David Crosby at home.
Photograph by Henry Diltz.

DEJA VU

David Crosby's triumphant comeback with CSN&Y and his father-and-son band CPR

By Simone Solondz

Rumors of a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion have proven to be just that in the past, but this summer the fab four of the West Coast got together to record a fine new album, Looking Forward, and despite Graham Nash's two broken legs, the band is touring the U.S. this winter. The reunion inspired David Crosby to write some great new material for the group, but he's also found fertile ground writing with his relatively new band CPR, which consists of Crosby, phenomenal guitarist Jeff Pevar, and Crosby's elder son James Raymond, a talented pianist and songwriter. Crosby and Raymond only recently discovered that they were father and son.

Crosby got his professional start in 1964 as one of the founding members of the Byrds, hailed at the time as America's answer to the Beatles. He made his mark with the all-time classic "Eight Miles High" (cowritten with Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn). In 1969 he hooked up with Englishman Graham Nash (who had just left the Hollies) and lead guitarist Stephen Stills, formerly of Buffalo Springfield, to form Crosby, Stills, and Nash (CSN), a band that debuted at Woodstock and helped redefine the sound of American pop. The band would record six albums, including the hugely successful Crosby, Stills, and Nash and CSN, as well as seven albums with Neil Young (CSN&Y). Crosby contributed the smooth middle voice in CSN's spectacular vocal harmonies, as well as great rhythm guitar work on both acoustic and electric that broke significant new ground in alternate tunings. His writing credits from this fertile period include "Déjà Vu," "Guinnevere," and the protest rocker "Almost Cut My Hair."

CSN and CSN&Y have reunited periodically over the years, and Crosby has also recorded a handful of solo albums. He spent a good part of the '80s dealing with and then beating various drug addictions. In 1995, when James Raymond learned the identity of his biological father, Crosby was in the hospital recovering from a liver transplant resulting from decades of substance abuse that almost cost him his life. Coincidentally, Crosby's wife and Raymond's wife were both pregnant at the time; Crosby is now the proud father of Django and grandfather of Gracie.

Crosby made a full recovery, and his clean and sober lifestyle has only contributed to his musical creativity. He continues to find gorgeous, complex chords via alternate tunings and to write lyrics and melodies that speak directly to the soul. Last June, I visited Crosby at his sumptuous Santa Barbara–area ranch. After showing me his favorite new guitar, a concert model six-string built by independent California luthier Roy McAlister, and playing me "Climber," a brilliant new song that didn't make it onto Looking Forward, we sat down to talk music.

For the new project with Stills, Nash, and Young, did you all write together, or did each of you bring in songs?

CROSBY I think most of us had songs and brought them to the party.

What are some of your favorites on the CD?

CROSBY Neil came with some beautiful acoustic songs. There's a song called "Looking Forward" that's a stunner. It's a pretty good record. There are some amazing songs on it. There's a song I wrote called "Stand and Be Counted" that people liked a lot.

You wrote it on acoustic guitar?

CROSBY I write almost exclusively on acoustic. I never write on electric. I sometimes write on piano.

Do you know the story about my son? He had been a musician for 20 years before he found out that I was his father, and he's a better musician than I am. I can still sing a little bit better than him, but only a little. And he will in due course blow my doors off there too. He's such an astounding musician. A lot of the words I write now I go straight to him with.

So the words usually come to you first?

CROSBY It happens every which way, but yeah, very often. I had the set of changes for "Rusty and Blue" [CPR] for a couple of years before it [came together]. I'm not sure who writes the stuff.

It feels more like channeling?

CROSBY Well, your head's got a lot of levels, right? The verbal crystallization level that I'm talking to you with right now isn't necessarily the one that does the writing. There's maybe a level that makes longer leaps, and that one gets a shot at inputting very often with me just as I'm going to sleep. The busy mind kind of cacks out, and this level, where I think a lot of the writing goes on, gets a shot at the controls.

And you wake up and write it all down?

CROSBY Yeah. One of the big effects on my writing was [Joni] Mitchell telling me to write stuff down. She said, "David, you throw away more good phrases in an afternoon than most people can come up with in a week. What's wrong with you, you brainless twit? Write your shit down!" And I learned from her that if you get even two words in a row that mean something, that make you feel something, you should write them down. So I do.

I can think of one song that was two completely different sets of words written years apart that I showed to a friend of mine who I wrote many songs with—Craig Doerge—and he said, "These sort of relate. Did you notice that?" No. Are you out of your tree? He said, "Yeah they do," and we wound up with "Night Time for the Generals" [on the live King Biscuit Flower Hour, King Biscuit].

