David Crosby interview: ‘We all bought Porsches and screwed our brains out’
David Crosby has lived one of the wildest lives in rock and roll. “I’m proud of myself,” he tells me. “I’ve made a lot of music, and the work is good… but I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. I got really off the rails, bad stuff happened and I used heroin and cocaine to blot out the pain. I went to prison for a year, in Texas [in 1985]. That was rough. But I beat it, man, and I’m proud of that. And I like that feeling, because I went for so long not being proud of myself.”
Crosby, a former member of such seminal bands as the Byrds and Crosby Stills Nash & Young (CSNY), is calling over videophone from the veranda of his ranch house in Santa Ynez, California. It is midday there, the sun is shining and a swimming pool shimmers in the distance. With his flowing white hair and Walrus-like moustache, he looks and sounds content – up to a point.
“I’m a happy guy, man, which is kind of weird in this ancient state of being,” says Crosby, who turns 80 next month. Tendonitis in his hands makes it increasingly painful for him to play guitar. He has type 2 diabetes and had a liver transplant in 1994, after struggling for years with hepatitis C, and major cardiac surgery in 2014, which has left him with eight stents in his heart. “I’m old, I’m tired, the world is kind of f---ed up. But I can still sing. I don’t know how or why, but I can, and I’m gonna.”
Next week he has a new solo album out, For Free, his fifth release in six years. It is a beautiful thing, by turns folky, funky, soulful and meditative, with all the gorgeous jazzy chords, flowing melodies, philosophical lyrics, sensitive singing and airy harmonies his fans have come to expect. He wrote and recorded it during lockdown and, he says, “I think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever done” – quite a claim from the writer of such classic hits as Déjà Vu for CSNY and the Byrds’s Lady Friend. But he does not expect to make much money from it. “The streaming services are ––” he snarls, suddenly furious. “They are not paying the artists jack s---. If I had a million goddamn plays, I could maybe buy you breakfast. If you think that’s right, you’re nuts.”
Crosby should be fabulously rich by now. By his own admission, however, he has squandered “many, many millions of dollars” on drugs. He filed for bankruptcy in 1985, and was effectively living from one tour to the next. But the pandemic put a stop to that, and Crosby now believes that he will never tour again. “Live music didn’t come back fast enough for me,” he says. “I can’t sleep on a bus, I don’t have a lot of stamina. So it’s pretty much ruined for me.”
He also feared that he would lose his home during the Covid shutdown because, he says, he “couldn’t make the payments”. Then, in March this year, he sold all his recorded music and publishing rights to the entertainment mogul Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group for a sum he describes as “a ton of money”. (Crosby is the latest high-profile artist to join that particular bandwagon: the deal came within months of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon each selling their music rights to investment funds for more than $300 million.) “I felt bad about it,” Crosby admits now. “Bad! I didn’t wanna do it. But I didn’t have any choice…” On the other hand, he adds, “You should have seen my wife’s smile when I told her I’d paid off the house!”
Crosby is a refreshingly un-guarded interviewee; as he speaks, his shifting emotions play out across his face, from joy to anger to sorrow. “I am opinionated, I am very outspoken, I definitely don’t censor myself well at all,” he says. “I’m very likely to tell you what I actually think rather than the politically correct thing. And that offends some people. It’s a shame that I don’t have better control, but there it is. That’s who I am.”
Born in Los Angeles in 1941, Crosby says music came easily to him. “It just rang my bell. I never studied it, I still don’t read and write music.” In 1964, he was a founding member of the Byrds, who blended the Beatles with Bob Dylan and ushered folk rock into the world, with instant success. “We went absolutely crazy,” he says. “We all bought Porsches and screwed our brains out.”
But his musical adventure had only just begun. In 1967, he discovered Joni Mitchell singing in a club in Florida and went on to produce her first album, Song to a Seagull. They also had a brief romance. “She’s a very strange lady, and our relationship is a little prickly, but I love her anyway. She’s the best singer-songwriter we’ve ever had.”
