DAVID Crosby sounds remarkably happy and healthy for someone who, as he describes it, is dying of three different diseases: hepatitis C, diabetes and heart disease. "But life itself is a fatal disease, so to hell with it," the 65-year-old singer and songwriter says from his home in central California.
Adversity has never been far away in Crosby's life and career. Aside from his various illnesses, he spent 10 years in a drug-fuelled haze, a period that ended in 1985 when he landed in jail for a year. As his professional life with Crosby, Stills and Nash was just taking off in 1969, his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car accident. His older brother committed suicide. In 2004 Crosby faced weapons and drugs charges after a hotel worker searched his bag and found a knife, a hand gun and marijuana.
Also, in no particular order or category, acrimony has plagued several of Crosby's musical collaborations. He had a liver transplant 12 years ago. He has made enemies. He fathered the children of a lesbian couple. And his piano player is his son, whom he met for the first time when both were professional musicians.
All of this sounds like a rock'n'roll fable, but it's not. This is David Crosby's life. By the standards of rock casualties, he shouldn't be around any more.
Yet, in 2007, here he is, brimming with enthusiasm, publicising his new autobiography and looking forward to Crosby, Stills and Nash's first Australian concerts in almost 20 years, beginning next month.
Crosby has been doing the rounds in the US talking about the book Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It. It's the follow-up to his earlier autobiography, Long Time Gone. Both contain no-holds-barred revelations by an old self-confessed hippie and troublemaker who now prefers the straight and narrow with his family, but still with music as a central part of his life.
He has made plenty of mistakes, not least his chemical phase, but is grateful for coming through it all. "It wasn't my way," he says, "to look after myself.
"It was not my way. That all changed, obviously, quite a while ago. When I went to prison, that was it for hard drugs and hard liquor for the rest of my life."
His off-stage pursuits have often led him on to the front pages of newspapers rather than the music pages, something that used to upset him. Now he's more used to it.
"Sometimes it upset me a lot, other times I looked at it as just part of the process of doing business," he says. "You can't do work in this world without being in their sights, so obviously you have to put up with it and do the best you can. There are people out there who are out to make their bones by assassinating you in print and they really don't care whether you are any good or not, they're just out to make an impression. That's really hard to deal with. It's just them out to make a name for themselves."
One time he made the tabloids was when he donated sperm to singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher, which resulted in two children.
Although the two of them have since separated, Crosby remains on good terms with both women as well as the children.
"They have been very kind to me, Julie even more than Melissa, but Melissa too. They have come up here to visit and to let me get to know them (the children) and for them to know me. I think that's extremely generous of them to do that when they were not obligated to."
Crosby has six other children, three of them grown up, and he is close to all of them. Then there is James Raymond, who plays in CSN as well as in Crosby's other semi-permanent line-up, Crosby, Pevar and Raymond. Raymond is Crosby's son, although the pair only met long after Raymond had become a professional musician. Now dad considers him a musical collaborator and inspiration, as well as family.
"He's who I turn to first," Crosby says. "I'll often go to him with lyrics and say, 'How does this make you feel?"'
While he gets on well with Raymond, certain other fellow songwriters are not so close, even though they've been working together on and off for almost 40 years. Stephen Stills is not his best friend.
"I don't really get on with Stephen," he says. "I never have. Him and I bump heads pretty regularly. I respect him and I care about him because I've been through too much not to. But we disagree on just about everything about how to live your life and what's important, whereas I look on Graham Nash as a friend. But you don't have to love somebody to sing with them."
He extends this philosophical approach when looking back on his career. Regrets he's had a few.
"Well, I wouldn't have wasted 10 years of my life on heroin and cocaine when I could have been spending it on music and people," he says, although the period wasn't a complete waste. "There was music that came out of it and I learned stuff when I was crazy," he adds, "but it's a lot of time and energy that got wasted." Jail, too, is a regret, although it was also a learning experience.
"Truthfully, it was as mad as they say it is. It was terrible, but being a junkie is a worse prison than being in prison, because you carry that prison around with you. You don't get to leave. This one you could do your year and then start over, which is what I did."
His Australian visit will follow a successful year in the US that included a reunion tour with one of his most successful and acrimonious ensembles, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, mainly in support of Neil Young's Living With War album. The Freedom of Speech tour was partly a condemnation of the US invasion of Iraq.
It was a huge success.
"We got a reaction all right," he says. "It's a funny thing, though, because this country is very polarised right now about the war. It's part of our job to be musicians and just to rock it, just to boogie ... that's part of the gig. But it's another part of our job to be the troubadour, the town crier."
Crosby's first chose to sing out and speak out in a political fashion during the Vietnam War, just as his career was taking off in the late 1960s. "I feel the same now as I did then," he says. "War is a dumb way to solve your problems."
Crosby, Stills and Nash were the epitome of the west coast hippie sound in the late '60s and early '70s. They played Woodstock and had a string of hits, including Marrakesh Express, Wooden Ships and Long Time Gone. They sold millions of albums as CSN and as CSNY, when Young joined the line-up. Crosby had already been in a successful band before then, having co-founded the Byrds. But that band eventually threw him out. To this day there is animosity between Crosby and fellow Byrds songwriter and guitarist Roger McGuinn, although Crosby insists it's all coming from the other side.
"I really regret the Roger McGuinn thing, because I really don't want to be his enemy. I want to be his friend, but he doesn't like me and that's just how it is. I wish he could set that aside enough to work with me."
Crosby, the son of an award-winning cinematographer, grew up in Los Angeles and had ambitions as an actor before music took a hold of him. He first plied his trade as a solo troubadour in New York's Greenwich Village, which is where he met McGuinn, leading to the formation of the Byrds.
Surprisingly, Crosby reckons the Byrds wouldn't have got a record contract if they were around today.
"Well, they wouldn't," he says, "because they don't have cute tits. The Byrds were a band from a time when what you could do was what counted. After VH1 and MTV, things were very different. It went from being a musical experience to being a theatrical experience, and therefore it mattered much more what you looked like than what you did. It did music in general a terrible disservice. That's not what music is about.
"I'm sure Bach and Beethoven weren't real good looking either."
The Crosby, Stills and Nash tour begins in Adelaide on February 20 and travels to Sydney, Yarra Valley in Victoria, Wollongong, Newcastle and Brisbane.
