Outside the Beltway

David Crosby, 1941-2023

The folk rock legend is gone at 81.

James Joyner · Friday, January 20, 2023 · 9 comments

Rolling Stone, “David Crosby, Iconoclastic Rocker, Dead at 81“

DAVID CROSBY, THE singer, songwriter, and guitarist who helped shape the sound of Sixties rock and beyond, died Wednesday night at the age of 81. A source close to Crosby confirmed the musician’s death to Rolling Stone, but did not disclose a cause.

Crosby was a founding member of the Byrds, playing guitar and contributing harmony vocals to their most enduring songs, including “Eight Miles High,” “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Shortly after being forced out of the group due to personality conflicts with frontman Roger McGuinn, he formed the supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and Graham Nash of the Hollies. The trio — which became a quartet in 1969 when Neil Young joined their ranks — played a major role in the development of folk rock, country rock, and the emergent “California sound” that dominated rock radio throughout the mid-Seventies. Croz wrote many of their most beloved tunes, including “Almost Cut My Hair,” “Long Time Gone,” and “Déjà Vu.”

“It is with a deep and profound sadness that I learned that my friend David Crosby has passed,” Crosby’s former bandmate Nash wrote in a statement. “I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times, but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years.”

“He was without question a giant of a musician, and his harmonic sensibilities were nothing short of genius,” Stills remembered in a message to Rolling Stone. “The glue that held us together as our vocals soared, like Icarus, towards the sun. I am deeply saddened at his passing and shall miss him beyond measure.”

“I’m heartbroken to hear about David Crosby,” Brian Wilson wrote. “David was an unbelievable talent — such a great singer and songwriter. And a wonderful person. I just am at a loss for words.”

While Crosby’s success continued in the 1970s and into the Eighties, his personal life was marred by heavy drug use, which wreaked havoc on his career and led to a short jail sentence in 1985. Yet he recovered and continued making music and touring for another three decades. “I have no idea how I’m alive and Jimi [Hendrix] isn’t and Janis [Joplin] isn’t and all my other friends,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014, years after he’d cleaned up. “I have no idea why me, but I got lucky.”

Variety, “David Crosby, Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash Co-Founder, Dies at 81“

Singer-songwriter-guitarist David Crosby, a founding member of two popular and enormously influential ’60s rock units, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash (later Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), has died, his representative says. He was 81 years old. A cause of death has not been revealed.

The death came as a surprise to those who followed his very active Twitter account, which he’d kept tweeting on as recently as Wednesday. One of Crosby’s final tweets the day before he died was to make a typically jocular comment about heaven: “I heard the place is overrated… cloudy.”

Former CSNY partner Graham Nash, who had been estranged from Crosby in recent years as their group went its separate ways, paid tribute on his social media. “It is with a deep and profound sadness that I learned that my friend David Crosby has passed,” Nash wrote. “I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times, but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years.

“David was fearless in life and in music,” Nash continued. “He leaves behind a tremendous void as far as sheer personality and talent in this world. He spoke his mind, his heart, and his passion through his beautiful music and leaves an incredible legacy. These are the things that matter most. My heart is truly with his wife, Jan, his son, Django, and all of the people he has touched in this world.”

Eight months ago, Crosby made headlines when he said he was done performing live, declaring, “I’m too old to do it anymore. I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength.” But he said he was recording as busily as possible: “I’ve been making records at a startling rate. … Now I’m 80 years old so I’m gonna die fairly soon. That’s how that works. And so I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it’s really good… I have another one already in the can waiting.” Crosby subsequently backtracked about having retired from performing live, saying in mid-December that he’d changed his mind: “Dare I say it?… I think I’m starting yet another band and going back out to play live.”

In recent years, as CSNY had seemed irrevocably split up, it was clear that what Crosby had wanted most of all was to reconcile with those bandmates. That was not to be, but Stephen Stills said in his own statement Thursday night that their relationship had ended peacefully.

Wrote Stills, across a series of tweets, “I read a quote in this morning’s paper attributed to composer Gustav Mahler that stopped me for a moment: ‘Death has, on placid cat’s paws, entered the room.’ I shoulda known something was up.

