A Thread From The Weave
By Steve Silberman
The ultimate David Crosby joke appears in an episode of The Simpsons called “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet.” Accepting a Grammy® from David, the perennially inebriated Barney blurts out, “You’re my hero!” When David asks him earnestly, “Oh, you like my music?” Barney replies, “You’re a musician?”
What’s no joke is that after four decades of composing, singing, and playing some of the most forward-looking music of our time as a member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, David is still more widely known for the kinds of offstage activities that make tabloid headlines than for his recorded legacy. This is, in part, because he has always joined forces with lead guitarists of such obvious flaming genius that his own role as an architect of subtle harmony and craftsman of contemplative melody is sometimes overshadowed. It’s also because his political convictions and public self-indulgences have made him a juicy target for those eager to dismiss the radical innovations of a generation with a cautionary tale of drug-addled excess. Even for many fans of songs like “Wooden Ships” and “Long Time Gone,” however, much of the glorious music that David made outside of The Byrds and CSNY remains undiscovered territory. After two inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his bittersweet fate has been to be simultaneously one of the most celebrated and most underappreciated musicians in the world.
By untangling the Crosby thread from the weave of his illustrious hands, what comes to light is a body of recordings that anticipated and influenced some of the most progressive developments in popular music, from the global cross-pollination of rock, folk, jazz and non-Western tonalities, to the rise of the performing songwriter, to the maturation of pop from a vehicle of shallow sentiment to an art of profound personal exploration. It was David who turned on another young guitarist, George Harrison, to the music of Ravi Shankar, in an act of artistic diplomacy that still resonates today wherever musicians reach beyond the lexicon of their own culture. By broadening the palette of popular song to include nonstandard tunings and intricate intervals with contrapositions like “Guinnevere,” he opened creative doors for generations of musicians to come. (The subversive nature of this mission was not lost on Miles Davis, who recorded an epic version of “Guinnevere” with his own Bitches Brew era band.) And while David’s most ambitious solo projects were often greeted with critical disinterest, many of them – in particular his 1970 masterpiece, If I Could Only Remember My Name – are now finally being restored to their proper place in the canon of music that transformed its own genre.
Most of all, what is revealed by hearing David’s music on its own is an otherworldly beauty not available anywhere else. From the shimmering mystery at the heart of “Laughing” to the hard-earned wisdom of “Tracks In The Dust,” his muses have inspired him to articulate areas of human experience that eluded even the most talented peers. Hearing these songs again or for the first time, the real David Crosby comes into view – the artist who has been pushing the boundaries and refining his craft for over 40 years, hidden in the spotlight.
David was born on August 14, 1941, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the son of cinematographer Floyd Crosby (who won an Academy Award® for Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas) and his wife, Aliph, who wrote poetry and was gifted with a fine harmony voice. When David was three or four, his mother took him to see a free symphony concert in the park. “The first thing I remember was being completely overwhelmed by the size and beauty of the voice of the orchestra, which broke over me like a wave,” he recalls. “I remember realizing that all the little arms were moving together, and that the reason the music sounded so big was that they were all playing it together. Since then I’ve always wanted to make music with other people where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
As a child David immersed himself in his mother’s collection of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos on 78s. When LPs became popular in the late 1950s, his classical diet was supplemented by the recordings of Odetta, Josh White, Joan Baez and The Weavers – folk music energized by the faith that a song could be a catalyst for social transformation. Pop, other than The Everly Brothers’ dreamy harmonies, held little interest for him. Instead of sitting in front of the TV at night, the Crosby family would sing together in their living room, trading rounds from the Fireside Book of Folk Songs. Soon David’s older brother Ethan – a talented guitar player in his own right – introduced him to the cool West Coast jazz of Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, Stan Kenton and others. The two boys learned to improvise scat-singing “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” as they did dishes. Ethan also gave David his first guitar and taught him his first chords.
By the time David enrolled in prep school, Floyd and Aliph had divorced. Growing up as a chubby, lonely teenager with a stubborn anti-authoritarian streak, he fastened on cars and music as ways of getting attention, particularly from girls. He sang in the glee club and in school plays, and his angelically pure tenor is already unmistakable on a 1958 recording of a student revue called Cuttin’ Capers. David also fell in love with sailing, which came as naturally to him as singing, and his imagination was sparked by the visionary science-fiction of authors like Robert Heilein. Eventually, he was kicked out of so many schools that he struck out on his own, working in the kitchen of a local coffeehouse where he could occasionally slip onstage to sing harmony.
