Graham Nash names the 1960s musicians who will last 100 years

Although Graham Nash may count himself lucky to have a few iconic songs under his belt, he knew that the true heavy hitters of his genre would last far longer than he ever could.

When looking at the beginnings of rock and roll, though, it was clear that the genre was nothing more than a passing fancy half the time. Little Richard and Chuck Berry may have been fun for their time, but it wasn’t until people started taking their model and twisting it in new directions that they saw what the genre could really do. And when talking about the titans of rock, there are no two more synonymous with the genre than John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards might have had a longer track record with The Rolling Stones, what ‘The Nerk Twins’ made in The Beatles could easily be placed beside works by Bach or Beethoven in terms of musical sophistication. Every artist would give their left arm to say that they made something a tenth as good as a Beatles classic, but even the Fab Four knew that there was more to offer in the rock sphere.

Their material was still silly love songs in many respects, and by the time Bob Dylan graced everyone’s speakers, even The Beatles had to take notice. Dylan was making people think in a completely different way, and while Nash got to absorb the Fab Four firsthand, Dylan helped make people get out of their funk and start listening to the real problems going on in the world on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. The only problem was that there was no real sophistication behind it.

Dylan was great, but he was still playing the same cowboy chords from the era of folk music, and Joni Mitchell might as well have turned the entire songwriting format on its head. She adopted rock and roll as her medium, but her career was defined by different artistic detours, whether that was using suspended chords throughout her music or collaborating with jazz artists to introduce different kinds of harmony to the pop song format.

That’s arguably what makes Mitchell’s place in Nash’s quartet so interesting. Lennon, McCartney and Dylan tend to dominate any discussion about songwriting in the second half of the 20th century, but Mitchell often approached composition from an entirely different angle. While many of her contemporaries were refining the language of rock and folk, she was busy inventing her own, using unusual tunings and harmonic ideas that sounded miles removed from the conventions of commercial radio.

Nash already had a certain fondness for Mitchell’s music, but he knew that all four of those songwriters had written music that defied generation, saying, “I think that in a hundred years’ time if anyone’s looking back at these ’60s that didn’t finish until ’74 when Nixon fucking got out of here, I think the only people they’re going to remember are Bob and John and Paul and Joni.” And yet that barely covers the main list of pop music’s greatest artists.

What Nash was really talking about wasn’t popularity but permanence. Plenty of artists have sold millions of records, packed stadiums and dominated headlines, only to fade from the cultural conversation a generation later. The figures he identified all changed the way songs could be written. Whether it was The Beatles expanding the possibilities of pop, Dylan dragging lyricism into new territory or Mitchell redefining musical structure, their influence runs far deeper than sales figures or chart positions.

Every name that Nash listed was wildly innovative for their time, but in terms of an all-around musician, it’s hard to quantify what Stevie Wonder gave to the format as well, especially with an album that was as musically sophisticated as Songs in the Key of Life. And while other writers may have taken up the mantle that Dylan started with like Bruce Springsteen, it’s hard to think of someone who turned the world of popular music on its head quite like David Bowie did.

So while Nash knows about the staying power of rock and rollers, we’re barely scratching the surface with Lennon, McCartney, Dylan, and Mitchell. It’s a great start, but when the Almighty Book of Rock eventually gets made, people will be shouting the same praises for everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Patti Smith to Lou Reed to Kurt Cobain.

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