Why did David Crosby hate punk?
Punk rock has a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. Even now, with decades of bands and artists who have adopted and manipulated their own vision of what punk is, there is still a large group of artists who look down upon the genre as juvenile or devoid of talent. But these are the same people who pretend they could have painted a Mark Rothko canvas.
You can only imagine how the rock world dealt with the rise of the genre in 1976 and ’77. The bands, who arrived with all the brattish intent of a half-naked toddler at a restaurant, all sat around spitting loogies and flicking bogies at their elders. They seemed to rip up the rulebook and, in doing so, render large swathes of what had come before as irrelevant or, at the very least, self-indulgent. It left a whole section of classic rock legends in a funk.
The late David Crosby was a man who always stuck to his guns in music and in life. A walking, talking mass of opinions, he delivered many moments that polarised people across his career, winning him fans and spurning would-be followers. An unflinching personality, alongside his music in The Byrds, CSNY, and as a solo artist, Crosby created an undisputed legacy that even his detractors are compelled to acknowledge.
One of the greatest indicators of his temperament is the reasons that led to Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman firing him from The Byrds in 1967. Tensions were already high in the band, but things were taken to another level at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June. Between songs, Crosby made a series of political diatribes and threw his support behind conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Understandably, this outraged his bandmates, with McGuinn feeling this fury the most.
Then, things came to a head during the early recording sessions for The Notorious Byrd Brothers later in the summer. Differences over song selections led to inter-band arguments, with Crosby angering his bandmates again. He was adamant that they record only original material, despite the recent failure of the single ‘Lady Friend’ – a Crosby original that peaked at 82 on the American charts. His refusal to record a cover of Goffin and King’s ‘Goin’ Back’ was the final straw. McGuinn and Hillman then dismissed him.
Clearly, Crosby was fearless in speaking his mind, and this trend continued throughout his career. After the internet age arrived and the social media site Twitter emerged in the late 2000s, David Crosby found the perfect conduit for his opinions. Able to express them concisely in 280 characters, this would see him deliver some of his best-ever moments, from the cutting to the hilarious.
Whether slagging off the entire hip-hop genre or labelling ex-Beach Boy Mike Love a “shithead”, Crosby’s fire never lost its incandescence on Twitter. In 2017, he provided one of his most fascinating takes, his opinion on the punk genre. Unsurprisingly, he hated the form.
Asked for his thoughts on the genre, he simply said, “no”. Then, when another user listed many great punk acts, including The Clash, The Stooges, Buzzcocks, Ramones and Descendants, Crosby wasn’t having any of them. He dismissed punk as “Pretty much all dumb stuff,” with “no musical value at all and mostly childish lyrics.”
When one user noted that the childish lyrics were the actual point of The Ramones, Crosby wasn’t swayed. “Yes, but dumb”, he wrote. Elsewhere, even the “punk poet laureate” Patti Smith wasn’t enough for Crosby to caveat his thoughts. “Not my thing”, he said after being asked for his thoughts on her.
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