How David Crosby turned grief into hazy magic on his solo masterpiece If I Could Only Remember My Name

By editorial board on December 4, 2023

“Christine had been killed. The studio was somewhere I could go where I’d feel something other than lost”

Crosby was a man fabled for his voracious appetites, be they drugs, sex or music. Even amid the legendarily open-minded counterculture of the 1960s, Crosby was pushing things to their limits, and very often beyond. His tastes were catholic alright, but with an emphatically small ‘c’.

 

Crosby was actually hurting more than most, though his hedonistic lifestyle, on the surface at least, did much to deaden the pain. His lover Christine Hinton, who he’d first met during his time in The Byrds and the inspiration behind the classic Guinnevere, had died in a car crash in September 1969. Crosby was inconsolable; he took to the bottle and began using heroin. When it came time to make If I Could Only Remember My Name, in November 1970, he was living in his houseboat in Sausalito harbour and recording at all hours of the night at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco.

“It was a very tough time for me,” Crosby told Classic Rock in 2011, on the 40th anniversary of the album. “When we’d been recording Déjà Vu Christine had gotten killed and I was totally depressed. The studio was mainly somewhere I could go where I’d feel something other than just lost. It was the only place I got to stop crying.”

So was recording If I Could Only Remember My Name a healing experience?

“I wasn’t even trying to get healed, man,” Crosby replied. “I was just trying to make it through. But it was healing in the sense that, during Déjà Vu and throughout If I Could Only Remember My Name, I was still incredibly sad about Christine. And I didn’t really have any way to deal with that. It didn’t fix it, but the studio was the only place that worked for me in my life. Everything else was tinged with her death. It was very difficult. That feeling intruded into the studio sometimes too. At the Déjà Vu sessions, I remember just sitting on the floor and crying. By the time of If I Could Only Remember My Name, I was dealing with it, but not well. I was mostly just suppressing it. The studio and my boat in Sausalito were my only places of refuge.”

He wasn’t alone much, either. The sessions were peppered with big-name pals, among them Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash and the cream of the Bay Area rock fraternity: Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Greg Rolie, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. (Excerpt from lLoudersound)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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