Long Time Gone

I've commented a lot about David Crosby, who died this past week at 81, on this blog, and despite my occasional criticism of some of the things he's said and done, I've probably been fairer to him his detractors (and you know he had a lot of them) have been.

Crosby could be mean and vindictive, as his fallouts with Graham Nash and Neil Young proved, but if you caught him on a good day, he could be the nicest man you'd ever met.  His brutal honesty was his biggest asset, like when he dismissed the idea of Kanye West as a genius musician (the world has since discovered that he's neither), but it could also be his biggest liability, as we discovered when he played art critic and dissed a fan who painted a picture of Crosby as a token of his esteem.  

Inevitably, we have to judge Crosby's legacy by his music, and when you look at his inventive guitar tuning, his masterful singing and harmonizing, he looks pretty good.  And while Nash, Young and Stephen Stills were better and more consistent songwriters than Crosby was, songs such as "Guinnevere," "Long Time Gone," "Laughing," "Page 43," "Bittersweet" and "Shadow Captain" proved that he was hardly a bad songwriter; in fact, the Crosby songs I just mentioned are among the greatest in the Crosby, Stills and Nash and Crosby/Nash canons.

In his final years, Crosby was more comfortable with himself as a musician, and he knew exactly how he wanted to spend the last days of his life - with family, music and love.  I'm only sorry that he was unable to reach a rapprochement with his former groupmates in CSNY while he was alive.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young had a magic quality to them, and the silencing of Crosby only reminds us that such magic will never come this way again.  RIP.