The musician David Crosby never got tired of: “Something about his music”
Most musicians know the concept of burnout all too well. Any casual fan will probably get tired of listening to just one artist repeatedly for months on end. Still, when it gets to the point where the artist in question gets tired of hearing the sound of their own voice, it’s usually time to take a step back and reassess what their musical priorities are. David Crosby did have more than a few of those dark days, but he said that he still never got tired of whatever Stephen Stills brought to the table.
When Crosby was first starting life with The Byrds, though, he wasn’t exactly meant to play the rough-and-tumble rock and roll that Stills had been playing. Half the reason why The Byrds worked is how much they had in common with The Beatles, down to those heavenly harmonies and the signature chime of the 12-string guitar on tracks like ‘So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star’.
And it’s not like Crosby was strictly tied to rock and roll, either. His musical taste ran the gamut of everything from classical to jazz, and given that one of his favourite artists in the world was Joni Mitchell, he didn’t fit in with the same crowd that just wanted to hear Rolling Stones-esque rock and roll.
But Stills was a bit of a different story. While Neil Young was his right hand man in Buffalo Springfield, Stills never was limited by rock’s standards, often playing any instrument that he could get his hands on and making the most out of whatever song he played. And despite Young being one of the best songwriters of his generation, Stills was a lot more approachable compared to his bandmate’s mentality of doing whatever the hell he wanted.
Once Crosby, Stills, and Nash were established, though, Stills became the pure engine of the group. Their harmonies may have been their calling card in their prime, but looking at their self-titled debut, almost everything on the record that isn’t a voice is being played by Stills, which normally involved tuning his guitar into strange tunings to get that signature brightness in the mix.
Even with their subsequent fallings out over the years, Crosby maintained that Stills was one of his favourite artists to listen to, telling Songfacts, “I still really love Stephen Stills. I just can’t help it. There’s something about his music, something about the way he plays that just thrills me. It always has.”
That’s not to say that there haven’t been a few strike-outs along the way, including the wilderness period where Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young broke up into separate duos to get all of their songs out. But given the fact that Crosby worked with Graham Nash throughout that period, Stills’s songs were able to shine through any of that bad blood half the time.
Then again, Stills has always seemed to work better playing off his bandmates than he does on his own. If they had been able to give him guidance on songs like ‘4 + 20’, maybe they could have been a little more communicative before convincing them to run through tunes like ‘Driving Thunder’ in the 1980s.
