THE HOLLIES
With voices in heavenly sync, made evergreen pop, until songwriting, drug differences and David Crosby sowed disharmony. Yet through splits and rifts, the group’s prime movers are still with us and primed to reclaim their legacy. “We were always the under
In 1966, the Manc Beatles discovered songwriting. Cue splits, but also survival against the odds: “It’s a tough one why we aren’t more acclaimed,” they reflect.
AMA CASS ELLIOT IS CRYING. Great big heaving sobs. They really should be tears of joy, since she and her fellow Mamas & Papas have just recorded I Saw Her Again on this April 1966 evening at Hollywood’s United Western Recorders. She’s crying because of a man she met 30 seconds ago.
“She’d asked what John Lennon would think of The Mamas & The Papas,” chuckles Graham Nash, the cad in question. “All I said was, ‘John’s from Liverpool and there are some tough guys there. He will probably put you down until he feels comfortable enough to let you in.’ I didn’t realise she had a big crush on John and didn’t want to hear he might be nasty to her. That was my first 30 seconds with Cass Elliot.”
Nash was in town with The Hollies, the band he had founded in Manchester with his primary school chum, Allan Clarke. 1965 had witnessed their first UK Number 1 single, I’m Alive; now America was taking notice. By the end of ’66 two singles – Bus Stop and Stop! Stop! Stop! – would make the US Top 10; soon there would even be a Shell Oil commercial. “Shhh,” laughs the environmentally conscious Nash today.
There was more. Artists and labels were beginning to grasp the notions that albums were the artistic and commercial future and that self-written songs meant longevity. And so, on For Certain Because… (from the line in Teddy Bears’ Picnic), the Hollies album recorded shortly after their return to Britain and released in December 1966, every song would be written by Clarke, Nash and guitarist Tony Hicks. It seemed that a glorious new Hollies chapter was commencing.
Once Elliot had gathered herself, she asked Nash what he was doing next. She wanted him to meet her friend, David Crosby. Nash agreed: “That moment changed my life forever.”
As Nash left for the Hollywood Hills with his glamorous new friends, Tony Hicks – also in attendance – mulled his options. “The boys were at the Whisky A Go-Go on Sunset
supping pints. I toddled off there. Graham has never been the same since.”
The evening set into motion Nash’s departure from Britain and The Hollies: the faultlines, he maintains, were as much between marijuana and beer as they were musical and geographical.
ASH AND HAROLD CLARKE WERE ALMOST forced apart before The Hollies. Nash’s father William spent a year in Manchester’s Strangeways prison for handling stolen goods. On his release, William was tempted to seek a fresh life for his family in Stevenage New Town. “Probably for the best we didn’t go,” notes his son today.
Secure once more in Skinner Street, Salford, Nash Jr began writing songs with his millworker pal, who preferred to go by his middle name, Allan. Their first effort, You’ve Got To Learn How To Twist, was undeniably of its time and the pair serenaded the Manchester coffee bar circuit with their covers-heavy set.
“We were acoustic until this guy Pete Bocking said, ‘You need a guitarist,’” remembers Clarke. “I thought we were doing fine, but Graham said we should make a change. Once Pete played the BeBop-A-Lula guitar part perfectly – I’d never been able to get it – we knew he was right. Then came bass, then drums. Then we broke.”
By the end of 1962 Bocking was gone and the band were The Fourtones, then The Deltas and finally The Hollies, after both Buddy and Christmas. In ’63, things happened with startling speed: the band were spotted at The Cavern by George Martin’s protégé Ron Richards, who’d overseen the first Beatles session for EMI and had judged Pete Best the weak link. Richards managed
The Hollies briefly, but as EMI’s man in the studio would produce the overwhelming bulk of their output until 1980.
Signed to Parlophone, they settled on a stable line-up: Nash’s rhythm guitar; Clarke’s vocals and harmonica; lead guitarist Hicks; drummer Bobby Elliott and bassist Eric Haydock. By the end of the year, they were in the British
Top 10 with a chirpy take on Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs’ Stay. In January 1964, they played it on the first Top Of The Pops.
The Hollies were the perfect storm. Clarke’s vocals were pristine but with a sprinkling of grit. Their harmonies were as tight as their heroes, The Everly Brothers. Hicks had a knack of returning from regular trawls around the music publishers of Denmark Street with potential hits. Richards was canny and versatile and EMI were desperate for The Beatles not to be a one-off.
But songwriting was not among their strengths. Hollies singles came from the pens of George Harrison, Leiber & Stoller, Gerry Goffin and Mort Shuman, and aside from 1964’s UK Number 7, We’re Through, credited to L. Ransford (after Nash’s grandfather L. Ransford Nash) but written by Clarke/Nash/Hicks, Richards restricted them to album filler. As Clarke recalls, “Ron said our songs weren’t A-sides.”
Manchester united: (clockwise from top left) Clarke and Nash in early band The Guyatones; Holliemania as the band arrive at Shoreham Airport, Brighton, April 27, 1964; on Ready Steady Go!, November 1964, with Eric Haydock (second left); seduced by the States – in New York with The Lovin’ Spoonful and, in California, Nash with Cass Elliot, both September 1966; (insets) key singles including the divisive King Midas In Reverse.
Only the most one-eyed Hollies fan would deny that, from the perspective of mid-1966, Richards had a point. Hard Hard Year, on June ’66’s Would You
Believe?, was a promising, Norwegian Wood-type strum with a searing Hicks guitar solo; Fifi The Flea – Nash’s solo showcase from the same album – was whimsical at best. The songs driving their success that year, I Can’t Let Go and Bus Stop (massive hits both sides of the Atlantic) were by Chip ‘Wild Thing’ Taylor and Graham Gouldman respectively. Yet The Hollies could see the writing on the wall. “When we saw The Beatles were writing A- and B-sides, we thought we’d get into that,” chuckles Clarke.
