David Crosby’s Cosmic Americana – The Atlantic

“We’re going to do sort of a science-fiction story, if you happen to’ll bear with us,” David Crosby mentioned on August 18, 1969, as his band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Younger started taking part in their track “Picket Ships” at Woodstock. Crosby, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist who died on Wednesday on the age of 81, was by no means a typical hippie, regardless of being one of many motion’s founders and figureheads. But the band’s Woodstock efficiency of “Picket Ships” is an ideal instance of his sweeping, singular, sci-fi-driven imaginative and prescient.

To him, the counterculture of the ’60s was greater than a protest motion or a bohemian aesthetic; it was a car for probing the reaches of being human. Whereas many anthems of the hippie period painted footage of folksy peace—together with CSNY’s personal “Educate Your Kids” and “Our Home,” each written by Graham Nash—“Picket Ships” is an outright downer, a darkish account of the apocalypse. Nonetheless, it soars with cautious hope, its titular ship crusing both the ocean or outer house.

In reality, Crosby was recognized for his love of all issues maritime, and to him, the ocean flowed into the celebrities. Musically, Crosby swirled the whole lot from free jazz to synthesizers into his cosmic Americana. “Science fiction was so expansive and it was so limitless,” Crosby informed Neil deGrasse Tyson on the latter’s StarTalk podcast in 2016. “Something may occur, and that was simply wealthy to me. And I lusted after it.” His obsession with house exploration, rising musical know-how, and the literature of the unbelievable solid a sort of future-folk.

Crosby’s band proper earlier than CSNY, the Byrds, began out as a gaggle of earthy Bob Dylan acolytes earlier than shortly reaching escape velocity with songs similar to “C.T.A.-102”—which combined folk-rock with digital noise whereas borrowing its title from a lately found quasar. One of many causes Crosby was ultimately fired from the Byrds was a inventive dispute over a track he had written, “Triad,” which drew from Robert A. Heinlein’s traditional novel Stranger in a Unusual Land. It’s a track about group intercourse, sure, however it units such terrestrial pleasures in opposition to a sci-fi backdrop. The place Dylan learn Jack Kerouac, Crosby learn Isaac Asimov.

Paradoxically, people—Crosby’s old flame as a musician—is a kind fueled by custom quite than innovation. When Crosby got here up within the music scene of the ’60s, people was solely progressive within the political sense, because of the leftist likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. So his debut album from 1971, If I May Solely Bear in mind My Identify, grew to become not solely the crown jewel of his solo profession; it elevated folk-rock to an entire new firmament. The observe “What Are Their Names” comprises what may be Crosby’s most on-the-nose lyric—“Peace will not be an terrible lot to ask,” he sings—however he transcends that platitude with a fugue of plucked strings and layered voices (provided by a choir that features, amongst others, Jerry Garcia and Joni Mitchell). All of it coalesces right into a ringing deep-space raga. The album’s cowl depicts Crosby’s face superimposed over a photograph of the ocean at sunset—as if to promote the notion that his thoughts and music are a part of an unbroken continuum, a sort of galactic hum.

Within the liner notes to the CD reissue of the 1969 album Crosby, Stills & Nash, Crosby defined that “Picket Ships” is an allegory the place “we imagined ourselves because the few survivors, escaping on a ship to create a brand new civilization.” However though he outlived a lot of his technology’s hard-living musicians, Crosby did greater than survive. He altered the trajectory of American music with an creativeness far past his age.