David Crosby knew his days were numbered at least several years before his death was reported Thursday.
“It feels like I’m at the end of my life and am running out of time. That’s one of the reasons I’m working as hard as I am; I don’t have a lot of time,” Crosby told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018, 49 years after he had performed at Woodstock with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
The co-founder of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash was 81. No cause of death has been disclosed yet for the Los Angeles native, whose history of drug abuse was well-documented by many, including Crosby himself.
“You have to understand that I wanted to quit. But I was so severely addicted that I probably tried to 10 times, and failed,” he told the Union-Tribune in 1988. “Now, if you try enough times and fail, you don’t believe you can. And I had pretty much given up. I thought I was going to die on drugs — end of story.”
Crosby’s luminous tenor and jazz-inspired songcraft helped propel him to stardom in the 1960s, first with The Byrds, then even more so with the supergroups Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
It seemed near miraculous that — unlike Crosby himself — his singing voice somehow emerged unscathed from his near-fatal habits, which included heroin, alcohol and free-basing.
What saved him, he maintained in his 1988 Union-Tribune interview, was serving nine months in a Texas prison in 1985, several years after being arrested in Dallas with a loaded .45 caliber pistol, a propane torch and a glass pipe containing drug residue.
“I had already served my time when my conviction was overturned,” Crosby told me in 1988. “People came up to me and said: ‘Aren’t you going to sue them?’ I said: ‘Sue them? Are you crazy? I’m going to send them a thank-you note!’ Being in prison saved my life ...
“Being locked up, it took six months before I even began to wake up. But that’s what did it. If I had a choice of going back to being a junkie or spending another year in jail, man, I’d walk in and close the cell door with my own hands. I can only tell you that being a really heavy junkie and free-base addict is a much worse prison than bars will ever make. So I don’t regret prison a bit.”
I interviewed Crosby multiple times between 1988 and 2018. The first was at the Hotel del Coronado, where we spoke over brunch, then in the hotel room he was sharing with his wife, Jan. She remained by his side during the interview and for the rest of his life.
Crosby and I hit it off, in part, because of our shared passion for jazz in general as well as saxophone giant John Coltrane and guitar legend Django Reinhardt, in particular. After several hours of conversation, Crosby asked if I’d like to accompany him and Jan to the San Diego Zoo that same afternoon. He also invited me to his duo concert in San Diego that night with longtime musical partner Graham Nash.
Crosby, who seemed to be the life of the party even completely sober, invited me backstage where he introduced me to a few of his musical pals, including Jackson Browne, who was headlining the show, and Kris Kristofferson.
The twinkle in Crosby’s eyes, on stage and off, was his nonmusical trademark. I saw it again when we spoke in 1989 after a Byrds reunion show at the Bacchanal, when I interviewed him in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1996 and when he, his wife and I chatted backstage at the Grammy Awards in 1998.
We weren’t friends — music critics, I have learned, should be cautious about not getting too close to the artists they write about — but we were friendly. And in the nearly 10 interviews we did between 1988 and 2018, Crosby was always candid.
This held true whether he was discussing his music, diving into politics and social activism, reflecting on his drug abuse or praising (and, later in his career, complaining about) his former band mates in The Byrds, CSN and CSN&Y.
“It feels like I’m at the end of my life and am running out of time. That’s one of the reasons I’m working as hard as I am; I don’t have a lot of time,” he said.
Having cheated death numerous times, Crosby was keenly aware of how precious life was — and how quickly it could end.
“What happens when you are at this stage of your life,” he said in his 2018 Union-Tribune interview, “is you look at it, and say: ‘How am I going to spend it? Am I going to sit on my butt and fade slowly out? Or am I going to do something with my time?’
“(Dying) is something you have to think about, but something we avoid thinking about. As a culture, we’re terrified of dying; that’s why we thought up religion. I’m trying to be conscious about (mortality), because I’m trying to be conscious about everything.”
Unlike some other rock stars of his generation, Crosby embraced social media, especially Twitter.
In what proved to be one of his final tweets on Wednesday, he joked about heaven, writing: “I heard the place is overrated ... cloudy.”
The many obituaries being published will tell you lots about Crosby’s history. Ultimately, he is someone who spoke best for himself. The Union-Tribune interviews with him, from 1988 and 2018, below tell you exactly how he felt.
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A drug-free life is the biggest kick of all for David Crosby
By GEORGE VARGA, Music Critic, Nov. 20, 1988, The San Diego Union-Tribune
David Crosby is beaming.
It is a gray, fog-shrouded morning, and the 47-year-old singer-songwriter and his wife, Jan Dance, are eating breakfast in the Hotel del Coronado’s Crown Room.
