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GRAHAM NASH AND DAVID CROSBY - a duo that created their own genre and brought their sophisticated blend of music through 4 albums in the 70's and a recently discovered live acoustic album that broke all the rules both on CD and DVD-A. Finally in 2004 they decided to do their first studio album in 27 years. The double-CD set will be released on August 10th, 2004 on Sanctuary Records, and Buzz Person was able to grab a precious 20 minutes with them just before their last rehearsal before their nationwide tour. [sqb] |
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| Buzz: Today is the 22nd of June and I’m in Burbank, California, sitting in on the rehearsals of Crosby, Stills & Nash and I happen to have sitting with me two of the Rock legends themselves, David Crosby and Graham Nash. Crosby: Just call me "Lege". Buzz: And Graham – Graham…… Graham Nash. He’s here too. Nash: Yeah, I’m here too. Buzz: It’s a particularly great pleasure for me because, you know, although I was a CSN fan, I was not really a real fan until I saw the two of them together in concert. They have a lot to offer and they’ ve been working on something they’re real proud of – a new project – and we want to talk about that a little bit today. Nash: Okay. Buzz: I’m not asking any questions to anybody in particular, so if you want to answer something just jump in, because it’s a – Crosby: We’ll do our usual Huey, Dewey and Louie kind of act. Buzz: Yeah, I know. You know, you kind of used to be known as the Laurel & Hardy of Rock N Roll back in the ‘70s. Nash: That was when I was the fat one, yes. Buzz: Tell us generally, what this new project is all about. Nash: Music – that’s what it’s always about. Crosby: [Laughing] Nash: You know, we had a lot of music to make. Crosby and I hadn’t made a record in 26 years and we figured it was about time. You know, we’d been working for the last three or four years, probably longer, with Stephen every year and, you know, we wanted to just switch it ‘round a little. Buzz: So you went into the studio and you cut a new album. Crosby: It actually started sooner than that. We knew that we were having – both of us, were having a period in which a great many really good songs were coming to us. You saw the quality of the songs that Nash put on his solo album and you knew that he was in the middle of a really good run of great songs. And then I got lucky and James got lucky all at the same time. As he said, we haven’t done it for a long time and it’s some of the best music we ever made, so. Buzz: Do you have a name for it yet? Nash: It’s just called Crosby-Nash. I mean, you know, we could get clever and call it, you know – “Your Sister’s Tits” – and – Crosby: No, I like – “Your New Tits”. Nash: Yeah. Crosby: I think that’s really a good one. Nash: Yeah, that was a good one, yeah. But, you know, the music is unpretentious and we wanted it to be that way. Buzz: Was there a defining moment during this period of time which kind of led you to decide, Yeah, we’re gonna do an album? Nash: I think what David said earlier was true. We had a backlog of songs, we had an urge to do it, we had the means, and when David and I talked about it, David had heard the production and the – Crosby: Quality. Nash: And the quality of “Songs For Survivors”, which was done by Nathaniel and Russell Kunkel. And we decided that, you know, we would want them to be involved and we talked about musicians. And between David’s band, CPR, and the musicians that I used on “Songs for Survivors”, particularly Russell and Dean Parks, we thought that would be an exciting band. So the band was Russell on drums, Leland Sklar on bass, both of whom we’ve worked with many, many years before. James Raymond, you know, David’s son, on keyboards, Jeff Pevar and Dean Parks. And it was a great band and it was recorded – all 20 songs were finished in a month. From January 12th to February 12th. Buzz: Right here at CenterStaging. Nash: Yeah. Nathaniel asked us were we would be most comfortable recording and we said we liked CenterStaging and we liked the people, its convenient and, you know, David flies in from his home up north and lands right here basically and just comes on over. Buzz: It’s not a typical sound studio in the pure sense of the word though, is it? Crosby: Well, there’s a reason for that. See, Nathaniel’s gear – his “Studio Without Walls” as he calls it, his Pro Tools rig, is pretty much state of the art. He’s - I think his gear is probably better than any studio’s that we know about. So, if you rent a studio then you have to bring his gear in and pay for his gear. Why are you renting the studio? All you need is four walls. So, we thought since we were, you know – it’s really hard for singer/songwriters these days, man, you have to beg and plead to get enough money to cut ten things and we figured that we could save a lot of money and also we discovered that it really actually worked better having us all in one room where we could talk to each other, communicate with each other, look at each other, catch each others’ eye, listen to what’s goin’ on. The focus in the room was very, very good. Nash: David’s not