“We’re going to do kind of a science-fiction story, if you’ll bear with us,” David Crosby mentioned on August 18, 1969, as his band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young started enjoying their tune “Wooden 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. Yet the band’s Woodstock efficiency of “Wooden 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 car for probing the reaches of being human. While many anthems of the hippie period painted footage of folksy peace—together with CSNY’s personal “Teach Your Children” and “Our House,” each written by Graham Nash—“Wooden Ships” is an outright downer, a darkish account of the apocalypse. Still, it soars with cautious hope, its titular ship crusing both the ocean or outer area.
In reality, Crosby was identified for his love of all issues maritime, and to him, the ocean flowed into the celebrities. Musically, Crosby swirled all the pieces from free jazz to synthesizers into his cosmic Americana. “Science fiction was so expansive and it was so unlimited,” Crosby advised Neil deGrasse Tyson on the latter’s StarTalk podcast in 2016. “Anything could happen, and that was just rich to me. And I lusted after it.” His obsession with area exploration, rising musical know-how, 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 shortly reaching escape velocity with songs equivalent to “C.T.A.-102”—which blended folk-rock with digital noise whereas borrowing its title from a just lately found quasar. One of the explanations Crosby was ultimately fired from the Byrds was a inventive dispute over a tune he had written, “Triad,” which drew from Robert A. Heinlein’s basic novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s a tune about group intercourse, sure, nevertheless it units such terrestrial pleasures in opposition to a sci-fi backdrop. Where Dylan learn Jack Kerouac, Crosby learn Isaac Asimov.
Paradoxically, people—Crosby’s past love as a musician—is a type 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, because of the leftist likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. So his debut album from 1971, If I Could Only Remember My Name, turned not solely the crown jewel of his solo profession; it elevated folk-rock to an entire new firmament. The observe “What Are Their Names” comprises what is likely to be Crosby’s most on-the-nose lyric—“Peace is not an awful 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). It all 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.
In the liner notes to the CD reissue of the 1969 album Crosby, Stills & Nash, Crosby defined that “Wooden Ships” is an allegory the place “we imagined ourselves as the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization.” But though he outlived lots 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.