But You Die Inside When You Choose to Hide

Reflections on David Crosby's passing

There are other things I’d like to be writing about right now for Jagged Time Lapse, and I really don’t want this Substack to become The Rock n’ Roll Undertaker Digest, but damn — I just can’t ignore the passing of David Crosby.

Fabulously talented and infamously difficult, Crosby somehow lived long enough — despite a great many forays into physical, spiritual and reputational self-destruction — to enjoy a massive critical reappraisal. (Fr’instance, his 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name, which was enthusiastically eviscerated upon its initial release by influential critics like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau, is now widely regarded as a psychedelic folk classic.)

Though I was certainly as guilty of making David Crosby jokes as any other wiseass kid back when he was hitting bottom in the ‘80s, I was also happy to witness his renaissance in the ‘90s and beyond. He was, after all, a formative part of my early listening, due to his indelible contributions to the first four Byrds albums and of course Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young). Few things can transport me back to the sunlit living room of my family’s house on Morton Avenue in Ann Arbor like the warm vocal harmonies of that first CSN album…

I got to interview Crosby only once, around the time of Sony’s big Byrds CD reissue campaign in 1997, and he was everything I expected him to be — candid, opinionated, prickly, screamingly funny, and kind of an arrogant dick — but also unexpectedly generous with his time, and extremely complimentary of what Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman and Gene Clark brought to the music they made together. I’ll have to dig that interview out of the archives sometime, though it may take me a while to find it. For now, I’ll just salute Croz by sharing the three things that immediately came to mind when I heard the sad news of his passing:

1. Of all the songs he wrote, “Lady Friend” — his final Byrds single — is unquestionably my favorite. Hell, most days of the month it’s my favorite Byrds single, period, which is saying something given the stiff competition from the rest of the band’s singles discography. But because it was released too late for inclusion on the first Byrds Greatest Hits album, and because it was cruelly left off 1968’s Notorious Byrd Brothers due to Crosby’s dismissal from the band, “Lady Friend” fell completely through the cracks for me and a lot of other people. I didn’t actually hear it for the first time until 1986, when it popped up on an import Byrds compilation CD that my friend and bandmate Bob was spinning. Its gloriously shiny and angular layers of melody and harmony stunned me then, and they still stun me now.

2. I can’t even count how many cassette mixtapes I padded out back in the ‘90s with excerpts of Croz’s between-song rants from The Byrds’s Monterey Pop Festival performance. To this day, the expressions “YOUR MOM GETS HIGH AND YOU DON’T KNOW IT!” and “I concur — HEARTILY” can still send my friend Eric and I into paroxysms of hysterical laughter.

3. “Everybody’s Been Burned,” one of three songs that Crosby wrote or co-wrote on 1967’s Younger Than Yesterday, his final album with The Byrds, was a song that I didn’t connect with at all until the early ‘90s. But I’ll never forget the night that changed my mind about it…

   I was having dinner at the apartment of a dear friend, an older gent who had been a mentor and something of a guardian angel to me during my troubled teen years. At one point, after several glasses of wine, he got up from the table and put on Younger Than Yesterday. As we listened to Side One, he revealed to me that he was gay — something I’d long suspected, though we’d never spoken about it — and that, after years of conflicted and closeted loneliness, he had found himself in a committed relationship, and was finally allowing himself to love and be loved like he’d always dreamed he could.

When we got to the final track of the side — “Everybody’s Been Burned” — he began to declaim the song’s lyrics aloud; the tears of joy and relief streaming down his face made it clear to me that Crosby’s song not only summed up my friend’s views on the risks of moving into a new relationship after all this time, but had also given him the strength and courage he needed to do so.

Everybody has been burned before
Everybody knows the pain
Anyone in this place
Can tell you to your face
Why you shouldn't try to love someone

Everybody knows it never works
Everybody knows and me
I know that door that shuts just before
You get to the dream you see

I know all too well
How to turn, how to run
How to hide behind a bitter wall of blue
But you die inside if you choose to hide
So I guess instead I'll love you

Whatever Crosby’s many faults, issues and misadventures, I’ll be forever grateful that “Everybody’s Been Burned” enabled my friend to experience the love he deserved. And as I listen to it again now, at a juncture in my life where circumstances could make it far too easy to hide myself “behind a bitter wall of blue,” I’m thinking I may have a thing or two to learn from it, as well.

Rest In Peace, Croz. You’ve got a whole new choir to harmonize with.

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