david crosby's sailboat the mayan

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A Schooner Runs Through It

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‘The Mayan stands for the good things in my life — health, sanity, and freedom — all the positive values’ — David Crosby

n 1967, between The Byrds and CSN, David Crosby first saw the 1947 John Alden-designed schooner Mayan (opposite), which he would own until 2014. He sailed her from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco with Graham Nash and others in 1970, then several times back and forth to Hawaii. Photo: Annie Tritt

In the months just before and after 1969, as clean-cut crooners and girl bands and Motown acts gave way to long-haired singer-songwriters who filled football stadiums, the Great American Songbook tilted on a fulcrum. At the center was a mustachioed scamp with sparkling blue eyes – and a wooden ship designed 40 years earlier by the great John G. Alden.

David Crosby was drifting more or less aimlessly in South Florida, circa 1967, when he spotted the schooner that would anchor his life for the next four decades. “One day in Fort Lauderdale, driving over one of the bridges,” wrote Crosby in his 1988 memoir “Long Time Gone,” “I saw her, right there in Port Everglades.”

What he saw was Design No. 356B, which John Alden’s office in Boston had resurrected in 1946 for a WWII Navy captain named Charles Allen from a 1928 design. She was 60 feet on deck, 62 feet to the head of the mainmast, intended to transit the Intracoastal Waterway between New York and Florida, then cross over to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. Charles’s son Paul Allen led the team that built her in six months near Belize City, using Honduran mahogany for the frames, yellow pine for the planking, and teak for the decks. A lifting centerboard kept her draft to 4½ feet. She was called Mayan.

After selling Mayan to current owner Beau Vrokyk in 2014, she underwent a full refit and regularly races on the West Coast. Visit medium.com/schoonermayan to read more on Mayan’s present life. Photo: Rolex/Daniel Forster

Crosby had recently invented a new musical genre, then been fired by the very band mates with whom he invented it. In those days just after the John F. Kennedy assassination, The Byrds (Crosby with Jim “Roger” McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and others) had been stewing in the rapidly changing musical ingredients of the day – the two-part vocal harmonies of The Everly Brothers, Bob Dylan’s smorgasbord of a folk lyric as heard in 2/4 time on a scratchy demo, that jangly 12-string Rickenbacker guitar that George Harrison carried through “A Hard Day’s Night.” The Byrds’ April 1965 “Mr. Tambourine Man” at once inaugurated folk-rock and a so-called California Sound that supplanted blues as the basic element of rock music.

But with massive instant success came massive competing personalities. Crosby’s radical pronouncements and scene-stealing at live shows grated on his mates’ nerves, as did his surprise performance with Buffalo Springfield at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in place of an absent Neil Young. When The Byrds were choosing the songs for their second album, Crosby insisted on his own composition “Triad” – a musically drifty song that advocated for threesomes as the fundamental unit of domestic arrangements – and rejected the cover of Carole King’s “Goin’ Back” that the other Byrds preferred. In October 1967, McGuinn finally kicked Crosby to the curb.

Wind and water

Crosby had sailed 8½-foot Sea Shell dinghies as a kid in Santa Barbara, and it was to those indelible memories and experiences that he returned while he nursed his bruised ego. “Sailing alone in that boat was a transforming experience,” he recalled of his early teenage years. “I used to sail outside the harbor and beyond the outer marker. Eventually I got real adventuresome with it, and they finally said they didn’t want me in the Sea Shell Club anymore. It evolved into my usual problem with authority.” While the young Crosby was out there breaking rules, he was also absorbing the beautiful things he saw around him – the schooner Gracie S that would become Sterling Hayden’s famous Wanderer, and the graceful old-school designs of John Alden. And so, after leaving The Byrds and gravitating toward the sailors of Coconut Grove, Florida, he was already primed for his first sight of Mayan.

“They wanted $60,000 for her,” wrote Crosby. “So we let it be known around town that I was a dumb hippie from the coast who didn’t know anything. Then my friend Bill Bolling started rumors that she had rot – a lot more rot, structural rot, than she had. A few weeks later, I showed up and said, ‘Gee, nice boat,’ and made a lowball offer. I got the Mayan for $22,500, which I borrowed from Peter Tork, who was flush with Monkees money. It was the best money I ever spent.” Arguably, David Crosby had “Daydream Believer” to thank for the most stable home in the next four decades of his monumentally unstable life.

Mayan playground

Meanwhile, the elements of his second act were coming together. Old friends were stopping by Mayan to visit. One of them was Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills. And when Jefferson Airplane came through South Florida, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick stayed aboard Mayan for a time.

“Grace and I were playing down in Miami somewhere and had a little break,” Kantner recalled. “So we took some funky seaplane out to the middle of some atoll in the midst of god knows where, landed in the lagoon where David was anchored, and stayed for a weekend or a week or whatever it was.” Never mind that Kantner’s “lagoon” was a Bahamian bank or his “atoll” on a cay. Together on Mayan, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner wrote “Wooden Ships” – the one song that would be performed by two bands in two separate sets at Woodstock, come August 1969, and spur at least two musical rebuttals, one from Jackson Browne (“For Everyman”), and another from Neil Young (“Hippie Dream”). Cultural critics can debate the layered meanings embedded in “Wooden Ships” or offer their highfalutin reflections on late-20th century nihilism in an age of nuclear Armageddon. Paul Kantner remembers it differently.

“’Wooden Ships’ was written for David’s sailing thing,” Kantner wrote. “David stole the first verse of it off a church, where they had a neon sign where they’d put little sayings: IF YOU SMILE AT ME, et cetera. We just ripped it right off. Part of the artistic process. We used to call it ‘the folk process.’” Meanwhile, Crosby was making new friends, too.

“I was folksinging in Coconut Grove at the Gaslight South,” Joni Mitchell told her biographer, David Yaffe, in 2015. “I hadn’t made a record yet. David had just purchased the boat that he loved. I fell into his merry company, and we rode bikes around Coconut Grove, and the winds were warm, and at night we’d go down and listen to the masts clinking down on the pier. It was a lovely period, and soon we became romantically involved.”

Photo: Getty images/Henry Diltz

They returned to Los Angeles together, and David Crosby used his music-industry connections to procure a deal with Reprise and produce “Song to a Seagull,” released in March 1968, the first record of Joni Mitchell’s magnificent body of work. In Los Angeles, they’d eventually split tacks romantically yet remain good friends, and Mitchell bought the bungalow with Tiffany stained-glass windows at 8217 Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon that would become one of the great cultural salons of their generation.

It was in that house, depending on whose version of events you believe, that Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash of The Hollies first sang together.

“In Joni’s living room,” Nash told Terry Gross in a 2013 Fresh Air interview, “David said to Stephen, ‘Hey, play … that song we were just working on.’”

The song was “You Don’t Have to Cry.” Nash listened, then asked them to play it again. When they finished, he said, “Bear with me. One more time.” On the third pass, Nash added a second harmony above Stephen’s melody. “Whatever vocal sound that Crosby, Stills & Nash has was born in less than 40 seconds,” Nash told Terry Gross. “No years of rehearsal to get that vocal blend. It happened instantly. And we all knew it – so much that we stopped the song, and we all started to laugh.”

In the typical musical scale used in folk music, there are seven notes (the piano’s white keys). But in a chromatic scale, there are 12 notes (the white and black keys). Harmony singers in folk music usually constrain themselves to the scale’s first, third, and fifth notes. In CSN, Crosby’s innovation was to use the whole chromatic scale as he’d heard in jazz and classical music. “All the intervals have emotional things to them,” Crosby wrote. “What we did, which made me extremely proud, was sing a lot of nonparallel stuff. I’d move the middle part around in internal shifts that kept it happening.”

The union of their voices changed the world of music, and the season that followed in that spring and summer of 1969 was an idyll. “We were all in love with each other,” Nash recalled. “I was in love with Joni. Stephen was in love with Judy Collins. David was in love with his girlfriend Christine Hinton.” The music they recorded was summery and light. With its scenes of domestic bliss, Graham Nash’s “Our House” gave Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon bungalow a permanent place in the Great American Songbook.

