The musician David Crosby always wanted to emulate: “I’m not good enough”
Rock and roll was never meant to be simple for David Crosby.
There are many different avenues for people to go down in this genre, and when The Byrds first started, Crosby wanted to make sure that he didn’t get stuck in a holding pattern too often every single time he made one of his records. He wanted to show everyone what was possible to do in the context of a rock outfit, and that wasn’t really surprising when you look at the kind of people he surrounded himself with after he flew free from his old outfit.
He was already an avid fan of everything that Joni Mitchell did when he first discovered her, but when Crosby, Stills and Nash formed, it wasn’t like he was going to be working with any old musicians. Stephen Stills was a musical dynamo in every sense of the word, and even if Neil Young helped bring an edge to the band, the reason why they worked so well together was that you could hear everyone’s individual personalities every single time they played one of their songs.
Graham Nash had the pop hits, and Stills had a straight-ahead approach to everything he was doing, but Croz was interested in what new harmonies he could do in the studio. He didn’t get his job as one of the greatest vocal arrangers by accident, and when listening to a song like ‘Deja Vu’, there were notes that no one would have ever thought of had they been brought up strictly on Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Crosby may have respected them, but he was also going to infuse a bit of jazz into his music.
But those influences would be reserved for when he brought out records like If I Could Only Remember My Name. He wasn’t going to be pulling out the same kind of chords that Miles Davis and John Coltrane used to do by any stretch, but the different notes that he chose for his melodies had the same kind of refinement that you would have expected out of someone like Wayne Shorter when he worked on Steely Dan’s best records.
Even when looking at those giants, though, Crosby was far more interested in the people behind the scenes. ‘The Dan’ had people like Larry Carlton behind them when they made some of their finest records, and Coltrane had a secret weapon in McCoy Tyner. Not everything that he played needed to be all that flashy, but when Coltrane was taking his solos, the backing track behind him had some of the most luscious chords that anyone had ever thought of.
Compared to everything else, this was a thing of beauty for Crosby, but he figured that no one could have ever touched what Tyner did when he sat behind the keyboard, saying, “I use a lot of tunings because I listen to a lot of jazz. I hear the chords McCoy Tyner had to play for John Coltrane. He was asked to play really rich, thick tone-cluster kinds of chords, which he did brilliantly. I would listen to those chords and say, ‘I want to play that, but I’m not good enough.’”
If he couldn’t get there on his own, the next best thing was to find his own musical language.
After all, Mitchell had made her own sound by using harmonies that no one had heard of yet, and when listening to some of Crosby’s best songs, they come from taking the guitar into different tonal centres. The chords that he played may have looked normal, but when you add in the detuned open strings, you start to get unusual harmonies that hit the audience’s ears and hearts in a much different way.
Rock and roll was a decent place for him to start, but the reason why Crosby’s music has lasted was because of him daring to dream bigger thanks to people like Tyner. Anyone can settle with those basic chords, but when you start thinking outside the box, some chords describe emotions that most people didn’t know they were able to feel.
