(Credits: Far Out / Eddie Janssens / wikiportret.nl)
Sun 29 March 2026 18:30, UK
Not everyone needed to have a degree in music to figure out what David Crosby was doing every time he performed.
There were legendary players who spent their entire lives trying to make the best music that they could, but even when looking through those elaborate harmonies, it was a lot easier to see what Crosby was going for when hearing those layers of harmonies on all of those classic Crosby, Stills and Nash records. But if he was working with some of the greatest musicians that he could find, he had to admit when some of them didn’t know the first thing about being a proper musician.
Then again, since when was rock and roll about being one of the best musicians in the world? Some of the biggest names in punk rock are legends for a reason, and yet if you were to ask any member of Sex Pistols what the theory was behind some of their songs, chances are most of them wouldn’t have the slightest clue. And as far as they could tell, that was one of their greatest strengths when they were working because they were bringing everything back to basics.
With Crosby, though, music was about something a lot more cerebral. He wasn’t going to be teaching classes on what good vocal technique was by any stretch, but when you look at his record collection, his sense of harmony was a lot more vast. He had grown up listening to the greatest musicians in jazz, and when someone like Jimi Hendrix came out, chances are Crosby could see the lineage from the other fusion players that he had seen coming out of the woodwork.
But even if CSN were trying to break new ground, Crosby knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with The Byrds. The jangle-pop legends were still some of the greatest musicians to challenge the British invasion, but when looking at the direction they were taking only a few years after ‘Eight Miles High’, Crosby didn’t want any part of them getting more folksy and delving into the country territory that they later did with Gram Parsons.
That said, it’s not like he took any of them for granted, either. Roger McGuinn had seen the potential in him when he first started singing harmonies with them, but when listening to some of the most important members of the band, he felt that Gene Clark wasn’t exactly the best musician in the group when he first started trying to figure out what the harmonies were on all of their songs.
Crosby couldn’t judge since he wasn’t properly trained, but he remembered that Clark was always following his ear over everything, saying, “Roger and Gene were up there singing these songs that Gene had been writing after he saw the Beatles. He was fascinated with the Beatles. He wanted to be the Beatles—as we all did—but he didn’t know the rules about music. He was completely uneducated, like me, so he just did what felt good.”
Considering what both of them did for rock and roll, though, Crosby’s lack of musical knowledge was practically a superpower back in the day. No one would have thought that he had the power to make a song as gripping as ‘Deja Vu’, but by spending all of those years internalising everything he heard from the likes of rock and jazz, he was creating a new type of music that no one else could have touched on at the time.
Joni Mitchell may have blown him out of the water when it came to some of the more intricate parts of her music, but Crosby wasn’t trying to be in competition with anyone. He could only make the best songs that he could, and he figured that it would be better for him to make the best tunes that he could as long as he kept following his ear every single time he started performing.
