Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty ImagesĪ couple of weeks later he was arrested again on similar charges, this time at a Dallas nightclub where he was performing. From left, Chris Hillman, David Crosby, Michael Clarke, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and Gene Clark. The Byrds in 1965, the year they topped the charts with Mr Tambourine Man. It topped the US chart, reached No 5 in the UK and has sold 14m copies. Their second album, Déjà Vu (1970), with the addition of Neil Young, and the band becoming Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY), felt like the crowning moment of a California golden age. Crosby’s long hair, walrus moustache and buckskin jacket made him look like a frontiersman for the Age of Aquarius. Their debut album, Crosby Stills & Nash (1969), was an immediate smash, and proved hugely influential on a rising generation of west coast artists. It was a group of distinct individuals who wrote their own songs, but together they created one of the great harmony-singing blends in pop history. This was defined by their shimmering recording of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man, its distinctive harmonies and chiming 12-string guitar carrying it to the top of the charts in Britain and the US in 1965.Īrrogant and argumentative, Crosby was sacked from the Byrds in 1967, but, after producing Joni Mitchell’s debut album, Song to a Seagull, he found an ideal berth with Crosby, Stills and Nash. In the mid-1960s he was a founder member of the Byrds, the Los Angeles band often credited with inventing the genre “folk-rock”.
David Crosby, who has died aged 81, was a premier-league rock’n’roll star twice.
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