Déjà Vu: Rock ’n’ Roll Memoir Coming From Graham Nash

June 20, 2012, New York Times - By DAVE ITZKOFF

Photo right - Graham Nash - Eleanor Stills

As a founding member of the British Invasion band the Hollies and then a crucial constituent in Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young), Graham Nash would seem to have accumulated enough experiences and anecdotes for two memoirs. But he’ll have to fit them all into one, for now: a book that Mr. Nash will write about his life and rock-music career has been acquired by Crown Archetype, an imprint of Random House’s Crown Publishing Group, the publisher is expected to announce on Wednesday.


“I’ve had an incredible ringside seat to the last 50-odd years of rock ’n’ roll,” Mr. Nash said in a telephone interview. “I think people will be very interested to know what the British Invasion was like, what Woodstock was like, what my friends are like, what trouble we got into, what heights we scaled. I think they’ll be interested in all of it.”


For the as-yet-untitled memoir, which will be released in the fall of 2013, Mr. Nash, 70, plans to begin his story with his upbringing in Salford, England, where, he said, his parents encouraged his pursuits of photography and rock music.
“When half my friends were getting slapped upside the head by their parents – ‘Better do what your dad did and your grandfather, if the mill was good enough or the mine was good enough for them, then that’s what you do’ – my mother and father never allowed me to fall for that gold watch theory,” Mr. Nash said.
Before he went on to advise CSNY’s listeners to teach their children well and inform them about the components of his very, very, very fine house, Mr. Nash crossed paths with other crucial rock ’n’ roll figures and became friendly enough with John Lennon and Paul McCartney to still refer to them by their first names.
Recalling a rendezvous from the early 1960s Mr. Nash said: “John and Paul called me one night, and said, ‘Hey, listen, come over, we want you to hear something.’ I’ve got John in my left year and Paul in my right ear, and they sang me a song they’d just written for Helen Shapiro called ‘Misery.’ ”
In more recent days, Mr. Nash said, he was meeting with publishers in New York to discuss his proposal for his memoir. “They were all more than kind to me,” he said, adding with a laugh, “but it was the people at Crown and Random House who gave me over seven figures.”
Despite the blissful demeanor you’d expect from the man who wrote “Marrakesh Express,” Mr. Nash said his book would not avoid discussing conflicts with his bandmates or other uncomfortable subject matter.
“I’ve been as honest as I can be,” he said of his discussions with his publisher. “If they ask me a question about drugs, I answered them. You ask me a question, you’re going to get an answer. Whether your like the answer or not is your problem, but you’ll get an answer.” (So far none of Mr. Nash’s answers have disrupted his current summer tour with David Crosby and Stephen Stills.)
In preparing to write a memoir, Mr. Nash said he had been surprised by the breadth of his own experiences. As he reflected on the experience of reading his book proposal, he uttered a phrase one probably should not teach one’s children, then added: “This guy’s had a great life. I wish I was him.”