Obituaries

You know the darkest hour is always just before the dawn

Posted on by brucehhackett

For a guy like me who has always held a special place in my heart for David Crosby and the marvelous music he has made, it has been most gratifying to see the abundance of heartfelt tributes paid to him in traditional and social media in the days and weeks since his death on January 18th at age 81.

Let’s face facts. “Croz,” as he was known to his closest associates, could be a prickly guy, full of challenging opinions and harsh words for friends and foes alike, so it’s not hard to imagine that some of them, when told of his passing, might have privately thought “good riddance.”

And there’s no denying that, thanks to a harrowing descent into full-blown drug addiction in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in convictions and jail time, he became something of a poster boy for the risks of excessive behavior.

But I’m willing to overlook all of that, because David Crosby has written, sung and played on some of my very favorite songs of the past 60 years — songs that have comforted me, exhilarated me and generally accompanied me on life’s ups and downs, and I’m eternally grateful to him for it.

He was a study in contradiction. He wrote gentle, ethereal music, but he was cantankerous and blunt. He was an extraordinary singer and arranger of layered harmonies, but he was inexorably drawn to hard drugs that put him in prison and almost killed him in the 1980s. He was outspoken and defiant about social issues but also wrote serene, mystical lyrics about love and karma. He was a fun-loving guy with a twinkle in his eye, but he was notoriously difficult to work with. As his longtime musical compatriot Stephen Stills put it, “He was both a genius and an asshole.”

Crosby, Stills and Nash at Big Sur Festival, 1969

As far as I’m concerned, Crosby earned his place in the annals of rock music based on his contributions to two titanic albums: “Crosby, Stills and Nash” (1969) and CSNY’s “Deja Vu” (1970). The lovely “Guinnevere,” the haunting “Long Time Gone,” the apocalyptic “Wooden Ships,” the angry “Almost Cut My Hair” and the magical “Deja Vu” have been hugely influential and impactful in my own musical development, and I never tire of hearing them.

There are so many others — tracks he recorded as a member of The Byrds, on seven solo albums, on a handful of duo LPs with Graham Nash, and on reunion albums with CSN and CSNY. Taken as a whole, which I invite you to do with my Crosby playlist on Spotify at the end of this essay, Crosby’s recorded legacy ranks right up there with the best of the singer-songwriters who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s and beyond.

He has been rightfully praised as one of the very best harmony singers and vocal arrangers in rock music history. He had an uncanny ability to move between the harmonic lines of his various singing partners, crafting unusually creative vocal parts that added uncommon warmth and depth to the songs to which he contributed. As an amateur singer myself, I love to sing along to the harmony parts of great old songs, but if I try to find and stick to Crosby’s parts on the CSN numbers, I fail every time. They’re so densely layered and almost hidden in the mix.

The back cover of Crosby’s 1971 solo debut

Crosby’s own compositions were typically not very commercial, and consequently, they weren’t heard on Top 40 radio. But on the FM stations, his dreamily eccentric melodies and chord changes were just what the doctor ordered. Take his fascinating debut solo LP, 1971’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” an eclectic batch of introspective tunes (“Traction in the Rain,” “Laughing,” “Song With No Words”) marked by start-and-stop rhythms, shimmering acoustic guitars and his crystal-clear voice.

British musician Robyn Hitchcock said, “Crosby let jazz, folk and rock’n’roll flow into each other, like a child playing with cups of water by a sink. There was a liquid quality to his songs and music.”

His lyrics could be dense or sharply defined. There’s an eight-minute track on the above LP called “Cowboy Movie” that told the tale of a group of Old West outlaws torn apart by a beautiful woman. In actuality, Crosby was singing about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and how singer Rita Coolidge played a pivotal role in the quartet’s initial breakup because both Stills and Nash had strong feelings for her.

Roger McGuinn and Crosby backstage in 1965

Crosby was a rebel almost from the very beginning. Soon after partnering with Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark to form The Byrds in Los Angeles in 1964, Crosby made it known that he didn’t want to spend his career reimagining the songs of Bob Dylan and others, despite the fact that the group had spectacular success doing exactly that. While he enjoyed coming up with and providing the harmonies that made “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” so popular, he kept pushing the group to record their own songs. Tentative at first, Crosby grew bolder with enigmatic material like “Everybody’s Been Burned,” “Eight Miles High” and, tellingly, a song about a ménage à trois called “Triad” that the band refused to record. His stubborn individualism ended up getting him fired from The Byrds, but it merely fed his need to further explore and experiment.

