An Interview With Graham Nash
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mr-fish/graham-nash-barack-obama_b_515286.html
by Mr. Fish
Posted: March 26, 2010
They got guns, we got guns, all God's chillun got guns!" So sang the
Marx Brothers during the frenzied build up to the ridiculous war that
finally erupted at the end of the 1933 anarchic comedy, Duck Soup.
What has always struck me about that film, beyond its satirical
strengths and punchy one-liners, was the fact that it was released
during the worst year of the Great Depression, after the GNP had
fallen a record 13.4 percent and unemployment had risen to 23.6
percent. It was as if Hollywood were attempting to provide the public
with a much needed escape from the agony of the massive financial
crisis by allowing them the chance to remember, with some fondness,
how preferable war, even a farcical one, was to staring the economic
calamity clear in the face. If only a plunging dollar could be
bayoneted and ballooning interest rates could be strafed out of
existence; to have a mortal enemy to kill is always preferable to
having a wound, stabbed into the back and out of reach, that bleeds
the strength out of one's optimism.
I'd gone to Atlantic City in August of 2009 to see Crosby, Stills and
Nash to be reminded of the exquisite outrage that they, along with
Neil Young, had so famously hurled into the hellish maelstrom that
was the Vietnam War and to reapply its relevance to my own opposition
to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, desperate to forget how
poor I was becoming, how many bills I'd be unable to pay at the end
of the month and how the current financial crisis, like the one
almost 80 years earlier, was slowly dimming the lights on every other
calamity in the world and making American self-pity the only agony
worth woeing over.
Atlantic City in August, while indeed funky -- and no stranger to
brown acid or vast amounts of illicit sex between strangers -- is no
Yasgur's Farm. Sure it is thrilling to approach by air-conditioned
car, this metropolis of magnificent lights, skyscraper hotels,
insomnia made jubilant by a gazillion flashing light bulbs, all of it
pressed right up against the black ocean, but outside of the car it
is abscessed New Jersey, the air damp and over-inhaled and brackish,
smelling like a drunk octopus riding a horse through stale popcorn.
And then you enter any one of the casinos and immediately find
yourself surrounded by the repulsive yin to the outside yang. Thusly,
walking into the Borgata Hotel Casino for the CSN show, I found the
air to be overly polite, like it had been blown through an Easter
basket. And then there was the geometrically cacophonous carpeting as
convincing of elegance and luxury as a 300,000 square foot toupee;
Tourette's woven into a nauseating aesthetic. And then there were the
cheap sonsabitches walking around in loud shirts and crisp white
sneakers trying to buy a million dollars with pocket change, their
telepathy horse-trading so hard with Jesus Christ that their lips were moving.
With incontinent classical muzak dribbled through the PA system and
making me feel more like I was waiting for a teeth cleaning than a
mind blowing, I sat down in my assigned seat and, looking at the
empty stage before me and the great hive of drums hanging amid a
ridiculous contraption of chrome scaffolding and the fake candles
wicked with 4-volt bulbs placed here and there and the Flying V
resting on a guitar stand, I began to worry that the men who I'd come
to see might no longer exist; at best, like the candles, they might
be poor parodies of themselves, having become so waterlogged by their
own celebrity over time that the only thing left linking them to the
glory of their past was the names on their drivers licenses. I had to
wonder if I'd made a huge mistake believing that, given the adoration
of enough fans, an alligator bag might learn how to swim gracefully
again; or that Muhammad Ali might be able to stop shaking just long
enough to snatch a fly out of the air and be beautiful again; or that
it could be 1969 again. Then the lights went down. Then the trio of
legendary sexagenarians took the stage, Stills in pleated black dress
pants, Nash in bare feet and Crosby in an outfit one might throw on
to clean out the garage. (Uh-oh.) Then the familiar harmonies were
blended. Then, almost immediately, a mood as perfect as a pearl was
fashioned right in the middle of all that superfluous and muculent
funk surrounding us all.
It was breathtaking.
Five months later I found myself sitting down with Graham Nash at the
Waldorf Astoria in New York to talk about both his recent induction,
as a Hollie, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the publication
of his new book of photography, Taking Aim, a collection of candid
photographs of musicians, past and present, some taken by Nash
himself, all of them chosen by him, his commentary captioned on
nearly every page. Predictably, when you have a conversation with
somebody as dynamic as Nash it's easy to ping-pong wildly off topic,
which we did. Despite being almost 70, up close his eyes appeared to
be brand new and curious about everything. Typically closed when he
sings, and he's been singing for a long time, it made sense to assume
that his eyes have probably seen less, though contemplated more, than
the average person and, like coins with limited exposure to the
outside elements, are now bright and shiny enough to practically
emanate their own light.
