The Marrakech Express

The song wrote itself on the train.

Graham Nash — then of The Hollies, not yet of Crosby, Stills & Nash — was traveling across Morocco in 1966. He took the train from Casablanca to Marrakech: a three-hour journey through flat agricultural plains, past the Atlas Mountains, into the red city.

The train was crowded. Chickens in the aisles. Farmers and merchants and tourists all compressed together. The light through the windows was gold. Nash watched the landscape scroll past and hummed a melody.

"Wouldn't you know we're riding on the Marrakech Express..."

He didn't record it for three years. By 1969, he'd left The Hollies, joined David Crosby and Stephen Stills, and they needed songs for their debut album. "Marrakech Express" fit the moment: optimistic, adventurous, redolent of incense and possibility. It became a hit. It became an anthem.

The song promised something Morocco didn't quite deliver. There was no psychedelic paradise waiting at the Marrakech station — just a chaotic city that had been there for a thousand years before the hippies arrived and would remain after they left. But the song sold the dream, and people followed the song.

The train still runs. ONCF operates the Casablanca-Marrakech route multiple times daily, now in modern coaches with air conditioning. The three-hour journey crosses the same plains Nash watched in 1966. The Atlas Mountains still appear in the distance. The light through the windows is still gold.

Every café in the medina plays the song eventually. It's been 55 years, and "Marrakech Express" is still doing what it was written to do: making people want to take the ride.