Fact #159598
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Short story:
David Crosby releases the whimsically-titled album Oh Yes I Can, his first solo work since 1971.Full article:
David Crosby, interviewed by Johnny Black for The Times
Most Britons with any awareness of David Crosby remember him as the plump, balding, Woodstock hippy, complete with drooping moustache, in the Seventies supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash. In the mid-Seventies, when punk briefly interrupted the dinosaur era of rock'n'roll, Crosby faded away in a drizzle of news snippets about his drug arrests.
Now, coming up fast behind Paul Simon and Brian Wilson, Crosby has released a new solo album, Oh Yes I Can (AAndM), plus a Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young album. There's also an autobiography, Long Time Gone, to be published by Heinemann on May 15, lifting the lid on his life as pop superstar, drug abuser and jailbird.
In America, Crosby never stopped being news, most of it about his escalating drug addiction, from marijuana and LSD in the Sixties to heroin and freebase cocaine by the late Seventies (Freebasing refines cocaine so that its effects are more powerful and more dangerous.)
"Freebase is the slipperiest, greasiest slope straight to hell," Crosby says. "Emotionally, you're zombie. Friends died from drug abuse and it meant nothing. When my parents died, from old age, even that meant nothing. That's what I regret most, that they never saw me clean up."
Crosby first found success in the folk-rock group The Byrds. Despite earning millions through his subsequent years with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, by the Seventies he was reportedly broke, having "smoked and snorted everything I earned". By the middle of the present decade he had reached what he now describes as "the bottom of the pit" and after several brushes with the law, Crosby gave himself up in 1985 and spent a year in jail.
While there, his fortunes sank so low that the education of his daughter, Donovan, was paid for by Nash. "In school, kids were showing her newspaper stories about me and saying, 'That's your dad. He's a junkie'."
How could it have happened? Crosby lounges back on the cushions, pushes his fingertips together, making a small cathedral out of his hands. "You don't even know. It creeps up on you. Once 25 of my dearest friends, including Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, came to my home to beg me to gave up. I didn't."
Even now a surprising number of British journalists still think he is the son of Bing "Worse than that, man, on breakfast television they cut my song in half to go to the weather! How unprofessional, how impolite!"
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Most Britons with any awareness of David Crosby remember him as the plump, balding, Woodstock hippy, complete with drooping moustache, in the Seventies supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash. In the mid-Seventies, when punk briefly interrupted the dinosaur era of rock'n'roll, Crosby faded away in a drizzle of news snippets about his drug arrests.
Now, coming up fast behind Paul Simon and Brian Wilson, Crosby has released a new solo album, Oh Yes I Can (AAndM), plus a Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young album. There's also an autobiography, Long Time Gone, to be published by Heinemann on May 15, lifting the lid on his life as pop superstar, drug abuser and jailbird.
In America, Crosby never stopped being news, most of it about his escalating drug addiction, from marijuana and LSD in the Sixties to heroin and freebase cocaine by the late Seventies (Freebasing refines cocaine so that its effects are more powerful and more dangerous.)
"Freebase is the slipperiest, greasiest slope straight to hell," Crosby says. "Emotionally, you're zombie. Friends died from drug abuse and it meant nothing. When my parents died, from old age, even that meant nothing. That's what I regret most, that they never saw me clean up."
Crosby first found success in the folk-rock group The Byrds. Despite earning millions through his subsequent years with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, by the Seventies he was reportedly broke, having "smoked and snorted everything I earned". By the middle of the present decade he had reached what he now describes as "the bottom of the pit" and after several brushes with the law, Crosby gave himself up in 1985 and spent a year in jail.
While there, his fortunes sank so low that the education of his daughter, Donovan, was paid for by Nash. "In school, kids were showing her newspaper stories about me and saying, 'That's your dad. He's a junkie'."
How could it have happened? Crosby lounges back on the cushions, pushes his fingertips together, making a small cathedral out of his hands. "You don't even know. It creeps up on you. Once 25 of my dearest friends, including Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, came to my home to beg me to gave up. I didn't."
Even now a surprising number of British journalists still think he is the son of Bing "Worse than that, man, on breakfast television they cut my song in half to go to the weather! How unprofessional, how impolite!"