Joni Mitchell with Crosby, 1968

He happened upon a then-unknown Joni Mitchell in a Florida coffee bar, took her to L.A. and supervised production of her debut LP. Around the same time, he met Stills and developed a simpatico musical relationship with him, and when Mama Cass Elliott brought Nash into their sphere and they discovered the indelible three-part harmonies they were capable of producing, the trio found themselves in the vanguard of the “back to the garden” movement that served as a counterpoint to the psychedelic experimentation going on concurrently.

L-R: Graham Nash, drummer Dallas Taylor, Crosby in front with Stephen Stills behind, bassist Greg Reeves, Neil Young (1969)

The threesome beefed up their on-stage sound with the addition of Neil Young, but things almost immediately went south for Crosby when his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car accident just as sessions for “Deja Vu” were getting underway. “David went to identify her body, and he’s never been the same since,” Nash famously said. Crosby himself added years later, “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was a lot of fun. We believed we were expanding our consciousness. But then the drugs became more for blurring pain, and you don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are.”

And yet, Crosby was an avid performer throughout the ’70s, mostly with just Nash and a backing band, contributing fine original songs like “Carry Me,” “Page 43,” “Low Down Payment,” “Wind on the Water” and “Shadow Captain.” As Stills put it in the wake of “CSN,” their marvelous 1977 reunion album, “His voice was the glue that held us together. He was a giant of a musician, and I will miss him beyond measure.”

Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1977

By the early ’80s, his addiction to heroin and freebase cocaine proved stronger than his love for making music, and he withdrew deeper into his problems, ultimately bottoming out in a Texas prison in 1986. Miraculously, he rebounded from that difficult time with his singing voice intact, and he returned to the road and the studio with his musical companions as they resumed their place as a reliable concert draw, offering classics and new compositions alike into the ’90s and 2000s.

Robyn Hitchcock said he marveled at Crosby’s longevity. “Because David did such a great job pulling himself out of the narcotic vortex in the late 1980s, it seemed like he’d be around forever,” he said. “It’s disturbing that he’s gone, almost as much as it’s sad. People like Crosby were built to endure, the way their love of music does, so even 81 seems too soon for him to be called away.”

In documentaries and a couple of autobiographical books, Crosby was as candid as we’ve come to expect from him. When asked if he had any regrets, he said, “Sure I do. I regret all the time I wasted being smashed. More recently, I’ve alienated nearly everyone I know. All the guys I’ve made music with won’t talk to me now. I don’t quite know how to undo the things I’ve said and done.”

Despite his unfortunate tendency to say things he later regretted, he somehow managed to collaborate with many dozens of artists over the years, participating in recording sessions or special live performances with a virtual Who’s Who of rock-era musicians. In addition to Stills, Nash and Young, his voice can be heard on records with James Taylor, Paul Kantner, Jerry Garcia, Phil Collins, Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Dave Mason, Art Garfunkel, Dan Fogelberg, Bonnie Raitt, David Gilmour, John Mayer, Marc Cohn, Donald Fagen, Shawn Colvin, Michael McDonald, Joe Walsh, Elton John and Carole King.

Crosby’s 2014 album “Croz”

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Crosby established a productive musical partnership with his long-lost son, James Raymond, and between 2014 and 2022, he released five albums of quality new material, and presented it in concert. I had the good fortune of seeing him perform at LA’s fabled Troubadour in 2014 as he was promoting “Croz,” the first of these recent releases, and found him to be in fine form indeed.

As he aged, Crosby wrote more often about his mortality and the need to make good use of the time he had left. He told Howard Stern in 2021, “I’m at the end of my life, and it’s a very strange thing. Here’s what I’ve come to realize: It’s not how much time you’ve got, because we really don’t know. I could have two weeks, I could have ten years. It’s about what you do with the time that you do have. People get old and die, and that’s how it works. But in the meantime, I’m going to have myself a bunch of fun. I’m going to make some more music.”

Crosby in 2019

He added in a 2022 interview, “I’m too old to perform live anymore. I don’t have the stamina or the strength. But I’ve been making records at a startling rate lately. I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can.”

Consider these lyrics from “I Won’t Stay For Long,” from his final LP: “I’m facing a squall line of a thousand-year storm, /I don’t know if I’m dying or about to be born, /But I’d like to be with you today, /Yes, I’d like to be with you today, /And I won’t stay for long, /I’ve got a place of my own, a little slice, There’s a sliver of air between the water and the ice, /It’s where I live, where I breathe…”

Nash, who stood by Crosby far longer than most but had recently severed ties with him, had only gentlemanly things to say about him after his death. “David was fearless in life and in music,” Nash said. “As one of his lyrics goes, ‘I’m not giving in an inch to fear.’ He leaves behind a tremendous void in terms of sheer personality and talent in this world. He spoke his mind, his heart, and his passion through his beautiful music and leaves an incredible legacy. These are the things that matter most.”

