David Crosby, Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash
Co-Founder, Dies at 81
Variety
By Carmel Dagan
January 19, 2023
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.
He was 81 years old.
His wife released a statement to Variety, saying, “It is
with great sadness after a long illness, that our beloved David (Croz) Crosby
has passed away. He was lovingly surrounded by his wife and soulmate Jan and
son Django. Although he is no longer here with us, his humanity and kind soul
will continue to guide and inspire us. His legacy will continue to live on
through his legendary music. Peace, love, and harmony to all who knew David and
those he touched. We will miss him dearly. At this time, we respectfully and
kindly ask for privacy as we grieve and try to deal with our profound loss.
Thank you for the love and prayers.”
With bandmates Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman
and Michael Clarke, Crosby set down the template for ’60s L.A. folk-rock in the
Byrds during his stormy 1964-67 tenure in the group.
Bonding with Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and
Graham Nash of the Hollies amid the glitter of L.A.’s late-’60s Laurel Canyon
scene, Crosby launched CS&N, whose multi-platinum 1968 debut inaugurated
rock’s supergroup era.
The addition of another volatile member, Stills’
erstwhile Buffalo Springfield colleague Neil Young, added to the act’s
commercial luster. However, a constant clash of egos within Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young, fueled by the rock excesses of the era, toppled the act
during the ’70s, though its members would regroup sporadically over the years
as a recording and touring unit. Crosby’s most stable association was with
Nash: The duo recorded and toured regularly into the new millennium.
While never the principal songwriter in either the Byrds
or CSN&Y, Crosby was an integral part of the densely layered harmony front
line that launched both those acts’ multiple chart hits.
The hedonistic personification of the ’60s
sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, he grappled with addiction for many
years. His sensational 1982 arrest in Texas on drug and weapons charges led to
a five-month prison stay in 1986. Wracked by years of cocaine and alcohol
abuse, he underwent liver transplant surgery in 1994.
Though he never returned to the popular eminence of his
early years, Crosby recorded and toured profitably into the 2000s.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
twice, as a member of the Byrds (1991) and Crosby, Stills & Nash (1997).
Crosby was a child of Hollywood privilege. He was the son
of cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who won an Oscar for his work on F.W. Murnau’s
1931 feature “Tabu.” Raised in L.A. and Santa Barbara, he was an indifferent
student who gravitated to acting and music at an early age.
Dropping out of Santa Barbara City College to pursue a
career in music, he became involved in the commercial folk music scene via
brief membership in Les Baxter’s Balladeers, a Limeliters-styled unit organized
by the well-known composer-arranger.
He began working the L.A. folk clubs as a solo act; at a
set at the Troubadour, his crisp tenor voice attracted the attention of Jim
Dickson, the house engineer at Richard Bock’s L.A. label World Pacific Records.
Dickson began demoing Crosby as a solo artist, but those sessions ultimately
culminated in the formation of a band.
L.A.’s nascent singer-songwriter scene was then
coalescing around the Folk Den, the front room at the Santa Monica Boulevard
club the Troubadour. One evening in 1964, the headstrong Crosby inserted
himself into a jam session involving two well-traveled young folksingers.
McGuinn (then known by his birth name, Jim; he soon changed his name to Roger
after joining the spiritual movement Subud) had previously worked with the
urban folk outfits the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and had met
Crosby during a Santa Barbara tour stop by the former act. Clark had been a
member of another clean-cut folk act, the New Christy Minstrels.
Though McGuinn was wary of Crosby’s outsized, opinionated
personality, he was under the sway of the Beatles and envisioned the formation
of a new group; Crosby’s access to free studio time at World Pacific led to
first sessions by McGuinn, Crosby and Clark under the collective handle the Jet
Set.
