Why David Crosby always felt that he failed Leonard Cohen: “An embarrassing story”
David Crosby: a man of many talents, but with absolutely no respect from Leonard Cohen.
That might seem a blunt way of putting it, but there was no easy method of saying that there was no love lost between the pair. It might have suited Cohen absolutely fine, but it was an eternal source of shame for Crosby. No matter how prolific he may have been, he was always cemented as a fraud in the eyes of his hero.
To be fair to him, he was practically still a kid when he was enlisted to produce the sophomore album for a man who already held up the pretences of being a literary giant. Well, he was 28 – but the point was that there was a defined gap in the life experience between himself and Cohen, to the extent that there may well have been unfair expectations placed on him.
After all, Cohen was no easy task master, and he knew every inch of Songs from a Room had to be iconic. Songs like ‘Lady Midnight’ and ‘Bird on the Wire’ would, eventually, go on to become startling songs defining the end of a dying decade, but not when they were in Crosby’s hands. Having been cajoled into working for Cohen by Joni Mitchell, his whole naive attempt at production was far too rushed, trying to fire on all cylinders for two days.
The ever-hard-to-impress master songster was, naturally, not pleased, and roundly dismissed Crosby from his duties in favour of Bob Johnston. The resulting humiliation was something that the former Byrds guitarist could hardly bear. “It really was not a happy experience,” he said, perhaps as the greatest understatement of the century.
And yet, he still went to pains to somehow prove that he knew it was all his fault. “It’s an embarrassing story for me and a bitter pill to swallow because I could produce him now in a minute,” he tried to offer, before candidly admitting, “but then I had no idea how to record him.” Crosby might have been a little hard on himself – after all, he’s just produced Song to a Seagull – but even still, the shame continued to hang there like an unbreakable fog.
The rest of us can cut him some slack on the matter, since we were not the ones in his shoes. But to him, there was no mistaking the undeniable embarrassment that went along with the affair, knowing he had failed to live up to expectations and had also seemingly placed an air of shame around Mitchell, on account of her recommendation.
To say it haunted him for the rest of his days was perhaps a bit extreme, but it was clearly something that he never managed to fully get over or reconcile: the fact that he had this golden opportunity right at his fingertips, only to let it slip purely through his own sheer inexperience. It’s Cohen, at the end of the day – you would be kicking yourself.
But with the production duties safely under Johnston’s wing, he guided it back to what it was always meant to be, and convinced Cohen it was still worth undertaking, given that he wanted to give up on the whole thing after Crosby’s sacking. Thank God he didn’t, though: just think where we would all be without it.
