R.I.P. David Crosby (and Some Cool Facts About His Background)

David Crosby (1941-2023) has just passed away at the age of 81.

Few thought he would make it to this age! I was a fan of The John Larroquette Show (1993-94), on which Crosby was stunt cast in a recurring part as Larroquette’s AA sponsor, a very funny in-joke that relied on Crosby’s legend as a problem partier. He needed a liver replacement because of his boozing and got into serious trouble with the law in the mid ’80s, for possession of heroin, cocaine and illegal firearms. Yeah, guns! To me that’s evidence of how drugs alter your personality. The guy always seemed like a big pussycat, Mr. Peace and Love. Coke makes you freak out and get all paranoid. Anyway, Crosby wasn’t the world’s greatest thespian, but he did make some self-mocking guest appearances on The Simpsons, Roseanne, and Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom Ellen, and much like that other rocker no one thought would survive Keith Richard, played a pirate in a theatrical film (in Crosby’s case, it was Steven Spielberg’s 1991 Hook, where that big bushy walrus mustache was put to sensible use).

Much like Pete Seeger and Pete La Farge, Crosby came from a very posh, very old American family, descended from Van Rensselaers, Van Cortlandts, and Delafields. Like both Seeger and La Farge, Crosby spent his early years as a folk musician in New York’s Greenwich Village. Crosby’s Philadelphia born father Floyd Crosby originally worked on Wall Street, but later became an Oscar winning cinematographer. For real! The Oscar was for F.W. Murnau’sTabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931). He also worked on Orson Welles’ It’s All True(1941-42), and shot such classics as High Noon (1952) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958), and somehow, for some reason, lots and lots of Roger Corman pictures for AIP. Ironically Floyd had retired a couple of years before AIP’sEasy Rider (1969), which famously used the music of The Byrds. Anyway, this Hollywood connection is why this guy from old East Coast families was an L.A. baby.

My definitive post on The Byrds is (not illogically) Roger McGuinn-centric, though Crosby was a key member of that seminal group throughout the first five albums and four years. One can’t fault him for leaving the band. It’s never a good place for a hippie to be where colleagues are telling you what you CAN’T do, and his bandmates carped at him for his political statements at the Monterey Pop Festival, and for sitting in with other groups, and they axed his amazing if icky song “Triad” (about a menage a trois) from The Notorious Byrd Brothers.

I selected the photo above, from the Byrds years, despite the fact that it doesn’t reflect what’s come to be regarded as the classic David Crosby look because I just really love that MOMENT of becoming, of ferment, and art and possibility that sort of climaxed in 1965-66-67. It’s another perspective from which to regard the singer. And besides, maybe he has some acid Kool-Aid in that Dixie Cup.

I’ve never been a Crosby, Stills and Nash fan and the one song of theirs I like and play a lot, “Woodstock” was written by Joni Mitchell, with input from Hendrix, with lead guitar by Neil Young and lead vocal by Stephen Stills. But Crosby was a guy who loved to harmonize, and judging by all his stellar collaborations, he was a valuable man to have around in a recording studio. He also recorded several albums as a solo artist, the first of which in 1971, was called If I Could Only Remember My Name, another example of his self-deprecating sense of humor. In 2018 he contributed the song “Home Free” to the movie Little Pink House, which we reviewed here.

By the way, Crosby wrote two books of memoirs, co-written with San Francisco hippie humorist Carl Gottlieb, whom we wrote about here.

Crosby’s final Tweet, sent yesterday, is destined to go down in history as some of the great “last words”. In a conversation about heaven, he wrote “I hear the place is overrated…cloudy”. Let us know, won’t you?