Credit: Far Out / Glenn Francis
Mon 11 May 2026 19:30, UK
If there was one thing that David Crosby was known for, it was being brutally honest.
He didn’t seem to possess that filter that exists between everyone’s brain and their mouth, and it wasn’t out of the question for him to call something crap if he felt that it wasn’t doing that much for him. He knew that he was going to make a fair bit of enemies doing that, but even if he couldn’t get along with some of his bandmates from time to time, he was going to play the kind of music that he knew was right for him.
Then again, becoming one of the older giants of rock and roll tends to grant knowledge of when to stop giving a shit as well. Crosby was willing to be more candid about his bandmates as he got older, and while that did lead to Neil Young not speaking to him for years after he had some choice words to say about his girlfriend at the time, Crosby could at least acknowledge when he made a mistake as well. When it came to music, though, his taste was a lot more rigid than most people.
He understood what good and bad music sounded like, and some of the worst records that he heard normally came from bands that he knew weren’t trying hard enough. People like Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell were testing the boundaries of what rock and roll could be, and since they were taking their cues from jazz, Crosby felt like it was a huge step backwards for bands that tried to unlearn everything they had ever been taught in the 1970s.
Not everyone needed to have the greatest knowledge of music theory to be a legend, but making music that was all about scaling things back didn’t sit well with him when punk started emerging. The entire genre felt like a bunch of style over substance to him, and even though there were many bands that were out there to change the world, Crosby felt like they had no business trying to change it with a first-grade knowledge of power chords.
Most people in that genre didn’t have the same kind of musical know-how, but as far as he was concerned, dumbing down the music wasn’t doing them any favours, saying that the genre was “pretty much all dumb stuff [with] no musical value at all and mostly childish lyrics”. Then again, maybe Crosby didn’t know where to look when looking through a lot of the punk underground.
Ramones may have been a band that didn’t have that many causes to stand behind, but it wasn’t like The Clash didn’t have a few more tricks up their sleeve. They were looking to make some of the most militant rock and roll ever made, and even if Joe Strummer didn’t need a degree in music to sound great, you were hanging on to everything he said whenever he sang tunes like ‘London Calling’.
Further reading: From The Vault
And when you think about it, Crosby was the kind of artist that a lot of punks were busy rebelling against. The days of a bunch of folkies talking about the problems with the world had become a thing of the past, and since that had given way to arena rock, punk was there to bring rock and roll back into the club scene where it had started back in its earliest days with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Crosby may have been more of a stickler for everything sounding perfect, but the number-one rule of rock and roll was to find the beauty in the imperfections. Music didn’t have to be absolutely spotless every single time it was played, and making songs that were this rough was just further evidence of a band being human.
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