Playlist: Time on Mayan inspired musical greats

•  “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” The Everly Brothers (The Very Best of the Everly Brothers)
•  “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bob Dylan (The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964. The Bootleg Series Vol. 9)
•  “A Hard Day’s Night,” The Beatles (Hard Day’s Night)
•  “Mr. Tambourine Man,” The Byrds (Mr. Tambourine Man)
•  “Triad,” The Byrds (unreleased on The Notorious Byrd Brothers; included on Never Before, 1987)
•  “Goin Back,” The Byrds (The Notorious Byrd Brothers)
•  “Daydream Believer,” The Monkees (The Monkees 50)
•  “Wooden Ships,” Jefferson Airplane (Volunteers)
• “Change Partners,” Stephen Stills (Stephen Stills)
•  “Our House,” Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell (demo on Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
•  “Willy,” Joni Mitchell (Ladies of the Canyon)*
•  “Wooden Ships,” Crosby, Stills & Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
• “The Lee Shore,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (4-Way Street) z “Man In the Mirror,” Graham Nash (Songs for Beginners)
•  “Critical Mass/Wind on the Water,” David Crosby, Graham Nash (Wind on the Water)
•  “Page 43,” Graham Nash & David Crosby (Graham Nash & David Crosby)
•  “Laughing,” David Crosby (If I Could Only Remember My Name)
•  “Sing My Songs to Me / For Everyman,” Jackson Browne (For Everyman)
•  “Hippie Dream,” Neil Young (Landing on Water)*
•  “For Free,” David Crosby, Sarah Jarosz (For Free)
•  “Wooden Ships,” Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, with David Crosby (Live from the Newport Folk Festival 2018)

Listen to this playlist on Spotify

*Songs not available on Spotify

Photo: Getty images/Michael Putland

Mayan saved his life

Through it all, David Crosby’s heart was never far from Mayan. As soon as the recording was completed in March 1969 for “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” their first studio album, Crosby and Christine Hinson straightaway returned to the schooner.

“We put out the album, and I took off and went sailing,” he recalled. “We went to the Bahamas, and I wasn’t around when the thing got big. But I heard – it filtered down to Florida, which was way behind the times in those days. All of a sudden, it was all over the radio. I missed the excitement of sitting in LA, in the biz, getting saturated with winning. But it’s probably a good thing, given my ego.”

The thing got big, all right, going on to sell 4 million copies. It set them up to headline the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 – arguably the pinnacle of any sunshine feelings among the musicians, which by then had come to include Neil Young. (“I lost my ampersand,” quipped Nash.)

The season that followed was marked by heartbreak, acrimony, and tragedy, all fueled by the cocaine that had come to define their scene. Their second album, CSN&Y’s “Déjà Vu,” mostly recorded in fall and winter 1969, was very different from the first. “I was not with Joni anymore,” recalled Nash. “Stephen was not with Judy Collins. And Christine had been killed in a car accident. It’s a fine record, ‘Déjà Vu,’ but it’s a very dark, bleak album.”

After Christine Hinson died, Nash grew deeply worried about his friend. “I watched a part of David die that day,” Nash wrote. “He seemed suicidal, and I feared greatly for his life. He needed a change of scenery, pronto.”

That change of scenery turned out to be a seven-week, 3,000-mile voyage from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco in January and February 1970, between the recording and release of Déjà Vu. In addition to Crosby and Nash, the crew for the trip included Ronee Blakely, a singer-songwriter who would go on to win a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in the 1975 Robert Altman film “Nashville.” And Joni Mitchell was aboard for the Jamaica-to-Panama leg – an experience she very much did not enjoy. “Joni remembered the sailboat ride as tortuous,” wrote her biographer.

“We hit seas that were completely abnormal, with 10-story swells,” recalled Joni. “I got a full body rash. They wrapped me in a sheet and tied me to the railing because of these swells. And I spent three days throwing up over the side. I hit the shore and just ran, so glad to be on the ground.”

Like any good voyage, this one produced different tellings of the same event from all aboard. Off the coast of Cuba, Nash wrote “Man in the Mirror.” On the Pacific side they encountered a blue whale, which kept the crew entranced for hours, an experience Nash captured in “Wind On The Water.” And for Crosby, the trip had been exactly the balm he needed. At the dock in Sausalito, Mayan became the salon Joni’s bungalow had been in an earlier season. Crosby wrote “Lee Shore,” “Page 43,” “Carry Me,” and other songs aboard the boat. Jackson Browne lived aboard Mayan between recording his first and second albums.

“David was feeling better; he was ready to rock,” Nash wrote of their return to public life in spring 1970 after the voyage. “Croz and I were both in great shape, tan and trim, clear-eyed, all those good things. We had the songs, as well as the love and trust for each other. The music and the Mayan had literally saved his life.”

Photo: Getty images/Michael Ochs Archives

And he played real good

David Crosby, 81 years old, died on January 18, 2023. In the intervening years, he had many good moments and some spectacularly bad moments, marked by three heart attacks, one liver transplant, and several convictions for possession of drugs and firearms, with hard prison time in Texas and Florida in the mid-1980s. Through it all, he was an undependable band mate. “All the guys that I made music with won’t even talk to me,” said Crosby in the 2019 documentary “Remember My Name.” “All of them.”

Still, in the last years of his life, he kept making good music, some of his best, and much of it with musicians one and two generations younger: Sarah Jarosz, Jason Isbell, the Lighthouse Band. (For a breath of fresh air, check out their August 2019 NPR Tiny Desk Concert.) David Crosby named his final album “For Free,” for the song Joni Mitchell first performed at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival, a song she wrote in that long-ago idyllic summer.

As for Mayan, Crosby sold her in 2014 to Beau Vrolyk, a man who has sailed extensively in Central America and the South Pacific and with whom the 1947 schooner is enjoying a marvelous rebirth. Vrolyk routinely brings aboard some of the Bay Area’s best sailors and yacht designers – Bill Lee, Stan Honey, Sally Lindsay-Honey, and others – and regularly introduces young people to Mayan and the good things that sailing can bring to a life.

“I was always at my healthiest and happiest aboard Mayan,” Crosby wrote.

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Rock star schooner ‘Mayan’ enjoys…

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Rock star schooner ‘Mayan’ enjoys new berth, ownership

Beau Vrolyk, seen through the wheel of his boat ‘The Mayan’ at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor on Friday, will participate in the Leukemia Cup on Sunday. (Kevin Johnson -- Santa Cruz Sentinel)

Beau Vrolyk, who purchased his boat ‘The Mayan’ from singer David Crosby, will participate in the Leukemia Cup on Sunday. (Kevin Johnson -- Santa Cruz Sentinel)

Beau Vrolyk stands aboard his boat, ‘The Mayan,’ at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor on Friday. The boat once belonged to singer David Crosby, and will take part in the inaugural Leukemia Cup on Sunday. (Kevin Johnson -- Santa Cruz Sentinel)

SANTA CRUZ >> From the dock, the 74-foot wooden ship appears, as the famous Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song goes, “very free and easy.”

Mayan is neither. In fact, she requires a crew of three to sail and cost Santa Cruz resident Beau Vrolyk $750,000 to own. But she came with a truly unique rock ‘n’ roll pedigree.

Musician David Crosby owned and sailed Mayan for the last 45 years, writing such rock classics as “Wooden Ship” and “Carry Me” on board what he once called his “deep muse.”

Today, the Alden 356-B Centerboard Schooner is permanently docked in a slip directly behind Johnny’s Harborside Restaurant in the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor.

“It took six months to convince Crosby to sell her to me,” Vrolyk says. “He didn’t need to sell the boat, he wanted to find a good home for her.”

According to Vrolyk, who is CEO of San Francisco-based tech platform company Engine Yard, he and Crosby hit it off after being introduced by master shipwright Wayne Ettel who rebuilt Mayan in 2005.

“David’s like a real guy. He’s not stuck up at all,” Vrolyk says. “I think he appreciated that we just interacted like laid back, normal people. Plus, he liked the fact that I’d grown up on boats just like Mayan. He knew she would be in good hands.”

