David Crosby (1941-2023), RIP

Probably like most of my peers, my first exposure to David Crosby was the eponymous 'Crosby, Stills and Nash' album from 1969 (he's the one with the mustache on the right - the order of names is in reverse to their pictures). I'm not sure when I first listened to it properly: certainly not upon its release. I remember at the infamous Weeley festival (August 1971) reading a copy of the International Times* that featured an article based upon CS&Y's 'Wooden ships' - the article was called 'songs ... the apocalypse' (I don't remember now whether it was 'songs of', 'songs for', 'songs about' or even something else). Then again, there was the soundtrack of the film of the Woodstock festival that featured two good songs from the trio.

However it was, I reconnected with this album during my gap year (73-4), especially liking the divine song 'Guinnevere', written by DC. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, he was never able to reach the same dizzy heights of this song or 'Wooden ships'. I've no doubt written this before, but I think the album would have been improved by removing the final song ('49 bye byes') and replacing it with David's 'On the lee shore'. There exists an almost finished version of this song on the unofficial album 'Studio Archives 1969': the lead guitar is a bit rough here and there and presumably would have been replaced had the song made the album. '49 bye byes' on the other hand is a waste of space. 

Thinking about it now, during the gap year I was also introduced to another Crosby song, the very contentious 'Triad', as performed by Jefferson Airplane. I have this version as well as Crosby's version (also on 'Studio Archives').

Then the Crosby trail ran dry, at least for me. Graham Nash's autobiography naturally contains a great deal of material about Crosby; one comes away thinking that Crosby peaked too early, and spent the last 50 years of his life in a crack cocaine haze. 

A few years ago I found the CSN  album that opened with a very strong Crosby song, 'Shadow captain', co-written with pianist Craig Doerge. His other songs on the album are not so good.

Other activities of note are 'discovering' Joni Mitchell and producing her first album. He also sang harmony vocals on several songs by Jackson Browne.

So farewell David, a voice from youth. Considering his life style, one might be surprised that he lasted so long.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
799	20/01/2015	Position paper submitted	DBA
1105	20/01/2018	Noise cancelling headphones	Personal, Headphones
1284	20/01/2020	Grand-daughter #2 standing	Grandfather
1465	20/01/2022	Accountant's gloves	Personal
1574	20/01/2023	David Crosby (1941-2023), RIP	Obituary, CSN

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* I found the article in the International Times archive; it was written by Jody Breslaw and is actually called "A hard rain's gonna fall", but it's subtitled 'visions of the apocalypse', which is what I remembered. The article covers two pages; the second page is very legible, but the first (that of course refers to 'Wooden ships') is not. In desperation, I 'printed' the page to PDF then in a PDF viewer increased the magnification to 400%: this is definitely legible.

Breslaw would appear to be a writer for the music press, as there are a few references to him (her?) in various rock publications. After writing about the apocalyptic vision of the early Dylan, Breslaw goes on to write The Buffalo Springfield-Byrds-Airplane-CSN&Y family pick up where Dylan left off.... From the first CS&N album, "Wooden Ships" is one of the classic apocalyptic songs. It arises from the humanistic, fabulistic science fiction tradition of, say, Vonnegut, but is more suffused with anguish and loss. Here it is again, an explicit depiction of the collapse of Western civilisation, etc., presumably through atomic holocaust. "Horror grips us as we watch you die", but there's still hope for us - "we are leaving" to make a new and better world. The music and lyrics have a pleading quality, a yearning theme of return to innocence which was later to culminate in Woodstock.

Reading this 50 years after the event, I am struck by how erudite is the above. One might imagine that IT was written by people who weren't too concerned with the niceties of language, but the punctuation of the above paragraph is 100% - 'etc' is written with a full stop before the comma as behoves an expression that has been shortened (et cetera). Similarly, the multiple commas around Vonnegut are correct. The only word that is wrong is the 'which' in the final sentence that really should be a 'that'.