Graham Nash: David Crosby Died In His Sleep After Contracting Covid-19
by Best Classic Bands Staff
This ad for one of the duo’s many albums appeared in the April 8, 1972 issue of Record World
Graham Nash has revealed that David Crosby died after contracting Covid-19 for a second time. On the Kyle Meredith With… podcast via Consequence of Sound in early April 2023 to promote his new album and tour, Nash said Croz “felt a little sick” while rehearsing for a show in Los Angeles. “And so he went home and decided that he would take a nap, and he never woke up. But he died in his bed, and that is fantastic.” It was the second time that Crosby had contracted Covid-19. At the time of his death in January, no cause of death had been revealed. Press reports had noted a sudden, brief illness.
In a February interview, Nash acknowledged that his long-strained relationship with Crosby had begun to improve. In his conversation with reporter Rob Tannenbaum for AARP Magazine, posted on Feb. 8, 2023, Nash said the longtime bandmates were “getting a little closer at the end” and that roughly a week and a half before Crosby died on Jan. 18, he had left a voicemail on Nash’s phone saying that he wanted to apologize. Nash emailed him back to set up a time to speak. “He never called,” says Nash, “and then he was gone.” The revelation follows the news back in 2016 that the pair and longtime best friends were estranged.
When Tannenbaum asked Nash if Crosby knew he was dying, Nash replied, “You know, I’ve thought about that myself. He was a very intelligent man. I wouldn’t put it past him to know that he was actually at the very end. The truth is, Rob, we’ve been expecting David to pass for 20 years.”
Crosby reaching out to Nash “made David’s death a little easier for me, because I realized that we were going to get together later in his life.”
Of Crosby’s musical talent, Nash says, “I have never heard anybody with the same brilliant sense of music and harmony that David had.
“His death is like an earthquake: You know that you’re in an earthquake, but subsequently, other smaller earthquakes happen afterwards. His death has been like that. It was only two or three days after he passed that I realized that he was actually gone.” Read the entire interview here.
When Best Classic Bands spoke with Nash in 2016, it was shortly after the headlines that the pair were no longer on speaking terms. “We were best friends for 45 years,” Nash told writer Mark Brown. “He has just treated me awfully the last couple of years and I’m just not going to stand for it.”
Nash, who turned 81 on Feb. 2, is gearing up for a new tour, Sixty Years of Songs and Stories, and preparing for the release of Now, his first new studio album since 2016. (Tickets are available here and here.)
2 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationCSNY was a family. Families love, disagree, love, fight ect. My Mom & I didn’t speak for years, but I came home to take of her (94) till her death (97). Best thing I have ever done. Nash felt the beginning of this reunion. I just wish they all could have this feeling. God Bless, Steven, Graham, Neil
I’ll never understand why so the cause of death for so many celebrities is kept “private.” In many cases, such as with Covid, or something like prostate or Colorectal Cancer, where early detection can save your life, hearing how someone familiar died from a preventable disease might very well spur people on to take action to prevent it. When a person has died, I really don’t see how or why they would object to the manner of their death being known. Knowing how someone died, as in the case of Christy McVie, from a cancer spread throughout her body gives fans a greater understanding of what Christy, as a person, went through and how she dealt with it (It also draws a reasonable question to Stevie Nicks claim that she was Christy’s “best friend,” as she appeared to be surprised by McVie’s illness, and apparently didn’t know about her critical cancer condition.) Dying is something that everyone will eventually have to go through, and if you can teach something through your passing, why would you not do it. What’s to be gained by keeping it “private” when after death what was is all meaningless anyway?