Named Mayan because of her country of origin of Belize, the schooner was originally built in 1947 using Honduran mahogany.

“Genuine Honduran mahogany is some of the most beautiful wood in the world,” Vrolyk said. “You can’t get it anymore.”

In 1967, after being kicked out of The Byrds, Crosby borrowed $25,000 from The Monkees’ Peter Tork and traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in search of a schooner. After buying Mayan and learning how to sail her, Crosby sailed to San Francisco and began living on her full-time in 1970.

In a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, the famously hard-partying Crosby told reporter Marc Myers, “Virtually everyone in rock ‘n’ roll has been on the Mayan. But I didn’t get my boat for partying. I got it to sail. Sure, after we’d dock, we’d go to someone’s house and get completely inappropriately high on a variety of substances, many of which were dangerous and did me a great deal of harm. But partying is not what the boat was about. The boat is higher than a party.”

Today, under new owner Vrolyk’s hand, Mayan will help fight blood cancer by participating in the inaugural Leukemia Cup Regatta on Monterey Bay hosted by the Santa Cruz Yacht Club.

For Vrolyk, it’s a personal cause. His father died of melanoma and his friend and former Santa Cruz Yacht Club Commodore Dave Emberson nearly died of leukemia four years ago.

“It’s a fun race for a serious cause,” Vrolyk says. “We’re starting the slowest boats first so, in theory, we’ll all be finishing at the same time if we’ve calculated the handicaps right.”

Mayan will be one of the first boats underway.

“She’s comfortable, but not fast,” Vrolyk says. “Kind of like Crosby.”

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MAYAN - The chronicles of our schooner

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Mayan's history - the crosby years, 3 comments:.

Two jcons, two friends, two unique designs and one soul.

I can only imagine what it cost him to let her go.

Bob Cunningham loves the Mayan, and thanks you for this beautiful article.

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A virtual port of call for all those who love the sea , hosted by nautical novelist rick spilman.

Thursday Daydream : the Mayan – David Crosby’s Legendary Schooner

On one hand, this is a very interesting use of Youtube by a yacht broker selling a classic yacht.   Here Bob Craven gives us a tour, a bit of history and low key sales pitch on David Crosby ‘s legendary schooner – the Mayan .   Beyond that the video makes for a nice daydream for those of us lacking the ready cash to buy such a boat but who still enjoy the music and the images.  The Mayan has been on the market since around 2009. See our post  from April 2010 when we posted about  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young  bandmate, Neil Young’s Baltic trader being for sale.

The Mayan – David Crosby’s legendary schooner

Thursday Daydream : the Mayan – David Crosby’s Legendary Schooner — 3 Comments

Pingback: ‘Wooden ship’ David Crosby te koop | Bootjesgek.nl

shame on david crosby for playing wichita ks at a venue under the control of the Kochs…has he no shame?

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Email This Page to a Friend Preview: David Crosby’s Legendary Alden Schooner MAYAN

September 13, 2014

David Crosby aboard his 58-foot Alden Schooner MAYAN. Photo: The Wall Street Journal

Folk rock and classic wooden boats – they’re a beautiful pairing, as we’ve written about here and here .

So I suppose it’s no wonder that for forty years David Crosby has been the proud owner of the magnificent 1947 Alden schooner MAYAN. How wonderful to learn that for Crosby, MAYAN was a “deep muse” — he wrote songs like “Wooden Ships,” “The Lee Shore,” “Page 43” and “Carry Me” while on board. 1

Unfortunately Crosby says that he can no longer afford the boat’s upkeep and has listed her for sale. On the other hand, it sounds like his efforts to sell her are half-hearted; “My wife would break my arms if I actually sold it,” he told the Wall Street Journal .

That being said, one yacht brokerage lists MAYAN as sold . Can anyone confirm that this is the case?

Here’s a nice video about the boat put together by his broker.

David Crosby’s Legendary Alden Schooner MAYAN

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From the Wall Street Journal Article: “Virtually everyone in rock ‘n’ roll has been on the Mayan. But I didn’t get my boat for partying. I got it to sail. Sure, after we’d dock, we’d go to someone’s house and get completely inappropriately high on a variety of substances, many of which were dangerous and did me a great deal of harm.

But partying is not what the boat was about. The boat is higher than a party. Sailing sweeps you away, and a party seems pallid and shallow. The boat is a way deeper experience, especially on long trips. I love voyaging—the longest has been 3,000 miles to Hawaii. I’ve also spent weeks all over the Caribbean.”

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The Most Interesting Man in Rock: How David Crosby Survived 'Everything' — and Lived to Sing About It

David Crosby has been through hell, but he still sings like an angel. A new documentary chronicles the survival and strength of a rock renegade

David Crosby has learned a lot in his eventful 77 years, but there’s one thing he can’t quite work out: how the hell he’s still alive. The two-time Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer has survived addiction, prison, heartbreak and four decades in music’s most notorious powder keg, the multi-platinum supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. As if that’s not enough, in recent years he’s endured a litany of health problems ranging from hepatitis C and liver failure to diabetes and numerous heart attacks. A cursory read of his biography makes you wonder if he and Keith Richards have some kind of running bet. While he might not know how he’s still alive, he does know why: music. “It’s the one contribution I can make,” he tells PEOPLE. “See, it’s dark out here now. The world is not a happy place. Music’s a lifting force. Music makes things better.” In the last five years he’s put out four albums that rank among the best of his career, and a fifth is on the way. It’s a creative renaissance — ”a big burst of energy and joy” — that surprises even the artist himself. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to fade out and die!” His workload reflects a man racing the clock. “You’ve got nothing more valuable than time. Time is the final currency. Not money, not power.”

His remarkable past and prolific present is the subject of a gripping new documentary, David Crosby: Remember My Name . Directed by A.J. Eaton, the film features Crosby in candid discussion with Academy Award-winning writer-director Cameron Crowe (the doc’s executive producer), who first met Crosby in 1974 as a 16-year-old wunderkind reporter for Rolling Stone . Crowe would recall these early days with Crosby in his mostly autobiographical 2000 film, Almost Famous . “Cameron has known me for a long time and he knows where all the bones are buried,” says Crosby. “He knows what happened because he was there. He was there in the dressing rooms and backstage with us for years. He watched me go down the tubes as a junkie. He watched me slowly climb back out of the dung pile. He asked me the hardest questions I’ve ever been asked and I answered. I did the one thing that they asked me to do to contribute to this film, which was not lie.”

The discussions are unflinchingly honest as Crosby faces his own mortality and speaks of mistreating himself and others. “If they’re doing a documentary on you, I want to know what matters to you. I want to know what you’re afraid of. I want to know what you care about. I want to know who you love. I want to know what you want to make better. I want to know inside stuff. That’s what I think a documentary should be: an opening of the human being you’re trying to learn about, so that you get to see who they are.” Though it’s hard to convey a life, especially one as full as his, in 95 minutes, Remember My Name does a damn good job.

The most affecting moments concern his estranged CSNY bandmates, none of whom are currently speaking to him. This most recent schism was triggered, in part, by a much regretted 2014 comment Crosby made about Neil Young’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, Daryl Hannah. It’s far from the first time the guys have been at odds, but relations have remained chilly (or non-existent) for the last several years and many fans wonder if the group really is done for good. Though Crosby says it wasn’t his explicit intent, Remember My Name registers as a very heartfelt mea culpa to his estranged musical brothers. The result is unforgettable, and even a little jarring. To be blunt, it’s rare to see a major cultural figure so publicly own their s—. And, dear reader, there’s a lot of s—. “I’m trying to be honest,” he explains. “I know what I am and I know that I’m difficult to deal with, and I know that I have certainly offended many people. I am opinionated and sometimes I may possibly shoot my mouth off. So I’ve heard — it’s a rumor.” A puckish smirk spreads across his still-cherubic face, betraying his well documented mischievous side. “I get in trouble, but I’m happy about myself now.”

