The one guitarist David Crosby could never repay: “He played perfectly”
There’s no other musician who has known the price that comes with rock and roll better than David Crosby.
His demons almost cost him his life more than a few times, and while he never truly failed him in the long run, you could tell that he was trying as hard as he could to fight against them whenever he first pulled himself out of the doldrums. He wanted the chance to make the kind of music that could wow people, and by the time he saw his twilight years, he was forever grateful for the people still in his corner, ready to help him bring his ideas to life.
Because when you look at it, Crosby was no stranger to burning bridges every now and again. There were plenty of moments where he had to put his foot in his mouth and walk himself back on things that he shouldn’t have said, but when he was at his lowest moments, there’s a good chance that Jerry Garcia and Graham Nash were the ones who kept him afloat when working on If I Could Only Remember My Name.
He was barely holding himself together after losing his girlfriend, and he was going to use music as the best outlet that he could whenever he wrote his tunes. He knew that he could try and sing his way out of any of his problems, but sometimes the biggest names in music were the ones that reminded him of what a true musician should look like.
Crosby was the first to say that people like Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan should be up there with the greatest artists who ever lived, but it wasn’t always about playing a million notes at a time that knocked him out. He wanted the chance to make tunes that would last, and that meant trying to see the mechanics of how someone like Phil Collins approached their craft or working with David Gilmour in the 2000s.
But in terms of guitar prowess, there was no one who had as many miles under his belt as Mark Knopfler. The Dire Straits frontman never claimed to be one of the greatest guitar heroes in the world, but half of his greatest work came from him playing off of someone else, whether it was finding the exact right song for Tina Turner or turning some of Bob Dylan’s Christian songs into some of the greatest moments of his career.
So when Crosby called Knopfler up to work on his record, he knew that he was going to play something that he was never going to be able to repay, saying, “I don’t know him, except as a brilliant writer, guitar player and record maker, but a promoter friend in Italy said, ‘I just had Mark Knopfler here and he’s so good; maybe you could write a song together’. He spoke to Mark’s manager, and they said, ‘Mark doesn’t really do that, but he might play guitar on something’, so I sent him ‘What’s Broken’, [my son] James’ song. He played perfectly; I don’t know how I’m going to pay him back, but I’ll certainly try.”
And when you listen to the way that Crosby’s voice plays off of Knopfler, it’s a wonder that they didn’t perform that much before. They were both tone painters that were meant to fill in the gaps on any of their songs, and you can definitely hear the guitar dancing around a lot of the changes that Crosby’s putting into the song’s harmony whenever he performed the tune.
Crosby could only hope to get that great at guitar, but he didn’t want to spend his time worrying about the mechanics of the instrument as much as Knopfler did. It was all about what the music was pulling out of him whenever he played, and hearing Knopfler’s delicate touch on the strings was everything that he needed to help tell the kind of stories that he and his son were singing about.
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