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Singer-songwriter-guitarist David Crosby, a founding member of two popular and enormously influential '60s rock units, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash (later Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), has died, his representative says. He was 81 years old. A cause of death has not been revealed.
The death came as a surprise to those who followed his very active Twitter account, which he'd kept tweeting on as recently as Wednesday. One of Crosby's final tweets the day before he died was to make a typically jocular comment about heaven: "I heard the place is overrated . . . cloudy."
Former CSNY partner Graham Nash, who had been estranged from Crosby in recent years as their group went its separate ways, paid tribute on his social media. "It is with a deep and profound sadness that I learned that my friend David Crosby has passed," Nash wrote. "I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times, but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years.
"David was fearless in life and in music," Nash continued. "He leaves behind a tremendous void as far as sheer personality and talent in this world. He spoke his mind, his heart, and his passion through his beautiful music and leaves an incredible legacy. These are the things that matter most. My heart is truly with his wife, Jan, his son, Django, and all of the people he has touched in this world."
Eight months ago, Crosby made headlines when he said he was done performing live, declaring, "I'm too old to do it anymore. I don't have the stamina; I don't have the strength." But he said he was recording as busily as possible: "I've been making records at a startling rate. . . . Now I'm 80 years old so I'm gonna die fairly soon. That's how that works. And so I'm trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it's really good . . . I have another one already in the can waiting." Crosby subsequently backtracked about doing concerts, saying recently that he'd changed his mind and expected to be out playing live again.
Crosby reentered the public consciousness in a big way in 2018 with a theatrical documentary, "David Crosby: Remember My Name," narrated and produced by Cameron Crowe. Crosby spoke about his own mortality in the film, and Crowe remarked on that in an interview with Variety, saying the singer was thinking about " 'telling the truth in my last huge interview that I'll probably ever do' . . . " In the second question of the first interview we did with Crosby, he came right out with 'Time is the final currency. What do you do with the time you have left?' . . . What's great is, he's got more energy than all of us. He's gonna outlive us all. He's batting his eyes like he's on his deathbed. He ain't on his deathbed at all! Maybe it all is a con job, like he says at the end. You don't know."
With bandmates Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, Crosby set down the template for '60s L.A. folk-rock in the Byrds during his stormy 1964-67 tenure in the group.
Bonding with Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Graham Nash of the Hollies amid the glitter of L.A.'s late-'60s Laurel Canyon scene, Crosby launched CS&N, whose multi-platinum 1968 debut inaugurated rock's supergroup era.
The addition of another volatile member, Stills' erstwhile Buffalo Springfield colleague Neil Young, added to the act's commercial luster. However, a constant clash of egos within Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, fueled by the rock excesses of the era, toppled the act during the '70s, though its members would regroup sporadically over the years as a recording and touring unit. Crosby's most stable association was with Nash: The duo recorded and toured regularly into the new millennium.
While never the principal songwriter in either the Byrds or CSN&Y, Crosby was an integral part of the densely layered harmony front line that launched both those acts' multiple chart hits.
The hedonistic personification of the '60s sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll lifestyle, he grappled with addiction for many years. His sensational 1982 arrest in Texas on drug and weapons charges led to a five-month prison stay in 1986. Wracked by years of cocaine and alcohol abuse, he underwent liver transplant surgery in 1994.
Though he never returned to the popular eminence of his early years, Crosby recorded and toured profitably into the 2000s.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of the Byrds (1991) and Crosby, Stills & Nash (1997).
Crosby was a child of Hollywood privilege. He was the son of cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who won an Oscar for his work on F.W. Murnau's 1931 feature "Tabu." Raised in L.A. and Santa Barbara, he was an indifferent student who gravitated to acting and music at an early age.
Dropping out of Santa Barbara City College to pursue a career in music, he became involved in the commercial folk music scene via brief membership in Les Baxter's Balladeers, a Limeliters-styled unit organized by the well-known composer-arranger.
He began working the L.A. folk clubs as a solo act; at a set at the Troubadour, his crisp tenor voice attracted the attention of Jim Dickson, the house engineer at Richard Bock's L.A. label World Pacific Records. Dickson began demoing Crosby as a solo artist, but those sessions ultimately culminated in the formation of a band.
L.A.'s nascent singer-songwriter scene was then coalescing around the Folk Den, the front room at the Santa Monica Boulevard club the Troubadour. One evening in 1964, the headstrong Crosby inserted himself into a jam session involving two well-traveled young folksingers. McGuinn (then known by his birth name, Jim; he soon changed his name to Roger after joining the spiritual movement Subud) had previously worked with the urban folk outfits the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and had met Crosby during a Santa Barbara tour stop by the former act. Clark had been a member of another clean-cut folk act, the New Christy Minstrels.
Though McGuinn was wary of Crosby's outsized, opinionated personality, he was under the sway of the Beatles and envisioned the formation of a new group; Crosby's access to free studio time at World Pacific led to first sessions by McGuinn, Crosby and Clark under the collective handle the Jet Set.
Under the name the Beefeaters, the trio issued a flop single on Elektra Records, but soon reformulated themselves as a full-blown rock quintet that reflected the influence of the Beatles' '64 debut feature "A Hard Day's Night." The lineup was filled out with the addition of neophyte bassist Chris Hillmen, formerly mandolinist with the bluegrass-oriented World Pacific group the Hillmen, and the unskilled but photogenic drummer Michael Clarke.
Rechristened the Byrds in obvious emulation of the Fab Four, the act was signed to Columbia Records in late 1964 on the basis of promotional efforts by Dickson, who was now managing the band. Momentously, the well-connected Dickson urged his act to cover a new song penned by one of his friends, folk star Bob Dylan.
Issued as the Byrds' first single, the harmony-laden version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" leaped to No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart in early 1965; the eponymous debut album reached No. 6. By that time, the group was the reigning attraction on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, thanks to a high-profile residency at Ciro's. For the next two years, Crosby's group would reign as American pop's answer to the Beatles, and influence a host of like-styled folk-rock acts. All of their Columbia albums during that period reached the U.S. top 25.
Though Crosby's pure, soaring voice was a key component of the unit's sound, he took a back seat as a writer to bandmates McGuinn and Clark, who were responsible for the group's hit originals. The Crosby-penned singles "Lady Friend" and "Why" failed to catch fire. The departure of the emotionally unsettled Clark from the group in 1966 only served to exacerbate tensions between McGuinn and Crosby.
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