The genre David Crosby didn’t want to be remembered for: “I never wanted to be labelled”
Music was never supposed to have any parameters around it, as far as David Crosby was concerned.
He liked the idea of making great tunes that people want to hear, but even if he fit pretty snugly into folk rock, it wasn’t out of the question for him to throw in some strange harmonies that didn’t exactly fit with what the rest of the band was doing every time he performed. That might have been what got him to leave The Byrds back in the day, but Crosby only saw that as a blessing so he could make the music that he wanted every single time he performed.
Even when working in Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Croz was never going to cower to what the rest of the band wanted to do every single time he played. He clearly had an agenda for how his songs were supposed to sound, and while Graham Nash and Stephen Stills could add their own sonic flavour to everything now and again, he wasn’t going to roll over when someone suggested that they completely change one of his tunes.
And if the supergroup’s albums were already a far cry from The Byrds, If I Could Only Remember My Name was the jump off the deep end. Crosby was practically making the same kind of jazzy arrangements that Joni Mitchell was trying to do on some of her best work, but it was better than trying to live the life of a country rocker when looking at where Roger McGuinn was taking his music.
Then again, country music has never been a bad word in the music community. Plenty of great artists have been able to pull from the greatest country singers of all time, but when Gram Parsons started to take the band in a different direction, Crosby felt that he needed to stay a lot further away from that style. He was similar in tone and instrumental choices, but he wasn’t going to be defined by that genre for the rest of his life.
Even as far back as his era, people were already talking about him being country-rock, but Crosby was always quick to shoot those comparisons down, saying, “I don’t think we invented any of that shit. I think they were just desperately trying to label us, and I never wanted to be labeled. We always fought being labeled because it is a function where somebody can dismiss you because they can say, ‘Oh, that’s a …,’ and they can stop thinking about it. So what you want to do is try to refuse the label.”
At the same time, you can’t deny that there aren’t pieces of country rock sprinkled throughout those early Byrds songs. They may have been put in there purely by accident when they started adding jangly guitars to Bob Dylan songs, but if you look at every single country-rock act that came out of California later on, it wasn’t that hard to see where they were getting their influences when they started having their own shimmering guitar parts.
And it’s not like Crosby’s fellow bandmates didn’t see that influence coming through every now and again. Even though the Eagles are one of the most popular country-rock acts to have come out of California, Stills had always turned his nose up at them by saying that they just wanted to be a lesser version of what he and Crosby were already doing in their supergroup.
But since Don Henley ran into the same problems about being put in a box whenever he sang, it’s not like Crosby was that far off the mark when he talked about not wanting to be labelled. He had a good idea about how he wanted his music to sound, and he didn’t want to be classified as the kind of musician that everyone expected to have a bit of twang in their voice whenever they performed.