With Richards’ blessing, The Hollies upped their writing game on tour in Sweden that summer. Playing two ‘Folkparks’ a night, travelling in a giant American four-wheel drive with a trailer, Clarke, Nash and Hicks committed songs to a Telefunken tape recorder. Where songwriting had been a sideline, after Sweden, it became central to The Hollies.
The result was December 1966’s For Certain Because… (or Stop!
Stop! Stop! in the US) – the first of three albums in 11 months where, L. Ransford having been let go, every song was credited to Clarke/Nash/Hicks. Its content was rife with clues that The Hollies
were changing (Haydock had been replaced by Bernie Calvert) – notably, the trancelike Stop! Stop! Stop! – but the perky sound and melodic tightness still played to their pop-smart rules. “I brought choruses,” explains Hicks. “Graham would start with verses and Allan would kick in with a middle eight. It wasn’t always that way, but that’s where our loyalties lay.”
UCH, THOUGH, WAS HAPPENING TO THE Hollies that would test those loyalties. Primarily, Nash had fallen in love with the United States Of America. “Absolutely, absolutely,” the 79-year-old enthuses from the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife of two years, artist Amy Grantham. “I saw what the country was, I saw the energy and I saw people who wanted to hear my opinion.”
The others would resist the temptations, but only just.
“In 1967, Neil Young and Stephen Stills came up to me in the Whisky A Go-Go saying they wanted me to listen to Buffalo Springfield Again,” says Nash. “They took me to their seedy hotel, sat me in a wardrobe, blew smoke in it, shut the doors and played it. Afterwards, they opened the doors and asked what I thought. I just said, ‘It’s fucking great man.’”
Evolution, For Certain Because…’s appositely titled follow-up, appeared in June 1967. The cover and the band’s psychedelic clothing were designed by Dutch mischief-makers The Fool, who would later cause havoc at Apple and have an album produced by Nash. Three months later came the single, King Midas In Reverse. Although not on the British version of November’s Butterfly album, it was the key to the future. A UK Number 18, after a run of five Top 10 singles. It was Nash’s baby.
“I loved that song,” he sighs. “It was very personal and The Hollies really liked it. Normally Hollies singles would go into the Top 10, but when King Midas didn’t, they started not to trust my desire to keep moving forwards and to talk about real stuff rather than ‘moon/June/screw me in the back of the car’ songs. King Midas separated us.”
“Graham was on a high,” suggests Clarke. “He was going to change the world with this song, so everything went in. The kitchen sink didn’t make it, but virtually everything else did. Ron wasn’t keen on it being a single and, although Graham was very airy-fairy about which way he wanted to go, we let him have his way. He wanted to do everything on his own. He was always very ambitious. He wanted to be recognised in his own right. I never cared about that.”
“I don’t know what the big thing about Midas is,” shrugs Tony Hicks. “It was a great recording, but it didn’t do as well as previous recordings, so we just pulled back a bit.”
The musical divisions re-surfaced on Butterfly (Dear Eloise/King Midas In Reverse in the US). The songs were again jointly credited, but now mostly separately written. Nash dominated, not least on Butterfly itself, which had orchestra, flute, distorted echo and, lyrically, a “lemonade lake”, but no harmony vocals. Despite Hicks playing George Harrison’s sitar on Maker, the album flopped, as had Nash’s power grab.
Hicks’s “pulling back” meant the next single was Jennifer Eccles. Titled after the then Mrs Nash, Rose Eccles, and the still Mrs Clarke, Jeni Bowstead, it remains the most twee moment in the catalogue. “Me, Graham and our wives were at his flat in Hampstead,” recalls Clarke. “We said, ‘Let’s write a silly song,’ and we wrote Jennifer Eccles. Graham said, ‘I don’t want to do these sort of songs any more.’”
ASH HADN’T QUITE GIVEN UP ON THE HOLLIES. During the writing trip to Morocco which had spawned Butterfly’s Postcard, he had also written Marrakesh Express. The Hollies had a crack at it in April 1968.
“It was unfinished, there are no vocals on it, it sucks,” claims Nash. “When I wrote Marrakesh Express, it needed the power of a fucking train through it, but The Hollies’ version is lifeless, there’s no energy. I felt ver y brought down because the lads weren’t accepting and trusting me any more.”
“Ron Richards turned it down,” claims Clarke. “We thought it wasn’t a song we should be recording, because it was very druggy.”
“Allan was miffed he hadn’t written it,” says Bobby Elliott. “Mind you, I liked it because I’ve always been a steam train anorak.”
“As far as we were concerned, it was not a hit single. Never has been, has it?” chuckles Hicks.
Next came Hollies Sing Dylan, an LP of Bob Dylan compositions. “Graham didn’t like the idea,” sighs Clarke. “He didn’t think we were good enough for those songs.”
In the meantime, Nash had fallen for the old flame of his new friend David Crosby, the up-and-coming Joni Mitchell. That summer, he flew to Mitchell in Los Angeles, where, among other things, he found a more receptive audience for Marrakesh Express.
“I played it to Crosby. He went, ‘Whoah, I know what we can do with this! Wait until Stills hears it!’ After The Hollies, I felt very encouraged that people I admired were telling me these songs were pretty good. They said, ‘Fuck ’em, come over here.’”
By the time The Hollies played London Palladium on December 8, the inevitable was about to happen. David Crosby’s cape