To understand why David Crosby always seemed to clash hardest with Neil Young, you have to strip away the mythology and look at the fragile machinery underneath.

CSNY was never a band built on stability.

It was a collision.

David Crosby brought the vision, the vocal architecture, the belief that harmony could be a spiritual force.

Stephen Stills brought raw musical firepower, a virtuoso who could outplay almost anyone in the room.

Graham Nash brought melody and emotional accessibility, the sweetness that made the chaos digestible.

And Neil Young arrived like a weather system—brilliant, unpredictable, impossible to control.

Together, they sounded like destiny.

Separately, they were walking fault lines.

Crosby never hid his own flaws.

He admitted his temper, his ego, his addictions, his capacity for cruelty.

He once described himself bluntly as “an a-hole,” and he wasn’t fishing for sympathy.

He knew he was difficult.

He fought with everyone eventually.

But even by Crosby’s standards, his relationship with Neil Young felt different.

Sharper.

Colder.

More permanent in its damage.

To Crosby, Young wasn’t just stubborn or aloof.

He was fundamentally self-centered in a way Crosby couldn’t forgive.

“Neil only thinks about Neil,” he said repeatedly in later interviews, not as a jab, but as a diagnosis.

Crosby believed Young operated on a singular frequency, one that tuned out the needs of bandmates, friendships, and shared history whenever they conflicted with his own instincts.

In the early 1970s, that instinct made magic.

Neil Young’s unpredictability electrified CSNY.

He walked in with songs that shifted the band’s gravity, then vanished just as quickly.

Sometimes he showed up.

Sometimes he didn’t.

Rehearsals were missed.

Tours were abandoned.

Commitments dissolved without explanation.

For a band that required all four voices to function, Neil’s absences were catastrophic.

Yet they tolerated it because they had to.

Neil Young didn’t need CSNY.

CSNY needed Neil Young.

That imbalance poisoned everything.

Crosby both admired and resented Young’s independence.

He respected that Neil refused to chase hits, refused to repeat himself, refused to “pull the handle” the way the industry demanded.

But admiration curdled when that independence came at the expense of everyone else.

Crosby believed bands were families, dysfunctional but bound by obligation.

Neil didn’t operate that way.

Neil operated like a lone wolf who occasionally tolerated a pack.

Over time, that philosophical difference hardened into personal grievance.

Still, for years, the resentment stayed mostly underground.

The public saw reunions, tours, flashes of reconciliation.

What they didn’t see was the accumulation of small wounds, the feeling that Crosby was always waiting for Neil to care just a little more than he ever did.

The breaking point came in 2014, and it detonated everything.

When Neil Young left his wife Peggy after nearly forty years of marriage and began a relationship with actress Daryl Hannah, the rock world buzzed quietly.

David Crosby did not do quiet.

In a moment of astonishing recklessness, he went on national television and referred to Hannah as a “purely poisonous predator.

” The comment was nuclear.

Neil Young severed ties instantly and publicly.

There would be no more CSNY tours.

Ever.

Crosby later apologized.

He admitted he was wrong.

He admitted Neil had every right to be furious.

But apologies don’t undo detonations.

That comment didn’t create the feud—it exposed it.

Behind it was decades of unresolved anger, of feeling dismissed, sidelined, and emotionally abandoned.

After the fallout, Crosby began speaking with a brutal honesty that bordered on self-destruction.

He acknowledged Neil’s talent without hesitation.

He called him brilliant, visionary, irreplaceable.

But he also returned, again and again, to the same accusation: selfishness.

Crosby believed Neil’s refusal to engage—politically, emotionally, communally—was not neutrality but indifference.

“I’m a very liberal guy,” Crosby said.

“Neil doesn’t really do politics.

He does Neil.

” To Crosby, that wasn’t independence.

It was a refusal to stand with others.

While Crosby was bleeding his truth out in interviews, Neil Young mostly stayed silent.

He rarely fired back.

He didn’t escalate publicly.

He let the distance remain.

And when David Crosby died in 2023, Neil finally spoke.

What he wrote stunned people.

Instead of venom, he offered grace.

He called Crosby the soul of CSNY.

He praised his voice, his energy, his role as a catalyst.

He remembered the early years as lightning in a bottle.

It was generous.

It was restrained.

And it came too late to heal anything.

They never reconciled.

They never sat in the same room again.

They never found peace.

The feud didn’t just fracture Crosby and Young.

It tore the entire band apart.

Crosby’s relationship with Graham Nash collapsed as well, turning from brotherhood into outright hostility.

Crosby accused Nash of pretending to care about him for financial reasons.

Nash accused Crosby of betrayal.

They stopped speaking entirely.

Stephen Stills remained the only thread that didn’t snap completely.

Crosby continued to admire him deeply, calling him the best guitarist, singer, and writer of the group.

But admiration doesn’t undo damage.

Time doesn’t either.

As Crosby aged, something else stripped away whatever filters remained: loss.

The death of his son Beckett at just twenty-one years old from an opioid overdose shattered him.

Beckett, raised by Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher, was Crosby’s biological son, conceived as a sperm donor, but deeply loved.

Crosby watched addiction take hold after injuries, watched helplessly as fear became reality.

Grief has a way of burning away politeness.

It makes old grudges heavier, sharper, more final.

Crosby stopped smoothing things over.

He stopped pretending the past hadn’t hurt him.

He spoke openly about regret, about being difficult, about making things worse.

He didn’t cast himself as a victim.

But he refused to rewrite his emotional truth for comfort.

To him, Neil Young’s defining trait wasn’t cruelty—it was emotional absence.

Some people hurt you not because they intend to, Crosby believed, but because empathy isn’t their first language.

Independence comes first.

Always.

Two men made history together.

Two men created harmonies that felt transcendent.

Two men never found harmony with each other.

Neil Young chose to remember the music.

David Crosby died believing Neil Young never truly cared about him.

Somewhere between those two truths lives the real story of CSNY: messy, human, painful, unresolved.

A band that didn’t collapse from a lack of talent, but from an overdose of humanity.

And a feud that proves even the most beautiful harmonies can hide a war beneath the sound.