Wild Tales

September 30, 2013
Nash delivers here a no-holds-barred, fiercely honest chronicle of the glories, excesses, disappointments, and joys of the rock-and-roll life. In the evocative and haunting style of his best songs (“Carrie Anne,” “Teach Your Children,” “Our House,” “Chicago”), Nash tells of his childhood in the rough-and-tumble north of England; his developing love of music and the formation, with Allan Clarke, of his first band, the Fourtones, who eventually became the Hollies; his introduction, through Cass Elliott, to David Crosby; his relationships with Joni Mitchell and Rita Coolidge; and his tumultuous relationship with group Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Even with Stills’s and Young’s virtuoso guitars and Crosby, Nash, and Stills’s genius for weaving harmonies around each other and flying into soaring musical flights, the group was anything but harmonious, and Nash doesn’t hold back in his descriptions of the titanic struggles between Stills’ and Young. After all these years, Nash says that he never tires of the unique sound that CSN makes: “It’s like the pull of gravity to the center of the earth; when I sing with those two, it keeps my world in balance.” Nash’s love of songwriting is undiminished, and lyrics and music continue to flow through his pen. Nash’s tour-de-force tale reveals a soul who is “a complete slave to the muse of music. Agent, Jillian Manus, Manus & Assoc.

September 15, 2013
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, drugs and big ideas, Nash grew apart from his old mates, especially as they failed to support his interest in nontraditional song approaches like the druggy 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 monster 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.

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September 15, 2013
Nash, a founding member of the Hollies and (later) Crosby, Stills, and Nash, has finally written an autobiography. Taking us from his childhood to the present day, the book is a portrait not merely of a rock 'n' roll star, but also of a man who has, it seems, constantly been seeking new challenges. (The formation of Crosby, Stills, and Nash came about because Nash was frustrated with the Hollies; in the late 1980s, having achieved pretty much everything it was possible to achieve in popular music, Nash returned to his first childhood passion, photography.) The book's title is a bit misleading: this isn't a collection of wild tales about the author's rock 'n' roll life; there are some such tales, of coursethe story of Nash's friend and bandmate David Crosby's long battle with drug addiction, for examplebut overall the book is simply the story of a man's life and his unshakeable passion to express himself through his art. Fans might say the book is long overdue, but it was definitely worth the wait.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)