David Crosby: A Musician Energized By Conflict
DAVID CROSBY, the musician, was born in Los Angeles in 1941, the son of a respected cinematographer, Floyd Crosby. David was charismatic, moody, generous, overbearing, surly, mean, gruff, erratic and funny. He was energized by conflict.
As a young man, David thought at first he should be an actor. He was attracted to women and women seemed to like actors. But singing was the first thing he loved to do. He could sing harmony by the age of six, and singing in the choir was the only way he got through high school, the only deep connection he felt to the school. When the choir director gave the choir a powerful song, and everyone was in tune, David’s brain was flooded with endorphins, and he felt the room, and everyone in it, lift right off the ground.
He once took a job as a busboy just for the chance to sing harmony with the performers that came through. ‘Why does that feel so damn GOOD?’ he wondered. Later, he found out ‘It’s all about balance in the sound wave ratios. Your brain is blissing out on balanced sound wave ratios.’
As soon as Crosby started playing the guitar, he felt powerfully drawn to it. Like him, the guitar could sound either bright or dark. And when he first got up on stage and heard the cheering, made music and felt waves of applause, that was it. He knew he was a musician, not an actor.
There was always this paradox in David Crosby: he had a sour, quarrelsome personality and a sweet, sweet singing voice. He had a striking gift for harmony in song, but not in life. He had four children, by four different women. He was a major talent, and a major pain in the ass. He’d say that turmoil is creative inspiration, and that arguments are fertile for a group; they launch fruitful experiments; stretch the thinking; bring greater complexity to the art and deeper understanding to the collaboration.
He loved guitars. Maybe, he thought, it’s that simple. You fall in love with the sound a guitar makes when someone really good is playing it, and you play it for thousands of hours, trying to find that sound, growing more and more excited as you get closer. Martin guitars were sacred objects to him. People talked about how America didn’t make the world’s best cars or the best movies anymore, but Crosby always felt Americans should be proud of the guitar of the Martin company, of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. He was sure those guitars were the best in the world.
He was formed by a great variety of music: the Beatles and Bob Dylan; John Coltrane; The Everly Brothers, with their layered harmonies; and Greenwich Village-style folk music of the early ‘60's.
Music was a great balm in the moment, but there was pain and confusion underneath. He was trying to escape something and on stage, with the lovely harmonies and the crowd roaring and clapping he felt ‘Things are great! I’m okay!’
And then the concert ended, and the cheering crowds left, and he had to be with himself again. He made caustic comments about his bandmates not only to other musicians — which is common enough — but to journalists, which violates show business code. With everyone he dealt with — bandmates, journalists, lovers, fans — Crosby tried to cut through the bullshit and make authentic connection. That called for bracing honesty.
He met Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark, while they were singing at a club called the Troubadour, and began joining them on stage. They became a three-man group, the Jet Set. They kept tinkering with the sound, with Crosby behind many of the changes. He brought in Jim Dickson to be their manager; he arranged their harmonies. The group added a drummer, Michael Clarke, and Crosby put down his acoustic guitar for an electric guitar.
Jim Dickson heard a new Bob Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man” and suggested the Jet Set cover it. Chris Hillman joined the group to play bass and sing, and the Jet Set became the Byrds. McGuinn discovered that if you play the 12-string Rickenbacker electric guitar and add a compressor to it, you get a long sustain, and a ringing “jingle-jangle” tone. Hundreds of young musicians heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” and traded in their Gibson guitars for a Rickenbacker 12-string.
For the first two Byrds albums, Gene Clark wrote most of the songs, and McGuinn wrote songs and there were always new Dylan covers to record, so there was little room for Crosby the songwriter. But then Gene Clark left and David Crosby started writing and co-writing songs for the third album, Fifth Dimension (1966). He helped write “Eight Miles High.” On the “Younger Than Yesterday” album, Crosby wrote “Everybody’s Been Burned” a sweet, jazz-inflected melody whose song title is pure Crosby: both whiny and matter-of-fact.
Crosby hated doing covers of old songs; he thought the Byrds should write all their own stuff. In concert, when his bandmates just wanted to play music, Crosby liked to treat the audience to his views on drugs and free love (good) and war (bad). In 1967 he said some harsh things to the others when they wanted to record the Carole King/Gerry Goffin song “Goin’ Back” and Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn kicked him out of the band — but kept the songs Crosby had written for the next album.
Crosby had already been playing a little with Stephen Stills, whose group, Buffalo Springfield had recently broken up. When Graham Nash, eager to get out of the Hollies, joined them, they had a unique sound, and in 1968 decided to form a new band and record an album.
