Music legend Graham Nash visits Sunset Center in Carmel, keeps momentum.

Graham Nash was anxious about how his longtime cohort and musical collaborator David Crosby would react after reading about himself in Nash’s new widely touted memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life.

“He’s my friend,” Nash says. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

But that took a second seat to a greater loyalty: the truth.

“I wasn’t pulling any punches,” he says. “I couldn’t lie. It’s what happened and people have to accept it for what it is.”

The unpleasant details surrounding Crosby’s notoriously prolific run as a drug addict are all laid out in black and white. But Nash thinks that helps make it an authentic industry observation.

“I don’t think any true rock-and-roll memoir – though I’m not sure about Annette Funicello or Pat Boone – would lack in [sex and drugs] and everybody knows it,” Nash says. “It would be very interesting to know how much better the music would be if we had been straight.”

The 71-year-old grandfather even acknowledges his own culpability – he admits he didn’t try to stop his friend from doing drugs because he feared it would be detrimental to the songwriting.

“I felt at many points that I was enabling [Crosby],” Nash says. “The more music I demanded of him, as his partner and his friend, the more money he made and that meant more drugs. It was an incredible downward spiral of me trying to protect my friend, trying to keep his life in some kind of order and watching it go out of control.”

After reading a draft of the book, Crosby gave his buddy a thumbs up.

Nash, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee – as a member of The Hollies and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – had his own surprising reaction to the book.

“When I first looked at the manuscript I said to myself, ‘Wow, I wish I were him,’” he says. “I’m an incredibly lucky person and I’ve been an incredibly happy citizen of the [U.S.] for 30-odd years. I get to speak my mind in this country. Writing the book was cathartic, but now I can get on with the rest of my life.”

Nash’s memoir begins, “It always comes down to the music.” For now the rest of his life certainly seems to, as he gets back to the music, full-time: This year, he reunited with David, Stephen and Neil for a couple performances at Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View and a show at the legendary Royal Albert Hall in the U.K. These days, the quartet’s vibe echoes with selflessness and age-induced wisdom, which is noticeably different from the way it was onstage 45 years ago, when fragile egos were as abundant as that cocaine locked in a special safebox on the tour bus so police searches couldn’t uncover it.

“I think we’re all now concentrating on our strengths rather than our weaknesses,” Nash explains. “We need to give back as people because we’ve been given so much in our lives.”

That includes eight Bridge School benefits that have reuinited the foursome to unleash their famously lush harmonies.

“Neil and his wife Pegi work so incredible hard on those,” Nash says. “And Neil puts to rest the notion of being too big to open a show because he always opens the show.”

The music of CSN and CSN&Y – “Suite Judy Blue Eyes,” “Marrakesh Express” and “Wooden Ships” to name a few – are part of the soundtrack to a generation, and one which will always radiate with potency, along with all the definitive material Nash penned earlier in his career with The Hollies. Nash’s solo career, while frequently overshadowed by his role with the aforementioned acts, yielded many of its own classics that helped define the Laurel Canyon folk sound of the early ’70s – most notably, his understated solo debut, Songs for Beginners, is an unpretentious masterpiece and considered one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of the decade.

“I’m a pretty simple man, when it all boils down to it,” Nash says. “I’m not a complicated musician; I don’t know a billion chords; I’m a very simple artist and that’s the way it’s been all my life.”

Currently, Nash (along with Crosby’s son James Raymond on keyboards and Shane Fontayne on guitar) is in the final stretch of a 40-date solo tour – stopping at Sunset Center on Saturday – and he says his setlists showcases music stretching all the way back to his beginning. But, memoir aside, he doesn’t like to spend much time thinking about the beginning.

“I’ve never been a man who looks backward,” he says. “I’ve lived an incredible life and in many ways it feels like it’s just the beginning. I’ll be 72 on my next birthday so I just want to get on with living a great life.”

His words often echo that sentiment, and furnish a reminder you don’t need a memoir to get at the heart of a guy who was such a superior lyricist, singing: “You who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by/And so become yourself because the past is just a goodbye.”

Beyond touring, he’s conducting book signings and opening shows for his original photography and painting.

“It’s a wonderful life,” he says.

GRAHAM NASH performs at 8pm Saturday, Nov. 16, at Sunset Center, San Carlos Street at Ninth, Carmel. $45; $105. 620-2048.

•• HEAR MORE HERE >> www.grahamnash.com