David Crosby: 12 Facts About The Late Musician

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are one of the best-known — and most simply named — bands in the history of pop music, yet each of its four members have established and acclaimed solo careers apart from the group, not only after CSNY broke big but before, too. As told by People, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are rock n' roll's first ever "supergroup," meaning that the band was formed not in some garage by a bunch of unknowns but consists of already famous musicians moonlighting from their regular gigs. 

Prior to the formation of CSNY in 1968, David Crosby was a guitarist and singer in the extremely popular 1960s band the Byrds ("Eight Miles High," "Turn! Turn! Turn!"), Graham Nash had been a member of the Hollies ("Bus Stop"), and Stephen Stills played with Buffalo Springfield ("For What It's Worth"). Neil Young had been in Buffalo Springfield, too, along with some solo efforts. Over the years, various groupings of those four musicians have played together off and on, but they all called it a day relatively recently, officially splitting up in 2016 (via The Wrap).

It would be fair to call David Crosby's music "folk," but he was heavily influenced by jazz greats like Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, and John Coltrane. Crosby told Jazz Times that his main contribution to the Byrds was constantly filling the band's motor home with the sounds of Coltrane. "We had a reel-to-reel player in the back," Crosby said. "I kept playing 'Africa/Brass.' Roger is a very talented guy, and he's very good at being affected by another kind of music and taking it into his stream. He would never have thought of the solo he played on 'Eight Miles High' if he hadn't listened to Coltrane." He even credited the way he sings, to jazz: "I'd been listening to really good horn players and I'm sure they affected me in terms of phrasing and melody choice."

Another jazz legend gave Crosby his big break. "He's the reason the Byrds signed to Columbia Records," Crosby told Vanity Fair. Executives at the label played the Byrds' demo for one of its biggest acts, Miles Davis. "The bosses asked Miles, 'What do we do with this?' because he was the hippest guy there. And he said, 'Sign 'em.' " Davis stayed a fan — in 1970, he covered Crosby, Stills & Nash's 1969 tune "Guinnevere."

"Easy Rider," the 1969 motorcycle road trip epic, was almost as much of a watershed cultural moment for the counterculture as that year's Woodstock festival. Co-written by stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, the film's backing music is made up entirely of rock songs — a novel idea for the time — including "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf and two songs by David Crosby's band the Byrds. 

By the time "Easy Rider" was in production, the Byrds were over, and Crosby had flown over to Crosby, Stills & Nash. Originally, Fonda wanted Crosby and his new band to write an entire, wholly original score for the film, and as a placeholder, editor Donn Cambern synched up the images with pre-existing rock songs, instead. "Originally he was just making it more interesting, but the music became inseparable from the pictures," cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs told MovieMaker (via Ultimate Classic Rock). 

It fell on Hopper to break the news to Crosby and company, and as he recalled in the book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," he threatened "bodily harm" to the band should it try to record anything for his movie. That's an ironic ending to the story of Crosby and "Easy Rider," since in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview and in the 2019 documentary "David Crosby: Remember My Name" (via Butler's Cinema Scene), he claimed to be the inspiration for Hopper's character. (Crosby said on Twitter Hopper once told him so.)

Their voices blend together so magically, and they've recorded so many songs and played so many concerts together, yet different members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young don't get along very well. But nearly all agreed that any enduring animosity is David Crosby's fault. "I want to work with all four of us. That's what I want to do," Crosby told The Wrap in January 2019. "I'll take more blame than anybody for being a s**thead to my friends in that group." 

In response, however, Graham Nash said a reunion was out of the question. "The truth is, none of us are speaking to David. Not me, not Stephen, not Neil," he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "And that's the way it is. We have to like and love each other to be able to make great music." That echoes what Nash told Billboard in 2016. While not saying exactly what Crosby did to make him so mad, Nash said he'd "saved his f***ing a** for 45 years," yet Crosby "treated [him] like sh*t." 

As for Neil Young, Crosby upset him in a 2015 interview with the Idaho Statesman during which he cruelly and alliteratively called Young's girlfriend, actress Daryl Hannah, a "purely poisonous predator." Crosby apologized, but it apparently didn't do much to ease band tensions.

David Crosby used drugs and carried guns — and both got him into trouble on several occasions. After the murder of John Lennon in 1980, anti-violence and anti-war rock star Crosby began carrying a handgun for personal protection, according to Ultimate Classic Rock. He had that firearm on his person when he was arrested in a nightclub in Dallas in 1982 for freebasing cocaine, to which he'd been profoundly addicted for over a decade, per the Chicago Tribune. To avoid prison, he agreed to check into a rehab facility, but he left after two days because they wouldn't let him have musical instruments. The next day, he was arrested in New York for cocaine possession and was ultimately sentenced to five years for the Dallas charges. 

In March 2004, Crosby left a suitcase behind at a hotel in New York City, and when an employee looked for an identification tag, he stumbled upon a small amount of marijuana and a loaded handgun, according to The New York Times. When Crosby came back to the hotel to get the bag, he was arrested, spent 12 hours in jail, posted bail, pleaded guilty to criminal weapon possession, and paid a fine.

Gravelly voiced blues rocker Melissa Etheridge and her partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher started a family in the late 1990s. Daughter Bailey Cypher was born in 1997, and son Beckett Cypher followed in 1998. The couple made that possible with donated sperm but refused to reveal the identity of their children's biological father until a February 2000 Rolling Stone cover story. Posed alongside Etheridge, Cypher, and their babies was the recognizable face of rock legend David Crosby. 

A few years earlier, Etheridge and Cypher had popped over to Crosby's home and mentioned that they were thinking of having kids. "And Jan [Crosby's wife] said, 'What about David?' " Etheridge recalled. After a year mulling it over, they officially asked Crosby to help them out. Tragically, on May 13, 2020, Etheridge announced that Beckett had died. "Today I joined the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to opioid addiction," Etheridge wrote of Beckett (via USA Today), who was just 21.

Crosby has another child for whom his parentage was once shrouded in secrecy. In the 1960s, he was briefly in a relationship with a woman, and when she became pregnant, they gave the child up for adoption, as per The Baltimore Sun. Crosby and his son, James Raymond, a keyboard player and composer, were reunited in 1994. Raymond played in Crosby's backing band.