For their debut record, “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” Crosby wrote three very different songs, each impressive in its own way. “Wooden Ships” is mellow on the surface but has a lot churning beneath. “Guinevere” is a shimmering meditation. “Long Time Gone” is a sad, bonkers, slightly paranoid song inspired by hearing that Robert Kennedy had been gunned down by a stranger.
Crosby helped Joni Mitchell get her first record deal, and produced her first album. They were lovers for a time in 1967 but she wrote a goodbye song to him “That Song About the Midway” and then sang it — twice — at a party. He learned that his girlfriend was breaking up with him when he heard her sing a song about it in a room crowded with their mutual friends. Crosby said of Joni, “It was very easy to love her, but turbulent. Loving Joni is a little like falling into a cement mixer.” She could have said the same about him.
Also in 1969, Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton, while doing a brief errand, was killed in a car accident and Crosby was the one asked to identify her body. For weeks after, he was distraught and started doing way too many drugs. He even traded a Martin guitar for drugs, traded a 1939 herringbone Dreadnaught Martin for some hard drugs, a trade he regretted the rest of his life. He’d betrayed his guitar.
While still doing too many drugs in 1970, he wrote two vivid songs — “Déjà Vu” and “Almost Cut My Hair” — for the CSN follow-up record “Déjà Vu.” Stephen Stills had broken up with Judy Collins; Graham Nash had broken up with Joni Mitchell; Christine Hinton was dead — so this album was darker than the last one. Neil Young joined Crosby, Stills and Nash and brought a certain edge to the music also, as the group became Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Even after his sad falling out with the Byrds, Crosby wouldn’t moderate his behavior. He was proud of being hard to figure. For him, the highs and lows of writing and traveling and bickering backstage and the roaring cheers on stage were all part of the rollercoaster of life.
Tension and conflict in the band would create new songs, new sounds, and artistic growth. Crosby never tried to get along with Neil Young, and he tried the patience of Stephen Stills.
Graham Nash was the band member whom Crosby got along with best and when CSNY broke up, Crosby made a series of albums with Graham Nash that did well, both critically and commercially.
In 2014, Crosby released “Croz,” his first solo album in 21 years. It seemed to free him up creatively, and he released five more solo albums before he died. All of that was great. But at the end of his life, Crosby had to face the fact that many of the musicians he’d worked with didn’t want to see him or talk to him, including Roger McGuinn, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young.
Still, he couldn’t regret his frankness; it was an essential element of himself.
By 2020, David Crosby had largely lost his ability to play the guitar. The dull ache of tendonitis in both hands had turned to fiery pain, and robbed him of his ability to pick the guitar strings properly. All those hours over all those years of playing guitar had caught up with him.
He was still planning new albums and trying to stay positive. (“People get old and die. That’s how it works.”) He got Hepatitis C and needed a liver transplant. He had Type 2 diabetes and needed a cardiac catheterization. He looked back over his life and could remember two or three heart attacks; drug busts; a firearms bust; eight stents put in his heart, one a near-death experience. A girlfriend of his had been held hostage by a drug dealer Crosby owed money to; he’d spent nine months in jail for heroin and cocaine possession; had gone through painful drug rehab…
But all of these legal hassles and medical maladies only gave him a deeper gratitude for life, for music.
He stopped saying that turmoil is inspiration. He’d say that was a bullshit excuse musicians give for leading tortured lives. Happiness is inspiration, Crosby said now. But he had trouble finding it. He’d say uplifting things like “Every day above ground is a gift” — but then he’d tell a journalist it was snotty of Neil Young to record all of his tracks for a CSNY album on his own, instead of recording with the full band.
David Crosby died in 2023. Near the end, friends seemed to want him to say he wasn’t afraid to die but he couldn’t say that. He said “I’m afraid of dying. I’m close. I’d like to have more time.” His last tweet seemed to be about Heaven: “I have heard the place is overrated… Cloudy.”
When he died, his friends and bandmates struggled to describe this blunt, outspoken man, and the life he led, in which harmony and discord were so strangely mixed. Stephen Stills deflected questions about Crosby’s behavior, and said he preferred to recall “the joy of making a wonderful noise together.”
Graham Nash said Crosby had never been the same since he’d seen Christine Hinton’s dead body. Nash eulogized Crosby as a man of “very deep soul” who was “as complicated as the intricate melodies he crafted.” Nash argued that Crosby’s personality was no longer important, that the memory of bad behavior fades, but Crosby’s music will last forever.
Bob Dylan said of Crosby: “He was a colorful and unpredictable character, wore a Mandrake the Magician cape, didn’t get along with many people, had a beautiful voice, an architect of harmony. He could freak out a whole city block all by himself. I liked him a lot.”