After a brief vacation from music, to take acting classes, David got a regular gig at a Santa Barbara coffeehouse called the Unicorn. There, he met the first seasoned performer who took him under his wing – Travis Edmondson of Bud & Travis, a folk duo known for mixing calypso and achingly passionate boleros into their sets. David would “hawk” Edmonson’s changes, and the elder musician’s buddies treated the aspiring hipster to his first taste of marijuana. He also paid young David the honor of recording his first song, “Cross The Plains,” on one of his albums.
By 1961 the folk movement was in full swing, with an underground railroad of coffeehouses stretching from the Bitter End in Greenwich Village to the Ash Grove in West Hollywood, featuring musicians, poets, and stand-up social critics like Lenny Bruce. These cafes functioned not only as a network of venues for peripatetic folkies, but also as gathering places where seeds of the antiwar counterculture-to-come were watered by the rebellious spirit of such Beat Generation writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. “They were the cracks in the pavement, and we were these little sprouts of grass that came up through there,” David observes. Their books also instilled in him the romance of the traveling life. When his girlfriend became pregnant with a baby boy, he signed the adoption papers and split from California, hitting the road with little more than a guitar and an Air Force surplus overcoat.
Arriving in New York City, David met the seminal folk artist Fred Neil, a fiercely talented performer who taught him is idiosyncratic playing style, employing two fingers and a flat pick. Neil also tipped David off to an emerging folk scene in Florida that combined his tow great loves – music and sailing. David and Ethan Crosby started singing regularly there as a duo, and after several months on the basket-house circuit, they signed on with a commercial operation called Les Baxter’s Balladeers, the kind of starched hootenanny-on-wheels parodied in A Mighty Wind. As David crooned, “Set me free, Lord,” the Balladeers would deliver a pious recitation of “The Midnight Special.” After a few months the brothers were on the road again.
While playing coffeehouses in Chicago, David – high on pot and cocaine – went to a club called McKee’s to hear the John Coltrane Quintet. The hurricane force of the group’s improvisations, stoked by the polyrhythms of drummer Elvin Jones, drove the young artist against the back wall of the club and into the bathroom. “I’m leaning against the tile trying to cool my fevered brow and come down enough to where I could maintain,” David recalls, “and then the door goes WHAM!, and there – SWEEEEwullululullulbraalllala! – is ‘Trane. He’d never stopped playing his solo. I slid down the wall and melted into a puddle on the floor. That experience is burned in my brain.” David started experimenting with nonstandard tunings in an effort to recreate on guitar the kinds of chords that pianist McCoy Turner used to accompany Coltrane’s titanic solos.
David was also starting to get serious about writing his own songs. It’s hard to remember now how unusual it was, before the Beatles and Dylan came along, for musicians to perform their own material. But hearing Meet The Beatles for the first time in Chicago pointed the young folksinger toward a vast expanse of uncharted musical terrain. “It absolutely floored me: ‘Those are folk-music changes, but it’s got a rock ‘n’ roll backbeat,’ I ate it for breakfast,” he says.
Among those he befriended on the folk circuit were Paul Kantner, Dino Valenti and David Freiberg, future members of the Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Like David, Kantner had grown up on a heady brew of the Weavers and science fiction. When Heinlein published Stranger In A Strange Land, David and his friends read it eagerly. In the novelist’s concept of telepathic “water brothers” who lived communally, they saw a blueprint for a more humane society. Sharing not only their possessions but their lovers, David and his friends formed households up and down the coast that foreshadowed the culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. “The dream was extended families. We thought it was possible to transcend the monogamous kind of two-by-two relationship and go way further with it,” he recalls. “Across sex barriers, across number barriers – make love to who you wanted to, in whatever number pleased you, and in whatever combinations pleased you.”
Back at the Unicorn in 1963, David was discovered singing solo at a table by the legendary producer Jim Dickson. At his behest, David recorded several promising demos, but the labels showed no interest – “You have no material here, and no one’s buying that vocal sound,” sniffed one producer. Within a few months, however, everything would change. One night in an L.A. club called the Troubador, David ran into two fellow folkies named Jim McGuinn and Gene Clark. (Jim would later change his name to Roger.) McGuinn was already strumming Beatles tunes on his 12-string guitar, Clark was an inspired and prolific songwriter, and the three hit it off, forming a trio initially called the Jet Set. As their music became more electric, bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke were asked to join the group. Finally, over Thanksgiving dinner in 1964, they baptized themselves The Byrds.
