One August night in 1968, Graham Nash was smoking hash in a motel room after a gig with The Hollies at an old variety house in Leeds, in the north of England. The acclaimed Merseybeat group that Nash co-founded with Allan Clarke six years earlier was laying down tracks for an album of Bob Dylan covers, but Nash thought they should focus instead on developing their own original material.
The muses were on Nash’s side that night, and he wrote three poignant songs he would eventually record with a new set of bandmates when The Hollies showed little interest in them: “Lady Of The Island,” “Right Between The Eyes” and “Teach Your Children.” Those new bandmates were, of course, David Crosby and Stephen Stills, who enticed the slim, dapper young Englishman to quit The Hollies, join an emerging community of gifted musicians in the hills of Laurel Canyon overlooking Los Angeles, and form a new band.
At a time when defiant slogans like “Don’t trust anyone over 30” were popular among young people who felt betrayed by their elders sending them off to die in Vietnam, “Teach Your Children” sounded a welcome note of reconciliation and compassion. It was instantly embraced as a unifying anthem in a fractious time.
Nash says he was inspired to write the song by seeing a curator’s juxtaposition of two images from Nash’s photo collection at a gallery in Santa Clara. The first was a chilling portrait by photographer Arnold Newman of Alfried Krupp, a wealthy industrialist from the family that built Germany’s monstrous war machine, and insisted on using slave labor from concentration camps in their factories during World War II. Beside it was Diane Arbus’ iconic 1962 photograph of a boy clutching a toy hand grenade, a fanatical leer on his face.
“I began to realize that if we didn’t teach our kids a better way of dealing with our fellow human beings,” Nash recalls, “we were fucked.”