Under the name the Beefeaters, the trio issued a flop
single on Elektra Records, but soon reformulated themselves as a full-blown
rock quintet that reflected the influence of the Beatles’ ’64 debut feature “A
Hard Day’s Night.” The lineup was filled out with the addition of neophyte
bassist Chris Hillmen, formerly mandolinist with the bluegrass-oriented World
Pacific group the Hillmen, and the unskilled but photogenic drummer Michael
Clarke.
Rechristened the Byrds in obvious emulation of the Fab
Four, the act was signed to Columbia Records in late 1964 on the basis of
promotional efforts by Dickson, who was now managing the band. Momentously, the
well-connected Dickson urged his act to cover a new song penned by one of his
friends, folk star Bob Dylan.
Issued as the Byrds’ first single, the harmony-laden
version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” leaped to No. 1 on the U.S. singles
chart in early 1965; the eponymous debut album reached No. 6. By that time, the
group was the reigning attraction on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, thanks to a
high-profile residency at Ciro’s. For the next two years, Crosby’s group would
reign as American pop’s answer to the Beatles, and influence a host of
like-styled folk-rock acts. All of their Columbia albums during that period
reached the U.S. top 25.
Though Crosby’s pure, soaring voice was a key component
of the unit’s sound, he took a back seat as a writer to bandmates McGuinn and
Clark, who were responsible for the group’s hit originals. The Crosby-penned
singles “Lady Friend” and “Why” failed to catch fire. The departure of the
emotionally unsettled Clark from the group in 1966 only served to exacerbate
tensions between McGuinn and Crosby.
Strife within the Byrds came to a head in 1967. That
June, the band appeared at the historic Monterey Pop Festival in Northern
California; the politically outspoken Crosby infuriated McGuinn with some of
his onstage remarks, and further enraged his bandmate by sitting in with
Buffalo Springfield for most of their set. In a move that could be considered
payback, McGuinn vetoed the release of a new Crosby composition, “Triad,” about
a sexual ménage a trois; the song would ultimately find a home on “Crown of
Creation,” a 1968 album by Crosby’s San Francisco friends Jefferson Airplane.
Finally, in October 1967, McGuinn and Hillman drove their
Porsches to Crosby’s Beverly Glen house and fired him from the Byrds.
Amid the then-burgeoning musical colony in L.A.’s idyllic
Laurel Canyon, the newly cashiered Crosby began jamming with his friend Stephen
Stills, whose L.A.-based band Buffalo Springfield had recently imploded amid
internecine strife, and Graham Nash, who had met the other two during a 1966
U.S. tour by his Manchester, England-bred group the Hollies. After a deal
brokered by David Geffen freed the three musicians from their outstanding
contractual obligations, Crosby, Stills & Nash was signed to Atlantic
Records.
The group’s self-titled album was released in May 1969;
it sported three notable Crosby compositions – the ballad “Guinnevere” (a love
song inspired by his girlfriend Christine Hinton and his ex-paramour Joni
Mitchell, who had subsequently entered a relationship with Nash), the
apocalyptic “Wooden Ships” (co-written with Stills and Paul Kantner, and
covered the same year by Kantner’s group Jefferson Airplane) and the stormy
“Long Time Gone.”
The harmonious album vaulted to No. 6 on the U.S. chart,
and was ultimately certified for sales of 4 million copies. In August 1969,
already ubiquitous on the American airwaves, the group made its second concert
appearance – with new member Neil Young in tow – before half a million people
at the Woodstock music festival in Bethel, N.Y.
Young’s addition to the lineup, now billed as Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young, ramped up the group’s already formidable commercial
clout. The superstar quartet’s 1970 album “Déjà Vu” rocketed to No. 1 and
ultimately sold 7 million copies; 1971’s “4-Way Street,” a two-LP live set
drawn from their subsequent U.S. tour, also claimed the top slot and went
quadruple-platinum.