In the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll, the influence of The Byrds was even more pervasive than that of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Folk-rock, country-rock, jazz-rock and psychedelia were all incubated and intermingled in The Byrds’ restless musical experiments, and they practically invented the cultural template of L.A. pop stardom – and then wrote the ultimate ironic song about it, punctuated by the taped screams of their adoring fans. Band as diverse as Fairport Convention, the Velvet Underground, the Eagles, R.E.M., Tom Petty, Nickel Creek, Wilco and The Shins can all claim to have been inspired by The Byrds without sounding much alike.
Part of why The Byrds’ sound emerged fully fledged in 1965, with the release of their groundbreaking cover of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," was that Dickson gave the group months of rehearsal time in World Pacific Studios long before anyone heard them. During this woodshedding period, the producer's advice was to "make records you're going to be able to listen to five or ten years down the road." Dickson also brought in an acetate of Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's rough demo of "Mr. Tambourine Man," urging the band to cover the song. Some of the music made at World Pacific was released on an album called Preflyte, and you can already hear David anticipating his mature vocal style in "The Airport Song,” which had a languorous, confident sensuality that recalled Brazilian music and West Coast jazz.
Energized by McGuinn's jewel-like Rickenbacker guitar and David's yearning harmonies, "Mr. Tambourine Man" shot to the top of the charts, with kids calling DJs begging to hear the tune. "'To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free' – that was the first time anybody put good poetry on the AM radio," David says proudly. To craft harmonies that sounded triumphant and melancholy at the same time, he drew on the rich choral drones collected by Phillipe Koutev on a Nonesuch album called Music of Bulgaria that he and Graham ended up listening to hundreds of times. "What I love to do inside a chord is not be parallel, to change the intervals between the melody and the high harmony, so that the relationships are changing as it goes along,” David explains. "It puts emotional tension on the chord, and if you do that right, you kind of disappear into the mix, and it's very hard for people to follow what you're doing."
By the time The Byrds burst forth tight-trousered at a club called Ciro's on the Sunset Strip, they were anointed as avatars of a new kind of hip. When the wildest dance-floor craze to sweep the nation to date was the Twist, the band boasted its own outrageously attired posse of gyrating ecstatics known as the Freaks, corralled by a sculptor named Vito Paulekas. Everyone from Odetta to Jack Nicholson to Little Richard to Dylan himself to Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky came down to the club to dance for hours.
Fame, and all of its temptations, came thick and fast. Weeks later The Byrds were getting high in London with The Beatles and the Stones, a dizzying ascent that was tough on Clark, a shy Kansas City boy who never lost his fear of flying. Hyped by the promoter as "the American Beatles," The Byrds faced hostile press on that first U.K. tour, and their feelings of dislocation honed the edge of menace behind "Eight Miles High." Eventually released in 1966 on Fifth Dimension, the single was boycotted by radio stations after a tipsheet called Bill Gavin's Record Report railed against its psychedelic double-entendre. While the basic structure of the tune was Clark's, the final product was a true Byrds collaboration. Hillman's bass crackled like an approaching storm, and David added a line of lyrics (“rain gray town, known for its sound") and brooding harmonies created by singing the melody line in reverse. McGuinn's apocalyptic leads were inspired by Coltrane's Africa/Brass and "India," which David kept in high rotation in the band's smoke-filled Winnebago along with the ragas of Ravi Shankar.
David relished his new role as a generational spokesman, and his status as a suede-caped pop icon swelled his already considerable ego. Ironically, it wasn't until the band's fourth album, Younger Than Yesterday, that he really made his mark as a songwriter.
"Everybody's Been Burned," written years earlier, had a completely original sound, with an eerily suspended melody that sounded like it was composed in a scale no one but David had ever heard. "Renaissance Fair," a sun-splashed tale of sensory awakening, was inspired by the local antiquarian festivals that the L.A. freaks turned into psychedelic bacchanals. But by then David was already on his way out of the group. His "Lady Friend," another innovative track released as a single, was pointedly excluded from The Notorious Byrd Brothers, as was "Triad," which was promptly recorded by the Jefferson Airplane and eventually live for the CSNY album 4 Way Street.
