Graham Nash of the Hollies, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is “eighty years old and still rocking,” according to a new interview in which the rocker discussed sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.
Graham Nash is fortunate he “got to know marijuana when I did.”
Nash delves into his substance abuse in his 2013 memoir, Wild Tales. The Crosby, Stills, and Nash veteran discussed the virtues of weed in a May 2022 interview with The Guardian. He claims it has enabled him concentrate on all of the world’s grandeur.
“I’m glad that I got to know marijuana when I did,” he said. “It changed my life completely. I get up every morning and I’m glad I’m alive.”
In a 2016 conversation with The Huffington Post, Nash stated that it also enhanced his creativity.
“In the last couple of years with the Hollies, I’d met David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills], and I was smoking dope, and I became more introspective,” he said. “I began to realize that I’d been trained by my experience in the Hollies to write hooks and melodies that you can’t forget if you’ve heard them once. When I joined David and Stephen and Neil [Young] and Joni [Mitchell], I realized there was more to say. There’s more going on in this world than just, ‘Moon, June, screw me in the back of the car’ kind of lyrics. … So my songwriting changed dramatically.”
Graham Nash’s life was also influenced positively by acid.
Graham Nash of Crosby, Still and Nash: “When we started there were no egos. That came from all the cocaine. There were an enormous amount of drugs being taken.” (via @IrishTimesCultr )https://t.co/i8l4zr9qtQ
— Irish Times Culture (@IrishTimesCultr) May 4, 2022
Nash claimed that, like marijuana, acid had a favorable effect on him. It aided him in comprehending his place in the cosmos.
“I took less than a dozen trips in my life but I realised with the first one that here we are, this ball of mud whizzing at 67,000 miles an hour through space, on one of trillions of planets,” he told The Guardian. “I understood when I took acid that everything is meaningless. And because of that everything is completely deeply meaningful.”
Crosby, Stills, and Nash were devastated by cocaine.
While Nash had only positive things to say about weed and acid, his encounter with coke is quite opposite. He claims that cocaine was a major factor in the breakup of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
“When we first started there were no egos,” he said. “I think that came from all the cocaine we snorted. That’s what brought egos into it. There were an enormous amount of drugs being taken.”
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young pic.twitter.com/H3jtMVfm0H
— Eric Alper 🎧 (@ThatEricAlper) January 22, 2022
Nash’s typical day before looked like this:
“I’d get high in the morning and snort in the afternoon and I’d keep going till 3-4am.”
Reflecting closely, Nash began to wonder if the group “may have been able to make more music if we’d not been quite so stoned.”
Nash last used coke on December 10, 1984.
“We had finished a tour and there is the tour-end party,” he said. “I walk into this room and see all these people smiling, and the smiles never made it to their eyes. It was only a mouth. And I realised I must look like all these people because we were all snorting coke. I stopped instantly and never went back.”