David Crosby saw the end was coming
‘I don’t have a lot of time,’ famed rocker said in 2018
David Crosby knew his days were numbered at least several years before his death was reported last week.
“It feels like I’m at the end of my life and am running out of time. That’s one of the reasons I’m working as hard as I am; I don’t have a lot of time,” Crosby told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018, 49 years after he had performed at Woodstock with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
The co-founder of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash was 81. No cause of death has been disclosed yet for the Los Angeles native, whose history of drug abuse was well-documented by many, including Crosby himself.
“You have to understand that I wanted to quit. But I was so severely addicted that I probably tried to 10 times, and failed,” he told the Union-Tribune in 1988. “Now, if you try enough times and fail, you don’t believe you can. And I had pretty much given up. I thought I was going to die on drugs – end of story.”
Crosby’s luminous tenor and jazz-inspired songcraft helped propel him to stardom in the 1960s, first with The Byrds, then even more so with the supergroups Crosby, Stills & Nash; and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
It seemed near miraculous that – unlike Crosby himself – his singing voice somehow emerged unscathed from his near-fatal habits, which included heroin, alcohol and free-basing.
What saved him, he maintained in his 1988 interview, was serving nine months in a Texas prison in 1985, several years after being arrested in Dallas with a loaded .45 caliber pistol, a propane torch and a glass pipe containing drug residue.
“I had already served my time when my conviction was overturned,” Crosby told me in 1988. “People came up to me and said: ‘Aren’t you going to sue them?’ I said: ‘Sue them? Are you crazy? I’m going to send them a thank-you note!’ Being in prison saved my life.
“Being locked up, it took six months before I even began to wake up. But that’s what did it. If I had a choice of going back to being a junkie or spending another year in jail, man, I’d walk in and close the cell door with my own hands. I can only tell you that being a really heavy junkie and freebase addict is a much worse prison than bars will ever make. So I don’t regret prison a bit.”
I interviewed Crosby multiple times between 1988 and 2018. The first was at the Hotel del Coronado, where we spoke over brunch, then in the hotel room he was sharing with his wife, Jan. She remained by his side during the interview and for the rest of his life.
Crosby and I hit it off, in part, because of our shared passion for jazz in general as well as saxophone giant John Coltrane and guitar legend Django Reinhardt, in particular. After several hours of conversation, Crosby asked if I’d like to accompany him and Jan to the San Diego Zoo that same afternoon. He also invited me to his duo concert in San Diego that night with longtime musical partner Graham Nash.
Crosby, who seemed to be the life of the party even completely sober, invited me backstage where he introduced me to a few of his musical pals, including Jackson Browne, who was headlining the show, and Kris Kristofferson.
THE TWINKLE in Crosby’s eyes, on stage and off, was his nonmusical trademark. I saw it again when we spoke in 1989 after a Byrds reunion show at the Bacchanal, when I interviewed him in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1996 and when he, his wife and I chatted backstage at the Grammy Awards in 1998.
We weren’t friends – music critics, I have learned, should be cautious about not getting too close to the artists they write about – but we were friendly. And in the nearly 10 interviews we did between 1988 and 2018, Crosby was always candid.
This held true whether he was discussing his music, diving into politics and social activism, reflecting on his drug abuse or praising (and, later in his career, complaining about) his former band mates in The Byrds, CSN and CSN&Y.
“It feels like I’m at the end of my life and am running out of time. That’s one of the reasons I’m working as hard as I am; I don’t have a lot of time,” he said.
Having cheated death numerous times, Crosby was keenly aware of how precious life was – and how quickly it could end.
“What happens when you are at this stage of your life,” he said in his 2018 interview, “is you look at it, and say: ‘How am I going to spend it? Am I going to sit on my butt and fade slowly out? Or am I going to do something with my time?’
“[Dying]) is something you have to think about, but something we avoid thinking about. As a culture, we’re terrified of dying; that’s why we thought up religion. I’m trying to be conscious about [mortality], because I’m trying to be conscious about everything.”
Unlike some other rock stars of his generation, Crosby embraced social media, especially Twitter.
In what proved to be one of his final tweets on Wednesday, he joked about heaven, writing: “I heard the place is overrated... cloudy.”
The many obituaries being published will tell you lots about Crosby’s history. Ultimately, he is someone who spoke best for himself.
(The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS)