Graham Nash Sings At Defense Benefit For Political Prisoner Pfc Bradley Manning
Graham Nash Stage
26 October 2012
Standing in line outside the church, the Church-in-Ocean-Park on 2nd and Ashland just off Main Street in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, I meet all kinds of folks waiting to get in. Folks like Eddie and Felicia, and two soldiers, one flower child, a lawyer, a rancher, a farmer, and also, a radical videographer who was there to make sure to document: Graham Nash playing to benefit the Free Bradley Manning movement. (Caint wait to see it Lionel!) This Church-in-Ocean-Park is a local landmark, host to countless activist events (Jerry Peace Activist Rubin used to host his New Year’s parties here; I was lucky to emcee in 2001) and tonight it was packed and sold out at 70 bucks a pop, with some people paying hundreds of dollars more to support the Manning Network.
[From http://www.bradleymanning.org PFC Bradley Manning, a 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst, is accused of releasing the Collateral Murder video, that shows the killing of unarmed civilians and two Reuters journalists, by a US Apache helicopter crew in Iraq. He is also accused of sharing documents and a series of embarrassing US diplomatic cables published by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.]
Campaign Organizer Emma Cape welcomed us as Graham Nash stood down to the side of the stage with his three-man band, watching intently. Emma brought everyone up to date and then brought up a poet Mary ____ (NAME TK) who, disguising her anti-war words as nature poems, occupied and burned through them with brilliance, ending one with the couplet
There are no unwounded soldiers
There are no unwounded soldiers
Then came Anthony ___(NAME TK) from another support operation, Veterans For Peace. “Where’s the outrage” he asked us. “A young man decided to do what was right, he speaks up and does the right thing, and he’s in jail for it.”
After teaching us the term C.Y.A., a military concept that means covering your ass, Emma thanked him and said: “And now for the performer you’ve all been waiting for…Graham Nash!”
Well Graham was, in a word, Transplendent. (Yes, that is a word stolen from “Annie Hall,” that scene where Woody Allen is in bed with skinning sitting up Shelly Duvall, she’s playing a Rolling Stone reporter going on about seeing the Stones.) At first blush, the audience was excited, yet completely still and unabashedly in awe of Graham, who said this was his 85th show of a tour (sans Crosby & Stills here, but with James Raymond and Shane Fontaine, two excellent musicians) [CORRECT NAMES OF BOTH OF THEM, TK]. White-haired and more angled and buff than spry (he turned 70 this year) the singer joked for a moment about getting to play for the first time at this intimate venue, “in my neighborhood,” adding, “It’s been 40 years since I’ve plugged in my own guitar…it’s going to be an interesting ride.”
And then he took off, attacking the guitar and piano. Here was the outrage. We tried to follow as close as we could, balancing our love and rage at the outrageous situation our government put 24 year-old PFC Bradley Manning in.
For Manning, Graham wrote “Almost Gone” about Manning’s 9-months in solitary confinement. He also played “Back Home” which he wrote about Levon Helm.
“We’re losing friends,” Graham said matter-of-factly, adding with that British sense of urrrr-gency, “by the day.”
Banging away at the keyboards, he took us back to his earliest solo LP days of “Songs For Beginners” in 1971:
“I am a simple man
And I play a simple tune
Never been so much in love and never hurt so bad
At the same time”
Which brought my date and me up to date, dissolving into tears and hugs. While four folks in front of us held up phones to capture the moments passing, we looked at each other after smiling and said: “We just had a moment, didn’t we?”
(Our previous moments related to that song, well that’s a whole ‘nother story: a friendship and love affair in Minneapolis when it seemed music was part of the revolution and so were we…)
After Graham did a song he wrote for The Bridge School concerts Neil Young puts on in Berkeley called, “Try And Find Me,” I lost it next during his next number, “about a nine week sailing trip from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco with David [Crosby].” Somewhere off Costa Rica, they saw a blue whale and out of that trip came, “To the Last Whale: Critical Mass/Wind On The Water”
“Over the years you swam the ocean
Following feelings of your own
Now you are washed up on the shoreline…
It’s a shame you have to die
To put the shadow on our eye.”
Melody combined with under watery whale howlings coming out of Fontaine’s guitar crashes into lyrics which tell of time’s passing, like a forest. And/or time is the forest and we passage through it
“Maybe we’ll go
maybe we’ll disappear
It’s not that we don’t know
it’s just that we don’t wanna care
Under the bridges, over the foam
Wind on the water carry me home…”
In 1969, Graham got a call from the great Wavy Gravy to come to Chicago for a benefit in defense of The Chicago 8, on trial at the time. Nash & Crosby called Stills & Young to join them. “Please come to Chicago,” begged Nash before Steven and Neil begged off, “just to sing.”
He tells the Church-in-Ocean-Park audience that he wrote this for the two musicians:
“So your brother’s bound and gagged, and they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago, just to sing…
We can change the world
Rearrange the world
It’s dying
To get better…”
He spoke about Bradley in between songs, continuing an attack on his imprisonment, reiterating how, “our government, in its insanity, has been torturing him!”
“Aren’t we a nation of laws?” he cried.
Song for Bradley Manning: “Almost Gone”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
After performing the song, Nash’s exhortation to us was this: “This kid faces life in prison, plus a hundred-and-fifty years, while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are all walking free! I don’t think we’ll be a really great country ’til we deal with this shit.”
I heard “Almost Gone” as an aching indictment, a bark to attention America! (Well, as much as Graham Nash can bark: More bite than bark always, the words are conveyed in a voice still from the starry heavens somewhere, if not even more so wonderful and filled with lightness and warmth. A man-in-harmony forever with other comerados, we could see up close his tanned neck vibrate with effort. Compared to the YouTubes of C&N on BBC TV (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
“Hey I’m not getting old, I’m just getting going!”
“America Come Home”, a special song written and sung by a friend of Nash’s (NAME TK) _____Rafael got us all caught up in the hardcore folk chorus of its Dylan-inspired warble. It reminded me also of George McGovern who’d just passed. His famous convention speech had the theme, cry and refrain, “Come Home, America.”
Walking home later, we Americans gabbed and giggled about how great it was to finally get to see this one-time Blackpooler (remember “Immigration Man”? Ahead of its time; checkitout – link below), so up close to his personable and revealing talkings and singings to us.
Was CSNY as big as I remember? As big as I loved them? Or was there a lot of snickering going on? Who cares, tonight love is in the air and we are fourth row from the stage listening to Graham Nash singing for justice for our fellow Manning, right?
Bradley Manning Banner
P.S.
No, Nash did not play “Military Madness” – much to my shock among all his awesomeness, but here’s a recent version sung with David Crosby
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Solo at a 1990 peace rally in Los Angeles with same song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Nash and Crosby, “To The Last Whale” live in 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Nash and Crosby in Holland with “Immigration Man”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
