The musician David Crosby knew lied through his teeth: “Full of BS”
David Crosby was always willing to go with the flow when it came to just about everything he did.
He was a child of the 1960s in many respects, and even if he had advanced a lot as a player, he was usually the one who was still fighting for the same causes that he believed in back when he and the rest of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were playing Woodstock for the very first time. But that didn’t mean that the mantra of peace and love extended to every single musician that he ever played with.
Make no mistake, Crosby was still laid-back every time he spoke, but he wasn’t about to say that he had love for every musician that he came across. He was the first to say that someone like Kanye West had no real talent as far as he was concerned, and compared to the geniuses of pop music that he heard before, like Joni Mitchell, he couldn’t stand the idea of Mike Love being much more popular than she was.
But that finger could be pointed right back at himself more than a few times as well. He was the first to say that he had to have been a bit of a handful to deal with back in the day, and even when he was making some of the greatest albums of his career, his emotional state and constant drug use were bound to throw a wrench into every album he was working on. You could forgive him as long as the music still sounded great, but there was a definitive moment where everything started breaking down.
It had all begun when his girlfriend passed away in the late 1960s, but aside from losing his other half, the late 1970s and into the 1980s were like watching a car crash in slow motion with Crosby. He was going on the kind of insane sprees that would have made even the wildest frontmen on the planet tell him to tone things down, but he figured that there were some pieces that were blown out of proportion a little too much.
This is half the reason why his former bandmates didn’t want anything to do with him after a while. Since he loved the idea of yapping about anything and everything, there had to come a time where he said that one wrong thing that he wasn’t going to be able to take back, and while that happened when he insulted Neil Young’s girlfriend, he felt that he needed to burn a bridge of his own when he heard about the details that Graham Nash put in his tell-all biography on him.
Crosby wasn’t going to suddenly claim to be an angel by any stretch, but he did know when Nash was taking things well out of context, saying, “Graham’s book is full of inaccuracies and chock-full of misinformation. When he handed [an advance copy] to me, he said, ‘It’s too late to change anything, but here it is.’ I was very unhappy about it. It’s a very shallow, very self-serving book, and full of BS.”
And it’s not like Nash was looking to kiss and make up directly afterwards. He stood by what he had said, and even though he regrets nowadays that he never got to fully make up with Crosby before his untimely passing, he wasn’t about to turn around and walk his claims back. He had gone through more than enough headaches with Crosby as a bandmate and singing partner, and he wasn’t about to go through his life as if nothing bad had ever happened between the pair of them.
But even if Crosby is no longer around to tell his side of the story, that doesn’t diminish the music that they made while he was still here. No matter what problems they had with each other, CSNY were made to sing together, and there’s a good chance that Nash still smiles every time he hears some of those old tunes of him and Crosby harmonising.
