Authors: Graham Nash
But, even so, it was cool meeting Morris. He was a gentleman thug, a great white, one of the early record sharks who put out a slew of legendary artists: Duane Eddy, Buddy Knox (check out “Party Doll,” a brilliant rockabilly hit), Lou Christie, Frankie Lymon, Dave “Baby” Cortez, and Joey Dee and the Starlighters (who in 1966 changed their name to the Young Rascals). A few years afterward, he went on a tear with Tommy James and the Shondells, so say what you will about Morris Levy, he knew a hit when he heard one and got it on record.
Man, we soaked up American culture like sponges. I loved it instantly. On the plane back, I remember being thrilled that we’d held our own with all the acts on that show. The other bands really dug the Hollies. We’d put tremendous energy into those two songs and we had
done
it. Now it was time to go home and raise our game to the next level.
T
HE LOCAL MUSIC
scene was on fire when we got back to London. The
Beatles were still undisputed kings of the top ten, but the
Rolling Stones, whom we toured with in early 1964, had finally pushed their way onto the international charts. So had the
Kinks and
Gerry and the Pacemakers, the
Dave Clark Five, and a few of our fellow Manchester bands—
Herman’s Hermits, whose lead singer,
Peter Noone, had worked the clubs with us, and
Freddie and the Dreamers, whose lead guitarist, Derek Quinn, had been one of the
Fourtones.
The tour we did with the Stones that year was a chilling experience. Hollies shows were pretty wild, but those Stones gigs
were something else. Mayhem to the nth degree. The first time we played with them was in Scarborough, on the east coast of England, and that joint was jumping before anyone hit the stage. They were rough and loud—and fantastic. Different from the Hollies. There was a certain earthiness to the Stones. This was before Mick became
Mick
, before he started strutting and dancing. Didn’t matter. They had that sound, that attitude.
At the time,
Brian Jones was already separating himself from the group. It had been his band at the start, but Mick and Keith had taken over, and you could tell that Brian was looking for a way out. He traveled with us, instead of with the other Stones, so it had come to that. The end for him was near.
Sometime afterward, when the Hollies were recording at Abbey Road, we learned the Stones were in a studio over on Denmark Street. In those days, sessions were pretty loose affairs, nothing like today, with all the paranoia and security. So Allan and I went over there to see what they were up to.
It was just a closet of a studio, about as big as my kitchen, and pretty crowded with all of us jammed in there—the Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, and an intense little guy in wild red leather cowboy boots who turned out to be
Phil Spector. They’d just finished making “Not Fade Away” and were working on the B-side, “Little by Little.” It was basically a throwaway, as most B-sides were, but they’d left a track open for percussion, so we all just started banging away on bottles and clapping. So for a few seconds, Clarkie and I were Stones sidemen.
We’d already toured with the
Dave Clark Five in late 1964 and often, to my ears, we blew them off the stage. I didn’t hang out with Dave—and I didn’t particularly like him. He was aloof and condescending, just a mediocre drummer; Mike Smith was the standout musician in that band. They thought they were the Beatles—and they weren’t. Their songs just didn’t cut it.
The Dave Clark Five tour might have been a slog had it not been for the third act on the bill. The
Kinks had just released “You
Really Got Me,” and we loved the shit out of that song. All those power chords ripping through the intro, and Ray’s nasal honk. It was obvious that record was going to be a smash, so we begged the promoters to put them on the tour. Lucky thing, too, because those guys were rascals. The Davies brothers were actually talking to each other then, and they were prodigious talents, lots of fun. They had a unique sound that was rough, raw, and edgy. And they were working-class lads, like us. Loved to join us for a few pints and raise a little hell. On the last night of the tour, the Dave Clark Five were in the middle of their big number “Bits and Pieces”—tits and wheezes—when
Eric Haydock and Pete Quaife, the Kinks’ bass player, took a huge bolt cutter to the stage power and cut those fuckers dead. Served ’em right.
We also did a tour with Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, a Norfolk band that we loved playing with. They had a sixteen-year-old lead singer, Terry Reid, who became a dear friend of mine and a future songwriting partner. That kid had a great set of pipes. Terry, of course, turned down
Jimmy Page’s offer to be the lead singer for his new group after the Yardbirds disbanded, a band that he’d call Led Zeppelin. Hey, shit like that happens all the time.
