Album: David Crosby <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Voyage, ATLANTIC

David Crosby's Long Time Gone is one of the most entertaining of rock autobiographies, a measure not just of his scarily excessive lifestyle, but also of the candid and amusing voice in which it was related. This three-CD set tracks his career chronologically across the first two discs, with the third given over to demos and out-takes. You're not likely to play CDs two and three much, as the first covers Crosby's upward trajectory through The Byrds, early CSN and CSNY, and his solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name, while the second offers a decade or two of dissipation, leavened only by the occasional shaft of insight like "Compass", a jailhouse reflection on addiction, in which he acknowledges: "I have wasted 10 years in a blindfold." The Croz's leonine presence is probably best captured in the melodramatic "Almost Cut My Hair", though his harmonies are, of course, sublime throughout. Track annotations are cute: "Tamalpais High (At About 3)" is revealed as an evocation not of being high on Mt Tamalpais (though he doubtless often was), but of hanging around Tamalpais High School at 3pm to prey on the schoolgirls as they came out...

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Almost Cut My Hair', 'Eight Miles High', 'Guinnevere', 'Triad'