David would brag to journalists that he had been kicked out of The Byrds because of their queasiness about "Triad," an ode to his polyamorous adventures with his friends. But he admits now that the story was 90-percent hype: "The reasons I left were multifold. A) I wanted more of me in The Byrds, and 'Lady Friend' is a perfect example of why. B) I had already discovered cocaine, and that didn't help. And C) We had a manager who helped the other guys convince themselves they could do better without me."
Jettisoned by his bandmates in the late summer of 1967, David freed himself from his contract by dispatching a letter to Columbia president Clive Davis that declared, "My music's all dried up. I don't have it anymore." In truth, he was about to enter the most inspired and prolific period of his life.
By the late' 60s, Laurel Canyon – a wooded enclave in the Hollywood hills – became a place of refuge and renewal for the best musical minds of a generation. Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, The Mamas & The Papas, John Sebastian, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, David and others lived there in rustic splendor. Former folkie-turned-Monkee Peter Tork, who played with Stephen on the coffeehouse circuit, bought a split-level house with a heated pool where refugees from their own bands (and a very young Jackson Browne) dropped acid and sang together night and day.
One day in 1966 while David was still a Byrd, Cass Elliot of The Mamas & The Papas arrived at his house with a dapper, slender young British hipster. Graham Nash had come a long way from Salford, the drab suburb in northern England that would provide the setting for songs like "Cold Rain." When he was growing up, his parents were too poor to even own a radio. But when he was four years old Graham was sitting in a half-open window, drawing in the soot on the glass, when suddenly the squeaking of the pane and the rhythms of traffic outside combined with the music leaking in from next door, and he had a vision of a golden city of melody rising in the clouds. "I felt special, as if I'd seen something that nobody else had seen. The music I heard was my music," he recalls.
The Hollies – the band Graham formed with his childhood buddy Allan Clarke – became a smash, with songs like "Bus Stop" and "Carrie Anne" reaching the top of the charts on both sides of thee Atlantic. By the time Graham arrived in L.A. on a tour, however, he was feeling underappreciated by The Hollies and constrained by the pop formula. He was already writing songs like "Lady Of The Island" and "Marrakesh Express," but they were being dismissed by his bandmates as uncommercial or downright scandalous, in parallel with David's problems in The Byrds.
After a stoned afternoon talking about music and life, the two became fast friends. When The Byrds arrived in England on their second tour, Graham rescued David from his hotel and invited him to stay with him and his wife at the time, Rose. He also brought David with him to a Hollies press conference, where the long-haired Californian scandalized the British press by snapping at a reporter who asked overly personal questions, "What the fuck business of yours is it?"
David's irreverence worked on Graham like a tonic. "I'd never met anyone like him," he told Dave Zimmer, CSN's official biographer. "He was a total punk, totally delightful, totally funny, totally brilliant, a totally musical man."
After Graham flew back to England feeling like an exile, David continued to woo him Stateside by sending him demos of new songs. Hearing "Guinnevere" for the first time, Graham recalls, "gave me shivers." When The Hollies came back to L.A. in 1968, David and Cass spirited him to a party where Stephen was sitting at a piano. Shortly thereafter he decided to leave his British life behind for good.
David made another crucial musical alliance in late 1967. On a trip to Florida to clear his head after being cut loose from The Byrds, he walked into a club in Coconut Grove and became entranced by the pretty blonde singer onstage with an impossibly pure voice and songs of overwhelming poignancy – Joni Mitchell. The attraction was mutual. David had bought a schooner called the Mayan, and the couple spent days together onboard, singing and making love. Musically, they were a match made in heaven: David was already experimenting with jazz chords, and Joni had been crafting her arcanum of nonstandard tunings since learning the basic technique from folk singer Eric Andersen. "She had tunings that I hadn't heard, and I had ones that she hadn't heard," David recalls, "and it was obvious to me from the get-go that she was an unbelievably good writer. It was inspiring to be around her, and also intimidating."
