The song David Crosby called his best: “This one is beautiful”
In the mid-1960s, David Crosby rose to fame as a member of The Byrds, a foundational folk-rock group championing the recent innovations of the stylistic pioneer Bob Dylan. Though the band enjoyed several prominent hits, none sold quite so well as their version of Dylan’s song ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. The cover appeared on the group’s 1965 album of the same name, which consisted mostly of folk covers.
Crosby was expelled from The Byrds in late 1967. He had clearly rubbed his bandmates up the wrong way, prompting their bitter justification that he was “crazy and unsociable and a bad writer and a terrible singer”. No doubt the singer-songwriter was a little unhinged, especially during some periods of his life, but the last two items on the list seemed spiteful and inaccurate.
For all his alleged personal faults, David Crosby was a talented singer with an iconic voice. His songwriting began to blossom with The Byrds before reaching full bloom in his next chapter, collaborating with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and Neil Young, and The Hollies’ Graham Nash. By the time he formed CSNY (or CSN when Young was absent), Crosby had also connected with Joni Mitchell, another significant influence on his songwriting.
Speaking to Joe Bosso in a past interview, Crosby reflected on the CSN debut album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, as one of the proudest releases of his career. “The term ‘supergroup’ didn’t exist until we formed,” he claimed.
Adding, “We had all been in successful bands before, but something like us had never happened. We set the precedent. And for us to become even bigger than our previous bands, that was even more unique.”
Indeed, the 1969 album was a seismic release and seemed to coin the term “supergroup”. Unlike much of Crosby’s material with the Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash was entirely constructed from original material. Crosby contributed two original songs, ‘Guinnevere’ and ‘Long Time Gone’, and received a co-writing credit for the classic song ‘Wooden Ships’. He and Stills wrote the song alongside Paul Kantner, who recorded it with his band Jefferson Airplane.
While appraising his songwriting contributions to the supergroup, Crosby picked out ‘Guinnevere’ as a favourite. The song stretches over three verses, each about a different woman: one was Joni Mitchell, another was Christine Hinton, and the third Crosby refused to identify. “I do think this one is beautiful. It could be my best,” he beamed.
Crosby is often happy with either the lyrics or the music, but in ‘Guinnevere’ he felt he had the perfect balance of the two. “I like it musically, I like it lyrically, and I like the mood that it creates a lot,” he said. Firstly, he noted the “intricate and delicious” structure, which cycles through 4/4, 6/8 and 7/4 in each verse. He also used an alternate tuning, which made for a more unique chord progression. “The guitar pattern, I can’t say how it came about,” Crosby added. “I just fooled around, and it came out. It’s in a very odd tuning that a guy from the Midwest showed me one time.”
A year after the CSN debut album, the trio teamed up with Neil Young for the classic album Déjà Vu. The robust tour de force featured songwriting contributions from all four members and a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’. Crosby penned the title track and the enduring rock out ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, the latter of which Young describes as the pinnacle of Crosby’s songwriting.
“It’s really Crosby at what I think is his best,” Young told Rolling Stone in 1970.