'Long Time Gone' - David Crosby with Carl Gottlieb

Author: Michael Goldberg
Journal: Rolling Stone
Date: December 1st 1988

David Crosby's autobiography, Long Time Gone, provides a gripping, sometimes terrifying portrait of a rock star's personal and professional decline through drug addiction. As an indictment of drug use and the rock & roll lifestyle, the book is long overdue.

Although much of the book reads like a promising rough draft in need of a tough edit, Long Time Gone is a triumph as a cautionary tale. The graphic details of Crosby's decade and a half of drug use--he eventually kicked his cocaine and heroin habit while serving time in a Texas jail almost three years ago--should put to rest any glamorous fantasies that readers may harbor about drugs.

"When you become severely addicted," writes Crosby, "you do stuff that doesn't show any sense at all . . . deliberately destroying your social circumstance, knowing that you're blowing your job, you're wiping out your savings, you're smoking yourself out of house and home, you're selling the car, and you're doing it anyway--just so you can do more dope. That's what being an addict is really about."

The book is particularly gripping in its second half, which chronicles how Crosby and his girlfriend Jan Dance (who is now his wife) were repeatedly busted on drug and weapons charges. Aside from tidbits about Crosby's own private life, there are numerous anecdotes about the Beatles, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane and other contemporaries of Crosby's.

As a literary effort, the book is more problematic. Perhaps the desire to get Long Time Gone into the stores in tandem with the new Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album--and in time for Christmas--caused Crosby and his collaborator, Carl Gottlieb, a Hollywood screenwriter who is a longtime friend of Crosby's, to rush things.

Rather than ghostwriting a narrative autobiography based on interviews with Crosby, Gottlieb has structured the book so that it alternates Crosby's first-person recollections of events with Gottlieb's densely written "objective" narrative and lengthy quotes from friends, business assiciates, crew members, former girlfriends and drug-treatment counselors. Among the show-business figures quoted in the book are Joni Mitchell (a girlfriend of Crosby's in the late Sixties), Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Joe Walsh and Crosby's former managers Elliot Roberts, David Geffen and Peter Golden.

Unfortunately, the results are often redundant, and one yearns for a writer who could have turned the facts of Crosby's life into more moving prose.

Despite such difficulties, the tales of Crosby's days with the Byrds, of putting CSN and CSNY together and of attending Woodstock are fascinating. Crosby himself emerges as strongly opinionated and occasionally naive but also as an often funny and likable iconoclast. The descriptions of Crosby's drug seizures, his self-destructiveness (he repeatedly burned himself with the torch he used for freebasing cocains and even blacked out on the freeway) and the string of girlfriends he did drugs with are strong stuff. During its best passages, Long Time Gone is nearly impossible to put down.