“He’s much better”: David Crosby on the musician he made his best work with
The art behind any great rock and roll song is collaboration. Although there are a handful of people who can claim to do it all whenever they get into the studio, it never fully congeals into sounding like a full band until everyone starts adding their own sonic spice into the mix and figuring out what they can do when working together. And even for a band that could be as insular as Crosby, Stills, and Nash, David Crosby knew that some collaborators were always bound to work better than others.
Because when looking at the band’s checkered history, it’s not like Crosby didn’t know what it was like to work with a bad collaborator. The massive disagreements over creative direction are what drove him out of The Byrds, and the only reason why his supergroup was named after every member was so they could splinter off into their solo careers at a moment’s notice if they wanted to.
That’s not to say that they didn’t know how to get the best out of each other, either. Crosby was the one who eventually convinced Graham Nash to work on ‘Marrakesh Express’ to turn it into one of the greatest songs of the late 1960s, and when Neil Young joined, he had enough sense to help Crosby come back down to Earth after years of drug abuse on American Dream, even if the album itself was among one of the worst things they ever made together.
But Crosby was never focused on making the most complex music ever created. All great songs are based on what comes out of someone’s heart rather than trying to make the mathematically perfect harmony, and looking through his solo catalogue, a lot of what Crosby was able to do was based around capturing a feeling rather than relying on some alien chords that hadn’t been thought of by man yet.
As he got to the end of his career, though, he had fought to keep things fairly close to the chest. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were always bound to butt heads once they got together, but when working on his solo music, his son, James Raymond, was normally the one guiding him through every tune, whether that was suggesting something different or correcting what the harmonies were supposed to be on any given song.
And even with legends in his back catalogue, Crosby had to admit that no one came close to what Raymond did for him, saying, “James gave me a chance to earn my way in, be his friend, and I’ve written a lot of the best music of my life with him. He’s a much better musician than I am. But when we butt heads musically, I submit to him – because he knows way more than I do. We have a good relationship here.”
Although someone like Young had spent every part of his career doing whatever the hell he wanted, Crosby and Raymond had spent that time trying to preserve what was already there. After all, music is a gift that most people hone throughout their lives, and while Crosby’s voice had gone through many different eras throughout his career, the fact that he could sound even stronger than before years before his death was a miracle.
So while Crosby, Stills, and Nash might have a few more platinum records than Crosby does on his own, keeping it in the family was one of the best things he could have asked for at the time. It wasn’t going to be easy working without his bandmates, but even if If I Could Only Remember My Name was in the rearview, that didn’t mean there wasn’t some untapped potential left in the tank.