just talking about musicians. He’s talking about the board and Nathaniel. Crosby: Were in the same room. Nash: All in the same room. Crosby: And the communication factor was very high. And I think the speed with which we got things done was pretty much astounding. We cut 19, 20 things in the amount of time that a really professional outfit would have expected to cut ten. Buzz: And so you could probably see songs going through certain metamorphosis? Nash: Well, yeah, David and I have always been pretty open there. We’ve been smart enough to realize that you don’t buy a dog and bark yourself. Meaning, that if you’re gonna employ great musicians like this, you don’t really have to tell them much, all you have to do is sing the song to them and say – okay, help me express this the best way we can. And that’s basically what happened. Buzz: I know that each of you had a backlog of songs to an extent – a few at least. Graham had “Live on the Wall”, “Penguin In A Palm Tree”, and “Half Your Angels” and David you had “Samurai” and “They Want It All” and “Luck Dragon” – but, that’s about six or seven. Did you…… Crosby: Well, we had more, James had more, and more came when we got in the room. It just was one of those periods of time – I don’t know why writing is cyclical, but it is. You go through periods of time when stuff comes one right after another, you know, bursts of two and three at a time, and you go through, you get done with that and you’ll go through nine months of time when nothing comes and you think that you’ve completely lost it. At least that’s what happens to me. Buzz: And I understand that some of the musicians who actually recorded the songs with you, actually did some of the writing on the songs. Nash: Absolutely, like, ”Don’t Dig Here” for instance, was basically a result of James reading a newspaper about Yucca Mountain, and about all the nuclear stuff that we buried there and the quest by the government to – for someone to design a sign that would last for 30,000 years. Crosby: And say, “Don’t Dig Here.” Oh my….. We co-wrote more on this record than we ever have and we did it in every possible combination you can think of. I wrote with – I wrote two songs with Dean Parks. I wrote a couple with James, Nash wrote with James. Nash: And with Russell. Crosby: And with Russell. Nash: See, because we weren’t interested in, I mean, you know – a lot of songwriters play the game of, you know - Hey, this is my publishing, it’s my future, etc. Well, we don’t give a shit about any of that. We decided that we would present an idea – well, here’s an example: David had to go and see a dentist, so we were stuck in the studio and we didn’t really want to do a lot of work without him. But, I was standing there and I had this couple of verses of this song that I called “Milky Way Tonight”. And, I said, “look, I got these two verses, what do you think?” And, so everybody said, “Well, you know, we could go here, we could go there, why don’t you go there . . . . . . by the time David got back and Crosby: I get back and it’s done. Nash: – it’s all finished. [Laughter] Buzz: Great, amazing. Crosby: The thing is to stay open, you know, which I think we successfully did. You don’t – you don’t go into it, you know, try to defend your turf, you go into it really open, you know. You say – what Nash and I both have done for a very long time, is we sit down with you, just like I’m sitting here with you, and we play the song to you. And if you don’t have a song that you can sit down and play to somebody and have them feel something, you didn’t really have a song in the first place. So, we think that’s really how you do it, but with this quality of musicians what happened was there was an immediate chemistry and a willingness to try, you know, almost anything. So the result, you know, the proof was in the pudding, the result was terrific. Buzz: And also Jeff Pevar was involved in one of the songs, too. Nash: Yes, I had this set of words and this melody that I really loved called – that I was calling “Jesus of Rio”, but I’m just not a good enough musician to play the guitar for the changes that I had. And when I played it for Jeff when we were on the “Songs For Survivors” tour, he put together the chords. And the chords were very important to the tune. And that’s why I shared the song with him 50-50, because without his chords it wouldn’t have been the song that it was. Buzz: Great song. Nash: Thank you. Buzz: So from the time that you went into the studio and you were creating new music all along until you had a finished product, how long was that.? Nash: Without the mixing part? Buzz: With the mixing part. Nash: With the mixing part – well, it took us a month to record it all, which is an astounding amount of time considering there’s 20 songs. And I must tell you also, that financially, we cut two albums for the price of one. Normally – I mean we have spent way more on one album than we did on both these albums. So, a month for the recording and probably about three weeks for the mixing, we took everybody to my house in Hawaii and we mixed it there. Buzz: I recall that David was gonna go over right after the CPR tour finished. Nash: Right. Buzz: [To