"There's no heart there. David was the centre of it all... he was the heart of this band”: Graham Nash reveals why he’ll never play with Stills and Young again
“It just would be a much colder scene,” he says
It sounds unlikely that Graham Nash will ever again share a stage with his surviving CSNY colleagues Stephen Still and Neil Young. In a new interview with Rolling Stone he said that without David Crosby, he doesn’t really see the point.
"I don’t think that me and Stephen Stills and Neil Young will ever play together again," he told the magazine. "There's no heart there. David was the centre of it all, as crazy as he was. And my God, he was crazy. But he was the heart of this band. And that's why I think that if Stephen and Neil and I ever played together, people would be missing Crosby. We would be missing Crosby. It just would be a much colder scene."
Nash and Crosby’s relationship has had its ups and downs but the Salford-raised musician was in regular contact with his old colleague right up to Crosby’s death in January last year.
"I really miss him," Nash said. "I miss him more every day because life is choices, and I only choose to remember the good times that David and I had, the good music that we made together. When I try and think about the bad things that happened, I don't want to do that. I made the choice to only remember the good stuff."
The last time the four members of the group all performed together was in December 2015. In the time since Crosby’s passing, Stephen Still and Neil Young have shared a stage together. Most recently they played a few weeks ago at Young’s Harvest Moon charity festival in Lake Hughes, California.
Before that in 2023, Stills and Young In 2023, Stills and Young played together at the Light Up the Blues charity show alongside Crosby's son, James Raymond. At that time, Stills noted that Raymond has a "singing voice (that) sounds so much like David that it's scary."
Even if they’re unlikely to play live again, there is still CSNY activity afoot. This week they release Live At Fillmore East, 1969 which was recorded at one of their first gigs after Young joined the group that summer. And as befitting the time it was recorded it’s coming out using solely analogue equipment. “There’s not one digital piece of machinery working in the making of the record,” Neil Young has proudly stated. “The vinyl comes out is just like a vinyl would have been in 1969.”
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Will Simpson is a freelance music expert whose work has appeared in Classic Rock, Classic Pop, Guitarist and Total Guitar magazine. He is the author of 'Freedom Through Football: Inside Britain's Most Intrepid Sports Club' and his second book 'An American Cricket Odyssey' is due out in 2025
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