David Crosby

David Crosby, founding member of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash — he also joined the Buffalo Springfield among many other musical ventures — has died at age 81. The 2020s are going to be a rough decade for the surviving icons of the 1960s music scene, and Crosby, who received a controversial liver transplant nearly 30 years ago (it was paid for by Phil Collins) is not somebody I would have predicted would have been around long enough to add to the decade’s grim tally.

An anecdote: About 25 years ago a friend offered to take me to a show Crosby was playing in what must have been about a 1,500 seat venue in Denver. The place ended up half full, and my friend told me he had gotten the tickets for free from the promoter, who was “papering the house” as they say in the business. This made me contemplate how around the time of Woodstock CSNY had been one of the biggest if not the biggest acts in the business, and here he and we were today.

Lets listen to a little David Crosby: