Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

Today we're talking about the life and music of David Crosby, who died last week at the age of 81.

I'll be joined by David Brown, author of Crosby stills Nash and Young,

the wild definitive saga of Rock's greatest supergroup. Also joining me is Andy Green,

who interviewed Kros many times himself.

As we go through this story, we'll also play a few clips from Andy's last two interviews with

Crosby.

Just last week, we did a tribute for Jeff Beck and we had Mike Campbell of Tom Paddy and the Heartbreakers on and he said

I don't want to think about what's up for the next five years, but we'll take it as a come

In terms of rock star deaths and then just a few days later we lose an absolute giant of

rock and roll and of the 60s David Crosby. Let's start at the beginning I mean he was

born to kind of an old money family although the access to the

old money seemed weirdly intermittent but his dad was a very accomplished

cinematographer and photographer he did did the cinematography for High Noon.

He won an Oscar, like one of the first Oscars. It's funny because while Crosby's talent for music was evident,

one of his original thoughts was, hey, I have an Indian Hollywood. I can go to Hollywood and be an actor.

Basically, his original goal was to be a Nepo baby in Hollywood. That didn't quite work out.

But one of the things reading your book, David, and reading Crosby's first memoir which is so

good this was a guy with a truly natural sort of God-given gift for vocal harmony he

was singing vocal harmony apparently without even trying at like age six which is so interesting

And he had a very interesting musical background too he did not really grow up with rock and roll even though he was a teenager when rock and roll was coming around. He told me in one of my interviews with him. Yeah, he didn't really listen much to like Chuck Berry. He was listening to Bach and he was listening to jazz. So he had a very interesting relationship right from the beginning

with choral music and unconventional chords and tunings.

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