--
MR. FISH: Let me start things off with a quote by photographer
Robert Frank: When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the
way they do when they want to read a line of poetry twice. I mention
that quote because I think it expresses what is uniquely special
about how you seem to approach both your photography and your music,
which is with a great respect for the vulnerability of a particular moment.
GRAHAM NASH: It's all about communication. It has to communicate -
that's all I want to do. I don't want everybody to agree with me - if
they don't agree with me, that's fine. I'm just trying to
communicate, it's that simple. And I don't want to waste your time,
because that's all we've got. When you boil it all fucking down, it's
your family and time, that's what you have and you deal with it
however you want. If I'm fine and my wife is fine and my kids are
fine, the rest is a fucking joke. And I can play this game - life - I
know how to do it. I'm old. I'm 68 years old, right, and I know how
to do this and I don't want to waste your time. Same thing happens
with a song - I do not want to waste your time with a song. Why waste
3 minutes of a person's life that they can't get back by singing them
a song that sucks and doesn't say anything? Why show somebody a
photograph that's a picture of nothing?
Right, and that's precisely what I mean about your focus and the
moments you capture - you do have this reverence for time as an
incremental measure of a meaningful life. Your best work, like Our
House and Simple Man, Lady of the Island and others, reminds us how
precious, how sacred, simple experiences can be when they're
unguarded and stripped of pretense.
Yes - that is what I try to do, and I can only try.
And your photography reflects the same reverence.
I think a still photograph has an amazing ability to move. Of course
it doesn't physically move, but it moves you. If I put an image in
front of you I want you to be thinking, I want you to be getting
angry, I want you to be getting sad, I want you to fucking react - I
want you to wake up! And if I'm writing a song like "Chicago," I want
you to be angry because when you bound and chain and fucking gag a
man and call it a fair trial you're fucked! This is America, for
God's sake. We have a Constitution. We have respect for humanity. I
don't give a shit what Bobby Seale was doing in that courtroom - you
cannot bound him and chain him and gag him and call it a fair trial.
And when those kids got killed at Kent State, fucking Neil was
furious and the way he dealt with his anger - same as you deal with
your cartoons, you fucking pour it onto the page - we pour it onto
the page of tape. And, again, we don't want to waste your time.
Which I think is what differentiates an artist from, say, a
mainstream journalist or an anchor on the 7 o'clock news [who] want
to waste our time and to pacify our anger and to keep us from
dissenting against power. An artist's main responsibility is to be
honest and to not bullshit, which is contrary to the job of a
politician or somebody whose objective is to preserve the status quo.
Absolutely true.
Now, just to illustrate what you said about the power of a good
photograph, I read somewhere that your song, "Teach Your Children,"
was inspired by your reaction to the Diane Arbus photograph, "Child
with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park."
I'd actually written the song right before seeing the Diane Arbus,
but when I saw that image...what had happened was I'd been collecting
photography from 1969 onwards and in a particular show at the de
Saisset Gallery in Santa Clara, which was the first show of images
I'd collected, I put the "Hand Grenade" photograph next to a picture
[by Arnold Newman] of [Arnold] Krupp, who was the German arms magnet
whose company was probably responsible for millions of deaths. It was
an eerie photograph, a portrait, and the lighting is weird and his
eyes are dark - a great image. And looking at them together I began
to realize that what I'd just written [Teach Your Children] was
actually true, that if we don't start teaching our children a better
way of dealing with each other we're fucked and humanity itself is in
great danger. I mean, look at what's going on in the world today -
look at the Obama Administration. What a pile of shit we gave him to
deal with, now he's trying to deal with it all on many fronts and
he's getting shit for not concentrating on one thing.
Well, frankly, I don't think it's the job of the President to solve
many of the problems most threatening to us. I think it's a mistake
to think that the Office of the Presidency of the United States is a
humanitarian position. Rather, [the Presidency] is a job for somebody
with a business mind - somebody who honors the traditional power
structures and upholds the absolute authority of multinational
corporations and who can manipulate information in such a way as to
prevent regular people from noticing how little control they really have.
