Remember His Name: RIP, David Crosby

A leader of the 60's and 70's counterculture, this loss reminds us music's transformational power.

This week, I need to leave politics and media to mourn the loss of a cultural icon, raconteur, provocateur, and musician par excellence, David Crosby. You’ll read elsewhere about his argumentative style and his struggles with addiction, so here, I’ll take a different approach.  

Some background: Even though the term sounds new, society has always had influencers. Throughout human history, they have scrawled on cave walls, served as court jesters, traveled the countryside as minstrels, spread the news and opinions of the day as town criers, built printing presses, spread religious beliefs (often violently), fomented revolution as pamphleteers, created newspaper chains, broadcast networks on radio, then television, and in the current era, used the internet and social media to change the culture.

Music has ebbed and flowed as a cultural-influencer. Early in the last century, Tin Pan Alley—the inventors of the “moon, spoon, June” school of low-impact rhyme—brought us light-hearted entertainment with no intention of changing the world. Since then, we’ve had periods of musical lulls where dancing was the thing, and periods of musical intensity where songs demanded a close hearing.

Today, we’re in a musical lull, but in the 1960s and 1970s, music was inseparable from social movement, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were at the forefront of a changing culture. Musicians served as a kind of collective conscience, and David Crosby reigned supreme.

Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair” became a counterculture anthem, and his “Long Time Gone” is  both a tribute to the assassinated Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr, and a cautionary tale for other would-be pot-stirrers (“You’ve got to speak out against the madness; you’ve got to speak your mind if you dare”).

Stephen Stills captured a generation’s angst in “For What it's Worth.” Graham Nash’s “Military Madness” depicts his birth during wartime, and “Chicago” immortalized the trial of the Chicago Seven and the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. With Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and others, Nash created the No Nukes movement. Neil Young wrote “Ohio” minutes after the Kent State Massacre in May of 1970. It was on the radio absolutely everywhere later that week.

They were our minstrels. From Bob Dylan, who told us the answer was blowing in the wind, to Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction, music was our scribe and the soundtrack to our lives. More than film, literature, or television, music spoke directly to the 76.5 million Baby Boomers who were not going to sit quietly while adults ruined the world. I grant freely that we went on to sew our own kind of ruination, but that is not today’s story.

There is a masterful documentary called "Stand And Be Counted," for which Crosby collaborated with a close CSN friend, David Bender. Find it, and you'll be grateful they took the time to show us the power that music has to change the world.

We’ve now come to the moment when those heroes are beginning to fail and fall. David Bowie has passed from a blood cancer, Linda Ronstadt, the best and most versatile voice of a generation, is still alive, but multiple sclerosis has robbed her of her instrument. Joni Mitchell, a soaring soprano and perhaps our best poet, has had debilitating health challenges, but because of friends and fellow musicians, led by Brandi Carlisle and Elton John, has been reinvigorated and lifted to the point where she can perform again, while not at her previous level, it’s still joyous.

I have no desire for the limelight, and for the most part, I wish my memories to remain personal—not public—property, but I’ll break my rule to tell this story because it provides insight into David Crosby.

In 2007, I got a call from our mutual friend, the aforementioned David Bender, who was the Political Director at Air America, a radio network that I had dreamed up a few years prior. (If you know his name, it’s likely because Rachel Maddow, who came to prominence at our network, referred to him as her “political guru.”) Bender asked me to produce a pilot radio show he was doing with Crosby for a major syndicator. We brainstormed at the Crosbys’ home near Santa Barbara, and went into the studio to cut a show about music, social change, and technological innovations because Crosby was insatiably curious about everything in life.

The syndicator hated it: “Where are the sex, drugs, and rock and roll he’s famous for? This is not what we paid for!” It was easy to box the troubadour in, but impossible to hold him in place.

When asked about the Grateful Dead and how they did what they did, Crosby’s dear friend and collaborator, the Dead’s Jerry Garcia, allowed, “Magic is what we make, and music is how we make it.”

Amen. Rest in Peace, Croz.

©2023 Jon Sinton