In any case, in 1965 things were happening at lightning speed on the rock ’n’ roll scene, and the Hollies shifted gears, heading into the fast lane.
Around this time, we got a call from our old friend and manager,
Michael Cohen, the guy who owned the Toggery, where I had worked selling clothes. “This neighbor of mine says her son writes songs, and she’s driving me fucking crazy,” he said. “Every time I meet her, she asks if you’ll listen to his stuff. Look, I know he’s probably awful and it’s an imposition, but I like this woman. We’ve been neighbors a long time. So would you do me a favor? Just go down there and see what this kid’s about.” Michael was always a decent guy, so we said, “Sure, leave it to us. We’ll get her off your back.”
So we go over to the address he gave us—a semidetached house in one of the better neighborhoods in Manchester—to meet this
so-called songwriter, a fifteen-year-old Jewish kid named
Graham Gouldman. Now, we’re the Hollies—and we
know
we’re the Hollies, so we’re not going to make it easy on him, kid or no kid. We’re sitting in this posh, middle-class living room, slipcovers on the sofas, nice art on the wall. I threw Mr. Songwriter one of my best stony stares and said, “Okay, kid—give it your best shot.”
He picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing: “
Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say, ‘Please share my umbrella …’
” And it’s fucking fabulous! Tony, Allan, and I are cutting glances at each other, and … we
know
this is a hit song. We know what we can do with it, too, putting a Hollies spin on the tune.
We were pretty excited, ready to rush out of there and get our claws into this song, when I said to him, “Uh, before we go … got anything else?”
Before the words were out of my mouth, he started singing, “
Look through any window, yeah, what do you see? / Smiling faces all around …
”
We just stopped and stared. “Okay, kid—that’s two. We’re definitely taking those two. No question about it.” I shrugged out of my coat and sat down again. Obviously, we weren’t leaving the house so fast. “One more time, kid—anything else in your songbag for us?”
He said, “Well, I do have another, but I’m afraid I promised it to my friend
Peter Noone.” And he launched into “
No milk today, my love has gone away …
”
Talk about being blown away. This fifteen-year-old kid wrote those amazing songs—I think they were the first three songs he’d ever written! It was incredible hearing them. And he eventually wrote “For Your Love” and “Heart Full of Soul” for the
Yardbirds, “Listen, People” for
Herman’s Hermits, and later he started the band 10cc. Nice little career, wouldn’t you say?
Before we even got back home, Tony had put a gorgeous twelve-string riff to the intro of “Look Through Any Window.” The song was made to be sung by voices like ours. All the harmonies were
right there
, and in no time we turned it into a Hollies song.
We recorded it in less than two hours and knew we had an instant hit on our hands. Same thing with “Bus Stop.” We cut it in even less time, an hour and fifty minutes flat.
Tony Hicks and
Bobby Elliott arranged it. Tony added that fabulous guitar intro, and we laid down the entire lead vocal and harmony just once. Reduced it to two tracks before putting on another set of vocals, followed by the solos—Tony, Allan, and me. In the can.
“Look Through Any Window” came out in September 1965 and shot right into the top ten. It also broke into the top forty in the States, which put us on the map there once and for all. The residual buzz from our performance at the Paramount in New York, coupled with a hit single, launched the Hollies into the forefront of the rock scene. We were frontline troops in the British Invasion, right up there with the
Beatles, the Stones, the
Kinks, the
Animals, and the
Yardbirds.
We decided we were through making our name strictly on covering American hits. We were writing our own stuff now, and in the process we were adding to the sound of rock ’n’ roll. Okay, that might sound egotistical, but it’s true. It wasn’t just us, of course, but we were leading the way. There was a drift away from the simplest pop forms built on standard three- and four-chord progressions. New chord structures were being experimented with, innovative tunings, melodic patterns. We abandoned the trite moon-and-June rhymes, the hold-your-hand and just-one-kiss fluff that had governed lyrics for so long, in order to express ourselves musically. As songwriters, everyone’s perspective was expanding, and with it their imaginations, their command of language, their facility with rhyme. Just listen to some of the singles released in 1965: the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and “Set Me Free,” “It’s My Life” by the Animals, the Zombies’ “Tell Her No,” “Satisfaction” and “Get Off My Cloud” by the Stones. Forget about where the Beatles were taking music. Creatively, the heavens had opened, and rock ’n’ roll had morphed into rock.