And the dance between them all is insane.
But let's compare what's going on in the world right now versus what
was going on in the 1960s. There are some depressing similarities: we
have an unjust and illegal war that we're fighting - in fact, we have
two, some would say more. All unnecessary and brutal and-
Silly - yep.
And, when you consider the economic crisis, you think of Dr. King
and his commitment to helping the poor and lower working class.
Sure, and the division between the rich and the poor is getting wider
and wider and wider.
And there's the social unrest exploding all over the world in places
like Greece and the Occupied Territories, Iran, and there's the
environmental movement still straining its efforts to save the
species and now you have Obama talking about building new nuclear
power plants, even after people like you fought so hard through the
70s to stop construction, which was a remarkable victory.
Right - when we did the No Nuke concerts at Madison Square Garden,
there hasn't been another nuclear power plant built in this country since.
I know - it was such an incredible accomplishment.
Well, when I met with Obama's people, before I decided to support
him, that was my first question: What is his stance on nuclear power?
I knew about his relationship with Exelon in Chicago and I knew he
got money from them, so I wanted to know what the hell his stance
was. And they said, well, it's a very interesting stance because he
knows we might need it, but he knows we'll never get it. So he can
afford to say that we need to do this, but he knows damn well that
until we can figure out how to store the waste and until we figure
out how to keep it out of the hands of terrorists, it'll never get
done. So I think he's walking this brilliant line between appearing
to support what is an unbelievable industry that has never made a
penny and has taken billions from the American taxpayer and knowing
that we'll never get [new operational plants].
But the message [Obama] is sending to the anti-nuclear activists,
then, is that big business trumps their concerns. The pronouncement
that we need to build more nuclear power plants can only be seen as
the President turning his back on the left.
I think they need to look a little deeper.
I'm not so sure. I think the left would prefer a public victory to a
private investigation into what may or may not be true about what a
politician says.
I think that's right.
I think that progressives would rather have an Administration that
honors their past victories and that doesn't try to marginalize their
deep concerns and send the message that the dominant culture is going
to continue pushing liberal values aside. Your point about Obama's
decision being a political move is not lost on me. However, I feel
that I must point out my belief that perhaps the greatest
contribution made by your generation was the idea that there should
be no compromise on certain issues, particularly when it comes to
things like war and pacifism and anything that threatens [to
compromise] our humanitarianism or the public health. In fact, I
think that there is a lot of rage and disappointment coming from
people who saw some of the liberal principles they believed [Obama]
had but was forced to compromise to get elected as never having been
part of his core belief system at all. I think that in the back of
some people's heads they thought he was going to be like Gandhi.
Where is the disappointment coming from, though? What is he actually
doing that is pissing the left off?
Maybe it's what he's not doing that's pissing them off.
Like what?
His amping up of the war in Afghanistan. His secret renditions
program. The bank bailout. His position on gay marriage and Don't
Ask, Don't Tell. The nuclear issue we've been talking about. Support
of Israel has been a sticking point, although some of the recent news
on the illegality of the new settlements is pretty remarkable. The
fact that you can all of a sudden criticize the Israeli government
and not be called an anti-Semite is amazing.
To have even put Israel in the middle of all that stuff is insane.
Sometimes I wonder if we didn't do it all deliberately.
Right, like our supplying weapons to both Iran and Iraq during their
war in the 1980s in order to help keep the region unstable and
reliant upon our intervention for survival.
Yeah, that's right - Eisenhower was right, wasn't he? But you have to
add something else to what he said. It's not only the
military-industrial complex, but the military-industrial commercial
complex, because trying to make sure everybody is in line to buy a
new pair of sneakers and a soda is insane.
And that brings up another interesting comparison with the past.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, in order to be involved with the
anti-war movement and in order to be an effective feminist and in
order to fight for civil rights, you needed to do all those things in
public. There was no Internet; there was no safety net that allowed
you to privately involve yourself in a mass movement.
Yeah, you had to do it publically and there were risks.
And that was even part of the appeal. I remember back to when I was
7 years old in the early 70s and how I wanted to grow up to be Angela Davis.
Wow! How fantastic!
And I really believed it was possible - I mean, why not?
Yeah!
And now I feel ripped off that I'm not Angela Davis.
Well, when we had the opportunity to speak out, we did, even to the
detriment to ourselves.
