Long Time Gone
David Crosby wrote this song the night Robert F. Kennedy was shot. June 5th, 1968. He was watching television when the news came out of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, and he picked up his guitar.
By morning he had it. Two months after Martin Luther King Jr. Five years after JFK. The third time in five years hope had died in front of him, and the song that came out is the one that names that exact arithmetic without ever naming a man. “It’s been a long time comin’. It’s goin’ to be a long time gone.”
CSN wouldn’t form for another year. Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, three singers out of three different bands, and when they finally cut a record together this was one of the first songs they put down. The harmonies stack one on top of the other until they sound like something larger than three men. Stills plays the bass. Crosby’s rhythm guitar churns underneath. The whole thing builds and keeps building.
It isn’t a song about Kennedy. It’s a song about the morning after, when you wake up and understand that the people trying to change things are the ones who get shot, and that someday might not come at all.
“Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness.” It is a command and a plea in the same breath. Crosby believed, even then, that watching the thing fall apart without screaming was the same as helping it fall.
Fifty-five years later the song still sounds urgent. That is not a compliment.
He wrote it in one night, the night the third one died. By morning it was a song. It has been a long time comin’, and it is going to be a long time gone.
