In a video featuring the aged but sharp-looking and witty storyteller David Crosby accompanied by various acoustic guitars he's been with over the years, he talks about the importance of good instruments to good playing.

His is known from pieces he wrote for Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young), such as “Guinnevere”, but also from solo works.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Crosby was always fond of experimenting with "open" tuning of the strings, creating his very distinctive pickings and melodies.

It is also remarkable and typical for him how he talks about marks on the instruments in that video, which others would profanely describe as wear and tear - with him you can only see that a guitar has experienced "thousands of hours of love".

Atmospherically perfect

In the obituaries of the musician, who died on January 18th and whose significance for the music genre of folk rock can hardly be overstated, many of the great tracks that make him unforgettable were - rightly - honored: heavier ones like "Wooden Ships" and "Almost Cut My Hair', more delicate ones like 'Triad', which he wrote while he was still with the Byrds in 1968.

On his solo album released in 1971 with the only superficially amusing title "If I Could Only Remember My Name", which John Pareles recently aptly described in the "New York Times" as "perfectly atmospheric", there is a more than tender song hidden , which deserves special emphasis.

"Traction in the Rain" is perhaps one of the most meditative songs not just of the hippie era, not just of the Laurel Canyon music scene, but of all.

He presents the guitarist and singer David Crosby almost naked in front of our ears.

A chord falls on the one of the bar, then not much happens until the next one - but due to the very gentle rhythm and the implied beat pattern of the guitar you start to count inside, soon you have a basic structure of the two chords that change again and again in the head, which are nevertheless connected by the organ tone of an open E-string played rhythmically on its own.

(If you just listened to this track by itself, it might sound like someone tuning their guitar.)

Struggle for traction

Above this guitar minimalism, Crosby's voice soars free as a bird: "It's hard enough, I know / To find the strength to go / Back to where it all began".

She wants to go back to her roots - a memory, but also those of life, one feels.

The singer struggles to stay grounded: "It's hard enough to gain / any traction in the rain".

It could mean the tires of a VW bus that shouldn't slide out of a Californian curve in the rain.

But it also means the wet, slippery road of remembrance, on which it is easy to slip.

That's pretty much it, in all its vagueness – the song doesn't exactly bombard you with imagery, ideas and literary allusions like a Bob Dylan one;

the more atmospherically open it appears.

But there follows his key sentence: