{"id":16242,"date":"2023-08-25T07:32:59","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T06:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=16242"},"modified":"2023-08-25T07:32:59","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T06:32:59","slug":"david-crosby-r-i-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2023\/08\/25\/david-crosby-r-i-p\/","title":{"rendered":"DAVID CROSBY: R.I.P."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Norman Warwick is impressed by the tributes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Crosby, the legendary singer\/songwriter, died at the age of 81, according to a statement from his publicist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is with great sadness after a long illness, that our beloved David (Croz) Crosby has passed away. He was lovingly surrounded by his wife and soul-mate Jan and son Django. Although he is no longer here with us, his humanity and kind soul will continue to guide and inspire us. His legacy will continue to live on through his legendary music. Peace, love, and harmony to all who knew David and those he touched. We will miss him dearly. At this time, we respectfully and kindly ask for privacy as we grieve and try to deal with our profound loss. Thank you for the love and prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1941, Crosby began his career with The Byrds before joining up with Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Graham Nash of The Hollies to form one of the most successful super-groups of all time, Crosby, Stills & Nash. The trio eventually added Neil Young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matt Schudel in The Washington Post wrote<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

David Crosby, a singer-songwriter who helped define the sound of the Woodstock generation as a key member of the 1960s and \u201970s bands the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash, but whose wanton drug abuse made him a cautionary symbol of the era\u2019s culture of excess, has died at 81.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A former publicist, citing family members, confirmed the death. No further details were immediately available, but Mr. Crosby had a history of hepatitis, diabetes, heart ailments and other problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Crosby possessed one of the most ethereal singing voices of the 1960s, a sweet tenor that harmonized well with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a member of the Byrds \u2014 a group once regarded as the mid-\u201960s American counterpart to the Beatles \u2014 and later with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash (sometimes augmented by Neil Young), Mr. Crosby sold millions of albums and performed songs that symbolized the era of peace, love and political engagement: \u201cMr. Tambourine Man,\u201d<\/a> \u201cTurn! Turn! Turn!\u201d<\/a> and \u201cEight Miles High\u201d with the Byrds; and, with Stills, Nash and Young, \u201cCarry On,\u201d \u201cMarrakesh Express,\u201d \u201cTeach Your Children\u201d<\/a> and \u201cOur House.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Crosby was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two times, as a member of each group, was at the heart of the Laurel Canyon music scene in Los Angeles and was considered one of the founders of folk rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He gained immense acclaim when he appeared with Stills, Nash and Young at the Woodstock festival in August 1969 and, four months later, at its dark-side-of-the-dream counterpart, the Altamont festival in California, where an audience member was killed by a member of the Hells Angels \u201csecurity\u201d team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a time when Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors and the Rolling Stones were taking rock in an amplified, acid-washed direction, Mr. Crosby and his band-mates turned to a gentler sound inspired by folk music, with acoustic guitars and intricate vocal harmonies. Every word could be clearly understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crosby, Stills & Nash \u201ccaptured the spirit of the last high moment of the American \u201960s,\u201d music journalist Paul Evans wrote in \u201cThe Rolling Stone Album Guide.\u201d \u201cThe CSN generation found in the band both spokesmen and representatives: The singers\u2019 slightly weary Utopianism, their bucolic fantasies and their songs about love and losses, reflected the inward turning of an aging youth culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a few years, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were genuine superstars. The group\u2019s 1969 debut album, \u201cCrosby, Stills & Nash,\u201d was hailed as a near-masterpiece, and the band won a Grammy Award as best new artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The group\u2019s next three albums, \u201cD\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu,\u201d \u201c4 Way Street\u201d and \u201cCSN,\u201d all reached either No. 1 or No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart and sold in the millions. Mr. Crosby wrote several well-known songs for CSNY, including \u201cGuinnevere\u201d<\/a> and the Vietnam-era anthem \u201cAlmost Cut My Hair<\/a>.\u201d One of the band\u2019s biggest hits, \u201cWoodstock,\u201d was by his protegee, Joni Mitchell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few groups were as well suited to their time as CSNY, embodying both the laid-back dreaminess and the pent-up social anger of the period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere\u2019s the thing \u2014 we\u2019re descended, singer-songwriters, from troubadours in the Middle Ages,\u201d Mr. Crosby told the San Luis Obispo Tribune in 2017. \u201cPart of the job should just be to boogie, make you want to dance. Part of the job should be to take you on little emotional voyages that make you feel stuff. And part of the job should be for us to be the town criers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each member recorded separately but, with the possible exception of Young, none could match the work they did together. In many ways, Mr. Crosby was CSNY\u2019s spiritual nucleus. His name always came first, and he seemed to personify the wistful California optimism of the hippie era. His song \u201cWooden Ships\u201d <\/a>(written with Stills and Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane) from CSN\u2019s debut album in 1969 reflected the spirit of the time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Easy, you know the way it\u2019s supposed to be<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silver people on the shoreline, let us be<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talkin\u2019 \u2019bout very free and easy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind the group\u2019s delicate musical harmonies, they often had fierce internal disputes. Mr. Crosby\u2019s worsening drug problems made him increasingly volatile and unreliable. Stills once poured a bucket of water over his head after a lackluster performance, and ultimately the other members of the group refused to go onstage with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey believed in me, and I let them down,\u201d Mr. Crosby told the Toronto Star in 1989. \u201cI became a junkie sleazebag, a criminal, paranoid fool. I didn\u2019t take care of anything \u2014 not my friends, not my music, not myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once worth millions, Mr. Crosby sold his guitars and memorabilia to buy drugs. He was freebasing cocaine and injecting heroin and often kept a handgun at his side. He was arrested several times and went to drug treatment facilities, only to walk out or relapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1982, he was arrested at a Dallas nightclub for illegal possession of cocaine and a .45 caliber pistol. While appealing his five-year sentence, he gave serious consideration to sailing away and leading the life of a fugitive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, he walked barefoot into an FBI office in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1985 and turned himself in. He went back behind bars, including for five months in a Texas state prison, before he was released in 1986.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was kicking coke and heroin under the worst possible circumstances,\u201d he told People magazine in 1987. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t give me an aspirin. I did it as cold turkey as you can do it, and it was hell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For 15 years, he didn\u2019t have so much as a beer. He later began to smoke marijuana again, angering some sobriety advocates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost people who go as far as I did with drugs are dead,\u201d Mr. Crosby told People. \u201cFool with them and you\u2019ll get strung out. Then there are about four ways it can go: You can go crazy; you can go to prison; you can die; or you can kick. That\u2019s it. Anything else anybody says is bull.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Crosby was expelled from several private schools before graduating from a public high school. Following an early interest in music, especially jazz and the Everly Brothers, he began to play folk music in his teens with his older brother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After performing in several groups in New York and California, he met Roger McGuinn, the leader of the Byrds. By adding amplifiers to their guitars, they created the jangly Byrds sound that took them to the top of the charts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1967, quarrels between Mr. Crosby and other members of the Byrds led to his departure. He retreated to Miami, where he heard Mitchell singing in a coffeehouse. Mr. Crosby produced her first album, \u201cSong to a Seagull,\u201d and the two had a brief romantic relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in Los Angeles, he met Stills (a member of Buffalo Springfield) and Nash (previously of the Hollies) at either Mitchell\u2019s home or that of Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the Mamas & the Papas. Accounts differ on where they met, but Mr. Crosby, Stills and Nash spontaneously began singing together and made plans to form a group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe reason we used our own names when we started the band was because we also wanted to pursue individual careers as well,\u201d Mr. Crosby told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. \u201cWe didn\u2019t like being locked into roles the way we were in Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds and the Hollies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Crosby\u2019s dependence on drugs increased in 1969, when his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a car wreck. \u201cDavid went to identify the body,\u201d Nash later said, \u201cand he\u2019s never been the same since.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his prison sentence in Texas, Mr. Crosby played guitar in a jailhouse rock band and began writing new songs for the first time in years. After his release, he published a contrite and revealing autobiography, \u201cLong Time Gone<\/a>\u201d (1988), released a solo album and reunited with Stills, Nash and Young for several acclaimed tours and recordings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDavid\u2019s playing some of the best music in his life,\u201d Nash told The Washington Post in 1987. \u201cWhich surprises me because, I confess, I looked for brain damage immediately. But he doesn\u2019t seem to have lost one cell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 1988 song \u201cCompass\u201d<\/a> from the CSNY album \u201cAmerican<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have flown the frantic flight of the batwing<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And only known the dark because of that<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have seized death\u2019s door-handle<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like a fish out of the water<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waiting, waiting for the mercy of the cat<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Crosby received a liver transplant in 1994 and, at various times, dealt with heart ailments, hepatitis, diabetes, a motorcycle crash and a house lost to an earthquake. In the late 1990s, he formed a band named CPR \u2014 not as a comment on his physical condition but for the primary band members: Mr. Crosby, Jeff Pevar and James Raymond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raymond, who was adopted in the early 1960s, learned in his 30s that Mr. Crosby was his biological father.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to Raymond, Mr. Crosby\u2019s survivors include his wife since 1987, Jan Dance; their son, Django Crosby; and two daughters from earlier relationships, Erika Keller and Donovan Crosby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Crosby described his second chance at music and life:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2000, it was revealed that Mr. Crosby was the biological father, through artificial insemination, of two children of singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner at the time, Julie Cypher. (Beckett Cypher, Mr. Crosby\u2019s biological son, died of a drug overdose in 2020.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a surprising late-career transformation, Mr. Crosby evolved from youthful rebel and junkie to mellow, seen-it-all sage. Among other things, he became an unlikely advice columnist for Rolling Stone, dispensing guidance about relationships, addiction and music, like a counterculture Santa Claus<\/a>. In 1989, he and his wife took in a teenage Drew Barrymore, helping the actress overcome her problems with drugs and alcohol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

