Yesterday was the 73rd birthday of musician David Crosby, and I got to thinking that's a milestone worth commemorating. Because other than Keith Richards, Crosby is probably the least likely rock 'n roll survivor we've got...and his survival was often in defiance of his best efforts to destroy himself.
There's something about Crosby that's fascinating to me. He's always been easy enough to caricature...the walrus moustache, the halo of frizzy hair, the general outrageousness (this is the man, after all, who harshed the happy buzz at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 by taking the stage and condemning the Warren Commission, charging the U.S. government with covering up a conspiracy in JFK's assassination). He's made more than enough poor life decisions to make anyone question his common sense. And yet...and yet...his talent is undeniable. He's a good singer, of course (not a great one...he'd never make it as a frontman in a rock back, but he's stellar on harmony), and an interesting songwriter (his arrangements and lyrics owe a great deal to jazz, particularly the spirit of John Coltrane). But I think his greatest ability is simply the way he brings things together. People and events seem to orbit around him. There's a reason why there's never been a Stills & Nash album (they actually tried it once in the 80s, and the record label told them to forget it and bring Crosby back in)...he's the molecular bonding of that unit, and the guy who electrifies any room he walks into. People are drawn to Crosby like moths to a flame.
The world at large first met Crosby as a member of the Byrds in 1965, but by that point, at the age of 24, he was already a journeyman folkie, having played throughout California, in Greenwich Village, and in many points in between. But he wanted something more, to find some way to tap into rock 'n roll. Meeting Jim McGuinn and Chris Hillman, fellow folkies, the trio went to see A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, and emerging from the theater, they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. The next day they traded in their acoustic guitars and banjos for electric models and amps, picked up a couple more members, and went on to create Folk Rock with "Mr. Tambourine Man" and Turn! Turn! Turn!", back-to-back number one hits that made the Byrds the biggest band in America barely a year after watching the Beatles cavort about on screen.
But Crosby was always a guy in search of something more, and despite the sudden fame and fortune, he wasn't satisfied. Growing increasingly unhappy, and never one to keep his opinions to himself, he quickly began alienating his fellow Byrds, until finally they had enough, and they fired him from the band.
By that point, if he hadn't been pushed, Crosby probably would have jumped anyway. His orbit had drawn a kindred spirit, Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, a band that was in the midst of a slow but inevitable disintegration (fellow Springfielder Neil Young quit the band not once, not twice, but three different times in less than twelve months), and they were already toying with forming their own musical effort (not a band in the traditional sense...both Crosby and Stills had had their fill of restrictive rock bands by that point).
Meeting Graham Nash was the lightbulb-above-their-heads moment, and the rest was history. (Neil Young came along a little while later, but exercising the habit he had honed in the Springfield, he quit before too long.)
The phenomenal success of this musical collective made Crosby a national figure, and gave him the wherewithal to pursue the lifestyle most could only dream of. Truthfully, wealth was never that important to him, and he gladly bestowed his money on friends and causes in need; for himself, his material indulgences were largely limited to a Mercedes-Benz and the Mayan, a 75 foot wooden schooner (an avid sailor, Crosby has expertly captained the boat around the Pacific and the Atlantic for decades. Time spent under sail were the rare instances when he would not use drugs at all, wanting to stay completely sober and alert. Sadly, due to ongoing financial problems, he had to put the boat up for sale earlier this year). But when people now recollect so-called "hippie hedonism", what they're really remembering is David Crosby. His home was a 24 hour-a-day bacchanalia, where the several women he was routinely sleeping with at any given time were strolling around the poolside naked, passing out joints to guests ("Cros always had the best dope", recalled Glenn Frey of the Eagles). So many people were traveling through Crosby's home day and night, he often went to sleep at Graham Nash's house, where he knew he could get some peace and quiet.
By '71, CS&N (and sometimes Y) were taking a break from each other, and Crosby decided to do a proper solo album. Bringing in Nash and Young, along with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, he gave us If I Could Only Remember My Name, a record that was less the traditional collection of self-contained pop songs than a highly eclectic mixture of folk, country, jazz and ambient sound. No one knew quite what to make of it at the time, but its since come to be regarded as a classic of its era and a harbinger of the later genre dubbed "Weird Americana".
After that, Crosby hooked up with Nash to form a new recording and performing duo, and entered into what I think might be his most creative period. If CS&N could fill football stadiums, C&N had to content themselves with clubs and small theaters...but they seemed to enjoy such intimacy with their audiences a whole lot more. And the music each of them made reflected new levels of maturity.
Unfortunately, from this peak, Crosby's life began to quickly spiral down. By his own admission, rarely a day had gone by since the early 60s that he hadn't indulged in something that was mind-altering, from speed to pot to acid to coke to heroin. He had always been able to handle it better than most, at least for a number of years, which probably led to a sense of invulnerability. And that invulnerability evaporated like smoke once he started freebasing cocaine in the late 70s.
In the course of a few short years, he had spent all of his money on drugs, and had grown so desperate, he was trading the publishing rights to his songs to dealers in exchange for fixes. Recording sessions for another album with Nash fell apart when Crosby couldn't get himself together enough to perform, and the same was true for a solo album he began and then abandoned.
You'll recall earlier in this piece that I mentioned that Stills and Nash attempted to record as a duo, but that their label refused to put the record out unless it were under the CS&N banner. By this point, Nash and Stills were exercising 'tough love' on Crosby, trying to convince him to go into rehab, but each attempt by him to get clean failed within hours, as he quickly scurried back to his pipe. With no other real choice but to reunite, Stephen and Graham invited David to join them again, but once in the studio, it was painfully obvious that his voice was shredded. Although his background singing does appear on such tracks as "Wasted on the Way" and "Southern Cross", they are buried deep in the mix, and the harmony vocal parts normally performed by Crosby are, on this album, sung by Art Garfunkel. The two Crosby originals that appear on Daylight Again are unreleased songs recorded several years earlier by David, with Stills and Nash adding new background vocals (in spite of their dubious origins, at least one of the songs, "Delta", is one of the best things Crosby's ever written, and remains a staple of his live performances to this day).
