LONG TIME GONE - David Crosby/Carl Gottlieb

Author: Mark Cooper
Journal: Q Magazine
Date: 1989

David Crosby was one of the '60s golden children, a hippy prophet who embraced the supposedly healing powers of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. As a founder member of The Byrds, California's answer to The Beatles, Crosby co-wrote Eight Miles High and helped establish folk-rock as America's response to the British Invasion. When he was ejected from The Byrds he joined forces with Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Graham Nash of The Hollies to form a supergroup dedicated to sweet harmonies and all things "natural". While Crosby was always inclined to deal in hippy paranoia (remember Almost Cut My Hair?), his gift for harmony helped make Crosby, Stills and Nash a tranquillising force at the beginning of the '70s. Alongside his friend Jerry Garcia, Crosby was the quintessential hippy philosopher, a firm believer in youth, drugs and sex as liberating forces.

Yet in the late '70s and early '80s, Crosby was reduced to a drug-taking machine who could think only of his next hit of freebase or heroin. While Crosby continued to tour with his increasingly desperate partners Stills and Nash, he was no longer able to function onstage without a couple of breaks in the show for drug intake. As early as 1979, Crosby's addiction ensured that drugs were now more important to him than his music. When recording with Graham Nash that year, he stopped their band at full tilt because his pipe had fallen off an amp.

By 1983, Crosby's life was completely out of control and he seemed certain to die in a freebase fire or to nod out at the wheel of his car from a cocaine seizure or a heroin overdose. By the end of 1985, Crosby and his girlfriend Jan Dance were covered in scabs and burns, smelly, filthy and on the run from the police. Eventually Crosby turned himself in to the police in Florida and was jailed in Texas on a variety of drug offences. In prison, he finally recanted while Jan sought help and rehabilitation.

Crosby's autobiography is a horror story. It is the tale of a man who had everything and yet was increasingly lonely and embittered, a man distanced from all his friends by his drug habit, who had lost the ability to make music or escape the prison of his own greed and selfishness. It is the story of a privileged Californian childhood which left Crosby at war with his parents' world and with an ego that made him charming, manipulative and selfish.

Crosby and co-writer Carl Gottlieb have composed a classic recantation tract that also offers a social history of the Californian rock milieu of the 60s and '70s. While Gottlieb offers a socio-history that interweaves with the reminiscences of Crosby's friends, colleagues and lovers, Crosby's own voice dominates the book. He emerges as a lucky man who knows he should have died. The latterday Crosby is as passionately opposed to drug abuse as he was once a thoroughbred drug connoisseur.

Inevitably Crosby's decline and born-again views dominate his perspective, yet this book will be as interesting to historians of Californian rock as it is to those who like to encounter superstars in all their folly. Readers of this compulsive tome may not like Crosby when they've finished but they will know more than they may want about that devil's contract between fame and hard drugs. Like Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick and the rest, Crosby is now a living argument that perpetual hedonism does not pay. This revisionist account of where the '60s was always heading is both sobering and a little depressing. Now Crosby has to prove that he can still make consistently good music while he's straight. He's already written an unflinching, harrowing account of life in the fast lane ****