My personal outlook was also in transition. I was starting to
become political and socially conscious, which would alter my perspective forever. I had been sheltered all my life, not so much by privilege but by limited circumstances. I hadn’t seen much of the world and I didn’t have much education, so I hadn’t read much about the world either. But living in London made it impossible to keep the blinders on. The people my age whom I encountered there were enlightened about the world situation, and I heard about it from all quarters: the escalation of the
Vietnam War, of course, but also the first commercial nuclear reactor, apartheid and racial equality, the Profumo affair, military coups in developing nations, our diminishing environment, Rhodesia, Ghana, the Congo, Gambia. The postwar world was evolving in front of our eyes, and I found myself thinking about it in new and emotional ways. The issues at large began affecting me personally.
My initial response to this was music, expressing my views through song. And in 1965 we wrote “Too Many People” in answer to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which the British had colonized in 1920. The situation there was a complete mess. So many innocent people had been slaughtered. It brought Jomo Kenyatta to the forefront of the African political system, and this scared England to death. Thinking about this, I began to realize that there were indeed
too many people
, too many rats, so to speak, and that population growth was an issue we’d better confront sooner than later.
With this song, I was starting to grow as a writer, starting to come round from the usual stuff the Hollies were writing and to view our stardom in an entirely new way. I felt we had a responsibility to use our public personae in order to speak out on important issues, to communicate them to our fans. It’s one thing to rail and rant one’s opinions, and quite another to put it across through music.
This was easy to do in 1965 as the city was changing into Swinging London. A full-scale cultural revolution was in progress, with youth and music dominating the scene, top to bottom. The boutiques on Carnaby Street catered to our lifestyle. Mary Quant was introducing miniskirts and Biba was around and Cecil Gee. The
King’s Road in Chelsea had Granny Takes a Trip. Jean Shrimpton’s face was everywhere, along with Veruschka and Penelope Tree.
Darling
and
The Knack
spoke to us from the screen, cynical and sexy and angry, and Radio Caroline was broadcasting off the coast. It was all happening at the same time, and I loved every minute of it. I immersed myself in the whole explosive scene, getting a new kind of education, something that filled in a lot of the gaps.
In between our gigs and recording sessions, Rosie and I made regular visits to Manchester. Both of our families were there, and we tried to spend time with them every chance we got. On one of those visits in 1965, something shocking happened. I got on the bus to go from Manchester to Salford. I was sitting on the upper deck as we pulled up to a stop outside of Lewis’s department store on Regent Road. From my seat, I could see my mother at the bus stop. But not just my mother. She was with another man. They kissed passionately, at least more than in just a friendly, impersonal way. I ducked back out of sight while taking it all in.
That really threw me for a loop. I’d always assumed my parents had a pretty good marriage. They’d only ever had one argument that I recall, when my mother hit my dad with a wire brush and broke his skin. Otherwise, things were fairly routine in our house. I’d never seen real passion, but I’d certainly never seen signs of discord. I guess sometimes kids don’t know all that’s going on below the surface.
My mother got on the bus after the kiss, but fortunately she didn’t come upstairs. I sure as hell didn’t want her to know that I’d seen her. And since I knew where she was going to get off, I stayed on the bus a couple stops past our house and walked back to make it seem more natural. That gave me a chance to process what had happened, to reflect on events in my own chaotic life. I was kind of stunned that something like this was happening to my family, but it wasn’t completely shocking to me. I’d been in rock ’n’ roll for several years already, and I understood temptation. I’d sown a lot of wild oats. Hey, shit happens, people make mistakes. Including me, big-time. So by the time I got home, I thought,
You know, that’s life.
A couple years later, I encountered an incident that helped put some pieces in the family puzzle. During a series of interviews with me and a few friends about the Manchester rock scene, Alan Lawson, a journalist, discovered that my younger sister Sharon was not my father’s daughter. You know how when siblings joke: “Look at her, she’s not a Nash. Really, look at her and look at us. Sharon must have been adopted.” It was a joke—but it turned out not to be a joke. Somewhere along the line my mother must have had an affair. It was absolutely shocking to me. So out of character for her. It was scandalous for those days, but my father always loved Sharon like his own daughter. Still, it had changed him. That and going to prison—I think he just lost his heart. He let his guard down and his immune system along with it, and he slipped into a steady decline.