David and Joni flew back to L.A. together, where he produced her first album, Song To A Seagull, letting Joni's voice and guitar speak for themselves. In turn, her music exerted its lunar pull on his imagination. "Everything was influenced by Joni after I met her," he acknowledges. The melodies he composed in late '67 and early '68 were of such uncanny beauty that engineer Stephen Barncard calls the whole batch a "skydrop." "Guinnevere," "Wooden Ships," "Long Time Gone," "Laughing," "Song With No Words," "Tamalpais High (At About 3)," "The Wall Song," "Games," and "Kids And Dogs" all took shape then, many of them composed on the Mayan. (The schooner has provided a haven for him for four decades. Later in his life, David would also write "Page 73" and "Shadow Captain" there.)
Joni had a line in "The Dawntreader" about "the songs that the rigging makes," and David clearly also felt inspired when voyaging in open water.
"The boat has strings too," he muses. "It's an arched piece of wood under tension from those wires, very similar to a guitar. These are shapes designed from sheer necessity, in which everything but what's necessary is pared away, and the shape that's left is exquisitely beautiful. I love things that are beautiful and functional at the same time. I love the sea, I love sailing, because it's a lodestone; it's a thing that keeps me in touch with the real world. On the boat, the ocean doesn't know who you are."
His relationship with Joni, however, lasted only a few months. When they met, David was already deeply in love with a young woman named Christine Hinton. By the time both women – and a mysterious third – were folded into "Guinnevere," he and Stephen Stills were starting to make heavy magic together. The Buffalo Springfield's hit "Rock And Roll Woman" featured David's uncredited vocal arrangement, and he sat in with the band at the Monterey International Pop Festival, hastening his exit from The Byrds. In June of 1968, David and Stephen recorded a demo of "Long Time Gone," with Stephen overdubbing layers of backwards guitar, employing a technique he learned from Jimi Hendrix. A legendary DJ named B. Mitchell Reed played the track on the radio, attributing the mystery acetate to a band called the Frozen Noses. But the heaviest magic was just over the horizon.
One afternoon that summer, David and Stephen were at a friend's house – Joni's or Cass's, depending on who's telling the tale – singing Stephen's new song, "You Don't Have To Cry," when Graham dropped in for a visit. The slim Englishman asked them to sing the song three times, and on the final round, he joined in, skimming a high harmony over the top. All three of them felt the intuitive musical connection they'd been waiting for their whole lives. "It wasn't more than thirty seconds of singing together before we knew exactly what we'd be doing from then on," David told Cameron Crowe in 1974.
The trio spent the next few months inside the music they created together, first in an apartment in London, and then at John Sebastian's house in Sag Harbor, a former whaling village near the tip of Long Island. (By that point, Graham and Joni had fallen in love, and Graham wrote "Our House" for her during these rehearsals.) After complex contractual voodoo to free Graham from his previous label commitments, CSN were signed to Atlantic by Ahmet Ertegun, who had discovered Ray Charles and established the label as a home for many progressive jazz, pop and R&B artists. In February of 1969, the trio returned to a rainy Los Angeles to record their first album, working in near isolation for weeks with engineer Bill Halverson, who had successfully captured The Beach Boys' silken harmonies using a technique called "air mixing," positioning the singers around a single microphone. Stephen was at the peak of his powers, playing guitar, bass and B-3 organ with equal amounts of soul, passion and restraint, often staying up all night in the studio.
Crosby, Stills & Nash, released in May of 1969 with an iconic Henry Diltz cover shot of the three men reclining on a couch, was a revelation. It had a fresh, unpretentious warmth and musicality that set it apart from the ponderous psychedelia of the time. Behind its irresistible surface, it was a highly sophisticated piece of work, incorporating elements of Cuban syncopation, R&B and country blues, as well as those inimitably radiant three-part harmonies.
David had clearly come into his own. "Guinnevere" is an astonishingly focused piece of composition that spirals inward upon itself, drawing the listener into a sublime meditative reverie. With "Long Time Gone," he finally nailed the authentic blues feeling he'd been chasing since his coffeehouse days. "Wooden Ships," written with Stephen and Paul Kantner aboard the Mayan, crystallized the idealism of a generation in a vision of utopia rising out of the radioactive ashes. One of the most lovely moments on the record – a little Bach-like vocal fugue that David improvised for Graham's "Lady Of The Island" – was captured in a single take.
The album was an instant hit. Like The Beatles, the union of Crosby, Stills and Nash was a rare and fortunate alchemy that presented each of the three bandmembers in his best light, while gracefully capturing the zeitgeist of an age. As David told Zimmer, "We felt like we'd really won, and everybody was on our side."