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Over under sideways down, when will it end?

Posted on by brucehhackett

When I first heard a couple of weeks ago that Jeff Beck died, I was sad, of course, particularly because he’d been taken by bacterial meningitis, a relatively uncommon occurrence these days. But I can’t deny that it just didn’t affect me the way I would’ve been devastated by the passing of Eric Clapton, or Jimmy Page, Beck’s fellow travelers in the British rock pantheon.

I came of age musically with Cream, and then Led Zeppelin, and for some reason I still can’t quite figure out, I never immersed myself the same way in Beck’s musical offerings. I’m not alone in this. Beck never got anything close to the worldwide fame, attention and appreciation of Clapton or Page, even though he was arguably as influential among recent generations of guitarists as either of them. They don’t call Beck “the guitarists’ guitarist” for nothing.

Beck’s death forced me to sit down over the past fortnight and finally listen closely to Beck’s catalog — his days with The Yardbirds (1965-1966), his time as leader of the Jeff Beck Group (1968-1973) and as a solo artist (1975-2023). What a revelation! Why did I wait so long?

There’s a clear reason, it seems to me, why Beck’s music often didn’t do as well on the charts as his compatriots’ albums did. Beck was far more experimental, innovative and willing to go beyond the blues or blues-rock favored by Clapton and Page. From his earliest recordings, he pushed the guitar to produce new, unusual sounds; he embraced the possibilities of incorporating jazz chords and free-form tempos in his jazz fusion period and beyond; and he spent most of his solo career recording instrumental tracks without benefit of a vocalist, pretty much a requirement if you’re going to make the pop charts.

I recall hearing Beck’s amazing blues-drenched 1968 debut album “Truth” in a record store around the same time I was snatching up the Cream and Zeppelin LPs, and I was compelled to buy it, but curiously, I didn’t listen to it all that often, and I didn’t buy any subsequent Beck albums. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I didn’t much care for the vocals provided by a young Rod Stewart. (In fact, I’ve never liked Stewart, particularly after he converted to a more pop-oriented approach.)

After getting the advice from a few Beck fanatics (especially my friend Ira) who pointed me toward the “essential” songs in his catalog, I found myself feeling more and more foolish that I failed to give this virtuoso his due. Each album in his repertoire — especially 1975’s “Blow By Blow,” 1989’s “Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop” and 2001’s “You Had It Coming” — contains tracks that had me picking my jaw up off the floor. Holy smokes. I now hereby acknowledge, belatedly, what my electric guitar player friends have been talking about all these years.

As Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash put it, “It’s a lot easier to appreciate Beck’s guitar playing if you’re a guitar player. He just had such a natural control over the instrument. It’s the ability to make it do something that you’ve never heard anybody else do. ‘Blow By Blow’ is the album I had when I was a kid. Jeff would go from love songs to a really blistering, hard-rock, heavy-sounding guitar without ever going over the top.”

Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil added, “Jeff Beck was an incredibly proficient guitarist, but he wasn’t Mr. Pedant. The late Seventies to late Eighties were full of guitarists who were preoccupied with technique, like the guitar wasn’t a voice but a tool to be mastered. Jeff Beck wasn’t that way. He used it as a microphone. He was confident.”

When Beck was just a boy, his parents pointed him toward the piano and encouraged him to learn the classics, but when he heard the great Les Paul on the radio playing “How High the Moon,” Beck asked his mother about it. “That’s an electric guitar,” she said. “It’s all done with tricks.” He replied, “Well, that’s for me!”

He was inspired by blues guitarists like B. B. King and R&B-leaning players such as Steve Cropper, and began learning on a borrowed guitar. He even made attempts to build his own guitar using cigar boxes and fence pieces. This early inventiveness became an integral part of his adult life, as he loved to tear apart and rebuild everything from guitars to cars, marveling at how things worked and how he might alter them to make them go faster, farther, louder.

As a teen, he met Page, and began playing in a succession of regional groups, most notably The Tridents, who played “flat-out R&B, like Jimmy Reed stuff, and we supercharged it all up and made it really rocky,” Beck recalled. “I got off on that, even though it was really only twelve-bar blues.” He also did some work as a session guitarist for a couple of records, although they went nowhere.

Then at age 21, he was recruited to become the guitarist for The Yardbirds, a promising British blues band that had just scored a Top Ten pop hit in the US called “For Your Love.” Truth be told, the position became open because Clapton, who considered himself a blues purist, didn’t want to play pop music and left to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (and then Cream). He suggested Page as his replacement, but Page was involved in lucrative session gigs, so he declined but instead lobbied for Beck to fill the slot, who eagerly jumped at the opportunity.