Trouble seems to have followed him from an early age. Born on Aug. 14, 1941 in Los Angeles, he was, by his own admission, kicked out of nearly every school he ever attended. Instead, his family provided a robust cultural education. His mother, Aliph, a descendant of New York’s prominent Van Cortland family, fostered an appreciation of poetry and music, and his father Floyd won one of the first Oscars for cinematography. For a time, Crosby thought he would follow his father into films as an actor — chiefly to attract women. “Then I went down and sang at a coffee house and I realized that I could meet girls that night ,” he laughs. “Not two years later after they saw the movie — now !” But singing quickly became a labor of love rather than lust. With early rock idols the Everly Brothers as inspiration, he trained himself to sing complex harmonies. Socially conscious songs like “Strange Fruit” showed him the good that music could do, while jazz pathfinders like John Coltrane and Miles Davis showed him the outer reaches of how it could sound. The novice musician’s distinctive style began to take form.

Crosby spent the early ‘60s playing folk clubs across the country before ultimately crossing paths with Jim (later known as Roger) McGuinn and Gene Clark, with whom he formed the Byrds. Fusing the rich lyrical poetry of coffee shop troubadours with the melodic sophistication and amped up arrangements of the Beatles, the band’s innovative “folk-rock” sound earned them a pair of Number Ones in 1965: a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” It was enough to impress the Fabs themselves, who befriended Crosby. During the L.A. stop of their 1965 U.S. tour, the Beatles invited him to their rented L.A. compound for a (reportedly) LSD-enhanced afternoon, and later welcomed him into London’s Abbey Road Studios while they recorded their landmark 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band .

However, rapid fame at an early age came with some risks. “If you’re successful right away, early on, usually it’s a disaster,” Crosby says with typical candor. Creative differences between the headstrong guitarist and the rest of the Byrds lead to increasingly tense sessions. His song “Triad,” an ode to ménage à trois, was rejected, and the group was less than pleased when he launched into a tirade about J.F.K. assassination conspiracies onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. In an echo of his school days, Crosby was expelled from the band that fall.

With time on his hands, he traveled to Miami, where he’d played as a penniless folkie years before. There he encountered two ladies who would have a major impact on his life. The first was a 74-foot mahogany sailboat, The Mayan , which became both a personal touchstone for health and freedom, and a muse for beloved songs like “Wooden Ships,” “The Lee Shore,” “Page 43” and “Carry Me.” The second was a young Canadian singer named Joni Mitchell. Enchanted after watching her perform in a Coconut Grove coffee house, he persuaded her to return with him to L.A. where he integrated her into the local music community and helped her secure a record deal. His admiration for her talent remains undiminished after half a century. “She’s the best there is,” he says with touching affection. “There’s no question. She’s better than all the rest of us.”

Their romantic relationship did not endure — Crosby likens it to “falling into a cement mixer” — but their friendship did. He recalls hanging out in the kitchen of her Laurel Canyon cottage one evening in 1968 when he joined voices with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash for the first time. Before the last notes had faded away, Crosby, Stills & Nash was born.

Their self-titled debut album shot to the top of the charts in the summer of 1969, and they hadn’t even played a concert together. To help tackle their complex arrangements live, the trio recruited Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young, and their name was appropriately amended. Their second-ever gig took place at the Woodstock festival, where Stills famously told the crowd that they were “scared s—less.” It wasn’t so much the sea of people stretched before them that rattled the nerves, but the small circle of musical peers like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and the Band watching expectantly in the wings to see if the so-called supergroup could deliver the goods.

They could, and they did. Their set, filled with generation-defining songs like “Guinnevere,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and “Wooden Ships,” was a highlight of the weekend, but Crosby cherishes a different memory. He recounts it in rapid-fire present tense, as if the long ago moment is unfolding before him.

“A girl — pretty girl — tan, blonde, is walking in the mud. Cuts her foot. Glass in the mud. Bad cut, bleeding. She’s hurt. She’s standing like a stork on one leg, holding her foot. Bleeding bad. A policeman just came on duty: sharp crease in his pants, mirror-shined shoes. Beautiful. This guy could be a recruiting poster. He sees the girl. Immediately, without hesitation, he walks into the mud with the shiny shoes. Gets the mud and the blood all over himself, all over his brand new shiny uniform. Picks the girl up, carries her gently and nicely, obviously being careful and nice with her. He carries her to his car, lays her in his back seat very carefully and gently. He’s obviously a gentleman. He’s obviously a nice cat. He lays her in there and gets ready, and his car’s stuck in the mud. Fourteen hippies pushed that car out of the mud. And I said, ‘Okay. This is it. This is working. This is what I wanted to see. This is how it’s supposed to work.’ That’s my Woodstock story. I saw it with my own eyes. There was a moment where we had hope. We saw how it could be better — plainly, obviously, right there in front of us. And we said, ‘Ah, that’s what I’m looking for. I don’t want a war. I want this.’ And that’s what Woodstock was. That’s why it’s stuck in everybody’s head: because, for a minute, we hoped.”

The hope was short-lived. Within the year, four peaceful student protestors were shot dead on the campus of Kent State University, inspiring Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s incendiary anthem “Ohio,” and Crosby himself would also be touched by tragedy. In September 1969, his long-term girlfriend Christine Hinton was driving their cats to the vet when one of the kittens got loose in the vehicle. In the confusion, her VW van crossed the center line and struck a school bus. Crosby rushed to the hospital, but it was too late; she was dead at the age of 21. The loss changed him forever. “There’s just this emptiness,” he says in Remember My Name . “It’s like a rip in the fabric, and an empty place. It leaves a big hole and you want to fill it.”

Crosby found refuge on The Mayan , embarking on a seven-week, 3,000-mile voyage from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco, where he scattered Hinton’s ashes in the bay. Music also provided solace, as friends rallied around him in the recording studio to work on his first solo album. Released in February 1971, If I Could Only Remember My Name features the likes of Nash, Young, Jerry Garcia, Joni Mitchell, and members of Santana and Jefferson Airplane. “That album is a tribute to friendship more than anything else,” he remembers. “Those guys knew that I was having real trouble making it from one day to the next, and they all showed.” The spirit of the sessions is clear in the opening track, “Music Is Love,” a spontaneous round sung with Nash and Young. But the album’s closer, “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here,” hints at the darkness that was never far away. Recorded by Crosby alone, the lyric-less a cappella piece is a haunting requiem for his lost love, and an exorcism of pain that words alone can’t express.

For much of the next 15 years, Crosby anesthetized himself with heroin and freebase cocaine, doing significant harm to both his musical relationships and his relationship to music. “The longer I did hard drugs, the less I wrote until it ground to a halt and all I did was get loaded,” he admits. “It nearly killed me, but more importantly, it kept me from making music.” CSN concerts were interrupted as Crosby left to stage to get high. As his bandmates became increasingly alienated, Crosby grew closer to Jan Dance, a young woman he met while recording at a Miami recording studio. Together, they slid into the depths of addiction.

Crosby’s body became covered with burns from his blowtorch used to prepare freebase, and drug-related seizures became alarmingly regular. One occurred while he was behind the wheel, resulting in the first of numerous drugs and weapons charges. Friends, including Nash and fellow singer Jackson Browne, recognized he needed help and staged an intervention for Crosby, who frustrated all concerned by sneaking off in the middle of it with his pipe. He would make at least six attempts to get clean, to no avail.

Wanted by the FBI after violating an appeals bond in 1985, Crosby became a fugitive. His money gone to drugs, he sold his last item of value — a grand piano — for $5,000 and rented a single-engine plane to fly from California to Florida in search of The Mayan . He and Dance planned to sail away and live the rest of their days abroad, but the boat was unseaworthy after years of neglect. Out of options, Crosby went to the nearest FBI office and turned himself in.

He spent that Christmas in a Texas prison, detoxing without so much as an aspirin. As he grew stronger, he confronted his past. “I woke up in a cell in Texas and remembered who I am,” he says. “I started fooling around with the guitar out in this little cinder block room and my brain started to work again.” Slowly, the future came into focus. He started playing with the prison band and eventually began writing. He cites one song, “Compass,” with obvious pride as “the first good song that I wrote” after getting clean. The lyrics detail the years he spent adrift, before offering a message of hope for himself.

