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“We’re going to do type of a science-fiction story, for those who’ll bear with us,” David Crosby stated on August 18, 1969, as his band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Younger started taking part in their tune “Wood Ships” at Woodstock. Crosby, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist who died on Wednesday on the age of 81, was by no means a typical hippie, regardless of being one of many motion’s founders and figureheads. But the band’s Woodstock efficiency of “Wood Ships” is an ideal instance of his sweeping, singular, sci-fi-driven imaginative and prescient.
To him, the counterculture of the ’60s was greater than a protest motion or a bohemian aesthetic; it was a automobile for probing the reaches of being human. Whereas many anthems of the hippie period painted photos of folksy peace—together with CSNY’s personal “Train Your Kids” and “Our Home,” each written by Graham Nash—“Wood Ships” is an outright downer, a darkish account of the apocalypse. Nonetheless, it soars with cautious hope, its titular ship crusing both the ocean or outer area.
In actual fact, Crosby was identified for his love of all issues maritime, and to him, the ocean flowed into the celebs. Musically, Crosby swirled all the pieces from free jazz to synthesizers into his cosmic Americana. “Science fiction was so expansive and it was so limitless,” Crosby instructed Neil deGrasse Tyson on the latter’s StarTalk podcast in 2016. “Something might occur, and that was simply wealthy to me. And I lusted after it.” His obsession with area exploration, rising musical expertise, and the literature of the unbelievable solid a type of future-folk.
Crosby’s band proper earlier than CSNY, the Byrds, began out as a gaggle of earthy Bob Dylan acolytes earlier than shortly reaching escape velocity with songs resembling “C.T.A.-102”—which blended folk-rock with digital noise whereas borrowing its title from a just lately found quasar. One of many causes Crosby was ultimately fired from the Byrds was a artistic dispute over a tune he had written, “Triad,” which drew from Robert A. Heinlein’s traditional novel Stranger in a Unusual Land. It’s a tune about group intercourse, sure, however it units such terrestrial pleasures in opposition to a sci-fi backdrop. The place Dylan learn Jack Kerouac, Crosby learn Isaac Asimov.
Paradoxically, people—Crosby’s old flame as a musician—is a kind fueled by custom reasonably than innovation. When Crosby got here up within the music scene of the ’60s, people was solely progressive within the political sense, due to the leftist likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. So his debut album from 1971, If I May Solely Bear in mind My Title, turned not solely the crown jewel of his solo profession; it elevated folk-rock to a complete new firmament. The observe “What Are Their Names” comprises what is perhaps Crosby’s most on-the-nose lyric—“Peace just isn’t an terrible lot to ask,” he sings—however he transcends that platitude with a fugue of plucked strings and layered voices (provided by a choir that features, amongst others, Jerry Garcia and Joni Mitchell). All of it coalesces right into a ringing deep-space raga. The album’s cowl depicts Crosby’s face superimposed over a photograph of the ocean at sunset—as if to promote the notion that his thoughts and music are a part of an unbroken continuum, a type of galactic hum.
Within the liner notes to the CD reissue of the 1969 album Crosby, Stills & Nash, Crosby defined that “Wood Ships” is an allegory the place “we imagined ourselves because the few survivors, escaping on a ship to create a brand new civilization.” However though he outlived a lot of his era’s hard-living musicians, Crosby did greater than survive. He altered the trajectory of American music with an creativeness far past his age.
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