David Crosby, whose voice soared with the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, dies
LOS ANGELES — David Crosby, who helped found two supergroups that broadened and deepened the reach of rock music, and who, with his outspoken political pronouncements and famously outsized appetites came to symbolize the Woodstock generation’s exuberance and excesses, has died, according to a source close to the musician.
Bedeviled by drug and alcohol addictions early in life and then corresponding medical problems as he grew old, Crosby was 81.
A guitarist who sang in a crystal-clear middle tenor, Crosby had a voice sometimes described as angelic. He wrote or co-wrote songs with evocative lyrics and unusual tunings, and many of them — “Eight Miles High,” “Guinnevere,” “Wooden Ships,” “Long Time Gone” — continue stirring the hearts of fans who had long since traded their mescaline for Medicare. He was twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
For some, Crosby took his place in rock history on Aug. 18, 1969, when he performed at Woodstock with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and the fledgling group’s recent addition, Neil Young.
At 3 a.m. on the festival’s final night, they played for about an hour. When they launched into “Long Time Gone,” an elegy inspired by Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination the previous year, Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus wrote of Crosby that he had “never seen a musician more involved in his music.” At one point, Crosby aimed his twelve-string guitar over the stage’s edge and, belting out the powerful lyrics he
