The “most important gig” David Crosby ever played: “I hate talking about it”
The art of playing live was never lost on David Crosby whenever he got onstage.
The art of music is also about sharing music with everyone who’s willing to listen, and whether it’s only ten people or 10,000, everyone is going to want to give their all to make sure that every soul that’s listening ends up having a good time. But while Crosby took a back seat to live performances at some points during his career, he got one of the most significant gigs of his career out of the way relatively early in his life.
Because when looking at the biggest names in music, Crosby always knew that performance was going to be a major part of his life. He loved listening to the biggest names in jazz music go absolutely crazy during their solos, and even when listening to a fellow folkie like Bob Dylan, all of the extra verses and ways he would twist words in his mouth made him one of the most improvisational musicians to ever come out of rock and roll.
That’s all well and good, but that wasn’t always what Roger McGuinn had in mind. The Byrds frontman liked the idea of keeping the ship rolling, and while Crosby was willing to play along for a while, there came a point where he either had to sort out his priorities on his own or spend the rest of his life putting on a smile for the cameras as he tore through ‘So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star’.
And when Crosby, Stills, and Nash first harmonised with each other, he had his mind made up for him. He had heard magic from the first few bars that they sang, and even if not every song that they did was radio-ready, Crosby didn’t sign up to have hits. All he knew was that something moved in his soul the minute that he heard Graham Nash sing ‘Marrakesh Express’, and that he would be a fool if he intentionally walked away from that kind of project.
But after making tracks like ‘Ohio’ and ‘Teach Your Children’, the band were being treated like more than a simple rock and roll band. The 1960s was the era where artists could make a real change in the world, and when the band descended onto a little farm for the Woodstock festival, Crosby knew that what he was doing was bound to be a monumental moment in rock history.
Despite being notoriously bitter about the various sequel iterations of the festival, Crosby felt that there was nothing that could match what he did at the first festival with CSNY, saying, “Woodstock was probably the most important gig of my life. I hate talking about it because everybody always asks about it, but it was a coming-of-age moment, when America realised there were a whole sub-culture, not just a few scattered kids, with these same values. Before that, we didn’t know how many of us there. In the long run, we helped the civil rights movement, and we helped bring an end to the Vietnam War.”
Then again, there are probably more than a few people who weren’t alone in thinking that, either. The idea of the Flower Generation putting an end to war once and for all may have seemed incredibly naive in hindsight, but given how little crime happened during the festival and the amount of peace and love that was being spread around, there was no reason to think that any of them were yanking our chains.
They were truly in it to conquer any kind of hate that came their way, and whether or not the rest of the world was down with it was beside the point. Because for those brief seconds when Jimi Hendrix showed up to play the national anthem and play his way through a blistering set, it truly felt like all musician-kind had reached a level of musical utopia.
