“It hit a certain spot in me”: The house party with David Crosby that changed The Beatles forever
There is no one I would have rather partied with in their prime than David Crosby. A luminous but capricious countercultural flame, the immensely talented artist would rub shoulders with some of the best of the business at get-togethers and commit some of his most storied moments to pop culture lore while making Bacchus proud. While his most famous juncture was when he, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash realised their collective vocal power at a dinner party, people often forget that Crosby had a defining impact on The Beatles at a soirée.
At face value, you might think that Crosby and The Beatles would have little in common. After all, he was from a wealthy, artistic family in Los Angeles, with his father an Academy Award-winning cinematographer who worked on Wall Street before entering the film industry. On the other hand, the Fab Four were working-class lads from the hard sea-faring city of Liverpool, and some of them, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had experienced parental loss at a young age.
Although their backgrounds were completely different, both Crosby and The Beatles were united in their unfettered creativity, love of folk music, and, more importantly, open minds. Neither camp would have achieved such immense cultural triumphs without the influence of the voice of their generation, Bob Dylan. Crosby’s first outfit, The Byrds, pioneered folk-rock by covering some of the troubadour’s numbers, such as their best-known track ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. The Beatles took cues from him in writing about real-life subjects and were even personally introduced to weed by him, the start of their experimental odyssey. Outside of this shared inspiration, though, both were more closely aligned in their worldview.
One of the greatest things about Crosby and The Beatles was that they were open-minded, allowing them to take their psyches and music to reaches far away from where many ordinary people could even dream of going. One night, at a house party in 1965 in the Hollywood Hills, both The Byrds and The Beatles embarked upon an LSD trip to get to know each other better. Although The Byrds left inspired, it greatly affected The Beatles.
This is where memories get hazy. Not long before his 2023 death, Crosby claimed he introduced Beatles guitarist George Harrison to the celestial sound of Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar. However, the year prior, he told a fan on social media: “I don’t think I ‘introduced’ George to Ravi… I did give him Ravi’s record at the time, and if that helped or if I helped George find all that music? Then good on me for once”. Funnily enough, perhaps owing to foggy memories once more and The Byrds being notoriously stubborn characters, frontman Roger McGuinn, who was also there tripping in the hills, claims he showed Harrison Shankar.
According to Harrison, though, Crosby made him realise just how great Shankar was. “It was an incidental thing, but somewhere down the line I began to hear Ravi Shankar’s name,” the ‘Quiet One’ once said. “The third time I heard it, I thought, ‘This is an odd coincidence.’ And then I talked with David Crosby of The Byrds and he mentioned the name. I went and bought a Ravi record; I put it on and it hit a certain spot in me that I can’t explain”.
Not only did the discovery of Shankar change Harrison personally and creatively almost overnight, but it also lifted the work of The Beatles. In tandem with their ever-expanding perception of LSD use, it pushed them into pioneering, experimental realms. In 1965, the North American version of the influential Beatles movie Help! featured a score by Ken Thorne, which contains one of the first uses of the sitar on a pop album.
Yet, this was just the start. 1966’s Revolver, the group’s first jump into psychedelia, inspired by Timothy Leary’s writings, drug use and using the studio as an instrument, would see Harrison play the sitar more concertedly, which then set the scene for their 1967 psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s. That record fused psychedelic rock and Indian music forever.
It’s also safe to say that this period of The Beatles is their most important, and it would not have been so without the influence of Shankar and Indian music. On the 1967 album, Harrison even played other traditional Indian instruments, such as the tambura and swarmandal, heightening their narcotic sound.
Harrison first met Shankar in 1966, and during this time, he started visiting the London-based Asian Music Circle, a hub for Asian musicians who wanted to bring the sounds of their native lands to Britain. It was such an enlightening time for him that he recruited some of them to perform on Sgt. Pepper’s tracks, including the droning classic ‘Within You Without You’. Compositions such as these saw them break off from tradition and institute real cultural change.
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