Living for today - David Crosby
David Crosby doesn't know where CSNY is going, he's just having funMarch, 2000
By JANE STEVENSON
Toronto Sun
David Crosby has a prediction about CSNY's reunion shows at the Air Canada Centre tonight and tomorrow night -- part of their first roadtrip together in 25 years.
"The thing about Toronto is -- we're figuring it's going to be nuts because there's Neil and he's got a Maple Leaf printed right on him," said Crosby, 58, holding court yesterday afternoon in a Toronto hotel room while he sipped tea.
Neil Young's local roots aside, Crosby credits him for literally and figuratively whipping him and bandmates Stephen Stills and Graham Nash into shape.
"You have to understand the guy," said Crosby, the most notorious CSNY member because of his past alcohol and drug abuse, car and motorcycles crashes, jail time and liver transplant.
"He's a consummate artist, he's an incredible craftsman, and he will not settle for doing anything less than the absolute best he can do. Whatever he does, that's the truth. And yes, he's very demanding of us, and of himself, about everything. He told me I had to go to the gym. I told him, 'But Neil, I've lost 33 pounds.' He said, 'That's good, and at the end of the three hours (onstage) you're going to wish you'd been to the gym. Now go.'"
It turns out CSNY have been playing between 3 1/2 to four hours a night since launching their tour on Jan. 24 in Detroit.
Crosby said the crowds, which he described as both "attentive and excitable," have ranged in age from 15 to 60.
And despite lacklustre sales of the latest CSNY album, Looking Forward, he maintained audiences are enjoying both the most recent material and beloved hits like Helplessly Hoping, Our House and Teach Your Children.
"Normally, when a band like us comes back and does what we're doing (you) play an old hit, and they go, 'Yeah!' Play another hit, they go 'Yeah!'
Play a new song, it goes thud. Unh-uh -- they're loving it."
Crosby also pointed out that CSNY, who have written some new songs together since Looking Forward, didn't want to be seen as a nostalgia act.
"This is not a Wurlitzer, we didn't come out and just do our hits," he said. "We are a very current affair and we are very much in forward motion.
Either we're a real band that's making music and playing it right here, right now, or we're a museum piece. And we're not a museum piece."
So what does the future hold for CSNY beyond the North American tour, which wraps up on April 19 in St. Louis?
Crosby doesn't know, and said that's part of the beauty.
"In life, you don't know how long anything's going to last," he said. "The joy of it is to relish the moment that you have now. And that's what we
are doing. We're taking it one song at a time, one day at a time, and we're loving it."
However, in addition to the CSNY tour, Crosby has got a new book in stores called Stand And Be Counted, which saw him interview more than 40 of his friends and fellow activists -- "everyone from Pete Seeger to Eddie Vedder" -- to recount how musicians and events have advanced human rights in the last 50 years.
Crosby began working on the book three years ago. It will also be the basis of a four-hour documentary on The Learning Channel in the U.S.
"I've always been fascinated with the courage of people to stand up for what they believe in," he said.
Among those interviewed in Stand And Be Counted is singer Melissa Etheridge, who dropped a bombshell back in January when she revealed that Crosby was the biological father of her two children with partner Julie Cypher.
"It is just about over with now," said Crosby of the media attention. "People say, 'Oh, okay, whatever.' They made a big hoopla about it because she and I are both in public life but I think it's pretty much done."
And yes, for the record, Crosby has heard all the jokes at his expense.
"Sure, all of them, as if I cared," he said.