I have wasted ten years in a blind-fold Ten-fold more than I’ve invested now in sight I have traveled beveled mirrors in a fly crawl Losing the reflection of a fight But like a compass seeking North There lives in me a still sure spirit part Clouds of doubt are cut asunder By the lightning and the thunder Shining from the compass of my heart

The compass had guided him back to music. “Having almost lost it, I treasured it more. I’ve been much more faithful to it since. When I didn’t die, and I didn’t end, I got a new chance. I felt much more strongly that I have to be true to my purpose here.” Within days of his release on Aug. 8, 1986, he appeared onstage with Nash, marking his first sober performance in two decades. He had just celebrated his 45th birthday.

Having reconnected with music, he reunited with the other love of his life. Jan Dance got clean while Crosby was in prison and the pair began to rebuild their lives together. A sympathetic judge reversed a court-ordered five-year separation resulting from their drug arrests, and they were married on May 16, 1987 in a ceremony at the Hollywood Church of Religious Science on Sunset Boulevard. “Jan loved me in ways that I didn’t love myself,” Crosby reflects in the documentary, “and taught me a lot about how to love, period.” Together they raised a son, Django, now 24.

Today, Crosby resides at the Santa Ynez ranch he shares with Dance and their many dogs, cats and horses. Upheavals in the music industry make constant touring a financial necessity — at least until his premium cannabis brand, Mighty Croz, makes the Fortune 500. “This streaming thing just crippled me,” he says, adding that the rise of subscription services cut his income in half. “It’s very hard. I’m 77 years old. I can’t really sleep on a bus anymore, so I’m tired as hell on the road. It’s a bitch, but the three hours that I’m onstage are heaven. I’m good at it, man, and I love it. I really love audiences. I really love singing to them, and I love talking to them, and I love taking them on an emotional voyage. I love it. It’s what I was born to do. It’s absolutely my thing. So for three hours a night, man, I’m the happiest guy in the world. Then I eat some kibble and get on a bus and go bang down the road to the next one. I can do it for four or five weeks and then I come home and I’m just destroyed. And then I put myself back together and I can do it again.” Even though he’s been through hell, his angelic voice remains astonishingly intact. When asked if he practices any kind of vocal conditioning, he merely cackles. “No, f— no! I’m doing everything wrong! The only thing I didn’t do was smoke cigarettes.”

Though he’s grateful to be singing, finances have forced him to part ways with another great love: The Mayan . It’s a personal loss he resolutely blames on the payment practices of streaming services. “I had the boat for 50 years. I sailed it all over the world. I loved it more than any other physical object on this planet. I had to sell it because they don’t pay me for records anymore. Imagine you worked your job for a month and they paid you a nickel. It’s completely out of proportion wrong.”

But the records continue to pour out of him at a furious rate, with the help of several young collaborators. In a twist worthy of one of Crowe’s scripts, Crosby has reconnected with a son, James Raymond, who was placed for adoption at birth in the ‘60s. (He also has daughters Erika and Donovan from previous relationships, and was later revealed to be the sperm donor for the two children of Melissa Etheridge and her then-partner, Julie Cypher.) After years working as a musician himself, Raymond went in search of his biological father in the ‘90s — and was stunned by who he found. Now the pair make music together, with Raymond producing 2014’s Croz and 2016’s Sky Trails . More recently, Crosby has joined forces with Michael League of the jazz band Snarky Puppy, who oversees the collective known as the Lighthouse Band, which also features vocalists Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis. “I feel like I’ve been rewarded an avalanche of good luck because these people are incredibly talented and like working with me,” Crosby says. “I write with all of them, and the result has been a serious upgrade in the amount and level of the music that I’m putting out. These people are not lightweights, man. When I write with them, we write really good s—. I mean really good.”

Any who fear he’s mellowed in his twilight years needn’t worry — he’s just as opinionated as ever. His most recent album, 2018’s Here If You Listen , continues to push the socio-ecological causes he first championed in the ‘60s. The track “Other Half Rule” urges women to run the planet after millennia of men — leading all the way up to the one Crosby refers to as “our Pestident” — have screwed it up. “Vagrants of Venice” is sci-fi tinged odyssey that touches on the effects of global warming, which Crosby repeatedly says is to the biggest danger facing our planet. “[Musicians] come from troubadours and town criers. ‘It’s 12:30 and all is well! It’s 12:45 you’ve elected an idiot to be president!’ That is part of our job, but it’s only part. Our main job is to take you on emotional voyages. The second job: make you boogie. We don’t want you to be able to stand still when we’re playing. We want you to want to dance. Third or fourth down the list comes being a witness.”

Despite all he’s seen and done, Crosby isn’t quick to give advice. When Rolling Stone asked if he’d be their new Dear Abby in a column called “Ask Croz,” he found it hilarious. But Here If You Listen does feature some words to his youngest son, Django, with “Your Own Ride,” the album’s emotional centerpiece. “You’re trying to say, ‘Look. I’d love to guide you in your life. I can’t really do that. I can only be an example, and I’ve been a questionable example. But I love you and I want the best for you.”

Regrets, he’s had a few; his biggest being the time lost to addiction. “It cost me probably 10 years of my life. I regret it greatly. If I had to change one thing, that would be it. No hard drugs, because it nearly killed me and put me in prison and, most importantly, it kept me from making music.” Intended or not, his recent geyser of work is a throw-down — a signal to his CSNY brethren that he’s back and means business, and a challenge to artists a quarter of his age to stand up and be counted. “I’ve wasted so much time and it grates on my nerves. I’m obviously trying really hard to do a whole s—load better. I’m trying really hard to be a decent human being and I certainly am doing what I was put here to do, which is make good music.”

For a man who rarely looks back, Remember My Name gave him the rare opportunity to step out of himself and scrutinize. At first the process was uncomfortable, but ultimately he found it cathartic. “The catharsis thing works. They taught me that in AA. You have to honestly look at your mistakes and then you can learn from it, which is the only good thing that’s going to come from any mistake. Then you can set that puppy down and walk on, because that’s what you need to do. You need to walk on. And you need to be looking forward when you walk on, not backwards. Otherwise you’ll run into a phone pole. So I think it’s had a great effect on me. It’s lightening my load.”

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If I Could Only Remember My Name

By Sam Sodomsky

March 10, 2019

The ’60s were over and David Crosby was living on a boat. Aside from the recording studio, his 59-foot schooner, named The Mayan, was the only place where things made sense. When Crosby was 11, his parents decided to enroll their son in sailing classes. The wild-eyed, giggling California kid had an anti-authoritarian streak that was starting to get him in trouble, and some time on the docks, they imagined, might give him some discipline, or at least a place to spend his summers. Sailing came naturally, like he had captained many vessels in a previous life. It was an uncanny feeling, comforting and strange. As the decade came to a close, Crosby wrote the title track of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s blockbuster album Déjà Vu about this very sensation.

Around the same time, he experienced his first major loss. In 1969, on her way to take the cats to the vet, Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton swerved her van and crashed into a school bus. She died instantly. Grief-stricken and depressed, Crosby stood at the start of a long spiral that would consume his next two decades. “I watched a part of David die that day,” his bandmate Graham Nash wrote. “He wondered aloud what the universe was doing to him.” He turned to hard drugs. Fifteen years later, he was in prison, almost unrecognizable, the creative spark that had defined him all but dissipated. Crosby seemed to exist only in the past tense.

In the beautiful tragic comedy that is classic rock radio, David Crosby is almost never the protagonist. He’s more like the stoned sidekick—colorful, lovable, always just kind of around . Once in a while, he takes the lead, but his voice remains most recognizable as the one somewhere in the middle—first in the Byrds, next in CSN, and then in CSNY. Much has been said of his ego—and much of it by Crosby himself—but few artists have been so content to have a legacy defined by the people around them. Surrounded by friends, he was happy. “I had never seen anybody who had that much interest and joy and spontaneous reaction,” Grace Slick said of her first encounter with Crosby in the ’60s. “You could just look at his face and be delighted because there was a human being getting that childlike excitement out of stuff.”

