Photos by Lizanne Webb [facebook.com/LizanneWebb]

Also shocked he doesn’t play “Military Madness”.

Dear Bradley,

Standing in line outside the church 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 into your defense benefit last Friday night. Folk like Eddie and Felicia and a couple of ex-soldiers, one flower child, a lawyer, a rancher, a farmer, and also, a radical videographer there to make sure to document: Graham Nash playing to benefit the movement. This Church-in-Ocean-Park is a local joint known for hosting countless activist events (Jerry Peace Activist Rubin–yes, his full name–used to host huge New Year’s parties here) and tonight its packed and sold out at 70 bucks a pop, with some people paying hundreds of dollars more to support the Network.

Campaign Organizer Emma Cape welcomes us. Graham stands down to the side of the stage in black shirt and pants, his three-man band watching intently. Emma brings everyone up to date and then brings up poet Mary who, disguising her anti-war words as nature poems, occupies and burns through them with brilliance, ending one with

There are no unwounded soldiers
There are no unwounded soldiers

Then we hear from Anthony from a big support operation, Veterans For Peace. “Where’s the outrage” he asks 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 thanks him and says: “And now for the performer you’ve all been waiting for…Graham Nash!”

Graham is in a word, Transplendent. (A word stolen from “Annie Hall,” a scene where Woody Allen is in bed with skinny Shelly Duvall, she’s playing a Rolling Stone reporter going on about seeing the Stones.) Graham says this was his 85th show of a tour (sans Crosby & Stills here, but with James Raymond and Shane Fontayne, two excellent musicians). White-haired and more angled buff-like than spry (he turned 70 this year) the former Hollie, CSNY-er jokes 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 takes off, attacking the guitar and piano. Here is his outrage. We try to follow as close as we can balancing our love and rage at the outrageous situation our government put 24 you in.

Graham sings “Almost Gone” about the 9-months in solitary confinement. He also plays “Back Home,” a number he wrote about Levon Helm:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Mz3jJmxHE

“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 sings us back to his earliest solo lp days of “Songs For Beginners,” 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…)

Graham performs a song he wrote for The Bridge School concerts Neil Young puts on in Berkeley called, “Try And Find Me.” Then I lose it during his next number which he says was “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 underwatery whale howlings coming out of Fontaine’s guitar crash into lyrics which tell of time’s passing, like a forest. 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…”

Next, Graham tells us a story from 1969: he 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.”

So he wrote this for them:

“So yer 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…”

In between songs, he continues to attack the imprisonment, reiterating how, “our government, in its insanity, has been torturing him!”

“Aren’t we a nation of laws?” he cries.

“Almost Gone,” is Nash’s take on your time in solitary confinement, 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 moreso 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 YouTubes of C&N on BBC TV – you get a sense of terrifically ageless wisdom.

I don’t know from “old souls” but Graham seems to not be very old at all, voice-wise. Perhaps there is a correlation between talent + energy given out equals good to go insides-wise?

(“Hey I’m not getting old, I’m just getting going!”)

Graham’s final exhortation to us is 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.”

“America Come Home”, a special song written and sung by a friend of Nash’s. 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 back about how great it was to finally get to see this one-time Blackpooler (remember his “Immigration Man”? Way ahead of its time, check it out), 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?

No, Graham did not play “MILITARY MADNESS” at the Bradley benefit. I wish I had had a chance to ask him why…

www.hankrosenfeld.com