But where is that movement now?
I think the movement is being controlled.
By whom?
By the military-industrial commercial complex. They don't want us
waking up. They just want sheep - go buy your sneakers, man!
Exactly - and Old Navy can sell you a t-shirt with a peace sign on it
and you can put it on and suddenly think you're involved in the Peace
Movement.
That's right.
And you don't even have to do anything - just wear the t-shirt.
Yeah, it's insane. They learned with the Vietnam War, man, you know -
when Walter was telling you every fucking night while you were eating
your steak dinner how many fucking Americans had just been
slaughtered. The public can only take that for a certain amount of
time, then they start to write to their congressman, they start to
get pissed and they start to rise up and then all of a sudden the
Vietnam War stops. Right? Did you ever see any footage of Grenada?
Did you see any footage of Panama? Did you see any footage of Iraq?
No.
They learned - they learned how to control it. And the media, as you
well know - you can count on one hand who owns the media that covers
the entire planet. They have no interest in people standing up and
saying that the President doesn't have any fucking clothes on.
And what do you think can be done about that? Can the movement be
revitalized? Is there a different strategy that people should be using-
Sure, and here's a perfect example. When Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt
and I found out that Congress was trying to slip an odd sentence into
an energy bill that would make the public responsible for 50 billion
dollars to restart the nuclear industry again we did a video of
Stephen's song, "For What it's Worth," with Ben Harper, with me and
Bonnie and Jackson and we went to the Hill and met with all those
people and showed them 126,000 signatures that we'd gotten in three
days and we managed to get the sentence taken out. I mean, we didn't
learn anything from Chernobyl? You know how many people are still
fucked up from Three Mile Island? And you know it's going to happen
again. You can't have 104 plants here and 72 in Japan and 15 in
France and expect nothing to go wrong. In the 50s they used to say
that nuclear power would be so cheap that they wouldn't even have to
charge for it - bullshit! Do you know how much energy it takes to
build a nuclear plant, to keep all that shit cool and safe so they
can store it for thousands of years, the waste I mean? We're only 200
years old and we can't control anything! How the fuck are we going to
control this shit for thousands of years? It's madness! It's a
industry that has no future - they're only trying to make money on
construction. They're even trying to say it's green!
I guess radioactivity is green because you can't see it - like it's
only theoretical pollution.
Well, water is really the next big thing - there's going to be wars
over water. I knew this 33 years ago. That's why I moved to the
wettest spot on earth, I swear to God. I was in San Francisco and we
were being told on billboards to shower with a friend because the
drought was coming and stuff like that and I knew what we were doing
to the Colorado River, how we were damning it and fucking it up, and
all the San Francisco people were saying, "Why are we sending all our
water down to that fucking desert?" And I'm thinking, water, I've got
to find a place where water will never be an issue. So 33 years ago I
moved to Hawaii. Now I'm lucky enough to be able to do that, but
that's how serious I think the water problem is going to be.
I think you're right, and what scares me most is how we don't
currently have any kind of organized mass humanitarian movement that
might help us survive such a catastrophe and prevent us from
descending into real tribal savagery. I mean, one of the things that
your generation had - that my generation doesn't have - were young
people who were able to articulate the politics of dissent and
humanitarianism well and who were able to, for want of a better word,
make progressiveness and radicalism sexy. That's what drew people to
the counter-culturalism of the time, the music, the fashions, the
grooviness of it all-
And we knew that, sure.
You made it hip to thumb your nose at the Johnson and Nixon White
House, but you also grounded [your dissent] in a certain logic -
there was a great deal of sanity in wanting to stop the war and to
argue against materialism and to live a more spiritual existence. It
was more than just an opinion that you were pushing - it was a lifestyle.
You're absolutely right.
And I just don't see that happening nowadays. In fact, most
unsettling to me about the recent death of Howard Zinn-
What a brilliant man.
Right, but what I found so odd about him dying was how unfair his
passing seemed. I found myself wondering, "Wow, all the real radicals
are disappearing." It was like he was gunned down in his prime, but
he was, what, almost 90? I suddenly realized that most of the people
who make me want to be a bigmouth are all over 60, at least.
[Progressive humanitarianism] moves forward in small increments. Did
you see Pearl Jam on Saturday Night Live this past weekend?
I didn't.
