The one guitarist David Crosby could never play like: “Much better than me”
Everything David Crosby ever did was always in the service of making beautiful music.
Not everything that he made had to sound absolutely fantastic on first listen, but with every record that he made, he wanted to get that much closer to making a record that could stand alongside his favourite artists like Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan. There was a lot of ground that he wanted to cover throughout his career, but his strong suit was much more rooted in vocal harmonies than the guitar half the time.
And when you look at what he’s done for the instrument, that’s saying a lot. The way that Crosby sings was always perfect for whatever song Crosby, Stills, and Nash were working on, and even though he could put together a creative tune, it was a lot easier to just sit back and watch Stephen Stills absolutely annihilate every single part that he made. Stills was definitely the genius of the band in many respects, but Crosby did get a few lessons in how someone could tune their guitar to make it sound great.
There were no rules when it came to alternate tunings in his mind, and when looking at the way that Joni Mitchell kept changing things around, he wanted to do the same thing. Having those open strings gives a much more ringing quality to everything that you played, and while they can be fun for someone who’s used to playing folk music, some of that adventurousness wasn’t going to sit well with what Roger McGuinn was doing when working with The Byrds.
The band had already become known as the American Beatles to many because of how great they sounded together, but Crosby wasn’t going to sit on his hands and not show his ideas. He knew there was something to the way that he played guitar on albums like Deja Vu, and he wasn’t about to watch as someone like McGuinn stepped all over him and tried to push them towards country music.
That wasn’t where he wanted to be, but he couldn’t deny that McGuinn had him beat when it came time to play anything on guitar, saying, “He was always a much better guitar player than me. When he got one of the first Rickies, it sounded like a glass avalanche. Unbelievable. He’s such a gifted musician. He basically does one thing, but he does it really well.”
“He’s also brilliant at voicing something into a different form, like turning ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ from a terrible goddamned demo into that brilliant record.”
David Crosby on Roger McGuinn
And while the phrase ‘one trick pony’ tends to be looked at as an insult, it was never that bad when looking at what McGuinn could do. He was turning everything inside out when he reinterpreted Bob Dylan’s tunes, and even when he came up with tracks of his own, saying that you influenced a Beatle on a song like ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ is something that you would want to hold onto for the rest of your life.
If anything, the fact that McGuinn was so good did help form how Crosby looked at himself. He knew that he was never going to outdo McGuinn as his own game by any stretch, but the least he could do was find something novel to work with, whether it was trying his best to find his own sound with CSN or going into more jazzy territory when coming up with the ethereal harmonies on some of his later work.
There was no real limit to where he could go, but Crosby could at least acknowledge when someone wiped the floor with him. He knew that his track record was better than most, but sometimes you need someone like McGuinn next to you to help keep you in check every time you perform.
