The Tracking Angle Interview: David Crosby

TA: Let's begin with If I Could Only Remember My Name , your first solo album. It won some awards for sound quality. You once were quoted as saying the engineer Steve Barncord did a really good job. Do you think that a record like that could be made and released today?

DC: Probably not. Things have changed in the field. It's not as loose as it was then. Nowadays, if it isn't a clone of whatever's at the top of the charts, it's very hard to get anybody to pay any attention to it at all. We (CSN&Y) had just gotten through doing Déjà vu, you know? And I had more stuff and I was just having fun in the studio. It was the only place that I was really happy right then. That was not long after that girl had gotten killed that was my old lady, and so the studio was my refuge. I would hang out there and all my friends that were loose on any given night would wind up there. It was very self-indulgent, but we had no push, there was no pressure so we could do anything that I could think of. That's not true these days. Nowadays, the prices are so huge and the game is so distorted that winning is what matters and MTV has changed it to where theatrical acts win more than musical acts. Smoke bombs and costumes, you know, how much rage you can seem to express and anything to cut through the fog. It has very little to do with music. But that was a very musical album. I think if it came out now, it would fail.

TA: I don't even know if you could get a label to release something that unconventional now. A major label, anyway.

DC: It's very difficult -- you see people, for instance Michael Hedges, whom I dearly love, who is just that innovative, and .... excuse me for that, that's a very un-humble thing to say ...

TA: No, it's true. Absolutely.

DC: But he does tremendously innovative stuff and is an utterly brilliant musician and he's still struggling to get his point across. And the same is true of other good singer-songwriters that are trying to break out now: Shawn Colvin, who is absolutely fantastic, and Marc Cohn. After he had that one hit, you know he didn't get a hit with the second album, and after that Atlantic Records is like, "Marc Cohn? Who?"

TA: It's like some expired shelf-life with a very short duration.

DC: Yes. "He's not here!" There are labels that don't treat people that way, but Atlantic is famous for it. If you have a hit on the radio, they can market it fantastically well. You know, witness Blowtie and the Hoofish.

TA: Right.

DC: Actually, I have no beef with them because I sang all the harmonies on their first single.

TA: Yeah, I remember I read that.

DC: Just because they were nice kids. But, you know what the deal is. That's how most major record companies deal now. They're after that bomb, and they do not sustain with an artist and they do not have any follow-through with an artist. And, what they want in material and artists that they can sort of generate: "Okay, give me a pound of bass player, a pound of drummer, a sort of androgynous-looking singer, the guitar-player has to wear a hat, call it ... Vandalism!"

TA: It's kind of a 1990's version of "So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star." Those are the ingredients.

DC: Yeah, only it's worse.

TA: Much worse.

DC: They really do think like that. And they offer this incredibly creative bullshit about how they really support their artists and really love the poetry.

TA: Not a big surprise, unfortunately.

DC: No, I know that you're around it and you know how it works.

TA: The last Crosby, Stills and Nash album, which is the one Glyn Johns produced, which I thought was the best thing you guys have done in a long time -- I didn't really see or hear much about that anywhere. Relatively speaking.

DC: You mean, After the Sun ?

TA: That was really a nice record. I don't know what your feelings are about it, but I liked it a lot.

DC: Um, I liked it. I thought that not all of the material on it was great, but I thought it was a pretty good record, and Atlantic just cleared it out like a Frisbee and blew it out of the air. They do that. They did that to the live album that I just put out last year.