by Jeff Gemmill
David Crosby 1997: Following His Heart
by Jeff Gemmill
With The Byrds in the mid-1960s, in addition to providing breathtaking harmonies, David Crosby penned some excellent songs--for example, "What's Happening?!" from , "Renaissance Fair," "Everybody's Been Burned," and "Why" from , as well as the single "Lady Friend." Granted, it stiffed on the charts--but, so what? It's great, with an undeniable, utterly hummable melody. If you don't know it, you should; it's now a "bonus" track on the 20-bit remastered version of . Then, after partnering with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash in the late '60s. . . well, everybody's heard the twin towers of "Long Time Gone" and "Almost Cut My Hair," from and CSNY's respectively, as well as "Guinnevere," which still wafts from the speakers like a gentle wind on a fall day.
Likewise, the same could be said of Crosby's stellar 1971 solo album, , which is well worth seeking out. Backed by a star-studded cast of supporting players (Graham Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and members of the Dead and Airplane), it contains the sprawling eight-minute "Cowboy Movie," underpinned by a sterling lead guitar and a sinewy, mesmerizing vocal. "Laughing" and "What Are There Names?" are but two other gems. Leaping ahead a few years to 1975, Crosby & Nash's LP is packed with one strong song after another: "Carry Me," "Bittersweet," "Low Down Payment," and "Homeward Through the Haze" are four examples. If you're unfamiliar with these songs, it's no surprise. So-called "classic rock" radio stations gravitate toward CSN/Y as a rule, preferring to play known quantities instead of seemingly "obscure" album cuts. Their loss--and ours.
Of course, there is much more than what I've listed above. "Shadow Captain" and "In My Dreams" from the 1977 album are standout tracks on a standout album. And, "Delta" from ... man! "I love the child who steers this riverboat/but lately he's crazy for the deep." To quote myself from elsewhere in these pages, when listening to that song I imagine a steam boat coasting down the Mississippi River, oblivious to all waving from shore. It's a metaphor for the state of man--both singular and plural, male and female. The music itself has an ether-like quality, calm on the surface but with an undercurrent poised to carry away careless swimmers.
Since his well-publicized crash-and-burn of the mid-'80s, Crosby has recovered--and returned to form, again making great music both with CSN and on his own. The title track to his studio album of a few years back, , is solid proof, but consider this evidence, too: the delicate "Yvette in English" (co-written by Joni Mitchell) and "Too Young to Die," a Jimmy Webb-penned tune that features one of Croz's all-time best vocals. Two other solo albums of note are live affairs. , from 1993, features a wonderful revival of "Cowboy Movie" as well as a guest stint by the Black Crows' Chris Robinson on "Almost Cut My Hair." , released last year but recorded in '89, features several songs from Crosby's overlooked Oh Yes I Can album, including its powerful title track and "Tracks in the Dust," a humorous--but pointed--explanation of why David continues to stand & be counted.
When The Old Grey Cat caught up with David on Monday, August 18, 1997, he was between takes in the studio with his then-new band, CPR. Their since-released debut album, as well as two live albums released during 1998, are both available from their website, . Also, released since this interview was the archival recording , which features a wondrous, mind-blowing performance by David & Graham Nash from 1971.
Also, in February 1999, The Old Grey Cat checked in with the Croz to learn about the & tour. To check out that interview, click here.
The Old Grey Cat: How did CPR come together?
Croz: I've been working for the last two or three years with a guitar player named Jeff Pevar, who is a complete stunner. He's worked with Rickie Lee Jones, Ray Charles ... I heard him playing with Mark Cohn. He's been a session guitar player in New York for years ... he's my current thriller guitar player. We got along great. He started working with me when I did solo shows or shows with Graham Nash.
Then, about two years ago when I was in the hospital--I don't want to be dramatic, but I was dying. I knew for many years that I had a son out there somewhere ... his mother had had him, and put him up for adoption. You can't track an adoptive kid from the parent down, only from the kid up ... So, when he got married, he wanted to know who his birth mother was. He went down and made the inquiry. I guess they just gave him the book; he's looking at her page, and, on the other side, is me. When he saw that, he'd been a musician for 20 years.
TOGC: That really says something about genetics.
Croz: Yeah, heavily. He started when he was a child playing the piano. The people who raised him--who are lovely people--had realized he had great talent. They encouraged it, gave him piano lessons, got him to study music ... he was everything I wasn't. He's a schooled musician. He can write music, he can read it, and ... he's just an incredibly talented young guy. When we met, we hit it off extremely well. We found that our music was very, very similar. So we started playing and started writing. Then, when he and I and Jeff got together ... there was an undeniable chemistry between me and Jeff and an undeniable chemistry between me and him. And there was a chemistry between the three of us. So we decided Crosby, Pevar and Raymond should become CPR.