Like sailing, music came naturally to young Crosby. His awakening arrived at age four, when his mother took him to see a symphony orchestra in the park. He was transfixed by everything, save for the compositions themselves. He sat in awe of the chaotic murmurs as the musicians tuned their instruments; the syncopated dance of their elbows when they kicked into action; how a vast body of voices could unite, suddenly, in harmony. He noticed the way that none of these sounds would be nearly as powerful on their own. “It just broke over me like a wave,” he reflected. It’s a thread he followed throughout his career.

While 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name is the first release credited to Crosby as a solo artist—and for a long time, the only release—it’s an album defined by harmony, community, and togetherness. The backing band is composed of members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with notable appearances from Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Graham Nash. At the time of its release, these were some of the most popular names in music, nearly all of them coming off respective career-bests and commercial peaks. And yet together, they sound gloriously abstract. The music feels the way a dream sounds when you try to retell it in the morning: foggy, only loosely coherent, dissolving in real time.

This is David Crosby’s fingerprint. Look back at his earliest songs and you can hear an artist fighting against the confines of popular music. He played guitar in strange ways, opting for odd tunings that carried his songs and lyrics to unexpected places. His first great song, the Byrds’ “ Everybody’s Been Burned ,” sounds a little like a standard, except for the bass soloing through the entire thing. Later, in a cut called “ What’s Happening?!?! ,” he sang through what sounds like barely contained laughter, like someone exasperated with how much they have to say, realizing how words fail our deepest visions. The band can barely keep up with him.

The story goes, Crosby was kicked out of the Byrds for a few reasons. One, he was a pain to work with. Two, he had taken to indulging in long rants on stage, veering toward conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Third, he had written this troublesome little song about a threesome . Continuing his nonmonogamous streak, he had also accepted a role playing with Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival. His bandmates took it as a sign of disloyalty—or maybe just an excuse to abandon him. Soon after his dismissal from the Byrds, Crosby and Stills began working with the Hollies’ Graham Nash on a new project focused on tight songwriting and three-part harmony. With Nash, Crosby found his most natural and consistent partner: someone who laughed at his jokes, provided comfort and wisdom when he needed it, and joined him on The Mayan for long treks down the California coast.

Near the end of If I Could Only Remember My Name , Nash and Crosby duet on a gorgeous, wordless piece of music, scatting along to one of the best melodies Crosby ever wrote. “I called it ‘A Song With No Words,’” he announces proudly at a show in 1970, gesturing toward Nash at his side. “ He called it ‘A Tree With No Leaves.’ That shows you where he ’s at.” The audience laughs. On the sleeve of the record, the song has both titles, Nash’s in parentheses, a symbolic compromise that speaks to the group mentality of the record. Alone with his music, Crosby heard sketches. With his friends around, they became forces of nature.

The creation of the album involved Crosby spending idle time alone in the studio, leaning against a wall or collapsing into tears, before his collaborators arrived to elevate the mood and enliven the music. Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel and Joni Mitchell’s harmony vocals turn “Laughing,” the most conventional song on the record, into the psych-folk ideal: a lazy sunset that gains resonance as it subdues. The kaleidoscopic opener “Music Is Love” was just a plaintive guitar riff before the choir turned it into a commune. “Everybody’s saying that music is love,” they all sing, one after the other, creating a world where it’s true.

Crosby was adamant not to let his pain define the record. “I got no more understanding than an ant does when you pull off his legs,” he told Rolling Stone about his grief. He spoke about his desire to keep the sadness to himself—“It was the most horrible trip of my life and nobody needs to go on it”—so that his music could remain an escape. The album ends up somewhere in the middle. It’s a peaceful but broken sound.

The only song with a narrative arc is “Cowboy Movie.” It tells the thinly veiled story of CSNY dissipating, less interesting for its hippy-comedown mythology than its depiction of a narrator finding himself more desperate and alone with each passing minute. The story is in the music too: a gnarled, paranoid skeleton of Young’s 1969 song “ Down by the River ” that crackles and fades like a dying campfire. Crosby’s voice is more ragged than usual. “Now I’m dying here in Albuquerque,” he sings at the end. “I might be the sorriest sight you ever saw.”

The record closes with two songs that Crosby recorded by himself. Both are mostly a cappella, his voice layered to sound angelic and vast. “I was sitting there, kind of goofing around,” he said of the experiments, “And then all of a sudden I wasn’t goofing around.” Titled “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here,” the closing song has since been identified as Crosby’s elegy for Christine. On a record that includes some of his most pointed writing about politics (“What Are Their Names”) and loss (“Traction in the Rain”), this was his clearest statement. He sounds helpless, haunted.

Throughout the ’70s, Crosby slowly fell out of focus. He and Nash made a few strong records as a duo and CSN had several more hits while they drifted apart. Nash knew the band was done when he saw Crosby abandoning a jam after his crack pipe fell from an amp. Things only got worse. At one point, Crosby boarded The Mayan in an attempt to flee from the cops before eventually turning himself in to the FBI. He left prison a year later with his hair cut short and his iconic mustache shaved off. Newly sober, his health began to deteriorate. He nearly died of liver failure in the ’90s, and, when he recovered, diabetes and heart disease followed.

Along the way, If I Could Only Remember My Name garnered a bigger reputation. Unlike anything else in Crosby’s catalog and misunderstood by its generation of critics, it was rediscovered by folk artists in the 2000s among similarly cosmic works by Judee Sill and Vashti Bunyan. Its most notable student, however, is Crosby himself. His last five years have found him returning to the record’s quiet, hypnotic headspace to work with a newfound urgency. On the best of his recent records, 2018’s Here If You Listen , he and his young collaborators return to some of the demos he made during the ’60s and ’70s, finishing the thoughts he abandoned. “If you don’t like the story you’re in,” he sings, “Pick up your pen and then write it again.”

It’s an inspiring new phase of his career, though it also highlights everything that’s been lost: collaborators, friends, time. In 2014, David Crosby sold The Mayan to a California billionaire named Beau Vrolyk. Crosby needed the money and figured this guy could take better care of it anyway. He hasn’t sailed since. The boat, however, has never been better. On a blog dedicated to its maintenance, Vrolyk writes passionately about the Mayan’s second life. He’s since made the boat more habitable for future generations. He got in touch with the grandson of the original builders to learn about its history. He even entered it in some races. “Old boats need love,” he writes. Some find it.

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John G. Alden MAYAN

Sail Number: 1947

Vessel Type: Alden Schooner

LOA: 65’ 11″ / 20.09m – LOD: 58′ 11″ / 17.71m – LWL: 45′ 7″ / 13.89m – Beam: 16′ 5″ / 4.99m – Draft Min: 4′5″ / 1.34m – Draft Max: 10′ 02″ / 3.07m – Ballast: 9000 lbs – Displacement: 60000 lbs – Sail Area Upwind: 1665 Sq. Ft – Design Number: 356-B – Hull material: Wood single layer carvel planking caulked – Designer: John G. Alden – Built by: Tewie’s Dockyard, Belize City, British Honduras – Year Built: 1947 – Current Name: Mayan: – Current Owner: Stacey and Beau Vrolyk – Location: Marine Traffic

Historical:

Owner Beau Vrolyk Comments

“MAYAN, John Alden design #356B, was built in Belize in 1947. She sailed for New York City upon launching and was sold into a post war market starved for boats. MAYAN served in the charter trade until 1969 when she was bought by David Crosby, the rock star, who owned her until we purchased her in 2014. Alden designed MAYAN to provide comfortable cruising for up to 8 guests and three crew. We have since altered her interior to support our family. During the ’50s she was re-rigged as a staysail schooner, we have returned her to her original transitional schooner rig, with a gaff foresail. She draws only 5′ with her centerboard up, which gives us access to all sorts of lovely gunk-holes and atolls. Home port is Santa Cruz, CA; although she’s only been “home” for less than half the time we’ve owned her. Most times, we’re either cruising the west coast of the US, or working on our lovely old wooden boat.”

MAYAN is a distinctive and elegant John Alden designed centerboard schooner built in Honduras in 1947 and rebuilt by the master shipwright Wayne Ettel in 2005.

