“Crazy as a f**king fruit fly”: David Crosby’s problem with Bob Dylan
It’s not wrong to say that David Crosby owed his career to Bob Dylan. When Crosby was first making waves in the music industry with folk-rock pioneers The Byrds, the band’s claim to fame was predicated on Dylan covers. Songs like ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘Chimes of Freedom’ fit perfectly into The Byrds’ vocal blend, giving them a refined and melodic quality that Dylan’s unique and nasally-voiced original versions didn’t have.
Dylan and Crosby seem like oil and water on paper: two highly opinionated rock stars who weren’t afraid to alienate and antagonize the people around them. Crosby got plenty of exposure to the mercurial Dylan over the years, and what he came out with was a sense of introversion.
“He’s friendly, but he’s not out front,” Crosby told Stereogum. “He doesn’t let you in. You’ll say, ‘Bob, where do you live?’ And he’ll say, ‘Well, you’re looking at a man that has no home.’ He’d be telling you about life instead of telling you he lived in Malibu. He’s not an easy guy. To this day, he’s not an easy guy. He doesn’t welcome you in with open arms and show you who Bob is. He likes being mysterious. He likes being oblique. And he’s smart enough to pull it off.”
Crosby added that Dylan was a “very interesting guy to be friends with,” but in other interviews, he wasn’t afraid to let loose. During an interview with the LA Times, Crosby claimed that “old, weird Bob” is “crazy as a fucking fruit fly.” Crosby thought that since Dylan wrote good music, it allowed him to act eccentrically. “You look at an artist, and you have to look at their art,” Crosby claimed. “Their art speaks for them better than they do. That’s where you see who they are.”
Evidently, Dylan had a similarly candid view of Crosby. “Crosby was a colourful and unpredictable character, wore a Mandrake the Magician cape, didn’t get along with too many people and had a beautiful voice — an architect of harmony. He was tottering on the brink of death even then and could freak out a whole city block all by himself, but I liked him a lot,” Dylan wrote in his book Chronicles. “He was out of place in The Byrds. He could be an obstreperous companion.”
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