Credit: Album Cover / KRLA Beat / Beat Publications, Inc.
Sat 1 August 2026 19:30, UK
It’s all peace, love, and ‘anything goes, dude’ until one poor bastard steps a toke over the line.
To be fair to his cohorts in The Byrds, David Crosby stepped a fair few tokes over the line on so many occasions that nobody is under the illusion that he would have been easy to work with.
At the height of his haywire days, he was caught by police backstage in a Dallas nightclub freebasing cocaine with a propane tank in one hand, a brown bottle in the other, and a .45-calibre semiautomatic tucked down his pants. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in jail. That gives you a fair picture.
But during his early days in The Byrds, his wayward ramblings and daring debauchery were just getting started. He had begun his musical life as a folk singer on the coffeehouse circuit, and that’s how he encountered Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark. They formed a trio, and then the trio became a five-piece with the additions of Michael Clarke on drums and Chris Hillman on bass.
All seemed fine at first; he was talented and transitioned from the coffeehouse ways to rather more groovy rock ‘n’ roll very seamlessly. But alarm bells started to ring around early 1967, three years into their tenure, when their performances became pitted with Crosby’s long-winded ramblings on the JFK assassination and how he thought the world would change if LSD was administered to “all the statesmen and politicians in the world”.
In truth, his weird spoken polemics would often be cheered, but the band saw these pauses to their own potential contributions as an overindulgence of ego. Matters were made far worse when he started popping up alongside Buffalo Springfield. Then he started writing shit like ‘Lady Friend’ and attempting to gain greater creative control while simultaneously slacking.
All the same, he had been there from the start, and he was central to transubstantiating their ambition from a pipedream over coffee in a dinghy folk club to a position of genuine rock ‘n’ roll reverence. Yet, despite that sacred influence, as soon as two Porsches sped their way towards his house, it was clear that the end was nigh. And by nigh, I mean about three minutes away.
Further reading: From The Vault
As Autumn dawned in ‘67, Crosby was shown the door (proverbially speaking, given that he was actually fired while in his own living room). ”They came over and said that they wanted to throw me out. They came zooming up in their Porsches and said that I was impossible to work with and I wasn’t very good anyway and they’d do better without me,” Crosby recalled in 1980.
He looked around his living room, gazing at various paraphernalia and the general aura of unkemptness, and wondered how it could possibly be! But Crosby knew better than anyone that when one door closes, another tends to open, that’s the thing with doors.
So, he happily added, “Frankly, I’ve been laughing ever since. Fuck ’em. But it hurt like hell. I didn’t try to reason with them. I just said, ‘It’s a shameful waste … goodbye’.”
