David Crosby’s cutting critique of The Doors: “Square wheel band”
Jim Morrison might have been written into the history books as a beloved musician, but his peers would tell you that he wasn’t all that much of a beloved person. When it comes to David Crosby, the singer of The Byrds and CSNY, things were just a little more heated.
Morrison lived a short but storied life. Before he died at 27, joining the infamous club, he burned bright as the wild card of the 1960s. The Doors were a sensation, terrifying not only the conservative mainstream but even some of their countercultural peers. Even though rock and roll had been growing and growing, it seemed that no one had ever seen anything like them.
Drenched in liquor and sexual intrigue, their live shows were more akin to seances or mass moments of hysteria, with Morrison ruling over them like a snake-hipped shaman. Their music weaves catchy rhythms with dark and mysterious lyricism as the singer deemed himself just as much of a poet as anything else.
But it’s one thing being wild on stage, and a whole other to carry that act on behind the scenes. The Doors’ leader never dropped it. By all accounts, he was exactly the same person in daily life as he was in the spotlight, making for an exhausting person to be around as he seemed to have no boundaries of respect or politeness. Frank Zappa once called him a “raging asshole”. Janis Joplin once his him over the head with a glass bottle after he started a fight with her and Jimi Hendrix. Lou Reed shrugged him off as simply a “silly Los Angeles person” with nothing intelligent to say. Overwhelmingly, the rest of the music scene didn’t seem to like him at all.
David Crosby is amongst that crowd, sharing his dislike for Morrison even as recently as 2019. When asked on X for his thoughts on The Doors, he didn’t hold back as he not only attacked the singer but went in on the whole group. He said they “Basically sucked …guitar and drums pretty ok …keyboard was awful ..his bass with left hand was abysmal, horrible …square wheel bad.”
But Morrison got it worse of all. “Morrison was no effing good as a singer or poet,” Crosby said, deeming him nothing but a “poser.” It’s an opinion he held onto for a long time as he previously said in 1998 that Morrison was “an obnoxious guy”, stating simply, “I knew him, I didn’t like him.”
However, later in his life, Crosby seemed to have a streak of intrigue or care. In 1998, his band CPR released a song based on The Doors’ singer, titled simply ‘Morrison’. “He was lost and I don’t think / He wanted it that way,” he sings, suggesting a level of sympathy towards the singer who he seemed “mad and lonely”.
But then again, Crosby did come back for more. As Doors fans critiqued his 2019 tweets, saying he was wrong, Crosby came back and doubled down on his opinion as he said, “I’m not wrong …they sucked all the time.” The CSNY singer was never one to mince his words, and that wouldn’t change for ‘the Lizard king’ regardless of his reptilian royalty.
