The one song David Crosby said he would never forget: “I don’t work with chumps”
For someone who valued their craft as much as David Crosby did, there was a certain magic in capturing a song in exactly the right way.
It’s never easy for anyone to grasp that one golden melody, and it’s almost a happy accident when they happen to have a tape recorder available at the right time to get the idea down. And while Crosby had that muse visit him on more than a few times throughout his life, he knew that tunes were good enough for him to throw caution to the wind every now and again.
But looking at how Crosby, Stills, and Nash worked, it was always about getting the best out of each band member no matter what. Each of them knew the magic they had on their hands when they first began harmonising together, but when they collaborated, everything had to be solid gold for them to consider it for the album. And if there was one stickler in the group, it was usually Crosby.
No one who joins a band like The Byrds is necessarily going to be all laissez-faire when someone decides to sing their part out of tune, and Crosby always set a high standard for the group. He had also studied some of the greatest jazz records and was a massive fan of people like Steely Dan, so for him, perfection wasn’t an accident. It was something that was achieved over time.
But when he started to jam with his new buddies for the first time, the material they were working on had a lot more complicated parts than he bargained for. ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’ is one of the best tunes they ever made, but it’s not like it was the most radio-friendly tune in the world, especially with all of the changes behind it. But when they landed on ‘Wooden Ships’, Crosby knew they landed on a happy medium between simple and complicated.
There are more than a few moments on the tune where some obscure vocal harmony jumps out in the mix, but the tune could work just as well being played on an acoustic guitar and no one else. And while Crosby knew that they had one of the best tunes from that time, he was so confident in the original demo version that he didn’t even bother properly recording it when he first came up with it.
This would have been the kiss of death for any other rockstar, but Crosby knew that a melody like that was never going to leave his brain, saying, “A lot of the stuff at the front was Kantner – it sounds like him. The guitar intro was Stills. It’s a good mixture of talents. I don’t work with chumps. I wouldn’t have needed [to record] it anyway. The song was so fucking good, there’s no way I’d forget it.”
And compared to everything else on the record, it does have a touch more psychedelia than everything else. CSN were never the typical hippy band that sang about peace and love by any stretch, but since this was still with Woodstock on the horison, hearing a folksy song like this with a melody that even The Beatles would have been proud to have written was at least a step in the right direction for them.
It was always going to be a challenge for each of them to leave their old bands and move on to something else, but this was as sure a sign as any that they were going to be just fine. The Hollies may not have appreciated a tune like ‘Marrakesh Express’, but even if they didn’t understand the direction that Graham Nash was going in, they were bound to be making songs that any other band would have given their left arm to have written.
