“It appealed to me”: The artist that made David Crosby want to leave The Byrds
There comes a moment when every musician needs to spread their wings. Even though it would be easy to repeat the same formula every time you go in to make a record, no one will ever be fully satisfied if they spend the rest of their lives playing the same chords that excited them when they were young. It’s all about evolving for mainstream artists, and David Crosby knew that his time was up in the late 1960s when he decided to leave The Byrds.
Then again, being in one of the most successful American bands at the time probably wasn’t the worst thing in the world. In the wake of the British Invasion, The Byrds seemed like one of the few American acts who could compete with the Fab Four, painting a picture of California the same way that Brian Wilson did and even getting the chance to hang out with The Beatles when making Sgt Peppers.
At the same time, there was a good chance the band was going to get monotonous really quickly. Despite them having charting singles and transforming Bob Dylan numbers into the sounds of jangle pop, their traditional pop fare was starting to look more than a little bit passe compared to what ‘A Day in the Life’ sounded like or even by the standards that Wilson was working with on ‘Good Vibrations’.
And being in a traditional pop band wasn’t what Crosby signed up for, either. Looking back on his influences, he was far more interested in genres like jazz and folk, so having to go onstage and sing ‘So You Want To be a Rock and Roll Star’ every night probably did nothing to scratch that itch he had to make something different.
For Crosby, the final straw came when he met Stephen Stills from Buffalo Springfield. Since the rest of his bandmates were concerned with making something more rustic, Stills’s creative dynamo energy probably appealed to someone who would have rather experimented than have to absent-mindedly strum through every single tune onstage.
Looking back, Crosby even admitted that some of the tunes Stills was playing were beyond anything that Roger McGuinn was pumping out, telling Uncut, “Could I have done more with The Byrds? Yeah, sure. But human lives do not go on parallel paths. What happened is that I encountered Stephen Stills and he swung really hard. He could play a kind of music that The Byrds couldn’t play, and it appealed to me tremendously. I wanted that, and I really didn’t want to go in the direction that Chris and Roger wanted to go in.”
But while it’s hard to think of Sweetheart of the Rodeo and the first Crosby, Stills and Nash as being that far apart, it’s much different than most people realise. Crosby had become interested in artists like Joni Mitchell, so half of his greatest pieces were about crafting melodies that were a bit stranger than breaking out the Hank Williams yodel and playing country rock for the rest of his life.
If anything, the fact that Crosby left everything like that behind is still one of the biggest gambles in rock history. He could have been set for life carrying on playing country rock, but by joining the folk-rock supergroup, he changed most people’s perception of what rootsy rock and roll was supposed to sound like.