For better or for worse, the album was a huge hit, and that meant a major tour had to be mounted to capitalize on its success. The better was that Stills and Nash were in great form on the road, and the success of the album had introduced them to an entirely new generation of fans; the worse was David Crosby. He was so strung out by this time, he had to freebase several times during each concert just to be able to keep performing! A small private area would be set up backstage for him, and he would stagger over during Stephen or Graham's solo sets and light up his pipe. Great risks were taken in each city along the tour to make sure that Crosby had the freebase he needed, and that the authorities didn't stumble across him backstage.
For all of the trouble taken to accommodate him, Crosby brought little to the tour, other than the value of his name and his blurry presence. He certainly wasn't up to snuff musically.
It was around this time that gallows humor became widespread about just when Crosby was going to become the next rock drug casualty. I imagine the betting money had it that his life could be measured in months, not years.
Life got worse. He was busted in Texas on drug and gun charges; skipping out on his court date, he had a warrant for his arrest placed on him. Run-ins with the cops in California made that state inhospitable to him as well. Winding up in Florida with his girlfriend, he was at the end of his rope. He was broke, utterly addicted, ill, and facing prison if caught. He had a hair-brained scheme of getting to the Mayan (which may have been docked in Bermuda, or Jamaica, or even somewhere in Florida...he could no longer remember), and sailing forever out of U.S. territorial waters, just drifting around the world. How he could have managed that without any income, or without daily access to drugs, seemed not to have occurred to him.
Only one thing was for sure: if he followed through on this path, he was going to die.
Instead, as Nash graciously put it later, "he chose life."
Barefoot and disheveled, Crosby walked into the FBI bureau office in Miami and surrendered himself, too tired and broken to run any longer. He was shipped off to Texas, where he was sent to prison...and not 'celebrity jail'. He would up doing hard time in one of the hardest penetentiaries in the Lone Star State. He learned to make friends fast, so that someone could watch his back. And he learned to make a small knife out of scrap metal and to carry it on him at all times, because there were more than a few cons who would have loved to have made a rep by killing a famous musician while in stir. The barber cropped his hair close and shaved off his moustache (the luxury of facial hair was an earned privilege). At that time, there was no prison drug rehabilitation program in Texas. You were thrown into a cell and left to either get clean or die from withdrawl.
But he did get clean, and he rediscovered music. As a reward for good behavior, he was allowed to join the prison band, which gave performances in the jail. This earned Crosby genuine respect among the prison population, as he was no longer just a pampered rock star who had screwed up, but was instead one of them, and he was giving them the gift of his talent.
He behaved himself, was a model prisoner, and his many well-known friends petitioned the judge to show leniency. Convinced that he had learned his lesson, the State of Texas released Crosby early, but only on strict probation.
Three decades on now, Crosby has had a few downs (mostly financial, the result of years of drug-driven tax evasion), but a great many more ups. While he was locked up, his girlfriend went into rehab, and they married after his release, each having remained sober ever since. They had a son together (Crosby also has a daughter born back in the 70s). He reunited with Stills, Nash and Young to record and tour, did solo work of his own, and wrote a couple of books. Life was good...maybe better than it ever had been.
And then he almost died. Ironically, it wasn't the drugs he used to do that nearly killed him...not directly...but rather the damage they did to his liver, which finally quit on him in the mid-90s. In critical need of a donor if he had any hope of survival, he remained in the hospital, growing weaker every day. It was then that a man he had never met before entered his room, and Crosby's life made another massive sea change.
In the early 60s, barely an adult himself, Crosby had gotten a girlfriend pregnant. His response was to grab his guitar and suitcase and scramble out of California. In all of the years since, he had never inquired among old friends about the girl or the baby. For all he knew, she had had an abortion. But she hadn't; instead, she had put the baby, a boy, up for adoption. The adoptive parents knew the names of the birth mother and father, and a few years later when David Crosby became famous, the parents realized that he was the selfsame biological father. But they never contacted Crosby, and they never told their son, James Raymond, who his birth father was.
At least until the 1990s, when the press was full of stories about Crosby's potentially impending death. Feeling that their adopted son ought to have the chance to meet his birth father at least once before he passed, they wrote to Crosby, who agreed to see James. And amazingly, they hit it off immediately. They bonded not in a father/son way, but rather over their shared passion for music. James was a successful session musician and composer...and to David's relief, he inherited none of Crosby's self-destructive addictive tendencies.
Then, almost miraculously, a liver donor became available, and Crosby's life was saved. When he was well enough, he formed a group with James, CPR, and got back to the business of making music.
(He also got into the business of making babies. At the request of musician Melissa Etheridge, Crosby donated his sperm to artificially inseminate her girlfriend, director Julie Cypher, and thus fathered both of their children.).
By 2014, Crosby was doing better than ever, releasing an acclaimed solo album (produced by James) that earned some of the best critical reviews of his career. True, a sold-out solo tour had to be temporarily halted when he underwent emergency cardiac surgery in the spring, but he bounced back quickly enough to launch a new Crosby Stills & Nash tour, and to continue work on what will be their next album.
And now he turns 73, no doubt much to the surprise of many. And instead of retiring with his memories, Crosby continues to push himself, to make new music and reach out to new fans, and to savor this life he, by most rights, probably shouldn't have made it to.
Personally, I'm very glad he's made it this far, and I'll be very happy if I can wish David Crosby a happy birthday in many years to come.
