Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash Narrated by Graham Nash

Overview

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.
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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 and political activist.* 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

09/30/2013
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. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

"Provocatively honest." –New York Daily News
 
"There are indeed wild tales to tell...Nash wasn't pulling back on the lurid details." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
"Shockingly candid." –Daily Express (UK)       
 
"Though CSN and CSNY made more than their share of beautiful music together and lived in a kind of hippie heaven replete with mansions, money and free love, Nash doesn't hesitate to share the dark side of stardom, too, particularly the drug-fueled ego trips and meltdowns that so often derailed the group....[But] the reader is inclined to believe that the drugs, the women, the accolades and the money were never the point. 'It always comes down to the music,' Nash says. And that's what makes this trip worth taking." –USA Today
 
“A no-holds-barred, fiercely honest chronicle of the glories, excesses, disappointments, and joys of the rock-and-roll life. . . Nash’s tour-de-force tale reveals a soul who is ‘a complete slave to the muse of music.’” –Publishers Weekly
 
“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.” –Booklist

Kirkus Reviews

2013-09-15
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169325294
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/17/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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chapter1
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Excerpted from "Wild Tales"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Graham Nash.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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