The Yardbirds in 1966 (L-R): Jeff Beck, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, Jimmy Page and Keith Relf

He was with the band for only a year and a half, but the work he did with them was significant. First came “Heart Full of Soul,” another Top Ten hit that featured Beck on what has been called the first use of a fuzz box to deliberately distort his guitar to sound like something else, in this case a sitar. This was followed by the #11 hit “Shapes of Things,” a cover of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” and the manic “Over Under Sideways Down,” all showcasing Beck’s edgy stylings. When the band lost its bass player, Page, who had grown bored with session work, agreed to temporarily take on the assignment. Once a new bass player was found, Page reverted to guitar, and for a few months, The Yardbirds boasted both Beck and Page on guitar, producing the psychedelic “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” and a heavy metal-ish remake of the jump blues tune “Train Kept A-Rollin’.”

But Beck disliked the constant touring and either left the group or was fired, depending who’s telling the story. (“They fired me,” said Beck from the podium at The Yardbirds’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.) He was a self-described perfectionist with a bad temper, which earned him a reputation as being somewhat difficult to work with, but he managed to pull together a lineup of future stars to comprise The Jeff Beck Group: Rod Stewart on vocals, Ronnie Wood on bass, Nicky Hopkins on keyboards and John Paul Jones on bass and keyboards. They recorded “Truth” in 1968 and “Beck-Ola” in 1969 but then disbanded. Beck remembered, “The 1960s was the frustration period of my life. The electronic equipment just wasn’t up to the sounds I had in my head.”

Different configurations of The Jeff Beck Group came and went, as did a lineup called Beck, Bogert & Appice in which he collaborated with the rhythm section from Vanilla Fudge. Only one of the albums from this period made the charts in his native England but they all reached the Top 20 in the US.

When Beck joined up with Beatles producer George Martin in 1975, he made a significant departure from his blues-based work and reached #4 on the US album chart with the all-instrumental “Blow By Blow,” which includes the luxurious ballad “‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers,” the ambitious “Freeway Jam” and a bonafide Beck tour de force, “Diamond Dust.” If you do yourself one favor this month, give this record a listen. Beck’s guitar here is truly inspired.

The follow-up, 1976’s “Wired,” was a little heavy on the use of Jan Hammer’s jazz-fusion synthesizer noodling for my tastes, but Beck continued to shine with his guitar soloing, and the album again sold well in the US. He toured with Hammer’s group, released a live album with them, and also worked with jazz bassist Stanley Clarke on a few projects.

In the early ’80s, Beck was no longer the tempestuous rebel, eager to mix it up with a wide range of artists. He performed at several benefit concerts with Clapton, Page and others. He was fond of doing cover versions of well known songs (The Beatles’ “She’s a Woman” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” come to mind), but none was more successful than his 1985 reunion with Stewart for a scintillating new arrangement of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” which peaked at #5 on the US Mainstream Rock chart.

He contributed to records by a broad variety of other artists, from Bon Jovi to Seal, from Ozzy Osbourne to Roger Waters, from Tina Turner to Paul Rodgers, from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Robert Plant, and also worked with newer stars like Kelly Clarkson and Joss Stone in more recent years. “Who’s gonna say no when I got the call? I was proud that someone remembered I was even alive,” Beck joked in an interview in 2019. Most unusually, he recorded and performed with actor Johnny Depp, who happens to be a credible vocalist and guitarist as well. Their 2018 album “18” included reimaginings of such classics as Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby,” “Brian Wilson’s “Caroline, No,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and John Lennon’s “Isolation.”

When Beck was inducted into the Rock Hall as a solo artist in 2009, he was genuinely humble about it. “I couldn’t believe I was even nominated,” Beck said shortly afterwards. “I thought the Yardbirds was as close as I’d get to getting in. I’ve gone on long after that and gone through different musical changes. It’s very nice to hear that people have been listening.”

Page, who rarely speaks publicly about other musicians, wrote on social media last week, “The six-stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions. Jeff could channel music from the ethereal, his technique unique, his imagination apparently limitless. Jeff, I will miss you along with your millions of fans. Rest in peace.”

Said Sir Paul McCartney about his fellow Brit: ““Jeff Beck was a lovely man with a wicked sense of humour who played some of the best guitar music ever to come out of Great Britain. He was a superb technician who could strip down his guitar and put it back together again in time for the show.”

Jeff Beck was never a prolific artist, releasing a new LP only every 5-7 years for the remainder of his life, but he made those releases count. I’ve compiled what I consider the most impressive and/or intriguing tracks from each of his albums (Dig his wondrous cover of “Over the Rainbow” from “Emotion and Commotion”!), and I invite you to revel in these selections for the first time (as I just recently did) or refamiliarize yourself with them if you’ve been away from them for a while.

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