Owned by David Crosby of The Byrds and CSNY fame for the past 40 plus years, she was the inspiration to one of the all-time classic modern day sailing songs, “Wooden Ships” which he penned in the salon. In addition The Lee Shore,” and “Carry Me,” we’re wrote while aboard.

Owner David Crosby Comments

David Crosby – “MAYAN became my rock. She was always there and I could always get away from the crazies in my business.”

“I always figured if everything really went to hell, we’d just leave on MAYAN and head for the islands. Back then a lot of us thought everything was going to collapse pretty soon. I’m sure glad it didn’t.”

Known Restoration History:

2005 – Wayne Ettel in Wilmington Harbor, CA. During the rebuild all planking was replaced and more than 70% of the frames. Frames were double sawn of purpleheart to match the original lines of the boat. Planking was with double planked Kapur below the waterline and Douglass-fir over Port Oreford cedar on the topsides. Both layers are sandwiching a thick layer of epoxy. The topsides are “bottle” smooth and extremely fair. The teak decks were re-laid in a modern fashion using 3M5200 as a gasket between sprung planks edge fastened with silicon bronze fasteners. A routed groove is filled with standard modern teak deck caulk. NO LEAKS!! The inside of the hull below the waterline is fully epoxy saturated to prevent rot intrusion.

Provenance (The Wall of Remembrance – The Owners, Crew & Notable Guest):

• Owner/Guardian: (1947-1948) Charles W. Allen, New York, NY.
• Owner/Guardian: (1948-1953) Harvey S. Bisbell of St. Thomas, V.I
• Owner/Guardian: (1953-1962) Sepico Company, Miami, Fl. Renamed Sepico II
• Owner/Guardian: (1962-1966) Alice B. Rivaly, Miami, FL. Renamed Mayan.
• Owner/Guardian: (1966) James E. Ottaviano
• Owner/Guardian: (1969-1994) David Van Cortland Crosby, Santa Barbara
• Owner/Guardian: (1994-1997) William Bevly B. Morgan
• Owner/Guardian: (1997-2014) David Van Cortland Crosby, Santa Barbara
• Owner Guardian: (2014-current) Stacey and Beau Vrolyk, Homeport St Francis YC, CCA, Santa Cruz, CA

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One of the prettiest classic yachts on the West Coast is up for sale, and she comes with an interesting provenance. But the 59-ft Alden schooner Mayan is more than just another cheap Stratocaster with a few rock and roller signatures scrawled on it. Not only is the 1947 boat a beauty in her own right, but Mayan is the boat that has been so much a part of David Crosby’s music, life and legend.

"After 40 years of sailing and writing many of my best songs aboard, I have reached the point where I must let her go," says the 68-year-old musician, famous for his work as a founding member of the ‘60s rock group The Byrds and later Crosby, Stills and Nash. Crosby, who grew up in Los Angeles and learned to sail at age 11, has owned the boat since 1968. Mayan was reportedly the inspiration for many of his songs, including Wooden Ships and Lee Shore . (We’d like to think the Steve Stills-penned Southern Cross , our favorite sailing-themed song ever, was also inspired by her, but CSN wasn’t returning our calls to confirm this.)

For many years, Mayan sailed out of Sausalito. She’s been berthed in Santa Barbara for at least 20 years now, and has always been well cared for. The boat underwent an extensive refit in Wilmington in 2005-2006 that included replacing all of her planking and 70% of her frames.

Asking price is $1 million. See more about Mayan here .

I would never had sold that boat

That boat is a piece of history

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David Crosby Understood the Sharpness of Despair

By Amanda Petrusich

David Crosby, one of the most iconic and enduring voices of the nineteen-sixties, died last week, at the age of eighty-one. He was a founding member of the Byrds and of Crosby, Stills, and Nash (sometimes Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young), two deeply beloved and influential folk-rock outfits. For anyone who found solace or haven in Crosby’s singing, his death feels like the dimming of some golden light.

Crosby was born in Los Angeles in 1941, and, by the late nineteen-sixties, he was a central figure in the art scene taking root in Laurel Canyon, a woodsy, bohemian enclave on the slopes of Lookout Mountain, in the West Hollywood Hills. At various times, Crosby’s Laurel Canyon cohort included Joni Mitchell (whom he consistently championed and very briefly dated), Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, Linda Ronstadt, J. D. Souther, Judee Sill, Carole King, Frank Zappa, and members of the Mamas and the Papas and the Eagles. Back then, Laurel Canyon was a countercultural oasis in the midst of L.A.—imagine rustic cottages with wood-burning fireplaces and spider plants dripping out of hand-tossed pots, with plentiful weed and incense smoke drifting up from little brass holders, and all-night jam sessions—and Crosby, too, felt like an emissary for a different sort of American sound, more spectral, almost phosphorescent. His voice was sweet but vaguely spooky, as though it were emanating from the inner depths of a seashell you once held to your ear. As though it were not wholly of this world.

Crosby’s commercial career began in 1965, when the Byrds’s jangly, tenderhearted cover of Bob Dylan’s “ Mr. Tambourine Man ” became a No. 1 single. Two years later, by Crosby’s own account, he was kicked out of the group after his bandmates accused him of being “terrible and crazy and unsociable and a bad writer and a terrible singer.” In 1968, he started playing with Stephen Stills, of Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash, of the Hollies. (In 1969, they added Neil Young to the lineup; he recorded with the band periodically until 2013.) There were lots of hits (“Our House,” “ Southern Cross ,” “Teach Your Children,” “ Ohio ,” “Just a Song Before I Go”) and lots of arguments, particularly as the decades stacked up. “When you meet, when you start a band, you’re in love with each other,” Crosby told Christiane Amanpour in 2019. “When you’ve done it for forty years, and it’s devolved to just, ‘Turn on the smoke machine and play your hits,’ it’s not musically exciting, it’s not fun, and we weren’t friends.”

In 1971, during a hiatus from the band, Crosby released a solo album, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” which he wrote while living on the Mayan, his fifty-nine-foot mahogany sailboat , and grieving the sudden death of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, who was killed in a car accident while driving the couple’s two cats to the veterinarian. Though the album was not widely celebrated at the time of its release (the critic Robert Christgau called it “ disgraceful ,” giving it a grade of D- in the Village Voice ), the record was later sought out and heralded by fans of surreal, haunted, jazz-inflected folk rock, who found beauty and elegance in its gentle, psychedelic meanderings. On “ I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here ,” Crosby sounds as though he’s disintegrating spiritually, singing in a soft, echoing harmony with himself. It is one of the best and most affecting evocations of fresh grief I’ve ever heard.

In the eighties and nineties, Crosby suffered. He later cited Hinton’s death, and his inability to process it, as the thing that pushed him toward shooting heroin and freebasing cocaine. In 1982, he was arrested on drugs and weapons charges, and later spent months in a Texas state penitentiary. In 1984, he was arrested again, for drunk driving and driving with a suspended license. In 1994, he received a liver transplant with the help of his friend Phil Collins. There’s a funny, resonant moment in “David Crosby: Remember My Name ,” a 2019 documentary about Crosby’s life and work, in which Cameron Crowe asks why Crosby is still alive. “No idea, man,” Crosby replies.

In an era in which likability (if not goodness) is heralded as a supreme virtue, the Croz remained irascible, short-tempered, and prone to unequivocal declarations, especially on Twitter, which he joined in 2011, and used enthusiastically until he died (he posted or retweeted more than a dozen times on Wednesday, the day before his sister-in-law, Patricia Dance, confirmed his death). Crosby embraced the odd grammar of Twitter—its randomness, its concision, its immediacy—and would often engage directly with strangers who provoked or petitioned him. He retweeted compliments. He made fun of Donald Trump. He was quick to eviscerate a poorly rolled joint . In 2017, he even appeared in a commercial for Twitter, playing a petulant crank—“How about any song with real instruments?,” he tweeted at Chance the Rapper, who was taking set-list requests—cementing his grumpy-grandpa role on the site. Sometimes he was an asshole, at least per contemporary standards of decorum. When a fan posted an original illustration of him, he responded with dismissiveness: “That is the weirdest painting of me. I have ever seen …..don’t quit your day job ……” When Phoebe Bridgers smashed a guitar on “S.N.L.,” he called the move “pathetic.” (Bridgers, to her credit, volleyed back an exquisite reply: “little bitch.”) Crosby seemed to find the notion of self-censorship stupid, and the stakes online inherently low; this often made me envy him. Such freedom! “Speak out against the madness / You’ve got to speak your mind, if you dare,” he sings on “ Long Time Gone ,” a heavy and portentous Crosby, Stills, and Nash song from 1969.