In between mouthfuls of eggs, beans and salsa, he animatedly discusses a variety of topics — jazz (he has an abiding love for the music of saxophonist John Coltrane); comedians (Robin Williams is a favorite); and gourmet cuisine (last night’s veal piccata and agneau dejeune at the Prince of Wales room earn hearty endorsements).
“Let’s face it, I didn’t get like this from not liking to eat,” Crosby says with a laugh, patting his ample stomach. “I love good food.”
The Crosbys rise from their table and are immediately approached by a long-haired boy of no more than 13. His quest: To shake hands with the mustachioed musician whose ascent to rock stardom began a full decade before the boy was born.
“I remember the first time a little girl came up to me on a Crosby, Stills and Nash tour and said, ‘You’re my mother’s favorite group,’ ” Crosby recalls, walking into the hotel’s lobby. “I felt like saying, ‘Thanks a lot, kid. You really make me feel over the hill!’ ”
His clear brown eyes dancing with delight, he breaks into a proud grin. Clearly, this is a man who is now elated to be considered over the hill — rather than buried 10 feet under it.
After spending almost all of the 1970s and half of the ‘80s in an abyss of drug addiction and deprivation that repeatedly brought him to the brink of death, David Crosby has returned — older, wiser and determined to stay straight.
“I had promised myself that once I became a musician and got really into it, it would be my life, and that I would never let anything, under any circumstances, be more important than the music,” he says a few minutes later, leaning back on a couch in a hotel suite overlooking the ocean.
“And I broke that promise; I absolutely trashed it. I almost let the drugs take it away from me. So, having returned to music now, I have more fun playing and writing than probably ever in my whole life. But it’s a tough way to do it — to almost have to lose something to realize what you’ve got.”
Crosby’s heady rise to fame, prolonged fall and unexpected return from a living hell is depicted in vivid, often grim, detail in his recently published autobiography, “Long Time Gone.”
A no-holds-barred chronicle, the book is notable for an absence of sentimentality and self-pity. With chilling candor, Crosby relates his and Dance’s tragic journey into heroin and cocaine addiction, their convictions on drug and firearms possession charges, his parole violation and his 1985 sentence in a Texas prison.
Yet, while his conviction was recently reversed by the Texas Supreme Court, Crosby agrees that he probably would not be here today were it not for his incarceration.
“There’s no question about it,” he says. “I had already served my time when my conviction was overturned. People came up to me and said: ‘Aren’t you going to sue them?’ I said: ‘Sue them? Are you crazy? I’m going to send them a thank-you note!’ Being in prison saved my life.”
He leans forward and looks his visitor directly in the eye.
“You have to understand that I wanted to quit. But I was so severely addicted that I probably tried to 10 times, and failed. Now, if you try enough times and fail, you don’t believe you can. And I had pretty much given up. I thought I was going to die on drugs -- end of story,” he says.
“Being locked up, it took six months before I even began to wake up. But that’s what did it. If I had a choice of going back to being a junkie or spending another year in jail, man, I’d walk in and close the cell door with my own hands. I can only tell you that being a really heavy junkie and free-base addict is a much worse prison than bars will ever make. So I don’t regret prison a bit.”
Eager to make up for lost time, Crosby has been a whirlwind of activity since his release on probation two years ago.
In addition to collaborating on his autobiography with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb (“Jaws,” “The Jerk”), he has regularly performed concerts with longtime partner Graham Nash, recorded a reunion album with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (“American Dream,” out this week on Atlantic Records), and completed a splendid solo album (“Oh Yes I Can,” scheduled for release in January on A&M Records). And, in May of last year, he married Dance, legally consummating a romance that began in 1978.
“The truth is, I’m having such a wonderful time I don’t want to stop,” he says. “It’s also probably the healthiest thing for a recovering addict or alcoholic to stay busy, so I do. I’ve wasted a ton of time, and I don’t want to waste any more.”
His busy schedule aside, the transition to clean living hasn’t been easy after years of spending up to $7,000 weekly on drugs.
“I still have dreams about it (drugs), Jan and I both do, regularly,” Crosby acknowledges. “And that’s real tough. You wake up, and you don’t know whether it’s a dream or you did it. The reason the recidivism rate is so high is because we know how to be junkies. We know how to fail. Nobody said this was easy, but it’s worth it (because) you get your life back.”
As of next month, it will be three years since Crosby and Dance assumed a drug-free lifestyle. During the course of this interview, a subsequent trip to the San Diego Zoo and a backstage visit at a Crosby concert that night, the two were never more than a few feet from each other.
Watching the couple together, it is clear they are deeply in love. Did this love play a significant role in enabling them to overcome their self-destructive ways?
