Graham Nash, in a sold-out concert at Vashon Center for the Arts on Saturday, Oct. 1, was one of those “you had to be there” events for those who were lucky enough to attend — a transcendent night of music that amazed, delighted and somehow deeply soothed, all at the same time.
How did Nash, at the unimaginable age of 80, do that? That’s the easy part to explain. The man is a rock and roll legend, and that’s what legends do.
His songs, wrapped up in the ethereal ethos of his musical era, are a kind of heartbeat for the grey-haired demographic that gathered in Kay White Hall on Saturday. Nash’s music, for those of us who are now a certain age, has always just been there.
But his songs, too, have also always been a kind of magic trick for us.
When we were young, “Our House,” and “Teach Your Children Well,” made us imagine how it would feel to be older, to fall in love or have our hearts broken, or even find ourselves raising our own happy little hippie family.
At the same time, groovy songs such as “Marrakesh Express” and the acid anthem, “Cathedral,” pierced the walls of our teenage psyches and took us on hallucinatory trips into what we imagined might be the wild freedom of the years to come.
Maybe this is what we’ll do, and what we’ll feel, maybe next year, or the next, we thought, with a kind of wonder, as the turntable spun or the transistor radio crackled in our childhood bedrooms.
Back then, Nash’s songs aged us — something that felt sublime at the time.
But now? The trick has turned around, and it’s even more fabulous: those very same songs make us remember, quite exactly, what it felt like to be young.
And so, what happened when a bunch of island-bound Boomers came together at Kay White Hall on Saturday, and Graham Nash took the stage?
The years melted away, and we all rocked out, of course.
We weren’t sure it was going to happen, at the start.
Nash was pushed out onto the stage in a wheelchair, and a hush fell over the crowd as he gravely explained he’d taken a serious fall in his home, in New York, just days prior to this West Coast tour. He said he’d had to cancel his first show of the tour, in Tacoma, the night before he came to VCA.
But next? He started to sing, and there it was: his light tenor voice, still elastic, still supple, with the low notes of age somehow giving that remarkable instrument even more power.
Backed by the intricate harmonies of his masterful sidemen, Todd Caldwell, on keyboards, and Shane Fontayne, on guitar, Nash was soon soaring, the pain of his body seemingly erased as he filled the room with a rich, warm and extremely full sound.
His music started healing him, and us, too.
Not only songs spilled forth, but also Nash’s dry and often very funny stories of the high times in which they were written. He spoke casually, conversationally, as if we were all friends gathered at the coolest dinner party ever.
He told us about his relationships with Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, and David Crosby, as well as his mates from the heyday of the British Invasion — Allan Clarke, with whom he founded the Hollies, and The Beatles, whose members he first met in 1959 on a Manchester, England stage, in a battle of bands that Nash actually won on that fabled night — way back when the lads from Liverpool called themselves Johnny and the Moondogs.
And after singing a throbbing rendition of Lennon and McCartney’s masterpiece, “A Day in the Life,” he turned on a dime, launching himself and the audience into the freewheeling, get-up-on-your feet-and-dance joy of Stephen Still’s “Love the One You’re With.”
Nash had us well in the palm of his hand, by then, old age and its infirmities and indignities be damned forever.
Because that too, as it turns out, is a legendary rock and roll thing to do.
Correction: Previous versions of this review in the Oct. 6 Beachcomber print edition and online, contained an incorrect spelling of the surname of guitarist Shane Fontayne, who has long worked with Graham Nash. We regret the error.