So, you were saying that you go to your son with a lot of ideas, and then he takes it a step further . . .

CROSBY He takes it to a different place than I would, and that's always good. It broadens your palette. It's like having new colors to paint with. It broadens the experience.

Can you tell automatically which tunes are for you, which are for CPR, and which are for CSN&Y?

CROSBY No, I can't. What I do is play them for everybody and see who's interested. Different groups have different tendencies. If I write a long, very complex song that goes to a lot of different places and has very strange chords, then I might lean toward CPR. Although that's not always true, because "Déjà Vu" was a long, complex CSN song. CSN liked the song "Morrison" [recorded on CPR], so we did our own version of it and played it live for a year.

Do you find that collaborating is different with everybody you work with?

CROSBY Yeah, and I really like doing it. I like it because when you write or play or sing with other people there's a natural exchange that goes on. You learn stuff from them, and they learn stuff from you. You are enriched by it and broadened by it, and so are they. I've written with a lot of people, very diverse people: Michael Hedges, Phil Collins, Joni Mitchell . . .

What are some of the methods that have worked for you?

CROSBY There's no set way. Sometimes you have a set of words and you say, "Here," and wait to see what happens. And it's like sticking a bomb in someone's pocket if you wrote really good words.

Has it ever happened that what they come back to you with is so different from what you imagined that it doesn't really work, and you say, "Hmm, maybe not"?

CROSBY No, I've been lucky. Joni took a set of words I gave her and just ran for the horizon.

Is that "Yvette in English"?

CROSBY Yeah.

That's a great song.

CROSBY I love it dearly. But she truly, truly ran with it. I only gave her the bare bones of what that song is. I still have what I wrote, and you can see that she started where I started, but she's a way better writer than I am, and she went for it. She took it a long way. That song is at least three-quarters hers. She wrote all the music. She wrote at least as many of the words as I did. And she took it to a level that I could never have gotten it to. I think she is the most brilliant singer-songwriter of all. I mean, I love Dylan. He's a good poet. But musically, she's light years ahead of him, and that's what kicks it over the top for me.

Has it ever happened the other way, where someone else starts it and passes it to you?

CROSBY That's mostly happened with James, my son. There's a wonderful, very strange song that he and I wrote called "Yesterday's Child." It sounds almost as if it was written by Ray Bradbury, like a dreamscape.

How does the guitar affect your writing process? If you're working in open tunings, are you hearing chords that you can't play in standard?

CROSBY That's the reason for going into open tunings in the first place. I would listen to [John] Coltrane, and here's this guy who wouldn't stick to a normal mode, so [pianist] McCoy Tyner would have to invent very dense, broad kinds of tone clusters, and they would be beautiful. And I would want to play that, and I couldn't. I'm not a great player. I'm not gifted. But in a nonstandard tuning I can.

So it starts with hearing a chord. Do you then go to the piano to work out the notes in the chord?

CROSBY No, I'm not schooled. I can't do that. I can't tell you the names of any of the chords I play.

So how do you figure out how to tune the strings?

CROSBY That happens sometimes by experimenting. I found the tuning for "Rusty in Blue" and "Tracks in the Dust" and a couple of other songs in C G D D A D by experimenting, by goofing around. Other times it's a friend. The tuning for "Climber," D A D G C D, came when a guy who plays guitar here in the valley, Mark Owen, was playing something. And I immediately found a bunch of stuff he hadn't found. The next time I showed him one of mine, he found five things in it that I never found, and I'd been playing in it for years.

He found chords?

CROSBY Yes. And that's the process. None of us owns any of it, right? I mean every series of notes, the most complex ideas that the most complex musicians in the world have played, some guy sitting around with a flute in the Nile delta played two million years before him [laughter]. It's called the folk process. You just naturally pass music along.

With a guitar, you take a regular tuning [strums a standard-tuned guitar] and the first thing you do is tune that low E down to a D because then it makes your D chord [strums] sound like that. And you go, "Ooh! That's cool! I really like that!" And you're hooked. From that day on, you're a lost soul.

Getting back to Joni Mitchell for a second, were you both coming up with alternate tunings at the same time?

CROSBY I was working in tunings when I met her, and she was working in tunings, so we influenced each other. She was writing songs like "Michael from Mountains," and I was writing "Guinnevere," and we couldn't help but listen to each other. I think she's probably more advanced at it than anybody except Michael Hedges. Michael Hedges was pretty much unquestionably the finest acoustic guitar player of this century. He took tunings to a level that nobody except Joni has ever gotten close to.

