving that problem. He came up with the banjo riff that imitated a balalaika, and that gave the record its inimitable sound.
He’d done the same magic for “Look Through Any Window” and
“Bus Stop,” with those unforgettable guitar riffs at the beginning of each. Tony was an incredibly tasteful guitar player; his playing carried the rest of the band. The singing was usually Allan and me, but Tony’s riffs on guitar and banjo helped give the Hollies their musical identity.

We really hit the mark when it came to our next record. Tony, Allan, and I wanted desperately to write a monster A-side. So far, our biggest hits were
Graham Gouldman songs, and, hey, you take ’em where you can get ’em. But we thought we were good enough writers to land the big fish. We knew the combination, how to come up with a universal theme, the right type of hook. So we went through a shitload of ideas until inspiration struck. I’m not sure which of the three of us came up with fun fairs. We had all been to them as kids: pulling ducks out of the water, a ring around a bottleneck, winning goldfish. We thought a love affair was pretty much like going round and round and round on a carousel. And before we knew it, the song just took shape. It was all there—the words, the tune, there was no stopping it. And Tony and Bobby wrapped it in an exceptional arrangement.