By the time they got to Woodstock, the trio had expanded into a quartet. With the addition of Stephen's former bandmate Neil Young, CSNY could play an astonishing spectrum of music live, from sweetly harmonized ballads to Springfield-style electric firestorms. Nine months later, when National Guardsmen shot four Kent State University students for protesting the Vietnam war, Neil wrote a song called "Ohio" that the quartet immediately recorded and released as a single, with a sleeve depicting the Bill of Rights. For a pivotal moment they were not only the best band in the world, they were also the counterculture's CNN.
During CSNY's rise to superstardom, however, David was struggling to hold himself together in the face of personal tragedy. Shortly after the trio's first album went gold, his great love Christine was killed in a head-on car crash while taking her cats to the vet. Her violent death – and the excesses David took refuge in to avoid being overwhelmed by grief – would cast a long shadow in his life.
After scattering Christine's ashes from the Mayan, David took off with Graham on a trip to New York and London, where they imbibed copious quantities of cognac and their friendship proved stronger than ever. Returning to the Bay Area, David did the only thing he knew how to do: "I plunged deeper into the music."
CSNY's Deja Vu, released in March of 1970, was a worthy successor to the trio's first album, but "with a harder and darker edge that seemed equally in tune with its time. While the lyric of "Almost Cut My Hair" can seem like hippie kitsch now, the paranoia and defiance in David's delivery were a perfect reflection of the national mood, with Stephen and Neil raising holy Hell in the studio behind him. The title track, introduced with an inspired burst of scatting, explored David's theories about why both sailing and music had come so naturally to him. "I didn't know about reincarnation when I was six years old, I just knew that I already knew how to sing," he says.
With the mega-success of the trio album and Deja Vu, David finally earned the creative freedom he sought in leaving The Byrds. For the next few months, with the Mayan berthed in Sausalito, he practically lived at Wally Heider's studio in San Francisco, with a rotating cast of friends – including Graham, Joni, Neil, Paul Kantner, David Freiberg, Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead – casually dropping in to contribute tracks to If I Could Only Remember My Name. "There was all this immensely wonderful chemistry going on," recalls David. "Jerry must have come around every night for a long time, and he was so helpful, so bright, so inventive, and having so much fun with music and life. If I had to elect one musician to represent musicians in the Galactic Congress of Beings, it would have been him. Paul and Grace were huge musical talents and so open. On any given night, we might try any given song, and then on some night, we would hit critical mass."
On "Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)," "Tamalpais High (At About 3)" and "Kids And Dogs" (an outtake heard here for the first time), David's nonstandard tunings and jazz sensibility, scat vocals and the band's collective empathy came together to create a musical atmosphere that sounded both intimate and infinitely spacious. After the final verse of "Laughing," the assembled chorus gathered its forces for an arc of transcendent harmony crowned by Joni's voice soaring heavenward, followed by the cry of Jerry's majestic pedal steel. It wasn't folk music, it wasn't jazz, it wasn't rock, it wasn't Bach – it was pure David.
Wally Heider's was a pretty cosmic place in 1970. Not only were the Dead recording their classic American Beauty there with harmony coaching from CSN, but Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were falling in love and making an album called Blows Against The Empire with many of the same musicians who played on David's record. High on Heinlein, inexhaustible weed and unlimited studio time, they dubbed themselves the Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra. The second side of Blows – featuring Paul's fable of a crew of acidheads who hijack a starship – was mixed with lysergic assistance by Graham, and earned the album a nomination for a Hugo award. One part of this suite, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite?," grew out of David's "beautiful gift of an open D tuning that was very sitar-like in its preponderance of drones when you played a fretted melody against them," said Paul.
"Cross-pollination will make the whole musical world better," David predicted in 1971. "The more we work with each other, the less we isolate ourselves, the less we try and get into group roles, the less we try and be cliquish and hang out only with our little buddies, the stronger the music's going to be."
If I Could Only Remember My Name (extending the reincarnation theme) ended with one of the most naked pieces of music David ever put on a record: "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here," a spontaneous vocal fugue that was his tribute to Christine. "That recording was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced," recalled engineer Stephen Barncard. "We were overdubbing vocals on some other song using the legendary Heider echo chamber, when David started singing with his own echo. He said, 'Put up some fresh tape,' and proceeded to sing layer after layer of what you hear on the record. In 15 minutes it was all mixed down, with no retakes or editing – just 100 percent magic."
