Chew's Reviews - David Crosby: Remember My Name

By Gary Chew |  

Let me give you a taste of how rhetorically adept David Crosby is in a new documentary film. This is a quote from the iconic namesake of Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young when he's describing how it was for him when he realized he was falling in love with Joni Mitchell (Lovin' this one): “It was like falling into a cement mixer!” Whoa! How can any man not be jealous when hearing that Crosbian utterance?

The entire film is almost as if Croz is in a confession booth revealing his sins to a man wearing a collar seated on the other side of a wooden screen. (Please imagine if you wish, Stephen Colbert.) The man, off-camera and not really in a confessional, is Cameron Crowe, who made ALMOST FAMOUS (2000). Crowe, a producer of this entertaining doc, has an abundance of vintage performance and interview material that he's loaned to A. J. Eaton, the director of DAVID CROSBY: REMEMBER MY NAME.

If one takes Mr. Crosby at his word, he has many things for which to atone: mainly his bleak record for being a gigantic jerk to other well-known figures who've gigged and caroused with him. And that's on top of his real record for doing joint time in the Huntsville, Texas prison on illegal drugs and weapons charges. But aren't most of this convict's excellent and unique songs really mellow?

It's a lengthy list of famous biggies who've been edited into this pretty smooth display of a new Crosby Saga, some of them being interviewed by TV talk show host Dick Cavett; one named Joni Mitchell. A few of the other personalities with face time in Eaton's “Davy Doc” are the Fab-Four, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Jackson Browne and Cass Elliot. To this day, Croz holds no love for Jim Morrison, calling the deceased Doors rocker a dork. But his super bud early on, after CSN materialized in the kitchen of a neat Laurel Canyon home, was Graham Nash. In decades past, Nash and Crosby totally clicked, but later on and now --- not so much … if at all.

Crosby, today, has truck neither with Nash nor Stills. Funny, I noticed in the film, lots of chatter out of David regarding Graham and nada about Stephen. I didn't see a clip of Stills even speaking, although I did watch his jaw moving during the sequences depicting CSN singing. Maybe David has never liked Stephen, even when they were first on the road and stage together. Moreover, Crosby was also tight with Young when CSN brought him on board. It's said, Neil also has zilch back-and-forth with “King” David now.

Crosby still carries a heavy load for the loss of Christine Winton, his 21-year-old girlfriend who died in an auto/bus crash driving her VW near Novato, CA in 1969. Discussing, in general, his relationship with women, the singer/songwriter/musician lays tons of guilt on himself. All the many, many women he claims to have known are the good guys … he's the bad guy. But my take on that goes this way: he appears comfortable discussing a topic of such intimacy for a documentary that's just about him. The ego is surely undying.

At 77, with a bundle of physical maladies (though off the drugs and booze), he maintains an apparently good working and loving relationship with his current wife, Jan Dance. Seems that Crosby knows time is now not on his side. That probably could be why he also states in the documentary with a certain degree of wisdom that, “Time is the final currency!”

Uh, should you, dear reader, ever be in the market for it, the brand name for this man's weed is …....... Mighty Croz.”

Copyright © 2019 by Gary Chew. All rights reserved.