As of 2019, Crosby remained estranged, somehow, from Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young. “All of the guys that I made music with won’t even talk to me,” he said in “Remember My Name.” “One of them hating my guts could be an accident,” but, he went on, “all really dislike me, strongly.” One of the last times Crosby, Stills, and Nash played together, in 2015, they delivered an unfathomably pungent version of “ Silent Night ” at the National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. Acrimony is evident in the stilted pre-song banter, during which Crosby appears to say more than his share of the lines on the teleprompter. “I can’t believe you,” Stills spits at Crosby, just before he starts strumming the opening chords on his guitar. The sourness between them seeps into their voices. It can be almost fun to watch, in an awkward, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” sort of way, though it is mostly hard to escape the plain tragedy of old friends still unable to make amends.

However cantankerous or stubborn Crosby was offstage, when performing, he was seized by a kind of silent joy. You could see it spreading across his face, loosening his features. Music softened him. In his later years, he wore a white mustache, long frizzy hair, and an omnipresent red beanie (knitted by his wife, Jan). He looked like someone who might sell you some garden compost. He looked salty. Performing was the one thing that seemed to reliably animate and excite him.

One of my favorite of Crosby’s vocal performances is a demo of “Everybody’s Been Burned ,” a Byrds song from 1967. The tone is somewhere between Nick Drake in his Warwickshire bedroom and Frank Sinatra on a barstool, sloshing a gin Martini. It’s a generous, humane song, about how terrifying it is to go on after loss:

Everybody has been burned before Everybody knows the pain Anyone in this place Can tell you to your face Why you shouldn’t fall in love again

Crosby’s voice is steady and pure. He understands the sharpness of despair, but he also understands what it means to give in to those feelings. The work, instead, is to transcend the fear. In a way, this was always Crosby’s mission—to overpower darkness, to sing it away. “You die inside if you try to hide,” he cautions. “So I guess, instead / I’ll love you.” ♦

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David Crosby's Schooner Muse

by Marc Myers Wall Street Journal June 6, 2013

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Singer-songwriter David Crosby, 71, is a founding member of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash; a solo artist, and author of three books. He is completing a new album of original material produced by another son, James Raymond, to be released early next year. He spoke with reporter Marc Myers. When I was 11 years old, my parents wanted me to do something besides get in trouble. So they enrolled me in sailing classes at the Sea Shell Association in Santa Barbara, Calif. From the moment I climbed into that 8½-foot dinghy in 1952, I knew instinctively what to do and sensed I had done it before. I was a natural sailor, and it's one of the reasons I later wrote "Déjà Vu." Sailing alone in that boat for the first time was a transforming experience. I came back the next day and every day after that. Sailing became one of the main streams of my life. I suppose my father was an influence. I remember seeing a photo of him at home sailing a big boat to Bermuda in his 20s. I still have it. "High Noon" also left a mark. My father, Floyd Crosby, was the film's cinematographer. I didn't realize until later, but "High Noon" had blossomed in my head. The movie is technically a Western, but it's really about an honorable, stand-up guy who sticks to his principles - even when he has to go it alone. Before long I sailed that dinghy around the harbor alone, getting as close as I could to the big sailboats anchored there - particularly a beautiful wooden schooner that I learned later was designed by John Alden, one of the great American yacht architects. I loved its design and wanted to see how the different lines and sails worked. As my confidence grew, I started sailing to the harbor's outer buoy. That scared everyone and they tossed me out of the club. My next big sailing experience came in 1967, after I was thrown out of the Byrds. I borrowed $25,000 from my friend Peter Tork, who was in the Monkees, and went down to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., looking for a schooner. I found one identical to the John Alden-designed boat I had seen years earlier and bought it. The 74-foot boat was named Mayan and was built in 1947 with Honduran mahogany. The cabins below can sleep eight, but six people is more ideal - four to keep watch and take turns manning the sails and two who can alternate cooking and cleaning. After I took possession, I had to learn how to sail it. I had never sailed anything larger than 8½ feet, and you need a good wheel-hand - that's me - and two good deckhands to handle the sails. So I made friends with lots of experienced sailors who wanted to sail on the boat, and they taught me everything I needed to know. Within a year, I decided to sail the boat to San Francisco and live on it full-time, until 1970. During that time I wrote many songs down below, including "Wooden Ships," "The Lee Shore," "Page 43" and "Carry Me." The Mayan has been a deep muse. I've always been a very careful sailor. I know, me and being careful - doesn't really sound right, does it? But when I sail, I take it seriously and take along spares for everything. You have to be careful when you're 1,500 miles from land. There's no one you can call. You're on your own. Virtually everyone in rock 'n' roll has been on the Mayan. But I didn't get my boat for partying. I got it to sail. Sure, after we'd dock, we'd go to someone's house and get completely inappropriately high on a variety of substances, many of which were dangerous and did me a great deal of harm. But partying is not what the boat was about. The boat is higher than a party. Sailing sweeps you away, and a party seems pallid and shallow. The boat is a way deeper experience, especially on long trips. I love voyaging - the longest has been 3,000 miles to Hawaii. I've also spent weeks all over the Caribbean. I still take the Mayan out sailing every chance I get with my wife, Jan, and Django, our son. But honestly, I haven't been able to afford the boat's upkeep for a while given my mortgage and other expenses. It's been on the market for a few years, but my wife would break my arms if I actually sold it. Look, I have maybe 10 more years, if I'm lucky. I have hepatitis C, diabetes and heart disease. I'm managing them. I'm going to the gym three days a week, I'm feeling strong and I can still make audiences feel great. My dream? One more tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash and my friend Neil [Young]. From there, I'd be fine. I'd be able to sail. I'd live. And I'd be happy.

Copyright protected material on this website is used in accordance with 'Fair Use', for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of the copyright owner(s). Please read Notice and Procedure for Making Claims of Copyright Infringement . Added to Library on June 7, 2013. (5638)

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David crosby's schooner arrives at dana point harbor, the rock and roll hall of famer's yacht was docked before it made its way to santa barbara. it is for sale for $850,000., debbie l. sklar , neighbor.

David Crosby's yacht, the Mayan, was docked Saturday afternoon at Dana Point Harbor before sailing to Santa Barbara, according to representatives at the Ocean Institute.

The yacht is for sale and appears in a classified ad on   yachtworld.com along with a number of photos of the galley, cabin, sleeping quarters and of Crosby at the helm of the yacht.

The ad reads:

Find out what's happening in Laguna Niguel-Dana Point with free, real-time updates from Patch.

• Current price: U.S. $850,000 
• Hull material: wood
• Engine/fuel type: single diesel
• YW No.  76263-2007887  

"This yacht is a classic wooden sailboat in look, in design and in performance. Mayan has been owned for more than 40 years by David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash. It was very extensively rebuilt ($600,000) in 2005 by Wayne Ettel in Wilmington, CA. The details of the rebuild were featured in Wooden Boat magazine No. 187/66.

"The boat is a very powerful design that takes the weather very well. The cabin layout is very traditional but easily sleeps eight in three staterooms plus a large saloon double berth. The boat has been continuously upgraded since 2005 with the addition of new electronics and continuous maintenance by paid hands."

The sailboat was docked alongside the Pilgrim, where just about the only sign of life on a lazy Saturday afternoon was a sleepy dog on deck sunning itself.

Incidentally, Crosby, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, co-wrote a song with Stephen Stills and the Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner called "Wooden Ships," released in 1969. It was written aboard Crosby's boat while he was in Florida, and some say the song's lyrics are about the Vietnam War. Crosby is credited with composing the music; Kantner and Stills are said to have written the lyrics.

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch? Register for a user account.

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