TOGC: That's a great story.
Croz: Well, it's kind of a wild one. To find him at all is against the odds, and to have him be ... not just a musician, but a fantastic one?! There's this incredible link [between us] ... when he's going to play, I sort of know what the next chord he's going to play is. And he sort of knows where I'm going. He's said he's never found anybody's music that was easier for him to learn. There's a real communication there.
He's also an incredibly nice young guy. So we just said, well, the music's just too good to ignore. We're going to go ahead and do it. We tried it out; we did about a dozen dates up the West Coast, San Diego to Seattle or something. It was some of the best fun I've ever had playing live. And we kept writing these songs, one after the other.
TOGC: So the songs you're recording now are all originals.
Croz: Yes. It's stuff that I wrote, stuff that James wrote, stuff that James and I wrote, stuff that James, Jeff and I wrote, stuff that Jeff and I wrote ... it's just a very, very hot chemistry. We've written probably five of the best songs that I've written in the last ten years in the past two months.
TOGC: Would one of the songs be "Morrison"?
Croz: "Morrison" was the very first one. It started out with an image about being lost. The metaphor was a gull that gets blown inland on a stormy day ... I thought that was a great metaphor for being lost in life. So I started trying to write that. Somewhere in there, it wound up with these images of being lost in a Paris graveyard. It was Jim Morrison, obviously, who did a very good "lost" himself. That's the way the song wrote itself out of me. I can't predict how that stuff's going to happen.
TOGC: When you do sit down to write a song, does it just flow out of you? Do you have a melody or an idea ...
Croz: It comes every which way, man. Very often it comes words first, sometimes it comes music first, sometimes both at the same time. I really can't predict it. In this case, I had no idea I was going to write a song about Jim Morrison. I was writing a song about a gull blown inland on a stormy day. It just came out that way; I didn't even really like Jim Morrison. . . I knew him, but I never was friends with him. But, I understand him pretty well because I was lost in the very same place. And so he was a good metaphor.
TOGC: What are some of the other songs you're recording?
Croz: There's a fantastic song that James had written called "One For Every Moment." It's an incredible love song that happens to have this very up, Latin flavor. There's one called "That House" that I wrote the words for; Jeff, James and I wrote the music. It might be one of my best set of words ever. It might be one of my best vocals ever, too, I think. There's another one that I've been doing, that I even recorded once before live, "Rusty & Blue." That came out fantastic! It's a stunner. I'm as excited as I can be. I feel so good doing it. . . the level of communication is so high, and the music is coming out so well that I get to the studio an hour early just so I can hear it.
TOGC: Do you have a title for the CD yet?
Croz: No. We're looking for one.
TOGC: Do you have a label?
Croz: No, we cut it ourselves. I took the money that I made this summer on the road [w/CSN] and just ploughed it right back into this.
TOGC: Are you thinking of going the independent route?
Croz: I've talked to Ani DiFranco [who has her own independent record label]. There is a temptation to do that. We will probably play it for some of the more independent labels. The big guys just have too much super-structure on them.
TOGC: Half the time they don't seem to know how to market people correctly.
Croz: That was certainly the case with Atlantic and Crosby, Stills & Nash. They had no idea how to market us anymore. They didn't know what demographic we were playing to.
I'll tell you how it'll work [for CPR]. If a record company listens to this band and really understands what it is ... 'cause it's sort of out on the edge where Steely Dan, Bruce Hornsby, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor are, people who make pretty sophisticated music. It's out toward that direction. If we find somebody who hears it and digs it, and really wants it ... and evidences a desire to work it, then maybe we'll make a deal with them. But we wanted to go in and cut the record on our own money so there was nobody telling us what to do.
TOGC: That's good.
Croz: Well, it's good because you get to follow your heart. You get to say, "What I really feel is this." I'm not trying to make a clone of the Spice Girls. This is the real thing that I'm trying to express. This is what I want to do--and we did exactly that. We didn't do anything except exactly what we really felt.
TOGC: You mentioned the Spice Girls. Do you stay in touch with the current music scene?
Croz: To a degree. Obviously, I'm happy as I can possibly be that Shawn Colvin somehow busted through and got a hit. She's one of my favorite singer/songwriters. She opened for Crosby, Stills & Nash and we all fell in love with her. Nash and I have gone and sung with her, I've sung on her records ... she's a close friend.
TOGC: She has a mesmerizing voice.
