It is amazing for many rock musicians that they survived the sixties and especially the seventies.

This is especially true for David Crosby.

What's even more amazing is that it survived the eighties.

Around 1985, Crosby was at rock bottom.

Wanted in several American states for drug offenses, he surrendered to the authorities in Florida.

Like his girlfriend Jan Daze, he was a physical wreck: as documented in a clinic report at the beginning of his autobiography.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the features section.

  • Follow I follow

While other rock stars were briefly imprisoned once, Crosby spent a total of more than a year in it.

This also served for detoxification: hard withdrawal in a barren single cell.

In 1987 he spoke to the privileged students of Beverly Hills High School by invitation, he reports.

There was a warning: He too had been of privileged origin and still crashed.

One of the students asked Crosby if he had ever been on stage under drugs.

The musician's answer, probably a bit stunned: "I did everything stoned."

Transition from folk music to rock

The still somewhat childish pride in the rebellious, as life-threatening as it may be, is still in this sentence. It is reflected in songs like "Eight Miles High" (1966), on which Crosby co-wrote with his first band The Byrds, as well as in the defiant "Almost Cut My Hair", which he wrote in 1970 for his group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) and which first became a hymn of the counterculture, later sealing its musealization.

In groups and solo, David Crosby helped shape the transition from folk music to rock and kept the boundaries flowing Laurel Canyon was involved, the Californian attitude to life around 1970 was impressively captured: from its naive euphoria ("Music is Love") to the tipping moments ("Traction in the Rain").

The eighties weren't good for you musically either: Their idea of ​​“modern” studio sounds and the use of synthesizers were a disaster for groups like CSNY.

On the other hand, you have to be grateful for the improved amplification and recording technology that made it possible, for example, to finally play and capture a live recording of "Wooden Ships", which the group played in Woodstock, twenty years later with as force as it was back then would never have succeeded.

So if you are looking for the epitome of Crosby's rock art, listen to the bootleg recording of the “King Biscuit Flower Hour” from 1989: the wooden ships never sounded better.

Nobody lived long enough

Since then, Crosby has found his feet again on the slippery road of life and career, but has also repeatedly faltered, not least due to a liver transplant. Phases of disputes and reconciliation with their old companions Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young are part of every big band - although, musically, this one could unfortunately never connect to their heyday at the beginning of the seventies. David Crosby also tried to revive her virtuosity with the CPR project, with guitarist Jeff Pevar and his own son James Raymond. Between prog rock and jazz, this trio recorded albums such as “Just like Gravity” (2001), whereby the result sometimes sounds like a little soulless program music.