LOS ANGELES — David Crosby, who helped found two supergroups that broadened and deepened the reach of rock music, and who, with his outspoken political pronouncements and famously outsized appetites came to symbolize the Woodstock generation’s exuberance and excesses, has died, according to a source close to the musician.

Bedeviled by drug and alcohol addictions early in life and corresponding medical problems as he grew old, Crosby was 81.

A guitarist who sang in a crystal-clear middle tenor, Crosby had a voice sometimes described as angelic. He wrote or co-wrote songs with evocative lyrics and unusual tunings, and many of them — “Eight Miles High,” “Guinnevere,” “Wooden Ships,” “Long Time Gone” — continue stirring the hearts of fans who had long since traded their mescaline for Medicare. He was twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

For some, Crosby took his place in rock history on Aug. 18, 1969, when he performed at Woodstock with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and the fledgling group’s recent addition, Neil Young.

The story of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — also known as CSNY — is a saga marked by great music, bitter breakups, reluctant reunions, more bitter breakups and devolution into duos, solo acts and entirely different bands.

“I know I have an ego,” Crosby wrote in his 1988 autobiography, “Long Time Gone.” “Opinions differ as to its health, size, and value.”

Crosby was ousted from the Byrds in 1967. He had demeaned the abilities of his fellow musicians, drifted into onstage tangents about who really killed JFK, and sulked when the band refused to include “Triad” — his tribute to sexual threesomes — on an album.

Crosby’s CSNY bandmates had a far longer, but no less turbulent, history with him.

“There was an obvious dynamic between the four of us, and we’ve all done horrible things to one another,” Crosby told Vanity Fair magazine in 2019. “But I let them down worse than anything they ever did to me. I became a junkie. There isn’t any lower stage in human development than a junkie, and I did it right in front of them.”

Born in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1941, David Van Cortlandt Crosby came from parents with old-money New York City roots in the Van Cortlandt and Van Rensselaer families.

When he was 6, Crosby started singing harmonies as his dad played mandolin and the family sang from “The Fireside Book of Folk Songs.” At 14, he was given his first guitar — his brother’s old Silvertone acoustic.

“I’ve always said that I picked up the guitar as a shortcut to sex, and after my first joint I was sure that if everyone smoked dope there’d be an end to war,” he wrote. “I was right about the sex. I was wrong when it came to drugs. Who knew?”

After his family moved to the Santa Barbara area, the teenaged Crosby was in frequent trouble. Later, playing folk songs at coffeehouses in Santa Barbara and then Los Angeles, he hurriedly left town after his girlfriend became pregnant. “I split,” he later recounted. “Hey, now’s the time for me to become Woody Guthrie.”

Developing into an itinerant rocker, Crosby played clubs and slept on couches across the country. In 1964, he returned to L.A., where he hooked up with a band that called itself the Byrds.

After being ousted from the Byrds in 1967, within four months, he had a new job. With other musicians and artists, he had gravitated to L.A.’s Laurel Canyon. He had an affair with Joni Mitchell, made a friend of Mama Cass Elliot and started playing with Stills, of Buffalo Springfield. Wowed when they saw British guitarist Nash and the Hollies at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, Crosby and Stills joined forces with him after the three jammed at a party.

In 1969, they released “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” an album that continued to sell in the millions for years to come.

The next year, with Young, they scored another huge success with the album “Deja Vu.”

But while they were known for their exquisite harmonies, CSNY was regularly torn apart by internal clashes, and an ever-present cornucopia of drugs didn’t help.

By 1982, Crosby’s addiction was in full flower. He was freebasing — smoking — cocaine, because snorting it had burned holes in his nasal septum. For years, he had been shooting heroin, partly to obliterate the painful memories of his girlfriend Christine Hinton dying in a 1969 car crash. Makeup artists plastered over the sores on his face, but his eyes were glazed and his performances muted.

After a bust at a Dallas nightclub in 1982, Crosby checked himself into half a dozen rehab programs and bolted from each before being sent to prison.

After he was paroled in 1986, he recounted the horrors of prison to students at Beverly Hills High School.

Crosby’s survivors include his wife, Jan, sons James and Django, and daughters Erika and Donovan. In addition, he fathered two children by artificial insemination for the singer Melissa Etheridge and her then-partner Julie Cypher. The babies were born in 1996 and 1998.

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