Croz: We were just so happy to see a real singer-songwriter break through. That's exactly what should happen and almost never does. Usually, the radio formats just exclude that kind of stuff.
TOGC: That's what frustrates me--and I'm sure frustrates you. As a fan who likes more than just the 20-year-ago hits ... for example, on Live It Up, your song "Yours & Mine" is as wonderful a song as any in the CSN pantheon. Yet, when they play you on the radio, it's always something 20- or 30-years old.
Croz: Yeah, that drives us nuts, too. The classic radio stations love Crosby, Stills & Nash but won't play anything after Deja Vu or, maybe, the CSN album--the one with the boat on the cover. It makes us nuts because we know ... like CSN now is going to go in, in January and February, and make another album. It's going to be one of the best albums we've ever made--and I know it because I know the songs.
That's another thing--we left Atlantic. CSN is going to find a new deal with somebody who actually gives a damn about us.
TOGC: I understand you're working on a book about ...
Croz: Yeah, I got a book that my friend David Bender and I are writing called Stand & Be Counted. It's about activism. . . musicians and activism. We're going to start with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and work our way up through the Civil Rights movement and into the Vietnam War era and into Live Aid, Farm Aid, the Amnesty Tour, on up to now, and try to show how this phenomenon grew up out of the cracks and just manifested itself out of people feeling they had to take a stand on things, that they found they could use music to gather people together for a cause.
It's a wonderful thing. It's a place where human beings can put somebody else's good ahead of their own. It gets very shining when they do that, man. It's a very good thing. And there's nothing about it. We looked, we researched; there isn't anything about it anywhere. So, we thought, we should write a book celebrating it and chronicling it, and hopefully try to help perpetuate it
TOGC: Will you be interviewing other musicians?
Croz: That's exactly what I'm doing. We have all the best musicians in the country ... all the obvious ones, like Bonnie, Jackson, Nash, and Elton, Phil Collins, and Paul McCartney. We have a ton of people. Joni's going to do it. Shawn said she'll do it. I've already done Neil, Don Henley, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Jewel, Hootie & the Blowfish. . .TOGC: Basically a Who's Who ...
Croz: ... Carly Simon, Pete Seeger. I did Pete ... that guy is a national treasure. He's a wonderful guy, wonderful dedication to life, wonderful set of values.
TOGC: Did you find it odd to be on the other side of an interview, to be the one asking the questions?
Croz: At first. But, actually, it came very easily because I have an advantage. I'm not some talking head asking, "Well, how did you boys meet?" I'm usually talking to somebody who I'm at least acquainted with, if not am friends with. And I'm talking to them usually, or very often, about concerts we did together. I try not to get in the way very much. I just try to elicit the response from them and try to get them to really talk about why they do it, what makes them feel the necessity to Stand & Be Counted, which is the title.
TOGC: Do you think the fact that they're songwriters and are in touch with their emotions that [the issues] just transcend ...
Croz: I think we react just as you do. When you saw the picture of the girl kneeling over the kid dead on the ground after Kent State, you were horrified, right? You said, how can they shoot somebody's child for doing what the Constitution says they have the right to do? How can they do that? How can this happen? Well, we feel the same way ... the only thing is, we have this incredible, lucky thing that we can do: We can externalize it--and also we can have a cathartic release about it. We can crystallize it and put it out there. I think we have every right to speak our minds. I don't think we should preach. The point is not to point fingers and say, "This is how it should be. This is what you should do, this is right and that's wrong."
TOGC: Sometimes pointing fingers is the right thing to do.
Croz: We did it when we did "Ohio," that's for damn sure. But that was pretty clear cut. It's better if you can lead by example, and it's better if you can talk in metaphors so that people get the essence of the thing without you saying, "Jesse Helms is an asshole." That makes a dull song.
TOGC: Depends who you're singing it to.
Croz: Yeah, maybe Nine Inch Nails could do a really good song about that ...
TOGC: 28 years ago today [August 18] ... 3 a.m. this morning ... CSN hit the stage at Woodstock. What's your memory of that. Looking back, do you wish ...
Croz: The truth is, man, my memory of it is very good. I loved it. I thought the second one was a media zoo, but the first one was a very ... heartfelt, wonderful, accidentally great thing where a lot of incredible music got played. There was a genuine feeling of brotherhood between the people who were there. Nobody killed anybody, nobody raped anybody, nobody shot anybody. I think that's probably the only group of people that size who didn't do that in the history of mankind. Anytime you get that many people together, even at a religious gathering, somebody beats somebody up. There was something special going on. It was a wonderful, wonderful time.
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