No, it wasn’t a huge gathering of 100,000 people on the Plains of Abraham or a pop fiesta in a packed Videotron Center. The Palais Montcalm was still the scene of something that looked like a great historic moment on Tuesday evening.
At the age of 82, the legendary Graham Nash appeared on a stage in Quebec for the first time in his life.
In his luggage? Nothing less than a collection of classics from the different incarnations of the legendary Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Young) as well as a few nuggets from his solo repertoire, most taken from his album Songs For Beginnerspublished at the heart of its prosperous period, in 1971.
Unless some old rock maniac provides us with proof to the contrary, this was the first time we heard monuments of the folk-rock repertoire of the 1970s such as Teach Your Children, Immigration Man or Our House in Quebec.
Anecdotes
Graham Nash didn’t mess around with the puck. Completely ignoring the songs from his most recent and yet more than worthy album, Nowpublished in 2023, he kicked off the evening by donning Wasted on the Way, Marrakesh Express et Military Madness.
Then the history class started. In front of an audience of connoisseurs eager for both his songs and his anecdotes, Nash dedicated Joni Mitchell I Used To Be a Kingsong written after their breakup.
For music history buffs, listening to the British artist present each of his songs was a delight. Southbound Trainfor example, served as a reminder of that time his late sidekick David Crosby invited a friend to their New York penthouse. The friend in question? Bob Dylan.
The memory of another legend, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, was evoked when Graham Nash recounted how he helped record Teach Your Children.
Public enthousiaste
Despite the weight of the years, vocally, it held up and, in terms of execution, Graham Nash could count on a band of musicians of high caliber, made up of multi-instrumentalists Zach Djanikian, Adam Minkoff and Todd Caldwell.
Their contribution was particularly remarkable during tracks where the guitars dominated such asImmigration Man et Love The One You’re With or during the invigorating introduction of Find The Cost of Freedom.
Time and again, audience members happily provided backing vocals for Graham Nash or called out to him between songs. “I want to smoke what he smokes,” the star even joked after a comment that we didn’t really understand from an enthusiastic admirer.
Denounce
Graham Nash is also a standard-bearer of the counterculture who does not hesitate to denounce the powerful or show his political colors. He did not deprive himself of it in Quebec.
Fiercely anti-Trump, he confided his happiness at having seen Joe Biden pass the torch to Kamala Harris.
The evening ended with an energetic Ohioan important protest song that Neil Young composed in response to the policies of Richard Nixon. Half a century later, this was possibly the highlight of this admirable concert that Graham Nash gave us.
