David Crosby, musician, 1941-2023

Among the long line of notables in David Crosby’s family tree was an ancestor who signed the American Declaration of Independence. Crosby, who has died aged 81, observed the spirit if not the letter of that document.

A founding father of the Californian west coast rock scene of the 1960s and 1970s, he led a life of bohemian freedom and artistry. The hippy utopia he chased, first in The Byrds then in Crosby, Stills & Nash, was a place of pleasure-seeking and open-mindedness, where social and musical harmony would be as one. A mirage, perhaps, and not without personal danger — but it was conjured, and endures, in the intoxicating promise of Crosby’s voice.

Born in 1941, he grew up in Los Angeles in a prosperous family, the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer. He aspired to be an actor, studying drama at college, but switched to music during the 1950s folk revival. “I picked up the guitar as a shortcut to sex,” he claimed in his memoir Long Time Gone. But there were nobler impulses, too: he ascribed his deep love of harmony to being taken as a young child to a symphony by his mother.

He made his start as a musician in the LA coffeehouse circuit, then hit the road as a wandering troubadour in the early 1960s. “That’s really the beginning of my actual independence,” he recalled. The Byrds were formed in 1964 after he encountered fellow ex-folkies Gene Clark and Jim, later Roger, McGuinn on his return to LA. Expanded to a five-piece and inspired by the British Invasion (“We were Beatle-struck,” in Crosby’s description), they rapidly became standard-bearers for an insurgent west coast sound.

Combining folk and rock, they scored their first hit with a 1965 cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man”. Crosby played rhythm guitar and sang mellifluous group harmonies. The Byrds songs that he co-wrote, such as 1967’s “Renaissance Fair”, pushed them towards psychedelia. Crosby’s musical adventurousness — he was credited with turning George Harrison on to Ravi Shankar’s ragas — was sharpened by a hearty appetite for narcotics, from marijuana and hallucinogens to heroin and cocaine.

The most radical of The Byrds, politically as well creatively, Crosby was fired from the band in 1967. The following year, he joined forces with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and The Hollies’ Graham Nash to form Crosby, Stills & Nash. Enlarged by Neil Young in 1969, when they went from CSN to CSNY, they were a new phenomenon, the rock supergroup. Crosby characterised their different styles of writing as going from “soup to nuts”. But from these sometimes clashing characters came beautifully tuneful music and unison singing.

Crosby was at the heart of their vocal style. “Those harmonies came out of the Everly Brothers, late-Fifties and early-Sixties jazz, and classical music,” he said. Among the songs he wrote were the elegantly complex “Déjà Vu” and the jazzy “Wooden Ships” (he was a keen sailor who once fantasised about leading a hippy flotilla to a paradise island). But harmony was harder to maintain outside songs. Drugs, jealousy and ego caused friction. Success — each of the band earned $7mn after taxes in 1970 — fuelled their misbehaviour.

Joni Mitchell, who briefly went out with Crosby — who produced her debut 1968 album — described him as “wonderful company and a great appreciator”. But he was also drawn to self-gratification. He slept with many women (his girlfriend Christine Hinton, with whom he thought he would settle down, died in a car accident in 1969). His drug use spiralled into addiction in the 1970s. In 1985, he was jailed for drugs and weapons offences.

Tranquillity came with his 1987 marriage to Jan Dance, who survives him. He returned to making solo albums after a 21-year break with 2014’s Croz. It launched a fruitful late period of work, ending with 2021’s For Free. Despite advancing years and the scars of past hedonism, Crosby’s pure voice was miraculously unchanged, as idealistic as ever. “We dream,” he sang on Croz, “Don’t we all dream?”