The song David Crosby called the greatest thing that ever happened to him: “It was an honour”
Throughout the 1960s, David Crosby was into music that meant something more than a bunch of chords thrown together.
He had already graduated from being a member of The Byrds, and while he might not have left on exactly glowing terms, it was easy for him to fit into his own niche when he began working with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. All of them were looking to take a few more chances, but sometimes a song can take someone on a journey they could have never dreamt of.
Then again, Crosby’s outlook on songs has been about more than a catchy tune. He had a keen ear for arrangements when helping put together vocal harmonies, but if you look at an album like If I Could Only Remember My Name, he wasn’t strictly about making the most pop-friendly songs. These pieces of music were practically diary entries straight from his broken heart, and that kind of emotional honesty doesn’t come without listening to other people who shared the same pain.
After all, Joni Mitchell had done the same thing when she wrote the album Blue, and while Crosby was never on the same level as Mitchell whenever he played his tunes, there was always a piece of his music that shared a love of jazz. He loved how those artists could dream big, so for him, it wasn’t crazy to think that The Beatles and John Coltrane had the same kind of magic going for them.
And you can hear it in the way that he throws in odd harmonies on some of CSN’s greatest tunes. The song ‘Deja Vu’ already sounds like a strange stream of consciousness every single time it comes on, but when you listen to Crosby’s attention to detail, certain licks are much more sophisticated than what people were hearing out of The Everly Brothers. But even if he had a love for jazz, he was never going to imagine that one day his heroes would be interpreting his own songs.
Those legends might as well have been on a totally different planet, but Crosby remembered being stunned when he heard Miles Davis do his own interpretation of his song ‘Guinnevere’, saying, “It was an honor that he did it. One of the greatest musicians of our time chose to do my song and, in hindsight, it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.” But it wasn’t like the arrangement was what Crosby had hoped for, either.
Any songwriter should have a unique vision for what they want their song to be, and when someone starts taking it out of the can and messing with it, there’s bound to be a few times where he gets more than a little bit opinionated. If you know anything about Davis, though, it was that he never did anything by the book when working in whatever genre he played in.
His main vocabulary was jazz, but everything from In a Silent Way right through to Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew were all different transitions into new sounds. So, of course, his version of Crosby’s song wasn’t going to sound anything like the original. The world already had one of those, and what Crosby was disappointed in is exactly what gave Davis’s version a lot more character.
Because, really, that’s what all great musicians should hope to do when covering someone else’s material. There’s no point in being too faithful whenever the song comes on, so it’s better to follow your own muse than worry about what the main songwriter thinks of every note you’re playing.
