David Crosby: 1941 - 2023
Harvey Kubernik and David Crosby 2022 Interview:
Q:
You always had a relationship with jazz. You saw John Coltrane play
live and spent a lot of time at Dick Bock’s World Pacific studio. Bock
issued many legendary jazz albums and titles from Ravi Shankar.
David Crosby:
I was a young folkie musician. My brother played a lot of fifties jazz.
I got turned on to jazz long before I got turned on to pop or rock ‘n’
roll. They played me Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill
Evans, all of those guys in the late fifties. And more obscure stuff
like Cal Tjader. J.J. Johnson. All jazz.
I
get to a point where my head starts to open up a bit and I started
playing guitar and getting more interesting on it. I’m starting to
listen to pop music and I realized those chords that I really liked they
were a little further along.
And I started hearing some people using
chords like that. And I wanted to go that direction.
Later
the minute that I heard Steely Dan I felt that was somebody else out
there that hears the same shit that I do. The minute what I heard what
Walter and Donald did. I was like their brother. I wanted to move next
door and pitch a pup tent on their lawn, because that was very jazzy.
Very strongly jazz influenced. And much more intense and sophisticated
than the pop music I had grown up with.
When we started the Byrds, man, there were other people around town.
Paul Revere & the Raiders. We’re tallkin’ primitive shit, guys
dancing on their amps in uniforms. I mean, come on. (Laughs). This is a
different world. And I hear Steely Dan. Man do I wish I was in that
band. And other bands came along as well as Michael Hedges. Another one.
Strongly jazz influenced but strongly classically influenced too.
And
I gotta say that is really where it came from to me. I listened to a
ton of classical music from my parents and folk music from my parents
and jazz music from my brother. My parents played classical music every
Sunday of my life. And that’s what did it. I knew those chords were out
there and I was lookin’ for ‘em. The Weavers and folk singers who could
really do it and really had something to say. Those people taught us a
whole lot.
Q: In the recent Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Déjà Vu reissue your recordings of “Laughing” and “Triad” are in the Déjà Vu package. But origins of these tunes go back, including your encounter with the Beatles.
David Crosby:
“Laughing.” The Byrds went over to England in 1965. And, of course, our
heroes were the Beatles. And they came to hear us and were really nice
to us. They were friendly and very real and not at all star people. None
of that. They drove us home from gigs and came to gigs more than once
and had us over to houses for dinner and to parties. They were really
nice cats.
I
was very taken with George. I liked him a lot. Always did, right from
the start. Very sincere. Very friendly and trying hard to be a decent
human being. And that appeals to me no end. I became friends with
George. So, I had just been turned on to Ravi Shankar by a friend in the
States. And I had an album by Ravi in my suitcase. I gave it to
George,” he recalled.
Now
that had repercussions. George told me later that I turned him onto
Indian music. I have trouble believing that. I think there were other
people who helped do that. But that’s what he told me. God bless me.
George liked Indian music, got interested in it and wound up going to
India. When he was in India he met a guru, a teacher that he liked.
Later
we were talking and he told me about this guy and he told me about this
guy and said he found somebody who might know some of the answers.
George was smitten. Well, I’m a very skeptical person about that, always
have been. The minute someone tells me they have God’s phone number and
address I kind of back off. I don’t believe in that. I wanted to say to
George, ‘Oh man, come on, take it with a grain of salt. The guy may
know something but don’t bet your whole month’s rent.’ I couldn’t do it.
It was George…And I just couldn’t give him that kind of advice.
And I
said I I’ve thought that I thought that I knew what the answer was and
the truth is the closest I came to it was laughing in the sun.
And that
was a song I wrote to George.
Q:
There is “Triad,” a 1967 composition about a threesome and sexual
freedom. Decades ago, it was presented to the Byrds for potential
inclusion on their LP The Notorious Byrd Brothers, recorded and rejected, later surfacing in 1971 on CSN&Y’s 4 Way Street. In 2006 the Byrds’ recording of “Triad” appeared on the Columbia/Legacy label’s There Is A Season box set.
David Crosby:
The reason the French call it manage a trois is they’ve been doing it
for a long time. It’s not controversial. I think there are people who
are very strait-laced, some of it for religious reasons and some of them
because they are squares. And for them the idea of three people making
love at the same time is not only strange but outrageous, terrible and
offensive. I don’t feel that way. Those things are very deeply seeded,
people’s reactions to sex and religions.
Q: I wanted to ask about the impact of Neil Young joining CSN&Y for Déjà Vu.
David Crosby: The
greatest strength we had was as songwriters. That was our main number
one strength. And the trick that we had was that we had several. Now
most bands had one. Some had two. What that gets you is that if you are
painting a picture and you have a number of colors on your palate, if
you are working with somebody else, they have different colors on their
palate. If they have six and they have nine, all of a sudden you have
sixteen colors.
It’s a better painting.
Now,
when you are making albums, the problem of having one writer is that he
or she tends to write very similarly song to song. With the four of us
we had four drastically different writing styles, four ways of
conceiving a song. They were very different.
Now
I will go out on a limb and say Stills was the best of us. I think he
was, without question, the best songwriter, the best singer and the best
guitar player. All three.
But I think all four of us had real skill as
songwriters and our stuff was very different than each other. I think
that’s one of the main reasons that it made it.
Q: When did you know or feel Neil Young could work in the existing CS&N trio format?
David Crosby:
I’ll tell you exactly. I was sittin’ in Joni’s driveway on Lookout
Mountain Drive in Laurel Canyon. And Neil drove by and he saw me out
there, turned around at the next stop and came back down and pulled in.
Gets out of his car and pulls out a guitar.
Now
this is when we are considering asking him to be in the group.
And he
knows that. He knows that Nash is against it. And he knows I’m kind of
on the fence, and he knows Stills is for it. That kind of makes me the
decider. I didn’t say anything. That’s how it was, right? Neil sat down
on the trunk of the car with me, the two of us, him with the guitar, and
he sang ‘Helpless,’ ‘Country Girl’ and a few other things. And I said
‘I wanna work with this guy. This is too good.’ It was about the
writing. It was all about those songs.
He’s
not as good as a guitar player as Stills. To this day he’s not as good
as a guitar player as Stills. He’s very very good. Stills is very much
better. We didn’t need him for that. We did need a guitar player when
Stills was playing keyboard. And that was a big factor in what Stills
said to us about bringing Neil in. But, for me, it was only about those
songs. They were excellent. Excellent.
And they were completely
different from us and I knew what would happen when we add those Crosby,
Stills, Nash vocal sound to a song like that. I knew what ‘Helpless’
would sound like. And I knew what we could do. It was irresistible.
Of
course, I wanted to work with him.
Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon and 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble. Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters.
Kubernik’s writings are in several book anthologies, including, The Rolling Stone Book Of The Beats and Drinking With Bukowski. Harvey wrote the liner notes to the CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.
During
2006 Harvey Kubernik spoke at the special hearings initiated by The
Library of Congress that were held in Hollywood, California, discussing
archiving practices and audiotape preservation.
In 2020, Harvey served as a consultant on the 2-part documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time directed by Alison Ellwood that debuted on the M-G-M/EPIX cable television channel.
Harvey Kubernik, Henry Diltz and Gary Strobl collaborated with ABC-TV in 2011 for their Emmy-winning one hour Eye on L.A. Legends of Laurel Canyon program hosted by Tina Malave.
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