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“To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed. Not necessarily violent and ugly, just unfriendly and distracted,” Bob Dylan told me last month. “You’re self-sufficient and you stay focused.”
That was David Crosby, who died on Thursday at 81, after a lifetime in search of not fame and fortune, but exactly that elusive creative spark Dylan spoke about.
In the wake of his passing, Crosby is being remembered as many things—legend, iconoclast, Boomer icon, curmudgeon, and even asshole—all of which underscore precisely the life path he chose: one of a true creator and collaborator, rather than some mere mortal. Freak flags, as one writer put it, are flying at half-staff. It’s all fitting and beautiful (even the asshole part), and would no doubt make the typically effervescent Crosby laugh that high, cackling laugh that was so singularly his.