HEAR! HEAR! THE HOLLIES 20 YEARS ON: Unfinished Business

HEAR! HEAR! THE HOLLIES 20 YEARS ON: Unfinished Business

FEATURES

Jeff Nesin

“I don’t know what to say about the whole 20 years. After the first year, after the first record, people would say, ‘Well you’re doing fine now, but how long do you think it’s gonna last?’ People are still asking me that and every tomorrow is a bonus as far as I’m concerned. We started off doing a hobby and getting paid for it, which is incredible. We’re very lucky guys! It’s luck and fate. We’ve been lucky so many bloody times and we seem to just get luckier.”

The thankful, modest speaker is Bobby Elliott, drummer on nearly 30 hits over two decades. Sitting with him in a comfortable

New York hotel suite are his exuberant Manchester mates Allan Clarke, Graham “Willie” Nash and Tony Hicks—the reunited, original Hollies (minus bass players Eric Haydock and Bernie Calvert). They pace, jump about, gesticulate vividly and interrupt each other with abandon. They are—very clearly—happy to be together again, happy to have recorded together again and proud of the fruit of those labors, What Goes Around..., happy to be going on the road together again. Happy.

Clarke ^ the strong but endlessly flexible lead voice of many hits that, even this morning, people around the world are singing to themselves as they walk to work, is particularly ecstatic. Though he needn’t yield to anyone as an international pop star, he obviously loves the Hollies—the idea, the sound, the people—more than himself. He tells me privately, “It’s been 15 years, you know. I think, subconsciously, I’ve been waiting for it.. .deep in my heart, waiting for it to happen and it has.”

What Allan has been secretly waiting for, of course, is the return, after 15 years of global conquest in the company of Messrs. Crosby & Stills, of wild Willie Nash. Though he is certainly the commercial focus, the sine qua non for record company and media attention (the Hollies hadn’t had an American record deal until they lured Graham back into Abbey Road), he is just as elated by present company and prospects as any of them. Amiable arid enthusiastic, Nash teased, reminisced j theorized and speculated with his homeboys as if he’d never left.

Tony Hicks, guitarist and unheralded third voice in the Hollies legendary three-part harmony (which spawned the much more richly rewarded CS&N three-part harmony) sat quietly for the most part, still baby-faced after all these years. Perhaps he was all talked out or perhaps he thought it demeaning to make too big a deal over the reappearance of the prodigal Pacific son. After all, they hadn’t sat around weeping for 15 years. “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” “Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress),” and “The Air That I Breathe” (a beautiful song that, alas, made the world safe for Air Supply), were all mammoth hits, after all. Still, things had been rather quiet of late, and MOR standards don’t generate the same kind of electricity—in band and audience—as the 19 singles sandwiched betweeen 1963 and ’68, before Willie split for the coast.

If the R&B remakes of “Stay” and Doris Troy’s timeless “Just One Look” (updated once again on What Goes Around...) were before your time and the curiously refreshing “Carrie-Arine” and “Jennifer Eccles” were too impenetrably British for you, still you have to be THRILLED by the trebly brilliance and vocal peaks of “I’m Alive” and the incomparable “Look Through Any Window,” and consider yourself at least reasonably blessed to hear such unlikely radio fare as “Bus Stop” (pronounced boos), the goofy “Stop, Stop, Stop,” or the uniquely modal “Oh A Carousel” and “Pay You Back With Interest.” And then there is “I Can’t Let Go” (a million times better than Ronstadt’s ’70s version) a track that never fails to take my breath away, one of the most adenoidally perfect records of all time. What, I needed to know, was that extraordinarily high ringing tone in the choruses? Allan grinned and said, “Paul McCartney thought it was a trumpet.” Graham laughed and slapped his chest. “That was me— that was Willie’s voice up there.” Surely it must be a tape loop, though. Allan shook his head. “Of course not. I simply slipped in behind him and...” Clarke mimicked grabbing Nash’s crotch.

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Actually, a tape loop was only something you stuck a picture to the wall with in the early Hollies years. Bobby Elliott, the band’s historian, explains via anecdote. “In 1963 we toured Scotland and Graham and I found an old record called ‘Stay’ in a junk shop—obviously the Maurice Williams original. We had one more gig so we set up in the afternoon to do the soundcheck and we rehearsed ‘Stay’ for the first time—we just ran it through. As the support band was setting up I noticed this guy playing harmonica with a bouffant hairstyle, a very mod hairstyle for those days. It was Rod Stewart with a band called Jimmy Powell’s Dimensions. ’

“Anyway, when we returned to London we wanted to record ‘Stay’ the way we’d rehearsed it, but we had trouble with the engineer. I wanted to penetrate the harmonies with the bass drum and I said, ‘Would it be possible to have a microphone on the bass drum, please?’ And he, being a very BBC type, said ‘We don’t do that sort of thing here at EMI. We find that one microphone for the drums is perfectly adequate.’ ” If this sounds like A Hard Day’s Night to you, too, you’re not alone.

