The 1969 song David Crosby wanted no one else to play: “Nobody else but me”
It’s hard to blame anyone like David Crosby for being a bit too protective of their own tunes.
As much as people like the idea of making the biggest hits they can think of, Crosby was the one who was constantly trying to reinvent the wheel on his tunes, and he wasn’t about to take his pieces of art and bend to whatever the record company wanted him to make every time he made a record. But even if the label could be malicious in his eyes at times, he knew that even his bandmates could have muddied up some of his greatest tunes.
You can trace that kind of playing all the way back to working with The Byrds. Despite Crosby and Roger McGuinn having a much more cordial relationship as the years went on, Crosby was the first to say that he didn’t want to end up playing the same kind of California-style music that they were doing every time they walked into the studio. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were there to give him another outlet, but even then, some ideas were a bit too odd for what his bandmates were used to.
Crosby was already looking to go beyond the traditional realm of rock and roll harmony, and while ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’ set everything in motion, it was a lot more interesting for him to make songs that Joni Mitchell could be proud of. And while Stephen Stills was down to make whatever left turn that the band wanted, ‘Guinevere’ was a bit more complicated than anyone was willing to stomach at the time.
This was a rock and roll song on jazz’s terms, and while Crosby wasn’t doing some superhuman shapes on guitar, there were a lot of people scratching their heads as to what tuning he was in half the time. None of those early CSN songs had to be in one set tuning, and after making everything sound perfect on his own, Crosby wasn’t going to let anyone else get in the way of the sounds he heard in his head.
There were plenty more opportunities for the rest of the band to add their two cents in, but Crosby insisted that no one else play the guitar on the record except for him, saying, “The only thing we wanted to do was get into a recording studio and do that, because we all had songs. I had written ‘Guinevere’ by that time. Nash had ‘Marrakesh Express’ and another song called ‘Right Between the Eyes’ – good songs –and ‘Lady of the Island,’ stuff that really didn’t fit the Hollies. I played on the things that I could play. Nobody else but me could have played ‘Guinevere.’”
But even if Crosby was determined to get it right, that didn’t mean that others couldn’t mess around with what he had already created. Miles Davis was already taken aback by the melody that he eventually worked up his own arrangement of the tune, but even then, there was that one special something that made Crosby feel a little bit detached from his own song when he heard it in the wrong context.
At the same time, hearing it in another context was a better way for Crosby to really internalise the song a little bit better. He didn’t have to worry about hitting every note perfectly whenever he heard someone else’s rendition, and even though the song was a lot more verbose than anything The Byrds had done, the best test was to let the song stand on its own without words and see if it still sounded great.
And even without the soaring harmonies on Davis’s version, Crosby would have been proud to have made a tune that could have stood on its own. The Byrds seemed like a distant memory after this song, and it was up to Crosby to make even more tunes that might possibly match up to this next phase of his career.