David's album was only one of the extraordinary solo projects to come out of CSNY in the early '70s. Stephen produced several under his own name and with his band Manassas; Graham's Songs For Beginners and Wild Tales were exquisite; and After The Gold Rush and Harvest launched Neil's career as one of the most passionate and uncompromising artists of the era. David and Graham also sang on albums by Joni, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Elton John, Dan Fogelberg and many others, nurturing a renaissance of songcraft.
CSNY's status as a "supergroup," however, turned out to be a mixed blessing. The original idea, David told B. Mitchell Reed, "was to build a mothership group that would allow us the freedom to do what we wanted to do." Ironically, Crosby, Stills and Nash decided to bill themselves by their names to avoid the burden of being a brand; the group would be a flexible constellation, enabling any member to go off and make a record when the muses called. Unfortunately, after the quartet's debut at Woodstock and DejaVu, anything less than all four of them was viewed as falling short, even when the music was sublime.
In 1971 Graham and David recorded a powerful duet album at Heider that proved they didn't need the other acronyms to make heavy magic. To back them up on several tracks, the duo tapped members of James Taylor's touring band, including guitarist Danny Kortchmar, bassist Lee Sklar and drummer Russ Kunkel. For "Where Will I Be?" – a wrenching account of David's devastation in the wake of Christine's death – Graham and David recorded a set of tuned glasses, "playing" them with faders at the mixing board. "Page 43" was tender and wise, an instant classic.
Even after CSNY reunited for one of the most financially successful rock ventures in history – their first stadium tour in 1974 – getting the quartet into the same studio for a session that didn't implode under the weight of supersized egos was proving impossible. Frustrated by the constant drama of trying to get the mothership off the ground, David and Graham took off for a spell on their own, playing acoustic gigs that highlighted the excellence of their new songs, the shamelessness of their stoned humor, and their telepathic abilities as harmony singers, while enabling them to play intimate venues and restore their emotional connection to the audience. (One of their duo shows was later released as Another Stoney Evening.)
For a streak of albums in the latter half of the decade – Wind On The Water, Whistling Down The Wire and Crosby/Nash Live – Kortchmar, Sklar and Kunkel were joined by keyboardist Craig Doerge, bassist Tim Drummond and multi-instrumentalist David Lindley. This group was dubbed the Mighty Jitters, owing to the fondness of certain bandmembers for cocaine. Accompanying the duo with exquisite delicacy for tender ballads like "Naked In The Rain," the Jitters could burn down the house for rockers like "Low Down Payment" and "Take The Money And Run."
"After the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album, Wind On The Water was the most fun I ever had making a record," says Graham. "There was a great sense of camaraderie. We rarely had to speak about what we were doing – we just cooked." And live, the band was a monster. "It was like being a painter and having a full palette of big, strong primary colors," David recalls. "Every time Nash and I hit the stage, we had to be running at 110 percent just to stay level with the band." Unlike the Mighty Acronyms, the Jitters could be counted on to show up when the muses called. "Bittersweet" was written at the Chateau Marmont in the morning, recorded in the afternoon, and mixed by nightfall.
Outwardly, David seemed to be undergoing a renaissance of his own. Wind and Whistling featured his strongest songs in years, and in 1977 the trio finally reconvened for CSN, attracting a whole new audience. The trio was also walking their talk, playing dozens of benefits for the antinuclear movement, veterans' rights, and the protection of marine mammals. Backstage, however, the increasingly indispensable Bolivian marching powder – ultimately as freebase, often with a heroin chaser was taking its toll. "I was burning at both ends and in the middle," David acknowledges. "It didn't slow me up, but I was foreseeing oncoming problems. I didn't think I was going to last a long time."
In Joel Bernstein's cover shot for CSN, the trio looked as comfortable on the deck of a rented sailboat as they had been on the couch. During sessions for the album in Florida, David happily met his wife to be, Jan Dance. But there were darker passages ahead. David's output of new tunes was dwindling to nothing, as if his hedonism offended the muses themselves. Before they split for a hiatus, his muses delivered one last masterpiece, "Delta," with the help of Jackson Browne, who brought his former mentor over to the late Warren Zevon's house and made him sit at the piano until the song was born. The next few years were a nightmare for David and everyone who cared about him, as chronicled in his frank autobiography, Long Time Gone.
