Musically Defeated: The artist that almost made David Crosby give up music
Music was never supposed to be a competition. Ignoring the labels that tried everything they could to make the biggest splash possible with every act, the core ethos behind any good songwriter is writing something that many people care about and can sing along to whenever they hear it. David Crosby was no different when he first started working with The Byrds, but when Bob Dylan came out, he would gladly give up everything to write like him.
Then again, The Byrds were never exactly born and bred as rock and rollers. They had the jangly guitars that made people want to play their tunes over and over, but artists like Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn got their start in the worlds of folk and country music, making songs that were dominated by acoustic guitars rather than the chiming 12-string electric.
Just like every other artist that came out of the 1960s, though, something altered their DNA when they heard The Beatles perform for the first time. Suddenly, rock and roll was the coolest thing in the world, and McGuinn ended up trading in some of his bluegrass instruments to get the same guitars that George Harrison was playing.
The Fab Four may have had the sound they were looking for, but there was no one who could compete with Dylan. After trying his hand at sounding like Woody Guthrie, Dylan’s songs for the people ended up having a drastic impact on what rock and roll would sound like, with every aspiring songwriter wanting to write just like him.
Even though Crosby didn’t see the big deal at first, he quickly found out that what Dylan did was borderline impossible, telling Rolling Stone, “Everyone was talking about him. I thought, ‘Fuck, I can sing better than that. Why are they making all that fuss about him?’ Then I started really listening. And I almost quit, right there”.
It’s not that Crosby is far off when it comes to Dylan’s singing voice. That nasally breathy delivery has always been a hit or miss with rock fans, and it’s not like Dylan has spent time trying to sound like the folk-rock answer to Mariah Carey. What he lacks in technical ability, though, he makes up for in pure conviction.
Listening to songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, you believe that Dylan has lived every word that he sings about, even when he’s talking about great figures of history who passed away long before he was born. This was a guy who seemed to have lived a full life before he had even opened his mouth to sing, and fans would spend the rest of their lives trying to come close to what he did.
Crosby may have helped give Dylan’s songs a boost when playing covers of him with The Byrds, but even those versions of the songs seem to be lacking something. They may play a decent version of it and hit the notes exactly how they are supposed to be hit, but the heart of the song still lies in Dylan’s original, having the kind of grit that no amount of jangly guitar could make up for.
For as long as Crosby continued to write songs, Dylan would always be the reference point, being a sort of litmus test for what constitutes a good song. A song may have a decent lick or one cutting line behind everything, but if it doesn’t come close to what Dylan is capable of, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
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