Right - Eddie Vedder, playing his guitar, and what's written on his
guitar? ZINN! And people can twist their heads up and say, "What's
that written on his guitar? Zinn? What the fuck is that?" And then
they go to Google and they type in Zinn and all of a sudden they're off!
Right.
I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it - I'm just saying
that that process is still going on. When you give a person too much
to think about, they become inactive a lot. They get paralyzed. I
mean, look at what kids are faced with today. I heard a thing on NPR
the other day while driving around about how some of these medical
students owe $300,000 in student loans. Think about that. How the
fuck are they supposed to pay that back? And the woman who they were
interviewing said that she wanted to be a family doctor, but she
couldn't afford to be a family doctor. She has to subset and subset
and subset and become the only doctor who does operations on ears and
then she makes all the money, but it isn't what she wants to do. I
want to be a pediatrician, I want to be a family doctor for people -
you can't! You can't afford it!
Lawyers are the same way. Accrue massive debt in law school and
forget about going into something like civil law. You're forced to
becoming a lawyer for some corporation somewhere.
It's all very carefully designed. Keep the sheep occupied and we'll
rob them blind and they won't even know. In fact, we'll even smile at
them and tell them they're doing great - like you said, we'll sell
them a t-shirt and let them think they're in the Peace Movement.
Right.
Keep everybody crazy.
Another important lesson that came from the 1960s was the fact that
it isn't necessary to go to every march and to every demonstration
and every sit-in and to be an expert on every bit of legislation that
might be moving through Congress to be political. I think the notion
that you require a vast understanding of every issue in public
circulation can become a deterrent to people getting involved in
dissent, like they're not smart enough. Again, that was the genius of
your generation: it was enough for a person to remain committed to a
lifestyle based on humanitarian ideals, to claim real ownership over
his or her values and a lifetime dedicated to peace, love and understanding-
Good ol' Elvis!
Right - and that was enough to be effective politically, because it
was a way to exist off the grid and not rely so heavily on needing to
be subservient to the dominant culture. In other words, so long as
you don't need laws to know that racism is wrong, or that sexism is wrong-
Or that homophobia is wrong-
Or murder or stealing, yeah. As long as your ideas and beliefs are
not determined by whatever rewards or punishments you feel you might
receive from the state, you're politicized and fighting power. You're
saying that your morality is self-generating and not imposed by an
artificial hierarchy.
Right, I'll give you another example: We had my song, "Teach Your
Children," in the middle of 1970, bolting up the charts. It was like
18 or something and then Kent State happened. We went down to Los
Angeles and we recorded [Ohio], mixed it, recorded Find the Cost of
Freedom for the b-side and we said we want it out right now. "Well,
you can't do that - you've got a hit moving up-" We want it out right
fucking now! We put that out in 12 days and the fucking cover for the
45 was a picture of the Constitution with 4 bullet holes in it. We
killed our own single. You don't do that - you're not supposed to do
that. We didn't give a shit. We thought the slaughter of these 4
kids, which the government still hasn't apologized for, was more important.
And that's what I'm saying, that that simple understanding doesn't
seem to be part of contemporary culture anymore, particularly when it
comes to the arts community and the musicians who have historically
been so effective in communicating that message.
But they are there.
Are they?
What about the Beastie Boys? What about their Tibetan campaign? How
about Green Day?
Well, all right - Green Day is a good example.
Let me tell you something - I have never met them, right? And as I
was leaving the after party [for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Induction Ceremony] at the Bull and Bear, in this hotel, I see Billy
Joe as I'm headed up the stairs and I don't stop, you know, I just
wave respectfully, and he parts the people around him and comes up
and he hugs me for 2 minutes, babbling about what a great songwriter
I am and how he wanted to be like me and write melodies that are in
people's hearts all the time and I said, "Wait a second - you have to
understand, I am really proud of you." Wait a minute, why's that?
"Because you're doing what we did - you're standing up there and
fucking telling it like it is! American Idiot was brilliant!" It kind
of shocked him a little bit. But there is this chain of musicians who
really do give a shit. They are there, maybe few and far between, but
they are there. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is a
fucking brilliant man. And we're trying to influence those people -
me, people like James Taylor, we're all trying to influence those
musicians who are coming up and following us because we're dropping
off the other end of this diving board, we can't help it. It's called
old age and eventually death. But we want to encourage people to
stand up and to give a shit and to have courage.
.
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