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Musician and hippie icon David Crosby (1989 in Amsterdam)
Photo: Photo Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images
David Crosby knew he didn't have much time left.
In numerous interviews he has given in recent years, the seriously ill rock veteran, who is addicted to alcohol, cocaine and heroin, has repeatedly emphasized that he still wants to make as much music as possible.
Which he then did.
Crosby has released one surprising late work after the other since his late comeback in 2014. Most recently, the contemplative »For Free« was released in 2021, on which he played together with his son James Raymond, whom he only found out about when Raymond, also a musician and songwriter, was already 30 years old.
His mother, whoever it was, had put him up for adoption once.
Back then, in the legendary summers of free love and expanding consciousness, clouded by a lot of marijuana smoke and LSD trips, in which David Crosby took on the role of the prototypical hippie and free spirit.
His career can be viewed as emblematic of that era: a short, euphoric high was followed by a very long, self-destructive hangover.
Crosby once said that he never thought he would live past 30.
But miraculously, the singer-songwriter, who shaped and influenced his generation like few others, survived the turbulent time of fame and ruin.
"I have no idea why I'm still alive and Jimi (Hendrix) isn't and Janis (Joplin) isn't," he told Rolling Stone in 2014 when a whole new, young generation in the freak and weird folk scene began to see him -Revivals rediscovered and acknowledged, "I think I just got lucky."
Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark and the other members of the band The Byrds were also lucky that Crosby joined them in 1964, otherwise they would probably have been forgotten by time.
It was the sweet vocal harmonies that 1941 Los Angeles-born college dropout and music vagabond Crosby implemented in songs like "Mr Tambourine Man" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" that helped the Byrds thrive, lending their music a soft, longing melody from the raspy folk of the Dylan adepts.
Later, as the band became early icons of the hippie scene, Crosby also wrote songs, including the psychedelic, cosmic "Eight Miles High," which remains a defining, drug-soaked anthem of the era today.
Incidentally, in 1967 he also discovered Joni Mitchell,
A threesome?
Too touchy for the Byrds!
His song "Triad", later taken over by Jefferson Airplane, was too sensitive for the more stuffy Byrds colleagues, however, the song was about a threesome with happily dreaming.
Crosby's radicalism, both in the lyrics and on the stage, led to his expulsion.
In 1967, at the Monterey Pop Festival, he made a conspiratorial rant about the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination, and it was over.
Soon after, however, also with the great creative time of the Byrds.
But the band's legacy remains the invention of folk rock.
Crosby suffered greatly from his shame, but wrote all the more beautiful and profound songs, which he soon recorded together with the two singers and songwriters Graham Nash and Stephen Stills as Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Later, another ex-Buffalo Springfield member, Neil Young, joined this protest movement supergroup.
CSN, the trio's acronym, became mascots of the late '60s counterculture.
In 1969, when the first disillusionment set in and the hippie utopias of
Love & Peace
were shattered by political assassinations, flare-ups of racism and constant deaths of soldiers in Vietnam, Crosby, Stills & Nash provided comfort and an atmosphere of blissful dozing through space and with their gentle harmonies Time.
Her performance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival (partly with Young) is still hailed by fans as essential.
Crosby's compositions, including the medieval minstrelsy "Guinevere," the soulful blues about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, "Long Time Gone," or the disillusioned, angry "Almost Cut My Hair," contained bitter messages, but the music and chants of CSN and later CSNY bedded the frustration into hopeful, relieving rock and folk music.
"Wooden Ships," a dream of an intact environment and free, easy life with a distinctive guitar riff, is one of the best songs Crosby wrote at the time, inspired by an old sailing yacht that he bought with the money from his Byrds settlement Schooner, which also became his private refuge in later years.
»Easy Rider« and a tragic accident
Not only was 1969 the year that Crosby wowed Woodstock, counterculture fanatic and filmmaker Dennis Hopper had previously immortalized him in his road movie Easy Rider: for the character of Billy, played by Hopper himself with a moustache, long hair and a fringed western jacket, he had taken the odd, buddy and good-natured-looking Crosby as his role model.
According to legend, Peter Fonda's Wyatt was inspired by Crosby's Byrds counterpart Roger McGuinn.
But just as the two bikers in "Easy Rider" did not have a happy ending, Crosby's future also darkened when his longtime girlfriend Christine Hinton died in a car accident that same year.
Crosby later viewed the tragic event as the turning point in his life, leading to depression and uncontrolled drug use.
"I couldn't handle it," he once told People magazine.
'I was very much in love with her and she just wouldn't come back.
That's when I turned to hard drugs more and more."
Arrests and jail time for cocaine and gun possession followed.
In 1994, Crosby, now suffering from hepatitis and diabetes, had to undergo a liver transplant funded by Phil Collins.
The music, still having sporadic releases as a solo artist and with Graham Nash, sank in the whirlpool of his personal crashes.
A number of friendships fell through without ever being mended, including with McGuinn, Stills, Nash, and Neil Young, whom Crosby once described in one of his numerous rants as "the most self-absorbed, self-obsessed, selfish person I know."
In a 2019 television interview with CNN, with a wavy white mane, a wrinkled face and a funny red knitted hat, he expressed regret that some of the most important people in his life were no longer speaking to him: "All my life I've been a bossy, aggressive and tough guy and i'm sure i let her down at times.
I know I did that when I became a junkie.
Becoming a junkie was really the worst thing I could do,' he said.
Instead of wallowing in nostalgia with old comrades, which would in any case be saturated with bitterness, Crosby sought contact with young musicians in his later years.
With the folk singers Michael League, Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis, who also accompanied him on stage as the »Lighthouse« band, he recorded the amazing late hippie album »Here If You Listen« in 2018, which not only features the most beautiful harmony vocals , but also contained reflective lyrics about the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a song about the effects of climate change in Venice.
Late gratification: Crosby's then-critically panned 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name, which contains some of his most haunting, intimate, and whimsical songs, is now considered one of his finest releases.
In time before his death, prevented from performing live by the corona pandemic and increasing frailty, Crosby sold the catalog rights to his extensive work to the IAG exploitation company of former music manager Irving Azoff in order to secure his livelihood and that of his family.
At the same time, despite all the differences, Crosby showed solidarity with Neil Young's protest against the streaming service Spotify and wrote on Twitter: "I can't work ... and the streaming stole my money".
David Crosby, the original Easy Rider who was as gentle as he was feisty, died Thursday in the presence of his longtime wife Jan Dance and son Django.
He was 81 years old.
In addition to many other prominent mourners, long-estranged ex-boyfriends Graham Nash and Stephen Stills also expressed their dismay and closeness to Crosby: "David and I have often clashed over time, but it was mostly just grazing shots, but we were still with numb skulls," Stills said in his statement.
»He was without question a giant of a musician and his sensitivity to harmony was nothing short of brilliant (...).
I am deeply saddened by his passing and will miss him immensely.«
