Wild Tales; A Rock & Roll Life

New York: Crown Archetype, 2013. First Edition [stated]. Fourth printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Graham Nash [Jacket Photograph]. [8], 360 pages. Illustrations. Index. Signed by the author on the title page with Certificate of Authenticity. Graham William Nash OBE (born 2 February 1942) is an English singer-songwriter and musician. Nash is known for his light tenor voice and for his songwriting contributions as a member of the English pop/rock group the Hollies and the folk-rock supergroups Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Nash became an American citizen on 14 August 1978 and holds dual citizenship with the United Kingdom and the United States. Nash is a photography collector and a published photographer. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1997 and as a member of the Hollies in 2010. Nash was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours List for services to music and to charity. Nash released an autobiographical memoir in September 2013 entitled Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, published by Crown Publishing. Photographs that he took during his career are on display as an art collection at the San Francisco Art Exchange. In interviews pertaining to both the memoir and art exhibit he mentions the impact of Joni Mitchell, with whom he had a relationship between 1968 to 1970 in his early time in California. Nash also had a short-term relationship with Rita Coolidge, as had Stephen Stills. From Graham Nash, the legendary musician and founding member of the iconic bands Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Hollies, comes a candid and riveting autobiography that belongs on the reading list of every classic rock fan. Graham Nash's songs defined a generation and helped shape the history of rock and roll, he's written over 200 songs, including such classic hits as "Carrie Anne," On A Carousel, "Simple Man," "Our House," Marrakesh Express, and "Teach Your Children." From the opening salvos of the British Rock Revolution to the last shudders of Woodstock, he has rocked and rolled wherever music mattered. Now Graham is ready to tell his story: his lower-class childhood in post-war England, his early days in the British Invasion group The Hollies; becoming the lover and muse of Joni Mitchell during the halcyon years, when both produced their most introspective and important work; meeting Stephen Stills and David Crosby and reaching superstardom with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and his enduring career as a solo musician. Nash has valuable insights into a world and time many think they know from the outside but few have experienced at its epicenter, and equally wonderful anecdotes about the people around him: the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, Cass Elliot, Dylan, and other rock luminaries. From London to Laurel Canyon and beyond, Wild Tales is a revealing look back at an extraordinary life, with all the highs and the lows; the love, the sex, and the jealousy; the politics; the drugs; the insanity, and the sanity, of a magical era of music. Derived from a Kirkus review: Down-to-earth autobiography of one of the great voices and songwriters of classic rock. Nash was raised in a Manchester, England, council house by working-class parents who allowed him to pursue his musical dreams rather than let him fall into the pattern—school, work, marriage, retirement, death—of so many of his fellow Mancunians. As a member of Crosby, Stills and Nash in the 1970s, he would note his narrow escape from that fate in the song "Cold Rain." Nash was also fortunate to be a member of the Hollies just when London record company executives were falling all over themselves looking to duplicate the phenomenal success of Liverpool's Beatles. With the Hollies, he honed his voice for harmony and his ear for the elements of a hit (including his 1968 classic "Carrie Anne"). But as the 1960s progressed and he developed a curiosity about art and big ideas, Nash grew apart from his old mates, especially as they failed to support his interest in nontraditional song approaches like the pop of "Marrakech Express." In Los Angeles, he fell in with a hipper crowd that included David Crosby, Stephen Stills and an intense Canadian-born genius named Joni Mitchell, who became his lover and muse (notably, in the hit "Our House"). Nash has some insightful things to say about that other Canadian-born genius Neil Young, as well as other lions of the period, including Cass Elliot, Rita Coolidge, Paul Simon, Ahmet Ertegun, Jackson Brown and others. Nash pulls no punches, shining light on his peers' good and bad points (as well as his own), but he manages to come across as a solid, sensible, bighearted chap. An entertaining, intimate portrait of rock music—and how it was made—in an age of excess.