Drummer Michael Clarke was recruited specifically because he had some great Beatle hair he didn’t own a drum set. The short version: The Byrds were all familiar faces in the early ’60s folk scene, but all of them had their minds blown by the Beatles, and all of them immediately started growing their hair out. Tambourine Man,” so the whole saga is fresh in my mind. A few months ago, I published a book with a chapter on “Mr. The single’s success also represents a fascinating point in pop history - a time when nobody quite understood what they were doing, when everyone was still fumbling around in the dark. You could argue that other acts combined folk music with rock ‘n’ roll before the Byrds, but nobody did it with anything like that band’s earthshaking force. Tambourine Man” is a big-bang moment, a pivot-point in the entire history of popular music. David Crosby wasn’t the driving force behind the song that made the Byrds famous he didn’t even want to record the damn thing in the first place. Please forgive me for being basic, but there’s a reason why this song is the obvious place to start this list. I haven’t written one since we lost Aretha Franklin in 2018, but I’m compelled to salute the man in the same way. (David Crosby himself did one of those interviews in 2021.) I wrote pieces like that for Prince, David Bowie, Chuck Berry, Tom Petty. They’re just fond, haphazard trips through different iconographies - a bit like what we at Stereogum like to cover in our We’ve Got A File On You interview series. These pieces aren’t exhaustive biographies or lists of their greatest achievements. He took to Twitter like a fish to water, and he kept himself in posting overdrive right up until the very last day of his life.įor years, when an iconic figure in music history would pass away, I would celebrate that figure by writing a piece that would go all through the flotsam of their career. He mended some old bridges, and then he gleefully set plenty of others aflame. (The press also went nuts over the fact that Crosby was the biological father of Melissa Etheridge’s children, as if it wasn’t just a guy doing a nice thing for his friend.) But Crosby overcame those demons, and he stuck around. The stories about his demons - the prison stay, the liver-replacement surgery - immediately became the kind of rock lore than you learn when you start buying copies of Rolling Stone as a kid. That band’s story was tumultuous, too, but they gave us even more music that helped define a very different era in American music and culture.ĭavid Crosby’s dark period was very dark, and it was long. After a tumultuous run as a Byrd, Crosby got himself fired and then became even more famous, getting together with a few other famous cast-offs and starting one of the first-ever supergroups. He kicked around the storied early-’60s folk scene and then found sudden fame as a crucial part of the Byrds, a band whose sound completely altered the course of pop history. He’s the son of the guy who did the cinematography for High Noon. In retrospect, David Crosby’s life looks like some kind of American epic. His final LP For Free came out in 2021, and it was beautiful. Crosby’s five late-career albums were all lovely, committed works, and his voice sounded like it hadn’t aged at all. After nearly 20 years without releasing an album, Crosby came out with Croz in 2014, and then he never stopped. Crosby also went through a remarkable artistic rebirth. In the last six years, Stereogum’s Ryan Leas interviewed Crosby three times I always got the impression that Croz and Ryan were basically friends. Crosby was available, and he was never shy about expressing an opinion. Crosby was always present, always visible. But nobody lives forever, and we lost David Crosby late last week.ĭavid Crosby’s loss wasn’t exactly a shock, but it was still jarring. For many years, Crosby was frequently mentioned alongside Keith Richards as one of those guys who simply couldn’t die, despite his own best efforts. For those of us who were born after Crosby helped change the sound of popular music, the man might’ve been more famous for being a drug-damaged mess than for being quite possibly the greatest harmony singer in rock history. David Crosby made it to 81! That’s pretty good! Crosby didn’t outlive famous ex-bandmates like Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, but he made it a whole lot longer than anyone could’ve reasonably expected.
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