David Crosby

Dancing Like Children: David Crosby on Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky

A guest posting today from our friend, New York Times best-selling historian Steve Silberman, on his dear friend David Crosby

A year ago, on January 18, 2023, David Crosby died with COVID-19 at home in Santa Ynez, California. To most people, he was the walrus-mustached prototypical hippie who added angelic harmonies to songs by groups like the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. To a generation of younger online fans, he was the mighty Croz, a cantankerous progressive who gave brutally honest ratings of the artfulness of rolled joints to those who bravely submitted a pic. To me, David was a close friend and an underappreciated genius who helped transform the shlocky commercial enterprise of late-‘50s pop into a mature and subtle art form by infusing it with jazz-inflected melodies, harmonies influenced by Bulgarian folk choirs, and a passion for social justice inspired by Odetta and the Weavers.

Few people know, however, that early in David’s career — at the moment he was becoming famous — he had a glimpse of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky dancing ecstatically together at a show that made such a vivid impression, David remembered it for the rest of his life as a vision of love transcending the limitations of gender.

In the fall of 1965, the Byrds were the hottest band in Los Angeles, due in part to the relentless promotional efforts of the band’s manager, Jim Dickson, who booked the band for months of shows at Ciro’s, a classic old-Hollywood supper club on the Sunset Strip that had once been home to boldface names like Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart. In March, when the band’s epic run began, only a dozen or so curious teenagers showed up at the door. But a month later, the Byrds’ electrified version of a new, unreleased song by Bob Dylan — “Mr. Tambourine Man” — was released as a single. It rocketed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK singles chart and became the title track of the Byrds’ debut album. The elusive Dylan himself came down to Ciro’s to bless the proceedings. Like the tiny Indra Club in Hamburg where the nascent Beatles woodshedded their way to glory, Ciro’s became the steamy incubator of rock and roll’s future.

Dickson juiced the crowd with a crew of freeform dancers led by sculptor Vito Paulekas who gyrated orgasmically as the band blew the roof off. To make the scene go viral before the term existed, Dickson told everyone to bring along the hottest celebrities, the foxiest “foxes,” and most outrageous groupies they knew. Soon a line of turned-on stars and starlets stretched down the block, clamoring to get in every night. Peter Fonda danced with Odetta and Lenny Bruce brought his mother. The whole Sunset Strip was revitalized, becoming one of the flashpoints of an emerging global youth culture, immortalized by Crosby’s future bandmate Stephen Stills in the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth.”

Allen and Peter turned up at the club that December as if summoned by a hip Bat Signal, immersing themselves in the scene for three weeks. It had been a tumultuous year for the poets. The previous June, Allen had kickstarted the cultural phenomenon known as Swinging London by reading with Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall, organized by Allen’s friend Barbara Rubin, which drew an audience of 7000 people, including Indira Gandhi. Upon returning to New York City, he’d been strip-searched at the airport by customs officials under suspicion of smuggling narcotics. Right before Allen went to Los Angeles, Dylan gave him a gift that would have a decisive influence on his poetic practice: a Uher tape recorder, which he used to capture the spontaneous “road poesy” that comprised The Fall of America. What Allen was doing in L.A. for the holidays with Peter, he told his friend Lucien Carr, was just having fun.

As a result, when the young David Crosby, looking like a psychedelicized Prince Valiant, gazed out from the stage in his green suede cape at the swirling madness unleashed by “Eight Miles High” – a song that the band was working on in the studio that month, influenced by Ravi Shankar’s ragas and John Coltrane’s torrential soloing – one of the things that blew his mind was the sight of two grown men dancing with abandon: Allen and Peter. “They were the most out gay people I had ever met. They were so wide open and having so much fun, they were like children dancing,” David recalled on a podcast series that we did together in 2020 called Freak Flag Flying. “It made everyone love them. Everybody else was trying to do the Shuggalooba or the Whamma-Damma or the Humma-Humma. ‘The dance this week is… wiggle your hips this way and put your left foot….’ — you know. But these guys were just blazingly high, full of joy, and obviously in love with each other. They danced like children.”

David knew who Allen was, having absorbed Beat sensibility through the books and other subcultural avenues, like many members of his generation. “I was unquestionably affected by all of those guys’ writing,” he told me in 1995. “A lot of my iconoclastic, outside-the-mainstream, don’t-take-the-establishment-point-of-view-for-being-what it-says-it-is-at-face-value attitude. A lot of my go-find-out-for-myself-what’s-on-the-other-side-of-that-hill. To say it another way: one thing we’re sure we don’t know is, we don’t know. A sense of adventure.”

Though David was primarily interested in women, his sexual adventuring did not exclude men. But the notion that two guys could not only get off together, but be as deeply in love as a heterosexual married couple, was new. Seeing Allen and Peter opened up areas of emotional possibility that David explored further in “Triad,” a song about a ménage à trois with ambiguous pronouns that proved so controversial among his bandmates that they refused to release it on their next album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. David was fired from the band two years later, which liberated him to form Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “The dream was extended families, and other permutations sexually, too,” he explained to me in an interview for Goldmine magazine in 1995. “We thought that it was possible to transcend the monogamous kind of two-by-two relationship, and go way further with it. Across sex barriers, across number barriers — make love to who you wanted to, in whatever numbers pleased you, and in whatever combinations pleased you. That sounded like a really good idea.”

The singer-songwriter and the poet reunited in 1992, when Crosby, Stills, and Nash played at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado and Raymond Foye invited David to a lecture on Dylan at Naropa University, where Allen was teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ed Berrigan recalled, “Allen walked up the center aisle to the audience mic, arm-in-arm with rock star David Crosby—a complete surprise to everyone. Crosby stepped up to the mic and said something to the effect of: ‘Writing a song is like throwing a paper airplane over a brick wall—you don’t know who it’s going to reach.’”

His songs are not done with reaching new listeners. One of the last times I saw David, he played me a copy of his luminous last album, recorded with Michael League, Becca Stevens, and Michelle Willis of the Lighthouse Band, of which he was immensely proud. On January 14, Michelle performed a song called “He Waits” from the album at the Bitter End club in New York City. Hopefully, the album, tentatively titled Hello Moon, will be released someday.  And six months before he died, David sent me these lines in a poem:

Almost done
almost done
The singer sings
Soon enough he’s gone
But not the song
It goes on and on
A newborn babe
Never growing old
Never quite gone
Rolling on and on