However, Crosby’s personal problems escalated at the
height of CSN&Y’s popularity. Already an enthusiastic consumer of cocaine,
he turned to heroin after Hinton was killed in a 1970 car accident. Though by
no means a stranger to drug use himself, Young was appalled by Crosby’s
behavior and the constant tension and disorder within the group, and withdrew
to focus on his solo career, though he would return to tour with the other
members in 1974.
Despite his eroding condition, Crosby released a 1971
solo debut, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” which peaked at No. 12 in 1971;
he received all-star backing from Nash, Young, Joni Mitchell and members of
Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Santana.
In 1972, a reunion of the original Byrds lineup of
Crosby, McGuinn, Clark, Hillman and Clarke was engineered by David Geffen for
his Asylum label, and McGuinn, who had led the act following Crosby’s exit,
disbanded the then-current edition of the group. However, while the 1973
release “Byrds” managed to reach No. 20 on the U.S. album chart, the set was
largely dismissed critics, and the members went their separate ways. No other
new material was ever released under the Byrds’ name.
Graham Nash was Crosby’s reliable partner and stabilizing
collaborator through the ’70s: Together they issued the duo recordings “Graham
Nash/David Crosby” (No. 4, 1972), “Wind on the Water” (No. 6, 1975) and
“Whistling Down the Wire” (No. 26, 1976). However, the pair were odd men out in
what began as a 1976 CSN&Y studio reunion: Their vocals were stripped from
the project, which was issued as “Long May You Run,” billed to the Stills-Young
Band, in 1976.
Nonetheless, CS&N managed to bury the hatchet long
enough to record “CSN” (No. 2, 1977) and “Daylight Again” (No. 4, 1982). But
Crosby’s personal life unraveled very publicly the year the second album was
released.
In April 1982, he was arrested in a Dallas nightclub and
charged with possessing a .45-caliber handgun and a pipe he used to freebase
cocaine. Convicted in 1983, he finally served five months of a five-year
sentence in 1986 – the year after another bust for drunk driving in Northern
California. He later credited the Texas conviction for ending his addiction to
cocaine. (His run-ins with the law continued in later years. He was convicted
and fined for marijuana and firearms possession in 2004. In 2015, he hit a
jogger with his car in Santa Ynez, Calif., but was not charged in the
incident.)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunited for a
performance at Farm Aid in 1985. In 1986, they appeared for the first of seven
times as headliners at the Bridge School Concert, a benefit event organized by
Neil Young and his then-wife Pegi for a Northern California school serving
disabled children.
Crosby maintained his solo career with the albums “Oh Yes
I Can” (No. 104, 1989) and “Thousand Roads” (No. 133, 1993). His most unusual
collaborative effort, the drolly named CPR, was founded in 1996, after he
reunited with his son, pianist James Raymond, who had been born in 1962 and
given up for adoption by his mother after a brief relationship with Crosby. The
band, which also included guitarist Jeff Pevar, released four independent
albums from 1998-2001. Crosby and Nash cut a self-titled duo release in 2004,
reaching No. 142.
His last solo recording, “Croz,” was issued in 2014.
Crosby returned to acting during the ’90s with
appearances on “The John Larroquette Show” (as the star’s Alcoholics Anonymous
sponsor) and “Roseanne” and in the films “Hook” and “Thunderheart.” He also
voiced two cartoon cameos on “The Simpsons.”
With Carl Gottlieb, he authored two memoirs, “Long Time
Gone” (1988) and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About
It” (2007). In 2000 he published “Stand and Be Counted,” a history of activism
in music, with David Bender.
Crosby is survived by his wife Jan Dance, their son
Django, son James Raymond, and two daughters, Erika and Donovan, from previous
relationships. In 2000, it was revealed by singer Melissa Etheridge that Crosby
was the biological father of two children born to Etheridge’s then-partner
Julie Cypher via artificial insemination.
CROSBY, David (David Van Cortlandt
Crosby)
Born: 8/14/1941, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Died: 1/19/2023, U.S.A.
David Crosby’s western – actor:
Thunderheart – 1992 (bartender)
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