Sometime in the spring of 1965 when I would have been 10 years old, I began hearing a new pop song that fascinated me. I particularly remember hearing it on a warm afternoon on the home bound school bus from someone’s low-fi transistor radio. I loved the way the jangly guitars flowed gracefully around the voices, the way they seemed to surround the song, like water in a busy brook pooling around a stone. But what I really loved was the way the combined voices sounded like a church choir, with the one voice that soared above the others, almost impossibly high on the word “hey” to kick off each chorus.
“Hey, Mr Tambourine man, play a song for me…/”.
The voices seemed to come from some other realm, a place of pure harmony, and that high voice seemed, in my mind, to be the lead angel. Every time the chorus came around, I waited for that voice, which was, of course, the voice of David Crosby.
Musically, Crosby’s collaboration with McGuinn and the other Byrds was incredibly fruitful. His musical sensibility, which was very much informed by jazz harmony, made breakthrough songs like “8-Miles High” possible. Crosby was so integral to the Byrds that it’s sometimes hard to separate his contributions from that of the others. One thing is clear: the group never sounded the same or soared as high after he was fired in late 1967. I won’t spend time on Crosby’s better known work with CSN and CSN&Y – it’s all there to hear. Listen to his sublime duetting with Graham Nash on “Geniveve” for an example.
Crosby himself became an almost too familiar figure in the emerging 60s counter-culture. He could be funny, brilliant, self-absorbed, irritating, outrageous, wrong-headed, all within the space of a few minutes. For me, David Crosby as spokesman for the counter-culture didn’t wear as well as David Crosby the musician.
As the 70’s wore on, Crosby became a kind of emblem for everything that was both wrong and right about the hippie movement. Endless creativity and endless screwups. Honesty and an unbelievable capacity for self-delusion. By the time punk-rock arrived (a term he coined, by the way), David Crosby, the eternal hippy with the balding pate and floppy handlebar moustache, had become something of a figure of fun, a target for the mockery of the punks.
I’ve heard stories about Crosby during the 80s, the period when his various addictions almost killed him. Crosby, begging a gas station attendant in Marin to advance him some money on the value of his car so he could buy crack. Undoubtedly, he was lucky to survive the decade.
Amazingly, he overcome his addictions and lived long enough to become a kind of funny, elder spokesman for the rockers of his generation. For a sense of Crosby playing this role, watch his gentle ribbing of Jakob Dylan (son of Bob) in the documentary “Echo in the Canyon.” It went something like this:
Crosby: So we listened very carefully to Dylan and everything he did.
Dylan: When you say “Dylan,” can you please be more specific?
Crosby: (with feigned astonishment) Is there another one?
Personally, I’m glad Crosby survived and continued to make music for as long as he did. I’ve been listening to his 2021 recording, “For Free,” named for his friend Joni Mitchell’s 1970 ode to the joy of music-making for its own sake. It’s well worth a listen, both for its music and its poetry. “Here if you Listen” from 2018 is also lovely: on this release, Crosby sings with an chorus of younger female voices, creating again the other-worldly harmonies that so captivated me years ago.
Judging from the comments of his collaborators like Graham Nash and Roger McGuinn, Crosby never became easier to work with. But for mere listeners like us, that’s irrelevant, like all celebrity gossip. It’s our privilege to focus on the music he created, not the process of its creation. At the end of the day, I think Crosby, for all of his misjudgments and faults, would have been fine with that.
