David Crosby looked back to the Byrds' first European tour when the Beatles took the band under their wing back in 1965. “Croz” recalled to Uncut, “Paul (McCartney) was kind to us from when the Byrds went over to England for the first time. They had us over to their houses, they’d invite us to parties. I remember McCartney drove me home in his Mini Cooper from a horrible gig somewhere in Soho. It was a terrible place — blood-smeared, bug-infested, hideous. And he went, 'Ah, it’s not that bad. We’ve played there three or four times!'”
Crosby went on to talk about the pair's most recent hookup: “Two or three years ago I’m in this big rehearsal complex at Burbank. I’m doing a relatively new song, a pretty intense song. I’ve got my eyes closed, because I’m into it. It’s one of those moments when it’s going extremely well and you don’t want to f*** it up, even though it’s just you and the band in a big empty room. So I get to the end of the song and I hear one pair of hands clapping. I open my eyes, look up and it’s McCartney. He’s been standing there the whole time. He’s rehearsing in the room next door and has come over to see me. He invited us all back to his room, we raided his groceries and talked endlessly. He was so gracious with us. He’s just as real now as when I first met him in the ’60s.”
When we last caught up with David Crosby, we asked him about how back in the Byrds' mid-'60s heyday, the “Fab Four” treated him and Roger McGuinn on as personal confidantes and musical peers: “They were extremely bright cats; not, y'know, reserved intellectuals from expensive schools — these were kids off the street who had smarts. Real smarts. And a tremendous amount of talent. And hangin' out with them, y'know, it was difficult, because there was such an intense sphere of people. . . y'know, a lotta pressure. It was very difficult for them to get five minutes to themselves. The time that I did spend with them, we spent very privately and doing ordinary things. Playin' guitar, laying out by the pool, talkin,' playing music for each other that we had recorded. Y'know, stuff that was all the more precious because it wasn't a big deal. I loved showin' John Lennon a chord he hadn't seen before. Good cats. And they were very nice to us. Drove us home from gigs, invited us over for dinner, came to our shows. They were as nice as they could be.”