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by Anthony Fawcett, Reed Books 1978
David Crosby, the sailor, the lover, the inherent harmony singer, captain of the sixty foot schooner, the Mayan. He still has the same familiar long flowing hair and the walrus mustache. His face is ingrained with years of knowledge of the music business and all its accompanying highs and lows. For all his reputation of being "Ol' Motormouth" and shooting his mouth off, he is and extremely coherent, succinct and enjoyable conversationalist. He can talk well about almost any subject and he outs his finger on the subject accurately when he sings:
"Anything you want to know, just ask me,
I'm the world's most opinionated man.
I'll give you an answer if I can
Catch one passing through
That feels right for you."
(From "Anything at All")
Crosby's house is high up in the wooded hills of Mill Valley. It is slung low, mostly zen air about it. Sparsely furnished, the few ornaments reflect his love of the sea - sailing-boat pictures in the kitchen, a white porcelain sculpture of dolphins and a collection of sea shells on the brick fireplace in the bedroom, exquisite throw rugs dotted about, from Ecuador, woven with uncanny resemblance's to Escher's drawings. The view from the bedroom window is breathtaking, out over the distant hills and woods of Marin County.
David shares the house with his girlfriend, Nancy, a wispy, long-haired beauty; they have just returned from sailing the Mayan down to Santa Barbara to be moored there while CSN is recording in Miami. He grew up in Santa Barbara and I asked him if he felt strange being back there. "Yeah, it makes it kinda funny to sail back there. I started sailing when I was eleven, I just hadn't had my own big boat until sixty-seven, and I probably wouldn't have fallen in love with boats unless I'd been in California. Let's see now, I'm thirty-six; that's twenty-five years that I've been sailing in and out of that harbor mouth. Really flashes me. I can remember when twenty-five seemed like middle age to me! That's funny .... I kept hoping I'd grow up, y'know. The years pass, and I keep hoping that soon, this year; but no luck yet. And no hope in sight either!"
The boat has been Crosby's salvation at times. When he had no one to turn to, no place to go, he had his boat - and the ocean. In his moments of deepest crisis he has taken to the sea. It is his sanity, sailing keeps him stable. "The boat, in fact, is his first home. "Yeah," he agrees. "If I had a choice of which I had to sell, I'd sell this house. Music and sailing are the two best things. Them and sex. No question. Actually, it's more than just pleasure, sailing is the only way I can balance the scene. Y'know, everything is wired to the teeth and going eight thousand RPM's all the time, and going sailing just tacks you right back down to reality. You don't do much dope and you just sort of rest and get healthy and stuff like that. It's great."
The ocean and the boat have also been inspiration for Crosby's song writing. "Wooden Ships", co-written with Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner being the earliest example. The seed for that song came when we were sitting in the main gallery. "What happened," says David, "was that Paul Kantner came down to my boat in Florida, he and Stephen came down together, and we sat around and wrote it. I had already written all the music. Paul wrote two verses and Stephen wrote one, and I wrote the things at both ends. And Paul at that time said he couldn't be credited because he was being sued by one of the early rip-off managers, who was after the Jefferson Airplane's money. So Paul never got credit on our record, and it was wrong because people didn't even realize that the song came out anyway. I always really liked it that there were two different versions of it. That got me off."
"Wooden Ships on the water very free
And easy, you know the way it's supposed to be
Silver people on the shoreline let us be ..........
And it's a fair wind blowin' warm out of the south
Over my shoulder. Guess I'll set a course and go."
(Wooden Ships)
"There was a science fiction movie inherent in it," Crosby continued. I had a whole story worked out behind it, and Stephen got entranced with it. We could have tried to put it together and we did get another friend of mine to try and work it into a treatment for a script, but it didn't work."
"I wrote Leeshore on the boat, too, at anchor. It's a good place to write."
"When I awoke this morning
Dove beneath my floating home
Down below her graceful side
In the turning tide
To watch the sea fish roam..."
