David Crosby

David Crosby: The Harmony and the Wreckage

In October 1968 the Byrds sacked him. Ten months later he stood on the stage at Woodstock with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, playing only the second live performance the trio had ever given, in front of half a million people. Their debut album took the 1969 Grammy for Best New Artist. Few careers have been rebuilt that fast, and few have then been dismantled quite so thoroughly by the man who built them.

A Cinematographer's Son

David Van Cortlandt Crosby was born in Los Angeles on August 14, 1941, the second son of Floyd Crosby, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, and Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, who worked as a Macy's salesperson. Both parents came from prominent New York stock: his father was connected to the Van Rensselaers, his mother descended from the Van Cortlandts and was granddaughter of the Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh. His older brother Ethan taught him guitar, and died by suicide at the end of 1997.

He passed through University Elementary School in Los Angeles, Crane Country Day School in Montecito and Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara, briefly attended Carpinteria Union High School in 1958, and finished his schooling by correspondence through Cate School. He studied drama at Santa Barbara City College before abandoning it for music, working first with Terry Callier and with Les Baxter's Balladeers.

The Byrds

In 1964 he joined Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark's Jet Set, which became the Byrds with Michael Clarke and Chris Hillman. Their 1965 cover of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one and effectively invented folk rock as a commercial form. Crosby's contribution was distinctive and hard to replace: rhythm guitar, songwriting, and above all the arrangement of vocal harmony, the element that gave the band its shimmer. He wrote or co-wrote "Why," "I See You," "Guinnevere," and "Eight Miles High" in 1966, a record that dragged raga and free jazz into a pop single and helped open psychedelia.

He also became impossible. At the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 he used the stage to question the Warren Commission's findings on the Kennedy assassination, infuriating McGuinn. Arguments over whether the band should record covers or his own songs during the sessions for The Notorious Byrd Brothers finished it, and in October 1968 McGuinn and Hillman dismissed him. He had played on the first five Byrds albums, and returned in 1973 to produce the reunion record Byrds.

Crosby, Stills & Nash

The partnership formed almost immediately, in 1968, with Stills out of Buffalo Springfield and Nash out of the Hollies. The self-titled debut arrived in 1969, Deja Vu with Neil Young added reached number one in 1970, and the live double 4 Way Street followed in 1971. Crosby's songs carried the group's strangeness: "Guinnevere" with its modal drift, "Long Time Gone," "Almost Cut My Hair" as the era's most literal statement of countercultural loyalty, and "Wooden Ships," co-written with Paul Kantner and Stills. The band's various configurations kept returning for decades, through CSN in 1977, Daylight Again in 1982, American Dream in 1988, Live It Up in 1990, After the Storm in 1994 and Looking Forward in 1999.

In September 1969, at the height of it, his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car crash. He never fully recovered, and his drug use accelerated from that point.

The Lost Decade

His first solo record, If I Could Only Remember My Name, appeared in 1971, was panned, and was reappraised decades later as one of the strangest and most beautiful albums of its era. Then heroin and cocaine took the better part of fifteen years. In 1985 he was convicted of drug and weapons offences and served nine months in a Texas state prison; later the same year he was arrested in California for drunk driving, hit-and-run, and possession of a concealed pistol and cocaine. In 1994 he underwent a liver transplant, necessitated by hepatitis C contracted through years of needle use and paid for by Phil Collins, which set off a public argument about whether celebrity and self-inflicted illness should affect access to organs. He married Jan Dance in 1987, with Stephen Stills giving away the bride. In 2004 he pleaded guilty in New York to attempted criminal possession of a weapon and paid a $5,000 fine.

The Late Flowering

What should have been an epilogue turned into the most productive stretch of his life. After forming CPR with guitarist Jeff Pevar and his son James Raymond, the child he had given up for adoption in 1962 and later found again, he released Croz in 2014 at seventy-two, then Lighthouse in 2016, Sky Trails in 2017, Here If You Listen in 2018 and For Free in 2021: five albums in eight years, more solo work than he had managed in the previous four decades combined. The 2019 documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name premiered at Sundance and found him unsparing about the damage he had done. He also fathered two children by donating sperm to Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher, made public in 2000, and built a craft cannabis brand. He died on January 18, 2023, in Santa Ynez, California, aged 81, after a long illness.

Why David Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is narrow and real: Crosby heard chords and voicings that other people in rock did not, and he heard them vertically. His gift was harmonic, in both senses. As an arranger he could take three untrained voices and stack them into something that sounded like a single instrument, which is why he became indispensable twice, to the Byrds and then to CSN, in bands otherwise led by stronger commercial songwriters. As a composer he wrote in modes and open, unresolved shapes that pop had almost no vocabulary for, which is why "Guinnevere" and "Eight Miles High" still sound like nothing else from 1966 to 1969. Graham Nash, who had by then stopped speaking to him, still called him "charming, caring and a brilliant musician." Five albums he played on sit on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.

The counter-case is severe, and he made most of it himself. This was a craft and ear gift rather than an intellectual one, and it functioned properly only in collaboration; his solo records, the last ones excepted, never approached the work he did inside other people's bands. He was fired from the first of those bands for being unbearable, and by 2016 Nash was announcing that CSN would never play again because he could not stand him. Fifteen years disappeared into heroin, and a liver with them. The honest verdict is that he possessed one exceptional faculty and comprehensively failed to protect it, then spent his last decade making up for lost time.

Legacy

The Byrds and CSNY records he appeared on have sold more than 35 million copies, and the harmony language he built has been absorbed so completely into American music that it now sounds like a natural feature of the landscape rather than an invention. He was also, uniquely among his generation's casualties, granted a long coda in which to work sober and admit what he had wasted. He used it, releasing five albums after seventy and dying with the discography he should have had all along.