“It did. I don’t think I could have made it without her,” Crosby says. “Jan is an incredibly strong person, but I don’t know which one of us had it tougher. It’s a rotten way to clean up, in prison. They lock you in a steel box, feed you through a hole in the door and say (he affects a thick Texas drawl), ‘Hey, you got yerself like this, get yerself out of it, boy.’ And they didn’t give a damn.
“Jan, on the other hand, might have had the tougher deal, because she could go and screw up. She wasn’t locked up; she could walk away and get the damn drugs. And she didn’t do it. Her support, our mutual commitment to try being alive instead of dead, was probably the deciding factor a lot of times ...”
In “Long Time Gone,” Dance is sometimes referred to as “Death,” a gruesome nickname inspired by her then-deathly pallor. Today, she appears radiant and in good health. So does Crosby, apart from his ballooning weight.
It is this sense of transformation, of returning from the brink of death, that made writing “Long Time Gone” such a cathartic experience.
“That’s the exact word,” Crosby says. “Here is a 489-page catharsis, although I didn’t write if for that reason. I wrote it because it was an outrageous story, and because Doubleday (Publishers) made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. But that wasn’t the bottom line of it.
“There is a naive hope that somebody who hasn’t started their drug experience will read it and say, ‘Hmm, perhaps that’s not such a good idea.’ And, also, that somebody who is way too far into their drug experience will say, ‘Good God, if a screw-up like him can get out of it, I can get out of it.’ Both of those things lurked at the back of my ‘60s mind.”
Crosby’s decision to denounce drugs is evidenced by his autobiography, and by “Oh Yes I Can,” his first solo album in 18 years. But his harrowing journey is best captured on “Compass,” a stunning song from the new Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album that ranks as one of the finest of Crosby’s career.
Sample lyric: "I have seized death’s door handle like a fish out of the water, waiting for the mercy of the cat, but like a compass seeking North, there lives in me a still sure spirit past."
“It was a major turning point,” he says of the song. “I don’t really think art and suffering are necessarily hooked up, particularly now, because I’m not suffering even a little bit, and I’m making some of the best art of my career. But there was a great deal of suffering involved in that one.
“When it came along, I realized that I was going to be able to write again. That was the first really good song I’d done in three or four years. It was just the most incredible feeling; I looked at the page of lyrics and said, “My God, these are good!’ To do that in a prison cell, with a bunch of graffiti on a wall two feet in front of your nose and some completely illiterate, liquor-store hold-up guy on the bunk above you, was really quite an experience.”
Is Crosby conceding that a generation that tuned in, dropped out and got high in the ‘60s shouldn’t have laughed at the admonitions of their parents?
“Well, the reason we laughed was because they said taking acid would cause us to look at the sun and make our eyes burn out, and that we’d have bad (deformed) babies. And we tried it, and it didn’t. So we thought they were lying about everything,” he replies.
“Of course, when they said smoking a joint would lead to harder stuff, we said, ‘Aw, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And, it galls me to say it, but they were right. There’s no question about it ...
“When people ask me how in the hell I could have been so stupid and have done such a dumb thing, I tell them, ‘Well, dope is this wonderful, twisty, little path. At the beginning it’s all nice and pretty with trees and grass, and you’re out there smoking a joint, going a little wacko and going to Suzi’s house. It’s a windy little path, and you can’t see the end where it goes over the cliff; it’s not visible.’ And that’s how it works.”
But what drew him to drugs in the first place?
“You do it because it seems fun,” he says. “That’s what’s so insidious about it. When you’re just smoking a joint or snorting a line of coke, you seem to be getting something for free, and it seems to be without any real danger to it.
“At the end of that same road, you are hopelessly addicted to cocaine and heroin, and you are dying. And when I say dying, I mean dead people on the floor. Dead. My friends, me — almost. And you don’t see that from the beginning.”
As a privileged rock star with widespread public support, Crosby realizes that he is better equipped to recover from his travails than “the average ex-junkie in the street.” He is determined to use his high-profile position to fight against the drugs that nearly toppled him.
“You have to spend a great deal of time educating people who are young, because that’s where you really have to stop it,” he warns. “... You have to put kids in front of recovering addicts, not their social studies teachers. It has to be somebody like me, who nearly died, looking them in the eye and saying, ‘Look, this is the real deal.’
“It’s not an impossible situation ... It’s a matter of people standing up and being counted, and getting angry that these sleazeballs are out in the street selling death, cheap. Because they are, and I don’t like it.
“And I’m not going to shut up.”
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David Crosby talks music, mortality, CSNY, and behaving better in a #MeToo world
BY GEORGE VARGA, Music Critivc, Nov. 6, 2018, The San Diego Union-Tribune
David Crosby is not ready to fade away. But the two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee hears the clock ticking louder every day.
“It feels like I’m at the end of my life and am running out of time. That’s one of the reasons I’m working as hard as I am; I don’t have a lot of time,” he said.