That same year, jamming sessions at house parties in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, led to Crosby joining forces with Graham Nash of the Hollies and Stephen Stills – and, a year later, Neil Young – of Buffalo Springfield. “It was a less idyllic scene than people imagine – a lot of competition, a lot of ego – but fruitful and inspiring to an incredible degree.” With their multimillion- selling second album, Déjà Vu (1970), CSNY became one of the most popular bands in the world.
Yet, for Crosby, fate had other plans. During the recording of the album, his longtime girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car accident, and his grief led him into a spiral of heavy drug abuse. The group became an on-again-off-again affair throughout the 1970s, until Crosby’s arrest in a nightclub in Dallas in 1982, for possession of cocaine. He subsequently fled rehab, but was rearrested in New York on further drug and gun charges, eventually spending nine months in a Texas state prison.
He acknowledges now that his enduring reputation as a “selfish and wacko guy” – a rampant drug user and womaniser who, by his own account, slept with “hundreds of women” – cannot have been easy on his bandmates. “I’m not looking for them to absolve me of my idiocy. I let all three of those guys down totally,” he says. In his defence, he notes that he has been faithfully married (to Jan Dance) since 1987. “Once I got married to Jan, I never touched another woman, ever.”
CSNY reunited for Live Aid in 1985 and continued to perform sporadically in various combinations. Then, in a 2014 interview, Crosby described Young’s girlfriend at the time, the actress Daryl Hannah – whom he married in 2018 – as “a purely poisonous predator”. (Crosby later apologised, admitting he was “completely out of line”.) Crosby, Stills and Nash last toured in 2015 but the following year Nash announced the group was finished for good, and that he was “done with Crosby”. This is said to have followed arguments about Nash leaving his wife for a younger woman. “He tore the heart out of CSNY,” Nash said of Crosby. “He’s not a really great person. He talks a good story.”
It’s hard to see how the band can bury the hatchet now. “There will never be any more CSNY, ever,” Crosby confirms. “Human lives don’t go in parallel paths. You’re either always growing towards each other or away from each other. The relationship soured between me and Graham. He turned into a guy I don’t really want to be friends with. Stills and I – I think – are still probably friends. I haven’t spoken to Neil for a couple of years. I’ve said some unkind things about him, and I’ve apologised. I like his art but he’s a difficult guy to deal with. That’s how that is.
“I am really proud of the work, but I don’t want to agonise about the relationships in those bands cos they’re done, and they’re done for other reasons nobody outside knows about. It has nothing to do with the cat fights, nothing to do with the arguments, nothing to do with me calling Neil’s girlfriend something bad, and nothing to do with Nash hating my guts. But it’s done. It’s over.”
In many ways, Crosby has put the past behind him. Perhaps most crucially, he says, “I don’t do hard drugs anymore, they nearly killed me” – though he stills smokes marijuana, which is legal in California, and even has his own craft cannabis brand, the Mighty Croz. “I like it, it’s fun.” The past few years have seen him hit a late creative streak, making solo music at a prodigious rate, something he partly ascribes to a blossoming relationship with his son, James Raymond, a pianist and producer, who was given up for adoption in 1961 but reunited with Crosby in 1995.
“I’m so proud of the way he turned out,” says Crosby. “I love making music with James. He’s a better musician than me.” Crosby also has three other adult children and was the sperm donor for two children by the singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher. Their eldest son, Beckett Cypher, died in May last year, aged 21, from a drug overdose. “It is still hugely painful,” says Crosby, his voice suddenly freighted with grief. “It’s never gonna get easy. You lose somebody you love and it hurts, that’s how it is.”
As he prepares to enter his ninth decade, Crosby says he tries not to worry about the future. “I live today. What counts is not how long you’ve got, man. What counts is how you live that time. So what I’m trying to do is fill my life with my family, with love, with music that I make, as much as I possibly can.
“I know this sounds corny, but I believe in music. It’s a lifting force, it makes things better. I believe it is my job to make music. And that’s what I’m doing, as hard as I can, as fast as I can, as much as I can.”
David Crosby’s For Free will be released by BMG on Friday