“An asshole”: David Crobsy on the star whose legend was blown out of proportion
Despite making some of the most luscious, blissful music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, few men of that era made enemies with as much aplomb as David Crosby. The erstwhile The Byrds frontman and Crosby, Stills & Nash mainstay remained notably cantankerous and difficult to get along with, even when his band contained Neil Young. It isn’t even down to the mountains of drugs that Crosby mowed through during his prodigious music career, even though I’m sure they didn’t help. Sometimes, people are difficult long before the drugs get hold of them, and the first person to admit this would be David Crosby himself.
At this point, it would be difficult not to. Across a music career spanning over half a century, the man rarely did himself any favours. Even in 2014, he managed to outdo himself by calling Daryl Hannah, who had just started a relationship with Neil Young at the time, a “purely poisonous predator”. Crosby later apologised profusely, both privately and publicly, recanting the statement in an interview with Rolling Stone. It’s telling that this was a step too far for even Crosby himself, who seemingly had never found a target that wasn’t fair game.
Everyone from The Rolling Stones to Phoebe Bridgers has been the subject of the legendary ire of Crosby. At some points, even the dead were acceptable targets to slag off. Not the Grateful kind, at least, he was such a huge Jerry Garcia fan he formed a band with him in 1970. No, I mean the dearly departed kind. In fact, his feelings about The Doors’ Jim Morrison were so strong that he actually wrote a song about how Morrison was deified after his death, despite the fact that no one knew him the way Crosby did.
In conversation with Marc Allan, Crosby was asked about his feelings toward the late singer, and he is typically frank about them. He said, “I didn’t like him. It was actually, most of the time he was drunk, and most of the time he was obnoxious, during the time I knew him anyway. Not a bad poet, but an obnoxious guy… Morrison was a tortured guy, man.”
Later in the interview, when asked why the myth of Morrison is blown out of proportion, Crosby manages to throw a dead man under the bus while patting himself on the back for it. “General showbiz stuff, plus he died young, plus there wasn’t anybody around like me who was a curmudgeon willing to say, ‘Ah, the guy was an asshole!'”
This was absolutely not true, by the way. The one guy who could possibly give Crosby a run for his money in the curmudgeon stakes was alive and well when Morrison passed away. Lou Reed was no fan of the ‘Lizard King’ either, and was reported, in an unsourced quote published by Classic Rock, to have responded to the news of his passing by saying, “How fabulous, in a bathtub in Paris! I had no pity at all for that silly Los Angeles person.”
That was arguably Crosby in a nutshell. Willing and able to give himself credit as a free-thinker who “tells it like it is”, despite a cursory look at the facts of the matter proving him wrong. One can only hope that he did a lot more apologizing in private than he ever did publicly.
