As a rule, rock stars live pampered, wildly self-indulgent lives that
commonly flout the simple virtues advanced in their songs. Okay, I'll
accept that-it's the rules of the game. It's just that some members of the
tribe take this behavior so far, and do it so consistently for decade
after decade, that they merit special attention. And when the bad behavior
comes from a huge ego whose tiny talent was floated by more accomplished
bandmates, well, it has to be David Crosby we're talking about. The
"C" of CSN&Y has been getting away with it for more than 40
years.
Most legends build slowly, but Crosby was obnoxious from the very start of
his career, before the Byrds, when he was an aspiring L.A. folkie in 1961.
One of his first acts as soon as he had a guitar in his hands was to
impregnate his girlfriend, Celia "Cindy" Crawford Ferguson, and
then "split." The confessional passage is on page 83 of Crosby's
second book (written, not surprisingly, with a collaborator). ".[W]hen
Cindy told me she was pregnant, I bailed. Left town, and went as far as
Denver, the farthest I had been from home, where I worked the whole winter
and never looked back." Oh, he does feel the occasional tinge of
guilt "for not being there for" the son born of that
relationship, but someone passed the pipe and he got over it.
"David was charming around chicks," says ex-neighbor Nurit Wilde
in the entertaining book Hotel California . "But there was a
revolving door with him-one girl in, one girl out. And if a girl got
pregnant, he was mean to her and dumped her." The book continues,
"By the summer of 1967 Crosby had become so obnoxious that [Byrd
leaders Jim] McGuinn and [Chris] Hillman could take no more of him."
After Crosby launched a tirade about the Warren Commission on stage at the
Monterey Pop Festival, the other band members handed him $10,000 to go
away. "They said I was terrible and crazy and unsociable,"
Crosby said. By his own admission, the sensitive artist chose to spend
part of that Summer of Love shooting heroin with Cass Elliot.
Despite Crosby's claim to have been an architect of their jangly sound,
the Byrds made some of their best music after he left, including such
classic albums as Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde and Sweetheart of the Rodeo (with
Gram Parsons). He was fired during the sessions for the seminal Notorious
Byrd Brothers , so his contributions to that were minor. Many of Crosby's
songs for the Byrds have dated badly, including "Triad" (a
smugly self-indulgent ode to a ménage a trois) and "Mind
Gardens."
Crosby must have put the spoon down for the first Crosby, Stills and Nash
album in 1969, because he held up his end with three decent songs:
"Wooden Ships" (recorded in superior form by the Jefferson
Airplane), "Long Time Gone" and "Guinnevere," but the
group's hits were by others and he's been coasting on this meager output
ever since. The comic highlight of follow-up Déjà Vu is his
self-important "Almost Cut My Hair." Ludicrously, this bathetic
ode is still in the group's set list, despite its author having given up
any hair to cut.
Crosby, Still, Nash and Young were propelled to fame by the brilliant
David Geffen, then a formidable music manager. In the biography The
Operator , Geffen describes Crosby as "obnoxious, loud, demanding,
thoughtless and full of himself." He adds that Crosby was the
"least talented" member of CSN&Y.
Here's how bad it got. CSN&Y were playing Carnegie Hall circa 1971,
and Crosby decides he has to have his drugs. "Crosby yelled and
screamed and threatened not to go on the next night if Geffen did not come
through," the book says. "Geffen finally relented." The
soon-to-be media mogul was subsequently involved in a sordid rendezvous
with band "ecstasy manager" Reine Stewart, who handed him a
package of dope to smuggle into New York.
Since Then , a follow-up to Long Time Gone , picks up after all of this.
It's 1985, and after 20 years filled with hardcore doping, the law is
finally closing in on Crosby. Increasingly paranoid, Mr. Peace and
Love has taken to waving guns around and freebasing cocaine. A Rolling
Stone profile around this time has him mumbling incoherently with his
equally addicted wife Jan and smashing his car windows when he can't find
the keys.
Crosby is our narrator as he describes convincing Jan to smuggle his
cocaine and firearms onto an airplane, then "bailing" after she
is caught with them. Incredibly, he left her in jail in Kansas City and
continued on with his nostalgia tour. "I'm not proud of that
period in my life, and it's painful to recall it now," he says, in
one of many such passages.
Crosby must have had great lawyers, because after all the charges and
failures to appear (he skipped a hearing in Texas and fled to Florida), he
ended up serving only a year in prison.
There's precious little about music in Since Then . Instead, we hear of
the medical problems (including a liver transplant) brought on by chronic
drug use, interspersed with bits of random armchair philosophy and
"wacky" road tales. He complains about bad catering, but no one
forces him to stuff all that food down. Recording sessions are mentioned,
but we get little more than the resulting albums' chart position.
Cold turkey withdrawal and a year behind bars haven't made Crosby much
more coherent. He still likes guns (though the law says he can't own them
anymore), and devotes considerable space to defending the Second
Amendment. He plans to teach his son Django "whatever I can about
women" (great idea!) and "how to be a rifleman." Crosby
recounts and attempts to justify several idiotic gun incidents, including
shooting wildly at a burglar and drawing a pistol on a parking lot
attendant at the Chateau Marmont.
Having run out of autobiography halfway through, Crosby devotes the second
half of his book to an off-the-cuff, unfocused political rant. He used to
like John McCain, but not anymore. He cares about the environment, man.
But after pontificating about climate change, he blithely segues into odes
to his polluting off-road vehicles and time-saving private plane, a
twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. Does it never occur to him that the carbon
dioxide emissions from that plane equal that of a dozen Hummers? Crosby
then has the nerve to dismiss the commercial flights the rest of us are
forced to take as an "unpleasant experience," complete with
cardboard cheeseburgers.
The great CSN&Y road trip lumbers on, with its two fat and balding
members-Crosby and Stills-serving as cautionary tales about the excesses
of the '60s. With the cheapest seats running $65 on Ticketmaster, it's
nice to know that Crosby is in the money again and has gotten his sailboat
out of hock. He hasn't made any worthwhile music in many years, but the
hippie faithful still turns out for the concerts. "There were more
bald spots per capita at this show than any other that I've been to in my
life," writes a young blogger.
Not surprisingly, the book is also carelessly copy-edited. Barack Obama is
identified as "Barak" throughout. Crosby professes to be
interested in Obama's candidacy, but another bong hit (remember, he admits
only to giving up hard drugs) probably took precedence to the spell check.
Since Then is, like Crosby, a bloated mess, rambling and lazy. He didn't
write it; he was interviewed for it. Save your money and turn instead to
the Neil Young biography Shakey , a superior book about a superior role
model who has something to say about growing old gracefully.
