The singer David Crosby would have joined all over again: “An amazingly talented human being”
David Crosby wasn’t shy about talking about the many regrets that he had in his life.
There were more than a few times where he put his foot in his mouth or did something that he wasn’t going to be able to take back, but he was also the one who could own up to those problems and still find a way to make music with his head held high and create something that no one had ever heard before. But there were more than a few times when he realised that he had burned some of his bridges far too late in his career.
Then again, Crosby wasn’t going to sugarcoat what he felt, either. He could be incredibly blunt about anything and everything that came his way, and if he could find some time to be absolutely vicious towards people like Kanye West, he could do the exact same thing if it meant tearing down any fellow classic rocker that didn’t seem to have the same kind of passion for music that he did.
But being able to make it to his twilight years was practically a miracle for Crosby. He had gone on the kind of massive drug-fuelled tirade that would have made Ol’ Dirty Bastard jealous, and he was certainly no saint when it came to his drug habits back in the day. When he did come up for air, though, he did recognise that he did have a lot of fun making those classics with his bandmates all those years ago.
Crosby, Stills and Nash was a match made in heaven when they first got together, and Crosby would have practically done anything to get away from the sound of The Byrds. He didn’t want to go the same country-tinged direction that everyone else was doing, and even if he was more comfortable praising jazz-influenced players like Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan, that didn’t stop him from having a soft spot for Roger McGuinn.
The Byrds were the first ones that truly gave him a musical home, and it’s not like he didn’t have his fair share of classics in that band. His harmonies are what made every one of their songs soar as they did in the early days, and when they weren’t making pitch-perfect jangle pop on their cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, he was a fantastic pop songwriter when he hit upon ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star’ and ‘Eight Miles High’.
And while Crosby never fully got to connect with McGuinn again, he said he would have done anything he could to be able to work with him one more time, saying, “I’ve been trying to get Roger to get The Byrds together for years. I ask him about once a year, and he still says no. But he doesn’t want to work with me, so that’s a shame. I think Roger is an amazingly talented human being. He seems on the face of it to be kind of stuck in a folk singer thing, but when it came to translating Bob Dylan’s songs into records, he was a freakin’ genius”.
“I would work with him again in a minute, if he would.”
David Crosby on Roger McGuinn
But by the last years of Crosby’s life, he and McGuinn were on completely different creative pages. McGuinn was interested in making music that fell more in line with the pop and country sensibilities that he built himself on, and that wasn’t exactly going to clash well with Crosby trying to make one of the most sophisticated pop songs that anyone had ever heard when he started following in the footsteps of bands like Vulfpeck.
There might have been a small chance that they could have buried the hatchet for a single show, but the thought of them making music together again seemed like a pipe dream during their final years. Nothing could dull the shine of those old Byrds records, but they stand more as a document of what McGuinn and Crosby were capable of than anything that they were going to make in the future.
