The 1960s songwriter David Crosby always wanted to write like
Everything about David Crosby was about looking out for that next perfect song.
He was always trying to push himself in every respect whenever he made a new record, and even if not every one of his tunes was a keeper, his status as one of the great survivors of rock and roll was what made him endearing all the way up to the day he died. But even with all of the great lessons that he learned along the way, there were some musicians that he could never fully wrap his head around when he heard their music.
Then again, every single ageing rocker has to come to grips with the fact that there are some genres that are beyond them. Crosby had always talked about how he wasn’t the greatest fan of punk rock when The Clash and Sex Pistols started making waves at the end of the 1970s, and there were also more than a few times where he called out people like Kanye West for having way too big an ego than they really deserved.
But Crosby was willing to dish out the compliments more than a few times as well. There wasn’t a day that went by that he wasn’t grateful for someone like Joni Mitchell out there in the world, and even when he was making his own amateur inroads into more progressive music, nothing could replace what Steely Dan made him feel every single time he heard one of their masterpieces like Aja.
In fact, those musicians were even good enough to rival some of the greatest songwriters that Crosby had ever seen. He had no problem saying that Mitchell was one of the best musicians that he had ever heard, but while he claimed that she put Bob Dylan to shame, there are precious few who could actually manage to make the same kind of anthems that Dylan did so quickly when he first debuted.
No one really had any reference point for his brand of rock and roll, and while Dylan was pulling from some of the greatest folk singers of all time, his way of bending a phrase always left an impression on Crosby. He didn’t realise what he was on about at first, but even if he thought his version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ sounded awful before The Byrds transformed it into something else, he had to marvel at how well Dylan crafted every single stanza that he ever wrote during his prime.
He wasn’t the greatest musician by any stretch, but Crosby felt that he would have given anything to be able to write like Dylan did, saying, “I don’t write so much now. I’m trying, but it comes when it comes and I can’t legislate it into being. Dylan used to get up in the morning, have a coffee and sit down at the typewriter and work. I wish to hell I had that kind of discipline.” But what’s even more insane is looking at the kind of track record that Dylan had that none of us know about.
Dylan was the kind of person who could write one song a day and have all of them be great, but we might be working off an incomplete number of anthems that he wrote as well. Everyone might focus on the way the world felt different after hearing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, but who’s to say that some of the leftover tunes that he was making around that time didn’t hit as hard as the versions that we heard on his records?
That method was completely alien to what Crosby was used to, but having that kind of discipline is something that only evolves over time. Dylan wasn’t the kind of person who entered the music industry fully formed, and if he wanted to write classics, he was going to need to pay his musical dues and go through endless sheets of rough drafts before he eventually landed on a great song.
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