Finally, in 1985, he hit bottom. "I had run out of room to hide or run. I only knew dealers and junkies and freebasers," David recalls. "I was a complete mess and had gotten busted way too many times. I sold my piano and used the money to buy drugs, and Jan and I ran away to Florida. My boat was absolutely trashed and derelict. We didn't have enough money to get a pizza, barely had any water, and we were sick and disheveled. I finally said, 'I've got to give it up. I'm gonna go turn myself in.’ Jan was scared shitless. I had strung her out too. She went into treatment, and I went to prison."
David served his time in a Texas penitentiary, stitching mattresses and mopping floors for guards who called him "rock star." Another staffer lent him a guitar that he was allowed to play in the music room, and David even organized a band that played a couple of shows in the exercise yard. Gradually, he felt himself come back to life.
The breakthrough was "Compass," a chilling account of his odyssey through the underworld. "When I wrote 'Compass,' I thought, This is me," he says. "I felt like a guy coming back from Vietnam who realizes he isn't dead and is shocked at first, then elated – and a little bit frightened, because he really hadn't planned on being around. My delight in music came back tenfold."
David's 1989 comeback album, appropriately titled Oh Yes I Can, was dedicated to Jan. "My Country 'Tis Of Thee" was the product of a chance meeting with the late guitar prodigy Michael Hedges, who ran into David at a 7-Eleven and introduced himself by playing his own "Aerial Boundaries." A fellow aficionado of mind-bending tunings, Hedges played with the gusto of a punk rocker and the Zen poise of a martial artist, and he and David collaborated on "Arrows," which appeared on CSN's 1990 album, Live It Up. For his next solo album, Thousand Roads, released in 1993, David asked friends like Joni, Jimmy Webb, Stephen Bishop and Marc Cohn for new songs so he could stretch into new territory. He and Joni wrote their first song together, "Yvette In English."
Through the '90s CSN plus-or minus-Y reunited for several heavily promoted albums and tours. While David was clearly delighted to be back in action, the offstage tensions remained, and the albums – featuring occasional gems like "Dream For Him," Neil's "Slowpoke," and Graham's "House Of Broken Dreams" – were marred by substandard material and slick production. David's problems were also far from over. In 1994 he was diagnosed with liver failure caused by chronic hepatitis C. But even in the worst of times, the universe had surprises in store. As he waited in the hospital for an organ donor, he learned that Jan was pregnant with a baby boy, Django. The couple sang "Amazing Grace" together as he was wheeled into the operating room.
After the life-saving operation, David got more surprising news in the form of a note from a young man named James Raymond. An accomplished musician himself, James had long known that his parents had adopted him, but his desire to find his biological father became intense on the threshold of starting his own family. When he first saw the name David Crosby on his birth certificate, he assumed it was some other David Crosby. But, in fact, James was the same child that David had left behind when he hit the road to become a folk singer.
Father and son hit it off immediately. Their musical sensibilities were uncannily complementary, as if something as specific and subjective as that could be transmitted in the DNA. With the versatile young guitarist Jeff Pevar, they formed their own band, CPR, which proved to be the perfect home for David's next creative resurgence.
Songs like "Map To Buried Treasure" and "At The Edge" poured out of him with a new vitality and the earned confidence of a survivor.
In 2004 David and Graham teamed up again in a Burbank rehearsal studio. These sessions were a cozy family affair, with wives and kids dropping in, Nathaniel Kunkel – Russ's son – running the board, and David, Graham, Russ and Nathaniel co-producing the record. The band united two generations of Crosby/Nash backup musicians (Russ and Lee, James and Jeff) with Dean Parks, the guitarist's guitarist behind Steely Dan's "Haitian Divorce" and dozens of other great records. They nailed 20 tracks in less than a month for a strong two-CD set called Crosby-Nash.
It had been a long time since the Laurel Canyon days, when David and Graham first found that the harmony they created together evoked a power much larger than any voice alone. While the corporate forces David warned against in "What Are Their Names?" seemed firmly in control – hijacking democracy while exporting military madness to the original cradle of civilization – there was always a chance the right song at the right time could change the world.
Their hair and whiskers had long ago gone snowy, but David looked almost boyish as he stood beside the slim Englishman. The two old friends looked into each other’s eyes and sang.