David Crosby's death evoked sadness and joy, for the singer and the music left behind
The death of David Crosby, seen in November 2011, leaves a trail of memories and feelings attached to the music he left behind. Credit: Charles Eckert
You sigh.
You hear the news and it's really all you can do.
Because you hear the news and you remember, and you're not sure whether to cry or smile, because sadness and joy swell inside you at the same time, moving through you like parallel rivers sweeping you back in time.
It's happening more these days as I get older — most recently, with the death Wednesday of David Crosby.
I got a Slack message from a colleague that contained his name, only his name, and I knew right away what that meant. And right away, the emotions rose.
It's too easy to say David Crosby was part of the soundtrack of my youth, though The Byrds and the various groupings of Crosby, Still, Nash and Young were certainly that.
And it's not just the music he left us, as wonderful and voluminous as it was. It also is — crucially — the memories that attach to the music. The glimpses. The fragments. The shards of feeling.
"Mr. Tambourine Man" is skipping along the front lawns of the old neighborhood. "Wooden Ships" is sitting on the bed in a close-eyed, apocalypse-chilled trance. "Woodstock" is the yearning to be somewhere else with half-a-million-strong. "Ohio" is simmering-then-explosive anger at a war and a presidency gone oh so wrong.
And "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," ahhh, well, that was exuberance and sorrow and love and breaking-up sung silently inside your head and out loud in your room and cruising on the highway and just walking down the street. And once again, while you're writing about David Crosby all these years later.
Crosby didn't write most of the songs, but that's OK. Because the sounds were gorgeous, the harmonies utter magic, and much of that was Crosby.
So this tender and complex mix, this pinwheeling between mourning and reverie, is not only about Crosby, but all of those he worked with who made the magic. And not just for all of them, but for yourself, too, for all the time that's passed, for the many lives you've led and the many people you've known, for the something lost and something gained in living all those days.
Crosby's death came hard on the heels of the passing of illustrious guitarist Jeff Beck, which leaves one wondering whether 2023 will be as difficult a year as 2022 with its far-too-many musical goodbyes.
Christine McVie and Jerry Lee Lewis. Ronnie Spector and Meat Loaf. Lamont Dozier and Jim Seals and Ronnie Hawkins and many more.
Touchstones, each in his or her own way, like all of our cultural icons. And like Crosby's music, theirs was evocative, too.
Meat Loaf is the open windows of a car, the wind blowing back your hair. Ronnie Spector is singalong ebullience wrapped in that wall of sound. And the memories flood in. The nights when Roy Orbison filled a void. The withdrawn moments when Leonard Cohen made you think. The chasm between love and desperation that Janis Joplin filled and rattled.
The songs are part of what makes life so rich, so beautiful, so resonant, and part of what makes it so difficult to let the songmakers go. But it's also so complicated, because even as you let them go and as they take a piece of you with them, they also leave precious pieces behind.
"I've been thinking about dying and how to do it well," Crosby wrote in one of his later songs, recorded just a few years ago.
I suspect he knew that if you live well, you'll die well. And judged by his music, which is how Crosby said he wanted to be remembered, he lived and died very well indeed.
I take the headphones off and close my eyes, and his voice and those harmonies are fresh again.
To everything turn, turn, turn.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
