Déjà vu: David Crosby and Ginsberg recalled

Twelve months on from singer's death

ONE YEAR ago, the death of one of the most significant singer-songwriters in US popular music was announced. David Crosby, who was 81, had been an integral part of two of the greatest rock bands of the later twentieth century: firstly, the Byrds, an act fêted in the middle of the 1960s as ‘the American Beatles’, and, secondly, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, one of the earliest of the so-called supergroups, combining the talents of established performers who had already forged successful careers with earlier ensembles.

But Crosby, a true politico with a campaigning heart, was much more than just a band member. His unique composing style, punctuated by periods in his life damaged by narcotic excess and a time spent in prison, would continue to sound after the groups had been left behind.

The final decade of a brilliant, if volatile, résumé sparkled with the warmth of five solo albums – all illuminated with the same highly personal poetry and jazz-inclined guitar chords and featuring work quite as good as that he had concocted with those famed battalions of music makers over the previous 50 years.

As a tribute to the anniversary of Crosby’s passing, we carry below an essay by STEVE SILBERMAN, an individual uniquely positioned at the crossroads of Beat and rock culture and a welcome guest contributor to the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation.

The acclaimed writer, whose work at the magazine Wired has drawn accolades and whose bestselling 2015 book Neurotribes dealt with autism rights and issues of neurodiversity, attended Allen Ginsberg’s Naropa University in 1977 and then became the poet’s teaching assistant. Later he established a close association with David Crosby, a man who had been a musical hero but with whom he developed a long-standing friendship. Such rich experiences provide us with a unique vision…

‘Dancing like children…’

By Steve Silberman

A year ago, on January 18th, 2023, David Crosby died with COVID-19 at home in Santa Ynez, California. To most people, he was the walrus-mustached prototypical hippie who added angelic harmonies to songs by groups like the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. To a generation of younger online fans, he was the mighty Croz, a cantankerous progressive who gave brutally honest ratings of the artfulness of rolled joints to those who bravely submitted a pic. To me, David was a close friend and an underappreciated genius who helped transform the shlocky commercial enterprise of late-‘50s pop into a mature and subtle art form by infusing it with jazz-inflected melodies, harmonies influenced by Bulgarian folk choirs, and a passion for social justice inspired by Odetta and the Weavers.

Few people know, however, that early in David’s career – at the moment he was becoming famous – he had a glimpse of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky dancing ecstatically together at a show that made such a vivid impression, David remembered it for the rest of his life as a vision of love transcending the limitations of gender.

In the fall of 1965, the Byrds were the hottest band in Los Angeles, due in part to the relentless promotional efforts of the band’s manager, Jim Dickson, who booked the band for months of shows at Ciro’s, a classic old-Hollywood supper club on the Sunset Strip that had once been home to boldface names like Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart. In March, when the band’s epic run began, only a dozen or so curious teenagers showed up at the door. But a month later, the Byrds’ electrified version of a new, unreleased song by Bob Dylan – ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ – was released as a single. It rocketed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK singles chart and became the title track of the Byrds’ debut album. The elusive Dylan himself came down to Ciro’s to bless the proceedings. Like the tiny Indra Club in Hamburg where the nascent Beatles woodshedded their way to glory, Ciro’s became the steamy incubator of rock and roll’s future.

Pictured above: David Crosby and Allen Ginsberg at Naropa, Boulder, Colorado, July 1992. Photo by Raymond Foye, Courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate/Stanford University Libraries

Dickson juiced the crowd with a crew of freeform dancers led by sculptor Vito Paulekas who gyrated orgasmically as the band blew the roof off. To make the scene go viral before the term existed, Dickson told everyone to bring along the hottest celebrities, the foxiest ‘foxes’ and most outrageous groupies they knew. Soon a line of turned-on stars and starlets stretched down the block, clamoring to get in every night. Peter Fonda danced with Odetta and Lenny Bruce brought his mother. The whole Sunset Strip was revitalized, becoming one of the flashpoints of an emerging global youth culture, immortalized by Crosby’s future bandmate Stephen Stills in the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth.”