“What happens when you are at this stage of your life is you look at it, and say: ‘How am I going to spend it? Am I going to sit on my butt and fade slowly out? Or am I going to do something with my time?’
“(Dying) is something you have to think about, but something we avoid thinking about. As a culture, we’re terrified of dying; that’s why we thought up religion. I’m trying to be conscious about (mortality), because I’m trying to be conscious about everything.”
Crosby is 77.
In late 1994, after years of drug addiction left him on his death bed, he received a liver transplant. It gave him a new lease on life.
In a 1995 Union-Tribune interview Crosby said: “I want to spend my time on the most precious things, and nothing else. But there’s also a clock ticking, in the back of my head, that says: ‘Hey, nobody knows how long transplants live, so you better get cracking and get everything you can done now. You better sing every day, and you better write’.”
Yet, while he only made two new albums between 1995 and 2014, Crosby is now working at a record pace in recent years. He has made three albums in the past three years — 2016’s “Lighthouse,” 2017’s “Sky Trails” and this year’s “Here If You Listen” — and is now starting another.
“The only reason I can make a contribution, make anything better, and help to use music as the positive force it is,” Crosby stressed, “is if I create more music. So, with whatever time I’ve got left, I should be working really hard. And I am.
“I spent so much time in my life being a screw-up, being a mess, that being a decent guy is really critical to me, to my survival as a human being. I need to feel good about myself, and I am trying to be a decent human. I’m desperately trying to do good.”
Crosby performs Monday at the Balboa Theater with his talent-rich Lighthouse band mates: Michelle Willis, 31; Becca Stevens, 34; and Michael League, also 34.
The leader of the jazzy band Snarky Puppy, League has won three Grammy Awards and co-produced Crosby’s “Lighthouse” and “Here if You Listen” albums. Stevens has made five solo albums and has teamed with such noted jazz artists as Jose James, Esperanza Spalding and San Diego guitarist Peter Sprague.
“I’m working with people who are a joy to work with and who are creative and young. That’s inspired me a lot and led me to write a whole lot of new music,” said Crosby, who — prior to his “Lighthouse” album — was never in a band with any female members.
“When were writing the songs, we were not thinking about who was going to be singing it, or how, only about a song that takes you on a little emotional voyage and explores something,” he continued.
“Both Becca and Michelle are very strong singers and creators. They don’t have to push to get up in the higher registers; they can float up there, effortlessly. I should have been working with girls all along!”
Doing so now has led Crosby to a state of self-reflection and soul-searching.
“We treat Michelle and Becca as ladies, because they are,” he said. “That’s forced me to address the #MeToo movement and how women are being empowered as a result.
“It’s also made me look at my behavior and not be a sexist idiot, which most guys largely are without even thinking about it. I don’t think we all are; that’s just how we grew up. When you work with very strong women who you respect, you do start to behave in a more gentlemanly way. You do try. It’s something I’ve had to work on.”
Crosby predicts that his Monday San Diego concert will feature many of the songs from “Here If You Listen,” as well as a few selections that date back more nearly 50 years.
“We’ll do most of the new album and we’ll do a few you recognize,” Crosby said. “Mind you, we go from stuff by The Byrds to stuff we wrote last week, but we do a lot of new material.”
Is that risky for an artist whose audience usually is dominated by longtime fans who grew up listening to Crosby’s recordings with The Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as well as his solo albums and numerous duo albums with Nash?
“We don’t look at it that way,” he replied. “We like doing new material and these are good songs. I don’t want to just do ‘the hits.’ ”
Crosby has been estranged from longtime musical partners Stephen Stills and Graham Nash since late 2015. All three have become more prolific as solo artists since their split and each sounds more inspired on their own.
“Well, it’s certainly true of me; I wouldn’t say it was true of them,” Crosby said. “They did one album, each, and they were both bad.”
Such comments would suggest Crosby is not ready to try mending bridges with Stills or Nash.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “Why not? I’d rather not get into that.”
Even so, Crosby is open to a reunion, if Neil Young — from whom he is also estranged — is involved.
“Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young has always been up to Neil,” Crosby said. “Neil is the big chicken there and he makes the decisions. If he decides to do it again, we will. I don’t think he’s going to; I don’t think he needs. But, usually, he calls when he needs us. And I’d do it, happily, if he did. I can only speak for me.
“I wish we had a song like (the Young-penned 1970 CSNY-recorded anti-war protest anthem) ‘Ohio’ that related to the state of things right now. We need one. I’ve been trying to write one and I hope somebody does. We need a fight song when we go out in the streets — our version of ‘We Shall Overcome.’
“We need that. Recording ‘Ohio’ was part of our job, the troubadour/town-crier part of our job. We need that."
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