The singer David Crosby called a complete fake: “It’s so bullshit”
It was always going to be difficult to please David Crosby whenever he sat down to make a song throughout his career.
His sonic palette was far more sophisticated than the average blues rock songs, and while he could still play straight-ahead rock and roll if he wanted to, it was clear when he left The Byrds that he didn’t want to create the same kind of musical schlock that he had been hearing throughout the rest of the rock scene. He had moved on to other things, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t get roped in with a few artists that didn’t have anything to do with rock and roll.
But it’s not like Crosby was a snob about what “real music” was all of the time. He may have been a little bit too honest towards the end of his life, but he was more than happy to stay in his own musical lane while the rest of the rock world came to him. He didn’t want to play the game of chasing trends, and it didn’t look like he really had to when all he had to worry about was following his bliss with Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
He had already heard what fantastic songwriting could sound like when hearing Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell tunes, but he felt that there was some undiscovered territory that he hadn’t covered until putting his power trio together. ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’ was the first time that people got to hear what he had to offer outside of The Byrds, but when looking at what he did on Deja Vu, he was a lot more interested in stranger harmonies that no one would have tried when writing the typical pop song.
It also helped that they had someone like Neil Young with them at that point. Young wasn’t the kind to play nice with others every single time he came into the studio, but hearing him add his roaring guitar to some of their songs was exactly what the band needed. They were edgeless in many respects when they started, but that didn’t mean that all of their shows had to be the most revolutionary thing in the world, either.
As any musician knows, you can take any gig you can get when you’re starting out, but being on television was much further removed from what Young wanted to do. They had already been to Woodstock and played to a crowd that truly believed that they could change the world with their music so when they had to share the stage with Tom Jones, Crosby could only laugh at how mismatched the pairing was.
Jones certainly had a great voice, but even his duet with CSNY on the song ‘Long Time Gone’ was almost too funny for Crosby to take seriously, saying, “We were all trying to swing so hard, and Tom is so fake. It’s so bullshit. He’s a nice guy and everything, but it was a mishmash of massive proportions. Of course, everybody loves it, and I hate it – but, you know.” And considering what the band were all about, they didn’t need this kind of spotlight on them, especially when they released songs like ‘Ohio’.
That’s not even meant to be a slam at Jones in the slightest. He had one of the most unique voices that anyone had ever heard at the time, and while he was, shall we say, boisterous whenever he sang, having that kind of voice put on top of songs that needed a much more careful delivery wasn’t exactly going to work all that well.
So while Jones was a fake in Crosby’s mind, that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t still be fun to watch whenever he goes back and watches the band playing with him. After all, this is still technically the “entertainment” business before anything else, and while Jones did leave everyone with the most heartfelt songs of all time, it was always entertaining to see him onstage, even if he was butchering a classic.
