The band David Crosby called the best since The Beatles: “I’ve always been a fan”
When David Crosby first started making music, he never claimed to be a musical savant by any stretch of the imagination.
He was happy to be able to put a tune together, and while he was a long way from following in the footsteps of his jazz idols by any means, his ears always gravitated to those who were working on a much different wavelength than what the rest of the rock and roll world was doing. But even when looking at the giants of the music world, Crosby had a much better time singing the praises of those who were willing to take more chances with what could happen on the radio.
Then again, if we’re talking about Crosby’s favourite artists, it usually comes back to what Joni Mitchell has done. There isn’t a soul on Earth that could claim to have the same kind of songwriting prowess that she did, and even though Crosby was over the moon whenever he heard people like Bob Dylan sing, Mitchell took the template that Dylan had worked with and created a whole new set of musical colours for people to play with whenever she made one of her tunes.
Not all of it was completely new by any stretch, but Crosby could hear where a lot of Mitchell’s biggest inspirations came from. She was a student of genres like jazz, the same way that he was, and when you look at his own tunes, a record like If I Could Only Remember My Name was his attempt to capture those notes that you wouldn’t typically find in a pop song. He was breaking out of the traditional hit-making convention, but there were other bands that were still miles ahead of him.
The fusion scene had given us everyone from the Mahavishnu Orchestra to Miles Davis’s electric period, and there was still a wealth of music that Crosby hadn’t even touched when he picked up an acoustic guitar. But even if those bands didn’t exactly have hits in the traditional sense, he was knocked back the first time that he heard what people like Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were doing when they formed Steely Dan.
The duo weren’t looking to join a band in the traditional sense, but when you hear them working in conjunction with all those session players, you can at least hear where their music was coming from. They refused to apologise for their jazzy vocabulary, and when it came to production value, every single one of their records managed to be the catchiest thing in the world while also sounding a lot more sophisticated than over half of the songs on the charts at the time.
And when looking through their history, Crosby felt that ‘The Dan’ could have competed with some of the greatest rock and roll artists that ever lived, saying, “I’ve always been a fan of Steely Dan. That’s the truth. They’re my favorite band since The Beatles, who were my first favorite band. I think Aja is one of the best records anybody ever made. Just fantastic. So was Gaucho. Those are two of my favorite records that anybody ever cut. I’ve loved Steely Dan so much that I’ve always wanted to meet Donald.”
Even though Crosby eventually did get to meet one of his idols, it was clear that Fagen could have still smoked him on any song that he sang. His music with The Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash was catchy enough, but when you’re dealing with someone that’s known to meticulously craft every single song, it’s not like they were going to be struggling with songs that only needed three chords.
Fagen was clearly in a completely different field, but Crosby never needed to feel intimidated by his friend, either. He knew that he wasn’t going to reach that level of greatness, and he would have rather gone down making the music that he could express himself best with and leave Steely Dan for those moments where he needed to hear something a bit more cerebral than before.
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