The one song that David Crosby couldn’t stand making: “He thought it was insipid”
David Crosby always tried to move the Earth if it meant getting the sound that he was looking for.
He might not have been the most diplomatic about every song he wrote, but when listening to every one of the tunes that he made, you can hear the pure love of the craft in every single note he sings. He had an immaculate ear when it came to arranging the right voice to fit the right melody, but when he first got started, he was never going to waste his time on a record that he knew was never going to go anywhere.
That might sound unbelievably pretentious, and it is to a certain degree, but Crosby had a much higher standard for what he was doing than most. It wasn’t worth it to waste time on making something that was never going to work to begin with, and if they had the chance to experiment with a song, he wanted to make sure that he could add his stamp to it rather than be a session man for someone else’s tune.
But when he first got started, he seemed to have the perfect happy medium with the Byrds. Roger McGuinn’s jangling guitar made them fit right in amongst the other American bands out at the time, but when listening to what they could do on tracks like ‘Eight Miles High’, they were clearly pushing the envelope a little bit further than any other band coming in riding the coattails of The Beatles and Bob Dylan.
And yet there was always some piece of their sound that didn’t sit right with Crosby. His strong suit was getting those harmonies to sound as perfect as possible, and he even had a few decent tunes under his belt like ‘So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star’, but when you look at where they were heading, he was going to need to jump ship if he wanted to make music anywhere close to what he had in mind.
Because as much as he loved the sounds of jazz and more complex artists like Joni Mitchell, that wasn’t where McGuinn fit into the picture. The best that he could ask for was a song that could possibly get in the charts, and while Crosby was more than willing to tweak songs to make them sound a little bit more complicated, he had far less tolerance for when they were being forced to make songs that he never liked in the first place.
A song like ‘Goin Back’ by Carole King would have been a fine cover tune for them back in the day, but after pushing themselves further and further, Crosby would have rather gone off on his own than take a step backwards, with McGuinn’s wife Ianthe explaining, “David really hated the Carole King song I know he thought it was insipid. I think that really was the catalyst [for his departure]. I think it was the lyrics that David objected to. I think it didn’t have the bite that the other songs had had.”
It’s hard to think of anyone having too much of a problem with a genius like King, but given what Crosby was working with, it’s understandable why he ended up leaving. The version of ‘Goin Back’ that the band worked up sounds fine as a decent Byrds song, but given how most of the tune is focused on a fairly simple premise and a bunch of ‘la la las’ in there for good measure, that wasn’t going to exactly fit with Crosby’s need to make more mature music when he talked Graham Nash into forming a band with him.
The song is perfectly fine on its own, but when listening to what Crosby, Stills, and Nash were doing on their first try, it was like a songwriting refuge for all of them. They knew that they could do something better than their bandmates were allowing them, and if Crosby had grinned and beared it through the rest of The Byrds’ career, the thought of having a song like ‘Guinnevere’ be put to the side in favour of pop tunes would have been the real tragedy.
