#David Crosby #Crosby, Stills & Nash #folk #folk rock #West coast folk rock #singer-songwriter #contemporary folk #ex-The Byrds #1970s
Contrary to popular opinion, the most stacked supergroup of the early 1970s was not Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. CSNY were not even, in fact, the most auspicious collective to include David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young at the time. That honor went to a bigger, wilder, albeit less-heralded amalgam known briefly as The Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra. It’s discography was sketchy, its personnel fluid, but PERRO pivoted around Crosby, Nash and most of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with auxiliary memberships for Young and Joni Mitchell, among others. Named by Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, they convened for his late 1970 album, Blows Against The Empire; a baroque psych gang show that recast the counterculture’s desire to escape urban life as a sci-fi mission to distant planets rather than as a rural property grab in Laurel Canyon or Marin County.
Crosby had moved next door to Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s Marin ranch in late 1969, and the Orchestra members had many other things in common, not least a fondness for Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and for Kantner’s awe-inspiring “Ice Bag” weed. It was at Heider’s that CSNY had battled through Déjà Vu, and where the Dead had crafted the sepia-toned epiphanies of American Beauty. As sessions for that last album were winding down in the summer of 1970, the Orchestra’s amorphous jams began to coalesce into their finest achievement. The stories that have become legend about Crosby and his circle often fixate on feuding, egomania, and patterns of behavior that in most every light look morally unconscionable. But If I Could Only Remember My Name reveals an alternative, parallel truth: a solo album, predicated on one man’s grief, where a musical community came together to help him transcend it.
On the morning of September 30, 1969, the same week that the first CSN album went gold in the States, Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton handed over a few joints to Crosby and Nash, loaded her cats into a green Volkswagen bus, and left their Marin place on the way to the vet. En route, she crashed into a school bus coming in the opposite direction; Crosby would have to identify her body later in the day. The tragedy did not derail work on Déjà Vu, and by the summer of 1970 Crosby was still processing his loss. “I didn’t have any equipment to deal with that,” he told Jesse Jarnow for the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast in 2020. “The only place that I knew I wouldn’t be utterly terrified and crying and distraught was in the studio. They all knew that the only time I was happy was when I was singing, so they got me singing every chance they could get. It was an act of kindness, but it was also joy.”
If I Could Only Remember My Name had a large cast, but they moved with great discretion. There were communal healing rites like the opening Music Is Love, and one solemn indictment of The Man – What Are Their Names, featuring a chorale of Nash, Young, Mitchell, Kantner, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Grace Slick and David Freiberg. Mostly, though, their presence was blurred and indistinct, giving Crosby the space to express himself in the distrait way – abstracted tunings, wordless harmonies, an aesthetic at once psychedelic and medieval – that he’d been finessing since his time in The Byrds. From: https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/david-crosby-his-masterpiece-revisited/
