Neil Young on the song that heard David Crosby “at his best”
Although he began his career with The Byrds, the late singer-songwriter David Crosby led a lengthy, chaptered career teeming with fruitful collaboration. With newfound fame approaching the 1970s, Crosby was proud to work alongside some of the leading figures of the singer-songwriter surge, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, who gave The Byrds their first hit with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.
In his most famous and long-lived collaboration, Crosby worked alongside Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. With a successful solo career on the boil, Young was absent for much of the band’s history, necessitating a name change to Crosby Stills & Nash.
Although Young joined the band for sporadic tours and limited studio sessions, he was deeply involved in the salient 1970 masterpiece, Déjà Vu. A true tour de force of the folk-rock movement, the album is home to memorable tracks written by all four members and even a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.
Neil Young contributed two solo credits to the album and also received a co-writing credit for ‘Everybody I Love You’. Speaking to Rolling Stone in a 1970 interview, Young discussed how he preferred to record his songs as if live rather than recording vocal tracks separately.
“My two [Déjà Vu] songs, ‘Helpless’ and ‘Country Girl’, I did the lead vocal while I was playing, all at the same time, so the drums and bass, guitar and piano were all going at once, and I was singing the lead, so my things sound different, from overdubbing, you know. I mean, I probably could have played on all of them, ’cause you know, I can make up lines and put ’em down…”
Continuing, Young recalled that Crosby also likes to record everything at once. “That’s the way I like to do it, and David likes to do it that way too, ’cause he likes to get off, he really likes to get off,” he said. “So one of David’s songs, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ – yeah, that’s the name of the song – there’s gonna be a lot of reaction to that song”.
Addng: “It’s really Crosby at what I think is his best. It’s like all live, three guitars, bass, organ and drums, and it’s all live, and there are no overdubs, one vocal and the vocal was sung live – we did it in San Francisco at Wally Heider’s – and then there’s the other way of recording, which is the way they recorded their first album [Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969]. And on this second album, there are about five songs that sound sort of like the first album.”
Indeed, Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ proved to be one of the album’s highlights. Alongside its affecting lead vocal and punchy riffs, the track connected with the concurrent cultural zeitgeist. Crosby addressed the hippie practice of growing one’s hair out as a protest against war. Contrary to the military crew cut, hippies liked to let their “freak flag fly”.
“It was the most juvenile set of lyrics I’ve ever written, but it has a certain emotional impact, there’s no question about that,” Crosby once said per Jacob Hoye’s 100 Greatest Albums.
Listen to David Crosby at his finest below.
