David Crosby (The Croz) Flies Away at 81

David Crosby, the impish hippie with the golden voice that caressed many of us into activism and awareness in the '60s all the way to today, has apparently flown to rock 'n' roll heaven to keep Janis Joplin company on her 80th birthday. 

Said to be the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's character in Easy Rider—the film that taught Jack Nicholson and the world how to smoke pot—Crosby (aka "The Croz") was emblematic of the generation he helped inspire. 

I got to meet David in November 2018 before a concert he did with The Lighthouse Band in Monterey, CA and interview him for CannabisNow magazine about joining the NORML board of directors and (attempting to) launch a cannabis brand. 

Sitting in his bus (but not smoking, since it was before his show), I got to ask him about the scene in Almost Famous where a roadie pulls out a joint to share. “I know this is good,” he says. “It’s from Crosby.” We also chatted about how it came to be that Tokin' Woman Melissa Etheridge chose him as her sperm donor: turns out, his wife Jan suggested it when Melissa admired their children. Crosby sang "Guinnevere" at the concert with a sweet nod to his wife of 35 years, for whom he said he washed dishes every night (doubtlessly the key to a happy marriage). 

In Stand and Be Counted (Harper San Francisco, 2000), Crosby's book documenting his participation in many of the landmark events of the 1960s and beyond, he writes, "At the risk of calling into question my own current choice of staying straight, I still believe we were right about acid and we were right about pot. They did blow us loose from the past and they did give us a new perspective, a way of setting ourselves apart from the rest of straight society.…Unfortunately, marijuana was illegal and you had to go to illegal people to get it. Those people would then hand you a gram of cocaine and say, ‘If you think that's fun, try this.’" 

After going to prison on drugs charges, Crosby was 14 ½ years sober, until he felt he could go back to smoking pot. "I don’t smoke it in the daytime; I vape buds at night," he told me. "In particular I don’t it before I play. I do it after. I have a lot more fun if I do it before I play, but I think I do better if I work straight and get loaded afterwards.” 

Me and The Croz in 2018. 

Some more of our conversation went like this: 

Q: Over the years, has marijuana inspired your music? 

A: Definitely. What I do every night, after dinner with my family, I go into the bedroom and I build a fire. And then I vape some buds and take a guitar off the wall and play. Stoned. Because you get what we refer to as “hung up.” And it’s just the right thing for guitar: you get hung up and you play until your fingers hurt. I do that all the time. That’s how I write music. 

Q: So the David Crosby songs we’ve known and loved over the years were written while you were… 

A: Stoned. 

Q: I know you have that live album with Graham Nash called “Another Stoney Evening.” 

A: That was a bootleg, a very famous bootleg. And we had it on reel-to-reel tape so we released it years later. 

Q: So how did it get that name? 

A: I said it during the show, that it was another stoney evening. 

Q: Because the crowd was stoned? 

A: And so were we. 

 

Crosby communicated with his fans via his Twitter feed, the portrait for which is the famous photo of him (shown above) with a joint in his mouth holding a gun cut out from a US flag to his head. He judged his fans' joint rolling, and answered questions, mostly about music. He "liked" a tweet I sent about my piece on marijuana and mothers being published, when I posted a picture of Elizabeth Taylor being tried as a witch for her healing powers in Ivanhoe on her 90th birthday, and another I wrote about him and the other pot-puffing Crosby, Bing. The day before he died, he tweeted in support of Greta Thunberg. 

Jason Isbell was interviewed by Rolling Stone about performing "Ohio" with Crosby in his last stage appearance last year. “Dave had just bought a brand new API console, the first brand new one I had ever seen in my life, and [Crosby] came in, sat down and dumped out a big sack of weed right on the console, and started rolling a joint,” Isbell says. “He smoked a joint, we sang together, and then he laid down on the couch and went to sleep.”

Crosby recorded this beautiful duet of the Joni Mitchell song "For Free" with Sarah Jaroz on his final album, the cover of which features a portrait by Joan Baez, who wrote of Crosby on her Facebook page, "He was always, I repeat, always present for me, to defend my character and politics. He was funny, clever, and refreshing to be around." It was Crosby who discovered Mitchell; Cass Elliot introduced him to Graham Nash; and Grace Slick painted herself lighting a joint for him and Jerry Garcia at the 1968 Monterey Pop festival. 

 

RS also published a link to Crosby's 20 essential songs, like the brilliant title track to "Déjà Vu" and "Dream for Him" from the 1999 Looking Forward CD, written about talking to his son about death: 

 

Somehow I must come up with better stuff
You see, I'm just not satisfied with all that simplified guff
That they shovel at the kids by the handful
Like candy they buy at the stand full...

 

 

Crosby's anthem "Almost Cut My Hair" spoke to many at a time when longhairs were much reviled, or buzz cutted and sent to Vietnam. Stills announced the band would be "taking a pause for the cause" after playing the song at Wembly Stadium in 1974. "Long Time Coming," written by Crosby after RFK's assassination, was performed by him at the Troubador in LA as part of the infamous 1994 Foamfoot Black Crowes show where, as described by Chris Robinson, “The songs sound like a cross between CSNY and Pink Floyd: every song is 10 minutes long."

 

Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind if you dare
But don't, no don't, no, try to get yourself elected
If you do, you had better cut your hair....

 

On “Carry Me,” a track off Crosby and Nash’s 1975 album, Wind on the Water, Crosby reflects on his mother’s death. “She was lying in white sheets there, and she was waiting to die,” he sings. “She said if you’d just reach underneath this bed/And untie these weights, I could surely fly.”

 

Crosby and others have said that another song on the RS list, "Eight Miles High" from the Byrds, was the first psychedelic song to make waves on the airwaves. Fly away, David, you're much more than Eight Miles High now.

UPDATE 1/24/23 - Just after Crosby died, two tragic mass shootings happened in in California, reminding me that he was on his way to a gig in Thousand Oaks when met in 2018, and that the show was cancelled because of a mass shooting there. And that he was greatly saddened by that shooting, near where he lived, that killed 12 people. It still seems to be a long, long time before the dawn. 

On a lighter note, it seems Tucker Carlson had to wait until Crosby died to allege that nicotine frees your mind while THC makes you "compliant & passive." I don't think he could have gotten away with that nonsense while Croz was alive.