LOS ANGELES — David Crosby, who helped found two supergroups that broadened and deepened the reach of rock music, and who, with his outspoken political pronouncements and famously outsized appetites came to symbolize the Woodstock generation’s exuberance and excesses, has died, according to a source close to the musician.
Bedeviled by drug and alcohol addictions early in life and then corresponding medical problems as he grew old, Crosby was 81.
A guitarist who sang in a crystal-clear middle tenor, Crosby had a voice sometimes described as angelic. He wrote or co-wrote songs with evocative lyrics and unusual tunings, and many of them — “Eight Miles High,” “Guinnevere,” “Wooden Ships,” “Long Time Gone” — continue stirring the hearts of fans who had long since traded their mescaline for Medicare. He was twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
