On September 30, 1969, David Crosby‘s girlfriend Christine Hinton packed their two cats into her green Volkswagen to take them to the vet then drove off from their place in Marin County. While she was driving, one of the cats escaped inside the van and jumped on Hinton, causing her to veer in the path of an oncoming school bus, which killed her instantly.
“I watched a part of David die that day,” recalled Graham Nash of Crosby, who also had to identify Hinton’s body. “He wondered aloud what the universe was doing to him. And he went off the rails; he was never the same again. We kept working, but the hippy love and sunshine in the first album had disappeared. We were all tormented, miserable, all coked out of our minds.”
The week of Hinton’s death, Crosby, Stills & Nash’s first album had also gone gold in the U.S., and the band was already well into their chart-topping opus, Déjà Vu, with the addition of Neil Young.
Still grieving, Crosby was also at his lowest point with addictions when he began working on his debut solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name. “The only place that I knew I wouldn’t be utterly terrified and crying and distraught was in the studio,” said Crosby. “They all knew that the only time I was happy was when I was singing, so they got me singing every chance they could get. It was an act of kindness, but it was also joy, man.”
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“The only place that I knew I wouldn’t be utterly terrified and crying and distraught was in the studio,” said Crosby. “They all knew that the only time I was happy was when I was singing, so they got me singing every chance they could get. It was an act of kindness, but it was also joy, man.”
[RELATED: David Crosby’s Salute to Music, Co-Written With Neil Young and Graham Nash]
Released in 1971, If I Could Only Remember My Name went to No. 12 on the Billboard 200 and featured an all-star cast of guests, including Young, Grateful Dead‘s Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, and Santana‘s Michael Shrieve, who co-wrote “What Are Their Names,” with Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick, David Freiberg, and Paul Kantner on its chorale, along with Joni Mitchell who also appears on “Laughing,” among others.
Nash also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the song, along with the opening “Music Is Love,” “Traction in the Rain,” “Song with No Words,” “Tamalpais High,” and “Laughing,” a song written by Crosby for George Harrison, urging the Beatle to take the Maharishi and other gurus with a grain of salt.
[RELATED: How George Harrison Inspired David Crosby’s 1971 Song “Laughing”]
“I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here”
At the end of If I Could Only Remember My Name is Crosby’s requiem to Hinton, “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here,” a somber one-minute-19-second hymnal of chants. “I don’t know where that came from,” recalled Crosby. “It was a hallucination. I’ve always been drawn to strange vocal works. I overdubbed six tracks a cappella, with echo. Later I was left with a persistent feeling it was about Christine Hinton, my girlfriend who was killed.”
He continued, “I was very much in love with her [Hinton], and she went away very suddenly. I was not equipped to deal with the loss. This piece was a sudden, improvised, overwhelming requiem.”
Recorded at Wally Heider’s Studio A in San Francisco during the fall of 1970, Crosby said the harmonies throughout the album were the “Mormon Tabernacle Choir of me,” including his closing outro.
“I made that song in about 15 minutes,” remembered Crosby. “I was standing in Wally Heider’s [recording studio], using their beautiful echo chamber, a real live chamber, and I was just fooling with it. There [are] six vocals there, and I did them one after another, two minutes each. And it’s probably the best piece of music I ever thought up. I certainly haven’t heard anybody else do anything even vaguely in that area, not one.”
“I Love It”
Initially, the critics didn’t get Crosby’s experimental leaps on If I Could Only Remember My Name and expected some form of continuity from previous CSN releases. “They were looking for another record that was full of big, flashy lead guitar and blues licks and screaming lyrics,” said Crosby. “[‘If I Could Only Remember My Name’] was not where everything else was going, so they thought it was irrelevant.”
Regardless of any mixed reviews early on If I Could Only Remember My Name was an album Crosby remained proud of decades after its release. In 2019, director Cameron Crowe also pulled part of its title for his documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name.
“I loved it,” said Crosby during the 50th anniversary of his debut in 2021. “You have to understand, the result was immensely positive. It came out of a really incredibly painful situation, but the music won. It’s like a battle happened and the music won. The result was this shiny, glorious, beautiful f–king piece of music that I’m immensely proud of.”
Crosby added, “The pain doesn’t show through; the only place you can sort of start to feel the pain is the very last song. The vocal thing on ‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here,’ you can feel the pain, but most of the record is a triumph of the joy of making music and being friends, over almost deadly sadness. I love it. I still listen to it.”
Photo: Anna Webber / Courtesy of Republic Media
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