One of the loveliest songs on Ladies of the Canyon is the plaintive “Willy,” about Graham Nash, but by the time the album was released in 1970, the relationship was over. “I had sworn my heart to Graham in a way that I didn’t think was possible for myself and he wanted me to marry him,” Joni later said. “I’d agreed to it and then just started thinking, ‘My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician. She kicked the kitchen door off the hinges.’ And I thought maybe I’m the one that got the gene who has to make it happen . . . As much as I cared for Graham, I thought, ‘I’ll end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges.’ It’s like, ‘I better not.’ And it broke my heart.”
The year was 1969, and she was twenty-six years old. Everything in the world was changing, and young men and women were rewriting, relationship by relationship, the rules of love, lust, marriage, and engagement. Joni took off for Greece and sent a telegram from Crete that said, “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand it will run through your fingers. Love Joan.” For years, she would speak with great tenderness of Graham Nash. She could be maligning her contemporaries left and right, but Nash was a sacred subject. “I loved the man so I can’t say a bad word about him.”
That was before the publication of his 2013 memoir, Wild Tales. In the book, Nash describes sailing with David Crosby on his boat, the Mayan. They set sail on January 23, 1970, months after his breakup with Joni. Nash recalled, “Joni met us just outside of Panama, and that altered the dynamic. I knew she was coming and it was anything but pleasant. Some kind of argument broke out, with Joan yelling that I hated all women. Coming from somewhere else, I would have dismissed such an irrational remark, but from her I had to think about it and it hurt, for sure. In the end it was nothing more than a way to strike out at me. She had come to Panama to have a nice sail with David and me, but things had turned too ugly between us.”
When we met, Joni countered all the important details of Graham’s sailing story: “It was unbelievable what he left out—the drama, the real drama,” Joni recalled in 2015. Because she is Joni, her first quibble is how the story of that boat ride is told. She agrees, the trip was monumental. But she finds Graham’s telling of it to be lacking, “I think these people are not storytellers. They’re sleeping through their lives.” It bothers her that he is clearer about where they kept their stash than on the details of their relationship. She told me, “First of all, he remembers where the dope was hidden: that’s the clue. Just before I got there, the cops raided the boat and they didn’t find the dope. It was hidden in a jar in the refrigerator. He remembers that. He remembers where the dope was hidden. In the meantime, they’re all beating me up for leaving Graham.”
All of a sudden we are there: at the soft spot beneath the steely layers that Joni has become known for. In the rock and roll legend books, theirs is the fairy-tale romance of another era: Joni, the blond, blue-eyed girl who could both bake and play the hell out of a guitar, and Graham, the brown-haired British Prince Charming who wanted nothing more than to live in that little castle on the hill in Laurel Canyon with the girl/musical genius whom he adored. In the telling, Graham is guileless. Why? Because he does more press than Joni and wrote it down in a best-selling memoir. Even after all these years, Graham has never wavered from this narrative, so his version sticks. And there’s even a score to it! “Our House” didn’t just make it onto charts all over the world, it’s become the ultimate paean to domestic bliss, a song to be played at weddings. In other words, Graham’s version feels like truth because we can all hum along to it.
Not surprisingly, this gets under Joni’s skin. Not just because she is competitive and prides herself on being more of a truth-teller than most of the Laurel Canyon crew, but because she loved him. She did not waltz away from the relationship without a second thought. She gave it a second thought, and a third, and by the time I interviewed her, she had thought it through thousands of times. “I was the great love of his life and I broke his heart,” she says, a bit derisively. “Well, my heart was much more broken than his. He just jumped right back into dating, he had one after another after another. And I suffered because I really thought we had a very good relationship, but at a certain point I introduced him to David [Crosby]. Now I had to take Graham and David, and it was as if they were married and he chose David. I chose to leave.”
Joni remembered the sailboat ride as torturous and ill planned. “Graham says I got on ‘somewhere near Panama,’” she scoffed. “There was no ‘somewhere near Panama.’ We sailed from Jamaica to Panama. There’s nowhere in between.”
As Joni remembered it, Crosby and Nash were ill-equipped for the journey: there was no radio, no lifeboat. “David trained Graham, who had never sailed before, but who was a smart dog, as second mate,” Joni told me. “But he doesn’t mention that we hit seas that were completely abnormal, with ten-story swells, in good, sunny weather. And going up ten stories and down ten stories, I got what might have been my first Morgellons attack. I got a full-body rash. Every pore doughnuted up like chicken pox blisters. They wrapped me in a sheet and tied me to the railing because of these swells. And I spent three days throwing up over the side. I hit the shore and just ran, so glad to be on the ground.”
When they arrived in Panama, Joni and Nash started fighting in earnest. Joni told me, “It got ugly. We had just broken up. I hadn’t expected him to be on the boat. David invited me; there were quite a few people on board. I had enjoyed sailing with him, and he’s a good sailor. Not so good that you don’t have lifeboats and a radio when you’re going to make a long sail like that, and then hit abnormalities. It was stupid. You’d think Graham would have the sense to be panicked, because we were in this extraordinary situation, improperly equipped. He says when we landed, it got ugly and I called him a woman hater. I racked my brain and thought, I wouldn’t even call David Crosby a woman hater, and he’s a human hater. He admires my talent, but not to my face. They admire my talent, but socially, it creates problems. They have to attack me. It’s weird.”
Graham has always professed his admiration and affection for Joni, and her reaction to his memoir reveals both her own deep feelings for him and how much she struggles with the notion that she alone is to blame for the breakup of their relationship, that if she’d only been a little less reckless with his heart, the two of them would still be playing piano and buying farm-stand flowers on Lookout Mountain.
Joni told me, hurt written across her face, “Graham says that I called him a woman hater. He said I was promiscuous.”
In Nash’s book he writes that he and Joni went to visit her parents in Saskatoon, and they wouldn’t let the two of them sleep in the same room. “I can’t describe what Joan’s room looked like,” he wrote, “because I wasn’t allowed within twenty feet of it. Bill and Myrtle were a very straight, religious couple, and they weren’t about to let a long-haired hippie sleep with their daughter under their roof . . . It wasn’t like she was a virgin, not even close. But just to make sure, they put me in a downstairs bedroom, separating us by a floor, and made it clear I’d need an army behind me if I intended to sneak up there.”
Joni found the line “not even close” to be deeply wounding.
“Now, does a man say that about the great love of his life?” she asked me. “No, he doesn’t.”
She grew even more heated. “It isn’t even true. In the Summer of Love, I was one of the least promiscuous people around. I got pregnant right out of the chute with my friend. I called for that. Then I made a bad marriage trying to keep my child, then I had an affair with a drummer in New York whose girlfriend was away, and when she came back it was over. Four people! Is that ‘not even close’?”
Looking back on the Summer of Love decades later, Joni said, “Free love—now we know there’s no such thing. Pay later, always.” She was joking, but not really. That sand ran through Graham’s fingers long ago, yet the two old lovers were still telling competing versions of their story. Joni was convinced that it was her pictorial memory—stored up like film, she would say—that would matter in the end. She was right, she knew it, and she knew that he must have known it, too. Their accounts may differ, but the upshot is the same: you really don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.