How does it work when you play with other guitar players? Does everyone need to get in the same tuning?

CROSBY No. When I'm working with Stephen [Stills] or Neil [Young] or with Jeff Pevar, who are the three lead players I play with the most, sometimes they'll go into a tuning too. Mostly they'll work it out in a regular tuning. Jeff more than Neil or Stephen will experiment with another tuning to play lead in because he has the ability to play with any combination of strings—it doesn't matter.

He can just figure it out on the fly?

CROSBY Yeah. Not to say that Neil and Stephen can't. They're brilliant players, both of them. When we started CSN, Stephen was probably one of the greatest acoustic guitar players in the world. He could pick an acoustic guitar in ways that other people simply couldn't. Witness "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and "Helplessly Hoping," etc., etc. Nowadays Stephen likes to play electric better than he likes to play acoustic, but he's still a killer acoustic guitar player.

And Neil loves to play acoustic. He's an incredible acoustic guitarist. And he writes on acoustic guitar and piano. Have you seen his solo show? Oh man! I wish you could have seen one of these solo shows that he just did. I went, and Dylan was there too. The two of us wound up standing right off stage about 20 feet from Neil behind the curtain the whole night. Hour after hour, just standing there transfixed. Just hung up. The cat's deep. He's just deep. He's a brilliant storyteller and musician. He's a fascinating artist, a very unusual guy.

And yet, you and Young and Stills and Nash all manage to make it work together.

CROSBY It's really weird, yes. Well, we don't manage all the time, but when we do do it, it's an amazing mixture.

You made a couple of reunion attempts that didn't pan out.

CROSBY There was an album called Human Highway that would have been a very good album, but it didn't happen.

What allowed you guys to successfully work together in the studio this time? Has anything changed?

CROSBY I don't know. Maybe we grew up more. But we're a bunch of wildmen, all of us. We're not like geese; we don't naturally fly in formation. We're like hawks; we seldom fly in formation. But when we do, we're very good at it.

Are you playing mostly acoustic on the new record?

CROSBY On most of the songs, that's what I'll play, unless we're playing strong rock 'n' roll, and then I have an Anderson strat. Tom Anderson is a builder in the valley who is making some of the highest quality electric guitars in the world right now. And then I have my McAlister guitar I played for you earlier.

Is that the guitar that inspired you to switch from pick-and-fingers to plain fingerpicking?

CROSBY I'm not switching. I finally started exploring playing with just my bare fingers rather than with a pick. It brings you to do stuff that you don't normally do. Instead of going [strums] it makes you go [fingerpicks individual notes], so you can be more selective.

But when you're playing with others, I'd imagine that for volume's sake, you'd use the pick.

CROSBY Each song is different. When CSN&Y goes out, I will unquestionably play that song ["Climber"] on that guitar [the McAlister], and believe me it will be loud.

Did you use the McAlister in the studio?

CROSBY Uh-huh. I used this and a [Neumann] U 47 and a [Neumann] U 67. I got a truly gigantic guitar sound. This thing records unbelievably well.

Do you record the music first and then add vocals?

CROSBY We do it every which way. The master for "Climber" was this guitar and a percussionist named Luis Conté. It was brilliant. And that's all there was on the master, and we added stuff after that.

Do you all play together in the studio?

CROSBY Oh yeah. Probably half of the things on the CPR record are cases where we played the entire song, everybody played and I sang or James sang live while we were cutting the track. Like "Rusty and Blue." That's a live track, and it's the first- or second-take live vocal. The only overdubs are the harmonies. Same for the Fisher King song, "Somehow She Knew." That one is the first take.

The vocals on CPR are very reminiscent of CSN. Is that because you're coming up with the harmonies for both groups?

CROSBY Yeah, sure, there's a connector there in me. But James came up with a ton of what we sang on CPR, and he tends to be weirder than CSN.

Has finding James inspired you to write music?

CROSBY Yeah. There are a number of songs on the CPR album that are affected by that and by almost dying.

Is there more freedom for you as a guitar player when you play solo?

CROSBY Probably. But I'm in a very fortunate space. I can work by myself, I can work with CPR, I can work with just me and Nash, which is a whole other chemistry. I can work with me and Nash and Jeff Pevar, which is yet another different chemistry. I can work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, which is its own separate strangeness, or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, which is a bigger and even crazier strangeness. And I can go out and sing with my friends, which I do all the time. If you try to do the same thing all the time, you get stuck. That's one of the things I admire about Neil: he doesn't do the same thing.

