“We’re going to do sort of a science-fiction story, should you’ll bear with us,” David Crosby stated on August 18, 1969, as his band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Younger started taking part in their music “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 “Educate 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 house.
In truth, Crosby was recognized for his love of all issues maritime, and to him, the ocean flowed into the celebrities. Musically, Crosby swirled every part 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 house exploration, rising musical expertise, and the literature of the incredible solid a sort of future-folk.
Crosby’s band proper earlier than CSNY, the Byrds, began out as a gaggle of earthy Bob Dylan acolytes earlier than rapidly reaching escape velocity with songs equivalent to “C.T.A.-102”—which combined folk-rock with digital noise whereas borrowing its identify from a not too long ago found quasar. One of many causes Crosby was ultimately fired from the Byrds was a artistic dispute over a music he had written, “Triad,” which drew from Robert A. Heinlein’s traditional novel Stranger in a Unusual Land. It’s a music about group intercourse, sure, however it units such terrestrial pleasures towards a sci-fi backdrop. The place Dylan learn Jack Kerouac, Crosby learn Isaac Asimov.
Paradoxically, people—Crosby’s past love as a musician—is a kind fueled by custom slightly 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 Might Solely Keep 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” incorporates what could be Crosby’s most on-the-nose lyric—“Peace is just not an terrible lot to ask,” he sings—however he transcends that platitude with a fugue of plucked strings and layered voices (equipped 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 sort 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 lots of his technology’s hard-living musicians, Crosby did greater than survive. He altered the trajectory of American music with an creativeness far past his age.
