5/3/2023 0 Comments Gonzalo lama![]() On the beach in Provincetown, where my family stayed every summer, I filled a bottle with sand, shells and seawater, brought it back to New York City, and put it on a kind of altar in my room as a reminder of my favorite place on Earth as I listened to If I Could Only Remember My Name over and over. The album opened up new spaces in my soul, as if the music was reflecting a secret self that I was only starting to discover inside me.Īs teenagers do, I developed a set of personal rituals to honor the sacredness of the music I loved. At the end of “Laughing,” David and Graham Nash’s intertwining voices soared to the heavens, with Joni Mitchell’s skimming harmony over the top, punctuated by Jerry Garcia’s distinctive “cry” on pedal-steel guitar. I wasn’t yet familiar with jazz, but tracks like “Song with No Words” and “Tamalpais High (At About 3)” prepared my ears to appreciate the modal meditations of Miles Davis and Bill Evans on Kind of Blue. ![]() With an all-star roster of brilliant improvisers that included members of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana, the album explored an astonishingly broad range of music, from spontaneous jams like “What Are Their Names” and “Music Is Love,” to the badass Phil Lesh-bass-driven “Cowboy Movie,” to a song called “Traction in the Rain” that seemed sculpted out of sunlight. Then David’s first solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name, hooked me for good. But there was nothing dated about the music, with those flamethrowing guitars and impossibly glorious harmonies soaring like Icarus toward the sun. With its Civil War-style portrait and embossed gatefold cover, Déjà Vu also seemed like an precious artifact from the past. I asked the guy behind the counter what he was playing and was confused as he recited a series of names that sounded like a law firm: “Crosby, Stills & Nash.” I was 12 years old.Ī year later, I bought another record by the same law firm, now with an additional partner named Neil Young. And the lyrics-about an elusive woman painting pentagrams on the wall of a garden-seemed timeless, as if they were taken from an ancient fable. ![]() Instead of the usual verses and choruses, an acoustic guitar spiraled inward upon itself endlessly, like a waterwheel glittering in the air. The story began in 1969 when I walked into a sandal shop in Provincetown-then a rustic fishing village and art colony at the tip of Cape Cod-and heard the strangest and most beautiful music I’d ever heard in my life.Īs the son of antiwar activists, I’d grown up on folk songs performed by socially conscious groups like The Weavers and Pete Seeger’s Almanac Singers. And now, one of the most profound and enjoyable friendships of my life is over. I waited for the other shoe to drop for three decades, but it never did. One of the most surprising twists in this story is that, despite the fact that David was practically more famous for pissing off his former bandmates than he was for being one of the most creative and influential musicians in rock history- the guy who helped inspire Dylan to go electric and turned The Beatles on to Indian music-he was never anything less than tender and respectful toward me. In an unlikely twist of fate, I went from being an obsessive teenage fan-rushing out to buy every new record, collecting every unreleased rarity I could find, staying up all night in a phone booth in a blizzard after a concert because I missed the last bus home-to being the guy David would send a just-written song to after leaving a voicemail, “Silberman, wake up! It’s Croz. Thankfully, I was never David’s manager, but for almost 30 years, the co-founder of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was my closest older friend. “Are you David’s manager?” one of them asked me eagerly. One night in 2016, I stepped out of David Crosby’s tour bus on a back alley in the Pacific Northwest and saw a group of boys waiting outside in the rain, holding albums and CDs that they were hoping David would sign. But perhaps I’ll see you the next quiet place
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