“At break time we popped out to the pub and I started plying the engineer with whiskies and saying ‘Please couldn’t you try a bass drum mike. It’s very important.’ After the third whisky he agreed to stick an oddmike on the bass drum. I remember I threw my granny’s curtains around it to deaden it and get the right sound for the mike. That engineer’s still at EMI. He’s probably 60-odd now, though we thought he was very old in those days. I think he’s been promoted upstairs to the tape library or something. In those days it was a case of ‘Oh, you can’t do that’ or ‘We don’t do that’ or ‘We don’t work like that here,’ so it took awhile to get any forward movement.”

This peek into the dusty past was punctuated by guffaws throughout until Graham, unable to restrain himself, broke in. “For the first four years we were making records— and we had a lot of hits in that time—we believed that the ‘echo machine’ turned off automatically at 10 each evening. That was the way they hurried us along.” “And of course there’s no such bloody thing as an echo machine,” Bobby concluded, grinning at naivete recollected. “It was just that the pubs closed at 10:30 and they all wanted to duck round the corner for last call.”

Allan and Graham are the original “original mates,” first meeting at the tender age of five-and-a-half. “I was transferred into his class at school,” Clarke remembers, “and he was the only kid who’d let me sit next to him. I was moving from another school district and there he was with his hand up. I thought, ‘This kid’s got to be queer.’ ” By nine they were performing together on a regular basis. Having quite literdlly grown up together gives their voices an indelible harmonic affinity that is as wonderful as it is long-lived. This served them well in the long interludes during the recording of What Goes Around...Graham says that, as the rest of the band members were working out songs in London “all they really had to do was play tapes over the phone to me in Hawaii. I knew that if Allan could sing it, I could sing it.” “That’s right,” Clarke beams, “any note that 1 can hit, he can get above it.”

When it came, the break—as in any longstanding relationship—was tough on all parties, and it’s taken them many years to fully understand what happened and accept it as history. As Allan tells the tale, “I knew the Buffalo Springfield before Graham did, but it was Mama Cass that actually introduced Graham to them. They came to the Whisky to see us when we did our show in Los Angeles. Everyone in L.A. was there to see the Hollies ’cos we’d never performed on the West Coast. David Crosby and Stephen Stills were there with Mama Cass and she took Graham aside, introduced him to Stephen and Crosby and that was it.. .he was gone. I suppose that was the start of Graham’s departure.”

But Nash’s “departure” was not simply from the Hollies. “I severed all my ties. I left my wife, my house, my family...” “He left his bank manager, he left everything,” Clarke continues. “He was on a different plane. When he got to the West Coast, he loved it. He loved the freedom.” Nash: “When I first hit New York I was astonished. When you were hungry you could actually get food to eat anytime, day or night. Clarke: “Graham was very impressed with the American way of life and that was probably the start of him becoming an American citizen.

“He was enjoying himself with the Hollies at that time. But when we returned home to carry on working, he longed to be back in Los Angeles. Ob' .uusly, deep down in his heart, he wanted to work with Crosby and Stills. And we were rejecting the stuff that he was writing—most of it was pretty out there for us. I mean we weren’t used to singing song like ‘Marrakesh Express.’ You know, ‘Blowing smoke rings from the corners of my mind,’ and all that. So he got a bit disillusioned and he took his songs to people who recognized them for what they were and said, ‘Yeah, let’s put this together as Crosby, Stills & Nash.’ Which is exactly what he did.” The rest is, indeed, history.

After all those years as separate entities the musical reunion, when it occured, was, as Allan saw it, “magical.” “The real magic was when Graham came down to Abbey Road this time round and, for a laugh, we sang around one mike and it came out on tape as just a perfect blend. We knew that we hadn’t lost it, the way we used to do it years and years ago...the magic way...like doing it live.” Willie expounded further, “When 1 sing my breath, the air I expel, pushes towards the mike and hits the stream of air from Allan’s mouth and the air from Tony’s mouth and that all vibrates together at that moment in one microphone and goes right down onto the tape.” Everyone in the room smiles.

Allan continues the story. “He came to the studio and it turned out great and we thought, ‘Why don’t we use it on the album with Graham as special guest.’ And then we moved to ‘Why don’t we do some more and see what it sounds like’ and then to ‘Well, why don’t we make an album.’ Nobody has pushed anybody for anything on What Goes Around...It’s been complete enjoyment from start to finish. And now we’re even going to tour! Things are just getting better and better. I can’t wait to get on the road over here. We’ve been away too long. As Graham says, there’s a lot of unfinished business here in America that we want to finish. This is really a dream that’s coming true for me.”