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 ****
