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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary:
David Crosby, the former Byrds singer who can
claim to be inventor of acid-rock, raga-rock and space-rock, released only
one solo album before falling victim to his drugs addiction, but that album,
If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971),
that absorbed his experience with the Jefferson Airplane and with
Crosby Stills Nash & Young, remains one of the most touching documents
of the post-hippy era.
Several historical figures of San Francisco's acid-rock scene attended
the sessions, including most of the Jefferson Airplane and of the Grateful
Dead. The melancholy, dreamy, ecstatic psalms of this album are embedded into
loose, shimmering, impressionist structures.
Crosby travels to another universe, whispers, wails, babbles, agonizes,
radiates "om"s, chats with mirages and ghosts,
sinks into a mystic-psychedelic trance.
Full Bio
(Translated
from my original Italian text by Donnie)
David Crosby was, in many ways, the inventor of acid-rock, raga-rock and
space-rock, when, inspired by San Francisco's hippie movement,
he convinced
the Byrds to abandon the exuberant folk-rock of their early days. David Crosby,
less and less in line with
Roger McGuinn's ideology
was dismissed from the
band in 1968. He took refuge with the Jefferson Airplane for some time, and
gifted them two gems such as the intimate
Triad and the visionary Wooden Ships.
From 1969 to 1971 he traveled with the supergroup created by Steve Stills, the
Crosby Stills & Nash, contributing to that project with some folk-psychedelic
delights (Almost Cut My Hair, Dejavu`, Shadow Captain).
Crosby then recorded his first solo album, which stands as one of the three
records with which the great California season of utopia ends, a record in
which the whole Bay Area musical community spiritually and materially
participates. If Blows Against The Empire envisioned the dream of leaving
Earth to go and found a new civilization on another planet, if Sunfighter
marked
the rediscovery of Mother Earth and therefore a resigned naturalistic idyll,
Crosby's record, If I Could Only Remember My Name (Atlantic, 1971),
represents the moment of maximum meditation, of
retreat from the public to the private, from the common to the individual.
It features
Kaukonen, Slick, Casady, Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane, as well as
Garcia, Leish, Kreutzmann, Hart of the Grateful Dead, as well
as songwriters Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash and others.
The influence of so many creative brains is tangible, but more than anything else
in forging the "neutral" sound of the disc, a sound that, like that of the other
masterpieces of the Bay Area, cannot be assimilated to any genre.
Crosby's personality,
instead, establishes the mood and ultimately the very meaning of the record.
The album is sad and dreamy, full of the new philosophy of resignation; it is a
long existential whisper. Crosby indulges in a mystical-psychedelic trance,
raves with dilated vowels, converses with mirages and ghosts. The
crystalline style of early Byrds collides with the disorganized sound of the
lysergic period of Younger Than Yesterday, a magic fairy tale style
is permeated with
Indian spiritualism. The shimmering caress and the long hissing echoes of the
leading guitar, melted on the fine sand of the other guitars, sculpt and
color an atmosphere of mystery and religiosity. The voices intone heroic psalms,
like a Greek chorus that supports Crosby's intense, hallucinated, "stoned"
monologue, made up of long whispered vowels.
The album opens with the slow progression of Music's Love, a mantra made of a
single verse ("Everyone says that music is love") repeated endlessly by Crosby
and the choir, hummed in a trance. Even more tenuous are Laughing, a single long
note, suspended between Earth and paradise, an echo that vibrates and returns,
and gradually fades into the silence of eternity, Traction In The Rain, a
revision of the whispered Triad theme on the tinkling strings of the guitar and
on the crystalline waterfalls of the harp, and above all Song With No Words,
drenched in an extraordinary lyrical intensity, a subdued and poignant prayer in
which the singing hovers in sublime flights, a` la Slick, unable to articulate words.
In closing, the hallucinating I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here, a funeral lament, a game of mirror images, a hallucinogenic trip, a cry of joy and despair, rends the
measure of the ambiguous equilibrium of dreamlike and mystical states.
An almost
baroque tone and harmonic architecture, a stubborn rhetoric of ecstasy, a
fragile vocal aestheticism and a strong pictorial impressionism make this album
more than unique.
Crosby never repeated himself at those levels, dedicating his old age to mediocre
records with Graham Nash and to a mediocre supporting role for Stephen Stills
in the
supergroup Crosby Stills & Nash; which attests to the merits of the album's
guests, but also attests to a kind of confessional style that can work only
once in
a lifetime. That ghostly ending that made his fans hope for who knows what musical
revolutions marked instead only the drying of a spring, the end of an era,
and the demise of a myth.
(Original text by Piero Scaruffi)
David Crosby's career was always marked by LSD. In 1966 he changed the history
of rock music because of LSD. In 1971 he gave rock music a masterpiece thanks
to LSD. During the 1970s he destroyed his life and his career because of LSD.
And much later he will resurrect as a different man and artist, thanks to
rehabilitation from drugs.
While they were still playing in CS&N, Crosby and Nash released a collaboration,
Graham Nash and David Crosby (Atlantic, apr 1972), that features
Southbound Train (Nash), Immigration Man (Nash),
The Wall Song (Crosby).
It was a lighter, softer, gentler version of CS&N's ethereal sound.
Wind On The Water (ABC, 1975) was, overall, even better, thanks to
a consistent "journey" from Carry Me (Crosby) and
Bittersweet (Crosby) through Take the Money And Run (Nash) and
Love Workout (Nash) all the way to the magical
To the Last Whale (Crosby).
Orchestral arrangements did not help
Whistling Down the Wire (ABC, jun 1976)
escape the sense that Crosby and Nash were selling out
(Out of the Darkness, Spotlight).
Crosby was clearly losing control of his mind. His second solo album,
Might as Well Have a Good Time (1980), was never released.
A series of arrests on drug-related charges and illegal-weapons charges
landed him a prison sentence. He spent the first half of 1986 in jail, and
finally got rid of the habit. His career resumed with a new Crosby Still Nash & Young album and, finally, his second solo album,
Oh Yes I Can (A&M, 1989), a decent effort that contains Tracks In The Dust and Lady Of The Harbor.
Crosby's third solo album, Thousand Roads (Atlantic, 1993), is mainly a collection of covers.
Seriously sick, Crosby united with his son James Raymond and guitarist
Jeff Pevar to form CPR.
In 2004, Crosby was again arrested for possession of drugs (as well as
for an illegal gun).
Crosby returned after a 21-year hiatus with
Croz (2014), his first solo album in 20 years, containing
the chirpy single Radio,
Lighthouse (2016), which was a collaboration with
Michael League of jazz-fusion combo Snarky Puppy,
Sky Trails (2017), a collection of mostly mellow jazz-soul-rock ballads a` la
Steely Dan
(She's Got To Be Somewhere, the male-female duet Sky Trails),
Here If You Listen (2018), credited explicitly to Crosby and his
touring band (Becca Stevens, Michelle Willis and Michael League), a rather
somnolent work,
and
For Free (2021), another effort of classy soft-rock with the collaboration
of
Steely Dan's Donald Fagen (co-composer of Rodriguez for a Night) and
Michael McDonald (River Rise).
Crosby died in 2023.
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