He published a second memoir, \u201cSince Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It,\u201d in 2006 and was the subject of a 2019 documentary <\/a>by A.J. Eaton, \u201cDavid Crosby: Remember My Name,\u201d in which he summed up nearly 20 years of his life: \u201cAddiction takes you over like fire takes over a burning building.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite occasional musical reunions, Mr. Crosby had difficult relationships with his former bandmates and eventually stopped talking to Nash and Young. Still, he wrote and recorded new albums into his late 70s, collaborating with a wide range of musicians, from rock guitarist Mark Knopfler to jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to the jazzy folk collective Snarky Puppy<\/a>, all of whom have featured regularly on these pages in articles still available in our easy to negotiate archives of almost 1,000 articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Realizing that \u201cthe only thing I can do now is use the talent I was given,\u201d he sought to make up for his lost years. It didn\u2019t matter that he no longer topped the charts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not interested in what I already did. It\u2019s already done,\u201d he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2015. \u201cThe trick is that when the music comes by your house, you have to have the lights on and the doors open.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The primary source for  this piece was written for the print and on line media by Paste. Other   authors and titles have been attributed in our text wherever possible<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images employed have been taken from on line sites only where  categorised as  images free to use.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a more comprehensive detail of our attribution policy see our for reference only post on 7th<\/sup> April 2023  entitled Aspirations And Attributions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

cover photo rip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mr. Crosby was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two times, as a member of each group, was at the heart of the Laurel Canyon music scene in Los Angeles and was considered one of the founders of folk rock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16242"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16249,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242\/revisions\/16249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}