Today, AARP.ORG released an interview with Graham Nash that took place two weeks after his bandmate and fellow music icon David Crosby died at 81 years old. Nash, known for his songwriting, photography, activism and harmonies, is also known for his tumultuous relationship with the late Crosby.
In the stark and revealing interview between Nash and AARP’s Rob Tannenbaum, the former member of the folk-rock supergroup spoke about the weeks before Crosby passed. “The fact is that we were getting a little closer at the end,” Nash admitted. “He had sent me a voicemail saying that he wanted to talk to apologize, and could we set up a time to talk. I emailed him back and said, ‘Okay, call me at eleven o’clock tomorrow your time, which is two o’clock on the East Coast.’ He never called, and then he was gone.”
Tannenbaum wondered if Nash’s bandmate knew he was dying. To which Nash responded, “He was a very intelligent man. I wouldn’t put it past him to know that he was actually at the very end. The truth is, Rob, we’ve been expecting David to pass for 20 years. Since his liver transplant and all his stents. He had seven stents. His body was really failing. But once again, I can only try to remember the good times, because we had many of them.”
From there, the two did just that, saying Crosby had an unbelievable uniqueness about him, that his rhythm guitar on every song was just phenomenal, and he was brilliant.
Despite the anticipation of his passing, Nash called Crosby’s passing ” like an earthquake: You know that you’re in an earthquake, but subsequently, other smaller earthquakes happen afterwards. His death has been like that. It was only two or three days after he passed that I realized that he was actually gone.”
Now that the “earthquake” had passed, Nash’s interviewer pondered his emotional response to others’ deaths. “It’s always been mysterious. We always want to know if there is a heaven or a hell. We all hope that we die peacefully and not in pain. We want all those things. I wish to God that David would have had a better ending. But him being happy at the end made it much better for me to be able to accept.”
Read the full Q&A article between Nash and Tannenbaum here.