Do you pare your guitar parts down more and more for each added guitar player in the room?

CROSBY Usually. If I'm playing with CSN&Y, you're talking about two brilliant lead players. Very often Graham and I will either just play rhythm on acoustic or not play at all. It needs what it needs. It doesn't need more than that. If you've got guys that good, sometimes you really don't want to clutter it up.

I've heard you say that singing harmony came naturally to you. Did guitar playing come naturally?

CROSBY Yes. My brother gave me my first guitar, and I think I learned E minor to A major. And that was good for about six months.

How old were you?

CROSBY I was probably around 12.

Do you remember what the guitar was?

CROSBY I think it was a Silvertone. Some inexpensive guitar.

Did you ever take lessons?

CROSBY I've never taken lessons of any kind, and I don't recommend it. I particularly don't recommend vocal lessons. Guitar lessons, maybe just so you can learn some technique and scales. But it sometimes can narrow your possibilities. Hedges was a schooled musician, and then he threw the rule book away. Boy, did he throw the rule book away! But a lot of people will go and study, and then they get told, "Well you can't do that," when obviously you can do anything you can do. If I'd gone to a guitar teacher, he wouldn't have looked kindly on my coming in the next day and going, "Well I changed all the tunings. What do you think of this?"

How did CSN get into vintage instruments? Did that come from you?

CROSBY I think we all quite naturally did that. [The vintage choice] was natural to [Stills] and it was natural to me, and I'd been doing it in the Byrds.

You were saying earlier that you now have six Martin D-45s: the one-of-a-kind 12-string, two '71s . . .

CROSBY Three. We went out and bought a bunch of 'em: Neil, I, Steve, and Graham. They're just now really right. They've been my main performance guitars for a long time.

You're not afraid to take them out?

CROSBY I like playing the best guitar I've got. Guitars inspire me; they thrill me. And if you're playing music on an acoustic guitar and you want to communicate something with people, it's good to be thrilled by your ax. So I use the best ones I have. I use the D-45s. And the Gibson custom shop built me a J-200 that I asked them to make. J-200s are normally maple or Indian rosewood, and I asked them to make me a Brazilian one, which they did out of stash that they had hidden. It's ridiculously beautiful. It's a real stunner. Jackson Browne wants it, and I won't give it to him. I've also got one prewar Martin: a 00-45.

What else are you working on these days? I heard you were producing a documentary, Stand and Be Counted.

CROSBY Yeah, I'm producing it and doing all the interviews, and I'm helping to write the book. It's about musician activism. There are a couple of people in there who are not primarily musicians—Robin [Williams] and Whoopie [Goldberg]—because they're my friends and they're very definitely activists. Harry Belafonte is at least as good a musician as he is an actor.

How many artists are you interviewing?

CROSBY I think we've done about 40. We just added Eddie Vedder and Tracy Chapman. It's a very wide-ranging thing, going all the way from Pete Seeger to now.

Is that something that will show in theaters eventually?

CROSBY I don't know how theatrical it is. I think it'll go on TV, probably in a couple of different formats.

Are you working on another solo record as well?

CROSBY On another CPR record. Why would I go in by myself when I can go in with these other guys that are that good? It's more fun. In the first place, nobody ever has made a solo record. There is no such thing. Somebody pushed "record." Somebody got the sandwiches. Somebody drove the truck. My first solo—quote, unquote—record, If I Could Only Remember My Name (which is one of the best records I've ever made in my life) has got every friend I have on it! It's a record by about 40 people! It was a delight—a complete, unrestrained, wacky, goofed, stoned delight.

I might perform solo just for the fun of telling the tale. I'm big into just telling the tale. I love that. Our job is to make people feel something, and all the different ways that we can do that are fun. It's fun to get up there with all four of us and crank everything up until you can hear it hiss, and then have one guy look at the other guy and go [plays air guitar and imitates the sound of an electric guitar playing the opening riff of "Ohio"]. Believe me, it's fun. Or [imitates the rocking opening of "Carry On"]. But it's also big fun to tell a tale in a way that makes somebody cry because it's something that they've always wanted to get out of their heart and they've never been able to express it, and you crystallized it for them. And they go, "Oh, there it is." And it gets them. That's a great feeling. It's a great gig.

It's a great gift.

CROSBY It's a nice gift too, but it's a great gig!

Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, March 2000, No. 87. That issue also contains a transcription of "That House" by David Crosby and CPR.

Read about David Crosby's guitars and gear in the What They Play department.

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