A critic once called David Crosby rock’s ultimate survivor. I’d quibble with that — Keith Richards charted much the same course, and did it all on just one liver — but that critic wasn’t far off. Crosby went from folkie to hippie to junkie and came out the other side as a rock star emeritus who kept creating music and pissing off his erstwhile friends right up until his death Wednesday at age 81.
As he pointed out to an interviewer a couple of years ago, Crosby was the only member of CSN&Y who never had a hit. He was never a prolific composer — his first writing credit didn’t appear until the third Byrds album — but his songs combined folk, blues and jazz in a way that elevated his bandmates’ more pop-oriented styles. And neither the Byrds nor CSN&Y would be famous for their harmonies without Crosby’s contributions.
He did his best work after Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman kicked him out of the Byrds. This was the song that greased the skids. Crosby took seriously all that peace-and-love stuff people preached in the ’60s, so he saw no reason to break up with one girlfriend just because he and another girl were also in love. Why couldn’t he have both together?
That was a musical question neither McGuinn nor Hillman thought the band should answer, so they left it off “The Notorious Byrd Brothers.” They didn’t appreciate Crosby’s between-song stage patter about JFK assassination conspiracies, either, so Crosby got the heave-ho. The Jefferson Airplane covered the tune on “Crown of Creation” in 1968, but Croz didn’t get to release the song himself until 1971, when it appeared on the CSN&Y live album “Four-Way Street.”
Crosby never again reached that height of popularity, and his addictions turned him into a punchline, but he emerged sober from time in prison around the turn of the millennium. Sobriety didn’t smooth his prickly personality — he wasn’t speaking to either Neil Young or longtime friend and musical partner Graham Nash when he died — but it did fuel a burst of productivity. He released five LPs between 2014 and 2021 and, amazingly after all he put himself through, he never lost his voice. This was the single from his final album, “For Free,” featuring guest vocalist Michael McDonald.
