(Credits: Far Out / Eddie Janssens / wikiportret.nl)
Sun 18 January 2026 19:15, UK
For as candid as some rock stars could be, you could hardly find anyone who didn’t mince their words as much as David Crosby.
He wasn’t exactly John Lydon slagging off every single artist that he came across, but if he felt that someone wasn’t living up to the standards that he had back in the day, it didn’t take him long to start tearing them through the mud whenever he got the chance. After all, the age of free love was also the age of free speech, and as far as Crosby could tell, there were many people who didn’t really deserve their spot at the top of the rock and roll world.
Then again, it was bad enough trying to get all the members of Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the same page when they first started making music. Some of their finest moments playing together came through a lingering sense of tension, and even up until the day he died, Crosby still had a lot of regrets about not being able to make up with people like Graham Nash in the way that he should have.
They were all trying to make the world a better place back in the late 1960s, but the Woodstock generation had a far different outlook depending on who you talked to. Because as much as Crosby believed in the idealism of hippies, he wasn’t about to say that Jim Morrison was one of the greatest living artists or anything. That was the dark side of Flower Power, but he would much rather have dealt with hippies with differing opinions than those who outright despised them.
And even while being right in the thick of it, Mike Love was not going to be doing Crosby any favours even in The Beach Boys’ prime. Brian Wilson may have been the mad genius behind all of the band’s greatest hits, and yet, with all of the great villains that populate their story, Love has always been the annoying one lingering around in the background all the time. There was always something inherently dislikable about him, but it got a lot more pronounced when The Beach Boys agreed to play for President Donald Trump.
Crosby didn’t usually have many kind words for people like Trump back in the late 1960s, but hearing that Love was steering the band into that territory wasn’t anything new to him, saying at the time, “Mike Love is, in the opinion of almost every musician I know, a shithead, most assuredly has no talent at all, and, as you can probably tell …I just don’t like him.” And it’s not hard to see why Crosby would have such vitriol, either.
It’s true that Love was the one that kept the band going when Wilson was out of commission and even managed to keep their touring schedule going throughout the years, but that doesn’t automatically make him the greatest musician in the world. His lyrics weren’t exactly the most insightful questions about life compared to Bob Dylan, and since many people have had horror stories about him being a jerk, you can kind of hear that in the way he writes his lyrics.
Let’s not forget the embarrassment that he made of himself and his bandmates when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Any sane person would have simply thanked their friends, family and crew and gone on their way, but Love’s need to call The Beatles and The Rolling Stones chickenshit from the stage despite Paul McCartney not even being in attendance at the time isn’t exactly the most professional move any member has ever made.
So while Crosby has no doubt taken a few cues from the way The Beach Boys constructed those beautiful harmonies, it’s not shocking to see him agree with Brian Wilson’s assessment of Love. It’s one thing to be a great singer, but what happens on and off the stage in between songs says a lot more about an artist than most people realise.
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