Allen and Peter turned up at the club that December as if summoned by a hip Bat Signal, immersing themselves in the scene for three weeks. It had been a tumultuous year for the poets. The previous June, Allen had kickstarted the cultural phenomenon known as Swinging London by reading with Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall, organized by Allen’s friend Barbara Rubin, which drew an audience of 7,000 people, including Indira Gandhi. Upon returning to New York City, he’d been strip-searched at the airport by customs officials under suspicion of smuggling narcotics. Right before Allen went to Los Angeles, Dylan gave him a gift that would have a decisive influence on his poetic practice: a Uher tape recorder, which he used to capture the spontaneous ‘road poesy’ that comprised The Fall of America. What Allen was doing in L.A. for the holidays with Peter, he told his friend Lucien Carr, was just having fun.

As a result, when the young David Crosby, looking like a psychedelicized Prince Valiant, gazed out from the stage in his green suede cape at the swirling madness unleashed by ‘Eight Miles High’ – a song that the band was working on in the studio that month, influenced by Ravi Shankar’s ragas and John Coltrane’s torrential soloing – one of the things that blew his mind was the sight of two grown men dancing with abandon: Allen and Peter. ‘They were the most out gay people I had ever met. They were so wide open and having so much fun, they were like children dancing,’ David recalled on a podcast series that we did together in 2020 called Freak Flag Flying. ‘It made everyone love them. Everybody else was trying to do the Shuggalooba or the Whamma-Damma or the Humma-Humma. “The dance this week is… wiggle your hips this way and put your left foot….” – you know. But these guys were just blazingly high, full of joy, and obviously in love with each other. They danced like children.’

David knew who Allen was, having absorbed Beat sensibility through the books and other subcultural avenues, like many members of his generation. ‘I was unquestionably affected by all of those guys’ writing,’ he told me in 1995. ‘A lot of my iconoclastic, outside-the-mainstream, don’t-take-the-establishment-point-of-view-for-being-what it-says-it-is-at-face-value attitude. A lot of my go-find-out-for-myself-what’s-on-the-other-side-of-that-hill. To say it another way: one thing we’re sure we don’t know is, we don’t know. A sense of adventure.’

Pictured above: Steve Silberman with David Crosby

Though David was primarily interested in women, his sexual adventuring did not exclude men. But the notion that two guys could not only get off together, but be as deeply in love as a heterosexual married couple, was new. Seeing Allen and Peter opened up areas of emotional possibility that David explored further in ‘Triad’, a song about a ménage à trois with ambiguous pronouns that proved so controversial among his bandmates that they refused to release it on their next album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. David was fired from the band two years later, which liberated him to form Crosby, Stills, and Nash. ‘The dream was extended families, and other permutations sexually, too,’ he explained to me in an interview for Goldmine magazine in 1995. ‘We thought that it was possible to transcend the monogamous kind of two-by-two relationship, and go way further with it. Across sex barriers, across number barriers – make love to who you wanted to, in whatever numbers pleased you, and in whatever combinations pleased you. That sounded like a really good idea.’

The singer-songwriter and the poet reunited in 1992, when Crosby, Stills, and Nash played at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado and Raymond Foye invited David to a lecture on Dylan at Naropa University, where Allen was teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ed Berrigan recalled, ‘Allen walked up the center aisle to the audience mic, arm-in-arm with rock star David Crosby – a complete surprise to everyone. Crosby stepped up to the mic and said something to the effect of: “Writing a song is like throwing a paper airplane over a brick wall – you don’t know who it’s going to reach.”’

His songs are not done with reaching new listeners. One of the last times I saw David, he played me a copy of his luminous last album, recorded with Michael League, Becca Stevens, and Michelle Willis of the Lighthouse Band, of which he was immensely proud. On January 14th, Michelle performed a song called ‘He Waits’ from the album at the Bitter End club in New York City. Hopefully, the album, tentatively titled Hello Moon, will be released someday. And six months before he died, David sent me these lines in a poem:

Almost done
almost done
The singer sings
Soon enough he’s gone
But not the song
It goes on and on
A newborn babe
Never growing old
Never quite gone
Rolling on and on

Editor’s note: Thank you to the author Steve Silberman and we acknowledge the permission of the Allen Ginsberg Estate on the Allen Project website, where this article first appeared, to republish the piece