Almost Cut My Hair

David Crosby almost cut his hair. He didn’t. He wrote a song about that instead, and the premise is so small it sounds like a joke until you hear what he does with it.

The opening lines are about nothing. Almost cut my hair / It happened just the other day. A man tells you about a haircut he decided against. But Crosby keeps going, and by the second verse it stops being about hair. It’s about identity. About refusing to assimilate. About the small acts of resistance that decide who a person is.

In 1970, long hair was not a style choice. I feel like letting my freak flag fly. That line carried weight then that it can’t carry now — having long hair could get you beaten up, fired, disowned. It was a visible marker of tribe. A way of announcing which side you were on without saying a word. Crosby understood that symbols matter, that the personal is political, that sometimes the most stubborn thing a person can do is refuse to change.

The music holds nothing back. The band sounds ragged. Neil Young’s guitar tears through the mix like he’s angry, and the whole thing runs slightly out of control — on edge, close to coming apart. That is exactly right for a song about gripping something while everyone tells you to let it go.

Underneath the noise there’s a soft spot the bravado doesn’t cover. I feel like I owe it to someone. He never says who. Maybe the movement. Maybe himself. Maybe the version of himself that still believed things could change.

That’s the whole song. A man explaining why he kept his hair, which is a man explaining why he wouldn’t bend. Fifty years on, it still sounds like an argument worth having.