DAVID CROSBY 1941-2023

As the architect of two 60s supergroups - and spokesman for the peace and love generation - David Crosby will be remembered for his contribution to the counterculture, not the darkness in his life

- Henry Yates

For better and worse, nobody embodied the counterculture like David Crosby. Close your eyes now and you’ll picture him at his 60s peak, as an idealistic young rebel in fringed jacket and Obelix moustache, offering his worldview from a West Coast stage. Think of his music and you’ll recall the wild-honey voice that defied age and gravity all his life, or those underrated guitar skills, standing out even in line-ups that featured such stone-cold pickers as The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Quite rightly, it’s this benevolent side of ‘Croz’ that was evoked by the well-wishers when the 81-year-old passed over on 18 January. But it’s telling that even the most loving eulogies came with a caveat. “David and I butted heads a lot over time,” wrote Stills. “They were mostly glancing blows, yet still left us with numb skulls. I was happy to be at peace with him. He was without question a giant of a musician.”

As a singer, writer, player and mouthpiece for rock’s most outspoken generation, Crosby’s genius was indeed undeniable. Yet those qualities were only one facet of a complex man whose estimation of himself as controlling, egotistical – “the world’s most opinionated man”, as he put it on CSN’s Anything At All – would at times have been endorsed by his closest friends.

Depending on when you encountered him, Crosby could be the blissed-out utopianism of the hippie dream or its bloodshot-eyed reflection in a cracked mirror. He could be the peace and love personification of 1969’s Woodstock festival or the pistol-packing paranoia of its evil twin, Altamont.