“David and I butted heads a lot over time, but they were mostly glancing blows, yet still left us numb skulls,” Stills continued. “I was happy to be at peace with him. He was without question a giant of a musician, and his harmonic sensibilities were nothing short of genius. The glue that held us together as our vocals soared, like Icarus, towards the sun. I am deeply saddened at his passing and shall miss him beyond measure.”

Crosby reentered the public consciousness in a big way in 2019 with a theatrical documentary, “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” narrated and produced by Cameron Crowe. Crosby spoke about his own mortality in the film, and Crowe remarked on that in an interview with Variety, saying the singer was thinking about “’telling the truth in my last huge interview that I’ll probably ever do’… In the second question of the first interview we did with Crosby,” Crowe noted, “he came right out with ‘Time is the final currency. What do you do with the time you have left?’ …What’s great is, he’s got more energy than all of us. He’s gonna outlive us all. He’s batting his eyes like he’s on his deathbed. He ain’t on his deathbed at all! Maybe it all is a con job, like he says at the end. You don’t know.”

New York Times, “David Crosby, Folk-Rock Voice of the 1960s Whose Influence Spanned Decades, Dies at 81“

David Crosby, the outspoken and often troubled singer, songwriter and guitarist who helped create two of the most influential and beloved American bands of the classic-rock era of the 1960s and ’70s, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has died. He was 81.

[…]

Mr. Crosby was inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a founding member of the Byrds and as a founder of CSN&Y. He brought jazz influences to both groups, in the process broadening the possibilities of vocally driven folk-rock. And his reach extended to later generations: His alternate tunings became an inspiration for the innovative “freak folk” movement of the early 21st century while influencing scores of other musicians eager to give acoustic music a progressive spin.

If Mr. Crosby’s music expanded boundaries, his persona fixed him in a specific era — and proudly so. In 1968, he wrote “Triad,” an ode to free love, recorded in distinct versions by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His song “Almost Cut My Hair,” which he recorded with CSN&Y for their acclaimed 1970 album, “Déjà Vu,” was a virtual loyalty oath to the counterculture.

Mr. Crosby’s image as the twinkle-eyed stoner and sardonic hedonist of the cosmic age was said to have been a model for the obstinate free spirit played by Dennis Hopper in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”

His impish indulgences turned potentially lethal many times. He became nearly as well known for his drug offenses, weapons charges and prison stints as for his music. By the mid-1970s, he was addicted to both cocaine and heroin.

“You don’t sit down and say, ‘Gee, I think I’ll become a junkie,’” Mr. Crosby told People magazine in 1990. “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was fun. It was the ’60s, and we thought we were expanding our consciousnesses.”

But later, he continued, “drugs became more for blurring pain.” He added: “You don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are. And I had the money to get more and more addicted.”

Mr. Crosby’s drug abuse may have exacerbated his medical problems, including a long battle with hepatitis C, which necessitated a liver transplant in 1994. He also suffered from type 2 diabetes and, in 2014, had to cancel a tour to endure a cardiac catheterization and angiogram.

Despite his health issues, his voice remained robust enough in those years for him to tour. And in his best moments while performing with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, he could recreate some of the most famous harmonies of the rock era. His voice remained strong as well when touring with his solo band in later years.

It’s hardly tragic when someone passes at 81. That’s especially true for pop culture figures we don’t know personally and whose peak years are decades in the past. Crosby, like so many of his era, will live forever in musical history and, seemingly, always be played.

I discovered the Byrds and CSNY circa 1979-1980, well after their heyday. Crosby and all the rest were slightly older than my parents so they’ve always been “old” to me, even though I enjoyed their music. But as the NYT obit puts it, despite his undeniable genius as a musician, Crosby has mostly stood out to me as a character from another era, forever stuck in time.

As an outsider, it’s always struck me as sad when bandmates who produce music that brings so much joy to millions have fallings out that ruin their personal relationships. The grind of the road and the seemingly inevitable substance abuse certainly can’t help. And it may just be that the personality types that produce such great songs are destined to be unhappy.