Gunnar and Matthew Nelson on their new Greatest Hits (And Near Misses) album
Multi-platinum band Nelson, twins Gunnar and Matthew Nelson, sons of Ricky Nelson, talk to Yahoo Entertainment's Lyndsey Parker about their comprehensive compilation Greatest Hits (And Near Misses) album and the death of their famous father.
Video Transcript
LYNDSEY PARKER: I'm real excited to speak with you guys because you have this long-overdue, long in the making greatest hits album. You call it "Greatest Hits and Near Misses." You've been doing this for 30 years. You have a vast catalog. But the average, casual fan, of course, knows you from the first album, maybe the first two albums.
GUNNAR NELSON: This is the whole journey. If you've ever wondered what you were missing because you didn't see past Milli Vanilli, you need to listen to this.
MATTHEW NELSON: Everybody put us in this category years later of the hair metal thing. But the fact was, none of those bands liked us. None of those bands would take us on tour. Gunnar and I kind of came up in the Laurel Canyon sound era in the late '60s, early '70s.
So you heard that music. It was like more like a folky, dare I say, country-rock kind of thing in there with the heavy guitar.
GUNNAR NELSON: I think what you got with Nelson, with the sound that eventually became Nelson, was the influences familiar with our dad's Stone Canyon Band being around and also growing up with our dad putting the Stone Canyon Band together in our house. And you had people like everyone from Dylan to Linda Ronstadt to the Byrds and Jackson Brown stopping by the house all the time.
I don't blame anybody back in the day because our image was designed to promote a response. It wasn't a record company fabrication. Everything that was done, Matthew and I did. We wrote all the songs, produced all the records, put the look together.
MATTHEW NELSON: And frankly, our dad had just died. And we were gut-shot. We had to kind of find ourselves, which we did.
Spent some time overseas, which is where the look came from. Our whole thing was, love us or hate us, you're going to know who we are. And that worked.
GUNNAR NELSON: We had to work extra hard because we were legacies. I think the perception of us being trust fund kids and things being easy kind of sucks. I mean, but we never really focused on all that. We just wanted to deliver some great music to people that they got off on.
The critics, those were the only people that we're mentioning the fact that we were progeny and our dad was Ricky and our grandparents were Ozzie and Harriet. We sold 7 million records to a bunch of kids who had no idea who Ricky Nelson was.
MATTHEW NELSON: People that we came into money. We were like the poor kids in the rich neighborhood. Our dad died. And unfortunately, the truth was he was over $4 million in debt. And we spent years paying that back.
So everybody has their own story. It's just, I think we're proof in the pudding that you can't always just judge it on the cover. Our parents, they had a horrible Hollywood divorce. And our mom liked vodka. Our mother made it very difficult for us to play music. She said we always reminded her of him. And the business was horrible, and it was going to take you down.
GUNNAR NELSON: And I found out she was a narcissist. So she blamed our father's being a musician and being gone all the time for the demise of their marriage because she couldn't accept her own responsibility in that.
LYNDSEY PARKER: I'm sorry that your mother and her side of the family wasn't supportive initially. But when you had the massive success that you would have a few years later, that you'd have in 1990, did they changed their tune at all or say, hey, we're sorry we doubted you?
GUNNAR NELSON: No.
MATTHEW NELSON: No, not really.
GUNNAR NELSON: We were always thinking that maybe one day we were going to get that, you boys done good, great job.
We were on our way to play the Universal Amphitheater, which was a big deal for us. That was the last place we saw our father perform. It was an 8,000-seat venue. And the office called us and let us know that they'd been contacted by our mom who wanted tickets to the show. And we were really excited about that.
So we sent a limo for her and the best seats in the house. We knew exactly where they were. And we could see them from the stage and stuff. And she actually didn't show up. She gave the tickets to her housekeeper.
Boy, we could do an entire interview on that. Narcissism is just this rabbit hole we could go down forever. But it's taken us kind of a lifetime to kind of wrap our brains around the fact that--
MATTHEW NELSON: It wasn't us, and you can't cure it.
GUNNAR NELSON: Yeah. And so like our dad said in his song "Garden Party," you can't please everyone. So you got to please yourself. And I think there are a lot of kids who spend way too much time trying to get that approval that they'll never get. But it's not their fault, and it's not their problem. It's just the person they're trying to get approval from is broken.
LYNDSEY PARKER: One, I'm sorry you guys went through that. But I'm pleased to hear that you made peace with it, came to terms with it, have seemed to be very grounded and have an understanding about it, like what you just said.
MATTHEW NELSON: I mean, I guess if you look at it this way too-- we talk about this a lot. If we didn't have our mother the way that she was, if we didn't lose our father when we were 18 in a plane crash so we were supposed to be on, all this stuff--
GUNNAR NELSON: If the press didn't tell the world that our dad had died in a plane crash before they called us, we wouldn't be the same guys.
LYNDSEY PARKER: I'm going to try to ask this delicately. But since you brought it up. I was unaware that you were supposed to be on that plane.
GUNNAR NELSON: We had never flown on the plane before. So the topic came up about New Year's Eve, he was going to be doing a show in Dallas. And he said, hey, why don't you guys meet me in Alabama the day before New Year's? We'll hang out there. And then you can fly on the plane for the first time. And then we can spend New Years together in Dallas.
And it was a bizarre thing. I know it sounds crazy. But we were supposed to leave. And we got a phone call from our dad. And he sounded strange, not the way he normally sounded. And he said, you know, boys, I was just thinking. I want you guys to fly to Dallas directly commercial and meet me there. And we're like, well, pop, the whole reason for us to go on this trip was to fly on the plane with you and the band.
And he said, no, I'm adamant about that.
MATTHEW NELSON: Gunnar and I just basically talked about it. And he said, that kind of blows the point. We'll just stay here.
I found out about the accident on the radio. I was listening to the car radio, and his songs came on. And at the end of the third song, I was like, wow, I don't know why they're playing his music on a rock station. It was awesome. And I pulled over, thank God. And the DJ came on after a long pause on that last note of "Garden Party" and said that it has been a tribute to Rick Nelson, who was killed with his band.
I was with somebody at the time. And they looked at me and said, it can't be true. And I apparently got out of the car and passed out. So I don't remember anything from-- it was just too much.
Gunnar found out about it on the television five minutes after I did. So that whole thing we're going to take the time to notify the family, that didn't happen with us because that comes with being a family like ours. So I'm pretty pissed off about it.
GUNNAR NELSON: Also, to add insult to injury, some idiot at "The Washington Post" made up a story, completely made up that Rick Nelson was freebasing on a plane, and the plane burned up. 100% untrue, 100% a lie.
Not only are we dealing with the loss of our best friend, who we were living with at the time, and the entire band who was our surrogate family, we are now meeting press at our gate of our house going, what do you think about your father's death due to whatever.
MATTHEW NELSON: And it was two weeks to the lead-out story in the national press. And it was absolutely, 100% false. But I believe that was the beginning of an era with the press where humanity didn't matter anymore.
And I think that's one thing that really inspired Gunnar. And we still stay after shows and shake hands with, for the last 30 years, everybody that'll stay. Sometimes it lasts two to three times longer than our show. And we play for an hour and a half, because we remember those things. The fact is, all of this stuff was stuff that made us who we are. We just wouldn't have had the drive that we had, had we had the life everybody thought we had. That's the irony.
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