David Crosby was a musical genius, but also, by his own admission, and everyone else’s, irascible and egomaniacal. Photo: AP

If thought had wings for flights of fancy you could say the angels now had a new voice to join in harmony in their choir. And that voice would belong to David Crosby.

Paradoxically, Crosby’s life traversed heaven and hell. The heaven was music and family. The hell was the landscape of addiction through which he travelled for a good part of his 81 years on earth.

It was not for nothing he called his memoir “Long Time Gone”. The title of one of his songs became an apt description of the lost, wasted years.

Interviewed recently on how he could still possibly be alive, he replied: “I don’t know. I have no idea.” Last week, he died, quietly and peacefully, surrounded by family.

The manner of his death certainly didn’t mirror a large part of his career. For one widely acknowledged and applauded for having a gift for vocal harmony, there were demons within him that tried to derail that sweetness and beauty into oblivion. The 1980s, for instance, were lost.

In 1985, he was incarcerated in a jail in Texas for almost a year for offences involving heroin, cocaine and weapons. The same year, he was the subject of police attention for drink-driving, hit-and-run, and more drug and weapons charges. He details it all in harrowing detail in his memoir.

In 2004, he was also before the courts for weapons and drug offences in New York. The cannabis charge was dismissed (Crosby was a lifelong purveyor of weed). He was fined $5000 on the pistol offence, and released with the warning, basically, not to get arrested again.

In that recent interview, Crosby said: “People ask me have I got regrets. I have huge regrets, I have huge regrets about the time I wasted being smashed.” Of heroin, he said it was “just great, only the first time. After that you’re just trying to catch up, you never get back, never.”

As it turned out, jail was the best thing for him. He started the long road back, notwithstanding the abovementioned incidents. By the end of the decade, he had released his second solo album “A Thousand Roads”. It had been 17 years since his first.

That first solo album is now, rightly, hailed a masterpiece of the times. “If I Could Only Remember My Name” was a blossoming of everything that had been hinted at from his time with The Byrds and then with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young.

CSN and then CSN&Y put the “super” into group. In the early 1970s, their sales were Everest-like. With the fame, though, there was the friction. As Stills has said, he and Crosby bumped heads so much they ended up numbskulls.

Crosby was, by his own admission, and everyone else’s, irascible and egomaniacal. He also was dealt the awful blow of his girlfriend Christine Hinton dying in a car crash in 1969. He tried to medicate away the grief. On the 50th anniversary of “If I Could Only Remember My Name”, Crosby said of the record, “It came out of a really incredibly painful situation, but the music won.”

PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.

That record is the essence of Crosby and his music. The first track, really, is the core and soul of the man. It’s called “Music is Love”. The songs then swirl through a kaleidoscope of words and melodies, some songs have no words, such as “Tamalpais High (At About 3)”, which a commentator to the track on YouTube sums up thus: “This is exactly how the late ‘60s and ‘70s sounded … if living had a soundtrack….” And some, such as “What Are Their Names”, focus on Crosby’s lifelong hatred of an establishment that spits out young lives to perpetuate its power.

A year before, CSN&Y had released what turned out to be their pinnacle in “Déjà Vu”. It included the Crosby songs, the title track and the one that became closely associated with him, the anthem to hippydom “Almost Cut My Hair”, where he lets his freak flag fly.

Musically, though, it’s “Déjà Vu” that is his message to the universe. The time changes, the ascending and descending harmonies, the meandering of mood in the clouds of mysticism, held aloft with the lyrics:

If I had ever been here before
I would probably know just what to do
Don’t you?
If I had ever been here before
On another time around the wheel
I would probably know just how to deal
With all of you
And I feel like I’ve been here before
Feel like I’ve been here before
And you know, it makes me wonder
What’s going on under the ground.

The breadth and depth of his writing and harmony gift, was probably no more in evidence than in “Guinnerve” off the first CSN album. Crosby told Rolling Stone: “That is a very unusual song, it’s in a very strange tuning (EBDGAD) with strange time signatures. It’s about three women that I loved. One of whom was Christine Hinton – the girl who got killed, who was my girlfriend – and one of whom was Joni Mitchell, and the other one is somebody that I can’t tell. It might be my best song.’’

Miles Davis was so impressed, he covered it.

Crosby up until the end was involved in the world. He was a frequent Twitter user, answering people’s questions on anything from the perfect reefer, to Donald Trump, whom he loathed, and the best songs of all time. He was still touring. He was still in love with life and music.

The warmth and regard in which he was held can be gauged from the tributes to his work, including from his bandmates, in times of love and war, fellow musicians and fans.

Perhaps the one to sum it up best is this from songwriter Gretchen Peters: “Can’t stop thinking about David Crosby. He was the glue in that miraculous harmony of CSN. And in every other configuration in which he sang. Sometimes the glue doesn’t get enough credit. But those middle harmonies, the choices he made, the tone, took it to another level.”

CODA: Personal favourite: “Wooden Ships” or “Long Time Gone”. Ah, can’t decide.