(Leeshore)
Crosby is still writing about the same classic California images that influenced him in childhood. "I just wrote a song called "I Needed to Ride My Car," now after all this time, that's about just zoning out in your car. You know, the times when you've been driving, 'cause you were thinking and it was the only place you could be alone. There were more problems waiting at your house and more back at the other place.... you just drove, right? Everybody did that!"
Harmony singing has always been what's closest to David's heart. He grew up listening to the Beach Boys and especially to the Everly Brothers: "The Everly's just nailed me to the floor, totally. I can sing you almost all the Everly Brothers records. So could Nash, and he was ten thousand miles away." David laughs, "I think harmony singer is printed on my DNA code, y'know, in big fiery letters."
"If I Could Only Remember My Name" was Crosby's only solo effort, which took to its fullest extent his love of abstract chorales and complex harmonies. "If I do another," he says , "it's gonna be even less commercial. I have another solo album planned. That first one was a very self indulgent record. I just did what I wanted, to have fun, and it came out. I have one piece that I cut for the record that I've never used, it's one of those ones without words. But I don't know when I'll get to it, if I do another one. You gotta understand it's very hard to get time to do a solo record when I have the opportunity to work with Graham Nash. And when I have the opportunity to work with Graham and Stephen. Both of those combinations are more fun for me than working by myself.
"A lot of the guys have something to prove. They really need to prove that it's them, y'know, that their solo effort is the heavy thing. And they're really driven by that. I'm not. Anybody that doesn't know I can write songs by now just didn't notice. And anybody that doesn't know I can sing by myself hasn't been listening either. I don't feel a great need to do solo work. The kind of stuff that appeals to me most to do by myself would be vocal chorals, pretty much acapella, pieces of vocal strangeness. Somewhere in between the "Critical Mass" part of the Whale song, let's say, and the "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here" vocal improvisation at the end of my solo record. I love that. It's not what you would call a commercial viable entity, but it sure does get me off. I sneak away into the studio and work on some pieces that I've got - I don't play 'em for anybody - I'm just slowly building them up; they're the Mormon Tabernacle me! Some of them are twenty, thirty voices, that I build up and do counterpoints with and stuff. Eventually I'll amass enough of them to put together another record."
It is getting late in the afternoon. Crosby has to get to the bank before they close because early the next morning he is flying to Miami with Graham to begin recording the follow up to last year's CSN. During the drive down the narrow twisting roads he contemplates the whole spectrum of problems which stopped the group from previously carrying out their plans.
Hair flying behind him, he frowns, shooting probing looks at me as he talks: "Well if you got that awesome body of work standing there, and you're standing in awe of it too, and you're afraid to try and match it... I mean, that was one of the problems that CSN and CSNY had; whenever we would try to get started making more music, we would always be standing in the shadow of that stuff. And it had to get to where we just didn't care, to where there was no history. It was getting too much in the way of doing any music in the present. And what happened was, we went in and made a very credible record. I was really proud of it."
His face relaxes, the lines of his skin deeply accentuated by his dimples, clearly visible, even under the thick growth. Crow's feet pull at his eye; he is a man who smiles alot. "Once we stopped worrying about whether it would stand up or not, it did," he continues. "But alot of times, I'm sure that that's been a problem for us. I'm sure it's been a problem for Neil, too. He has shelved records over and over again. He must have shelved seven or eight records now that I know about. And that's crazy. He's one of the greatest living songwriters. It's always a problem, though. I mean, now we have to go in and try and match up to the last piece of work we did. That can frighten you in the studio."
In the little town of Mill Valley, David seems to be a revered member of the community. Friends wave or stop to say hello at every turn. And he'll spot a beautiful girl at a hundred yards, whether he knows her or not. As we walk across the square to the bank I ask him if he's happy, if things have come together for him. He doesn't stop to think before he answers:
"I mostly am, there are things that I can't say I've got a handle on yet and there are plenty of things that I'm dissatisfied with, but I wouldn't want to be satisfied. I think that when a person is satisfied with himself it's usually signs of bad things. But mostly, yeah, I am kinda happy. I've figured it out. I'm one of those lucky human beings that's already found a couple of things that really do get me off and I get to do 'em. And oddly enough, one of them makes me a living. That's sheer gravy, you know!"
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