Crosby] Did you actually do some mixing over there. Crosby: Yeah. Buzz: And you weren’t in the water all the time? Crosby: Yeah, it was, you know it was tough, man, it was tough. I’d get up in the morning and I’d have breakfast, go for the walk on the beach, come back, play in the water with my kid then I’d sort of amble up to Nash’s and I’d say, Yeah, that sounds pretty good, but you need to change this, and then I’d go back to the beach. Nash: It’s true, we trust – we trust Nathaniel…. he’s impeccable. And, so what he would do is, he’d start a mix, he’d get it to where he felt it was worth presenting to us. The next morning we would check it out, we’d make suggestions and he would change them and we’d come back and say, Sounds fantastic – let’s do the next one. Crosby: As soon as he’d put a mix to bed then we’d take off for the beach and he’d get the next one set up. So, there was a fair amount of beach time. I was having a terrific time because my kid absolutely adores the beach at Hanalei and he won’t get out of the water, as a matter – the only way we could get him out of the water was hold up a cheeseburger. Nash: A very damp cheeseburger…. Buzz: And I understand you have a record label for the album. Nash: Yeah, Sanctuary loved this record. As a matter of fact, it was their suggestion that we do a double album. Because really, I don’t think it ever occurred to David and I to do a double album because, you know, you’re dealing with the attention span of listeners and you’re dealing with costs – of how much a double album costs. But when the response from Sanctuary Records was so positive, and their suggestion that we do a double album, David and I thought about it and we thought it was a good idea. Buzz: Can you tell us a little bit about Sanctuary, I understand that they’re about to release Neil Young’s “Greendale” on the DVD. Nash: Great, well that should sell a lot. Crosby: Sanctuary started out as a management company in England and expanded into being a record company and they are described by other people as being lean and mean, and not carrying the kind of absurd super-structure that the big majors are carrying and they are therefore, far more effective. We hope that that’s all true. Buzz: Well, we’re going find out. Nash: Well, the most important thing is that they love this record. They’re knocked out with both the graphics and the music that they’ve been presented with and that’s a great start. Buzz: Speaking about the graphics, who did the graphics? Nash: We had this photographer called, Buzz P.., – no [laughter]. My future, hopefully, son-in-law, Kinski Gallo, did the graphics. He came up with the beds which all the words went on. Because it was a double album there are a tremendous amount of lyrics there, so we didn’t really have a lot of room to be able to put, you know, lyrics to 20 songs on there, so we put web pages on there that people can download the lyrics from. And, I think it’s a great piece of work, he did about 14 covers before we finally ended up with the one we liked. Buzz: I had a chance to look at it last week when I was up here and I’m very impressed with it. Nash: And, thank you very much for your photographs too, Buzz. Buzz: My pleasure…. Before we finish here, I know both of you have talked about doing a little bit of a tour in support of this album – Nash: Yes, yes. Buzz: – when it gets released. When is it going to be released by the way? Nash: August 10th. Buzz: And I know that CSN is out [on the road] until what, about September 22nd. Nash: Yes. Buzz: So, when do you think – are you still planning on doing a little bit of a tour for this – Crosby: We’re going out September 23rd. Nash: Not quite [laughter]. We are gonna have at least, you know, a week or so rest and about a week of rehearsals, but we should be out in October. Buzz: Can you tell us a little bit about how, you know, how extensive, how many cities? Nash: We don’t know yet. I think our thoughts are, you know, maybe 12 to 15 dates in really great theaters. Buzz: What size theaters? Nash: Oh, you know, a couple of grand. Buzz: Okay. Nash: 2,000 seaters – theaters. We want to really make this a musical tour. We have the music, we have the talent and we have the band. Crosby: The thing about it is -- is that it’s probably the most expensive band in the world. And, so, we really can’t afford to take them out for a couple of months, although given the quality of the music we’d probably like to. I think we’re gonna be able to do a few very, very really, really good dates, and they will probably be some of the best music we’ve ever gotten to play in our lives. Buzz: Well, I’ve managed to listen to a little bit of it, and, so, I can tell you from my standpoint I’m very excited about it. I know that your fans who are listening to this will look forward to August 10th and also look forward to seeing you in October. And, I want to thank you both for sitting in with me today. Nash: You’re welcome, and now I hear the band already striking up and we’ve gotta go. Crosby: [Laughing]. Buzz: That’s right. Nash: Thanks Buzz. Buzz: Time to go to work. |
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| TRANSCRIBED BY MARY JO SEIDL | ||||
