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I was living in Chicago...
with a friend of mine named Clem Floyd.
Clem was going with a little German hooker named "The Duchess."
She was about 4-feet-2 and cute.
And very popular.
And we were as stoned as we could get.
We took everything we had and anything anybody else had.
We were gonna go hear John Coltrane. He was a hero.
So they would play this tune, ensemble,
and then Trane would start soloing.
You know, 15, 20 minutes. He'd be blowing pretty hard.
And I was very high.
Got to be too much for me. I went and ducked into the men's room.
And I got my head against this puke-green tile. I can still remember the color of the tile.
And I'm, like, thinking, "Okay, it's gonna be all right now. Just get it together now. It's gonna be okay."
Somebody kicks the door open.
Bam! It's Trane.
He's kicked the door open because he's...
...playing at the most intense level you could ever imagine in your life.
He never stopped soloing.
He's still soloing,
and he's up where it's really hitting the thousand mark, you know?
He's, like, burning.
I never heard anybody be more intense with music than that in my life.
In that little bathroom.
Little tile bathroom.
People ask me if I got regrets. Yeah. I got a huge regret about the time I wasted being smashed.
I'm afraid.
I'm afraid of dying.
And I'm close.
I don't like it.
I'd like to have more time. A lot more time.
This is Big Sur Folk Festival.
And that's Christine right there.
This is the four of us.
I think that would've been the cover for Human Highway.
That's me back before I had the mustache. The Byrds.
God, that's a great shot of Miles.
That's the intensity right there.
Me and Neil.
Me and Garcia.
God bless Jerry Garcia.
This is me and the Lighthouse band goofing off at a great moment,
and it's just, I'm so happy right there.
If I were to come to you and say, "No music, you don't get any of that,
but you get extreme joy in your home life and an incredible family..."
- No music? - No music.
Do you make that trade?
That's no world for me.
And is that a selfish thing?
I don't know. Maybe.
But no. Me, music? No music?
No, not interested.
It's the only thing I can contribute, man. It's the only thing... Place I can help.
It's the only place I can make it better. It's the only thing I got to offer, really.
I don't want to go. I got a lot of stuff I'm trying to do.
I'm touring because I... I'm touring because I love to sing.
I do need to tour,
to just simply buy groceries and pay my... My mortgage.
The hardest part is just leaving home.
I don't like to leave home. I love my wife. I love my son.
I love, I love it here.
Hi, Mama!
How's my girl?
I'm under some pressure, yeah.
You gotta understand, I'm the guy in Crosby, Stills and Nash,
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young that... That's never had a hit.
Black. Hi, Black.
The way I get through it is, I know what he's going toward.
I know what makes him the happiest.
I'm 76 years old.
I've had...
two or three heart attacks.
I've got eight stents in my heart.
You know, I had hepatitis C,
which destroyed my liver, which made me have to have a transplant.
I'm diabetic.
That does kill you in the long run.
But I'm happy.
I don't think people know how sick he really is.
I'm so glad he's as stubborn as he is and wants to sing anyway.
I might say, "Hey, honey, I think you should stay here and go see the heart people right now
and not go out on that tour," and he'll go, "Fuck you. I'm going."
And I have to be okay with that.
I have to say, "Go, honey. Have fun."
And I might not ever see him again.
At this point in my life, every...
minute that you get,
you know, is... Is precious.
Time is the final currency.
And so how do you spend it?
I wanted him to choose family first,
and I thought he would.
This is really where I feel alive.
The only solace I have is that when the light does go out,
I hope it's when he's singing.
Man, I hate leaving.
I just hate leaving home.
I love singing, but I hate leaving.
Six weeks... you'll be back.
Hopefully.
I promised my wife I'd be back.
Keep your fingers crossed.
When I was a young guy,
I was taken to a small symphony orchestra playing in the park by my mom.
And the power of the orchestra was gigantic to me.
It broke over me like a wave.
And I noticed...
all the elbows were moving together.
All the doodly-doodlies were going together.
That's why it was that powerful. Big imprint.
Then I encountered the Everly Brothers. I hear that, and I think, "Oh."
And I started singing three-part to their two-part.
I just naturally love singing harmony.
My mom was a humanist...
and felt that equality between human beings was, like...
where it was at.
My mom got a Josh White record.
It's one of the first records I remember really knowing,
and there was a song on there called "Strange Fruit."
And I didn't understand it, so I went to my mom, and I said, "Mom...
I don't understand. What's the strange fruit that he's talking about?"
And my mom started crying.
Didn't have no concept
that anybody could hang another human being because they didn't like what color they were.
My mom was really good at loving.
My dad was a crusty old guy.
Didn't ever express any of that stuff at all.
It was a little bit of a dysfunctional family.
The pictures which follow give an idea of my method of working.
One of my earliest memories
was watching my dad pull himself up into the belly of a B-24
and fly away into the Second World War.
He was, you know, shooting footage.
And very dangerous stuff too, but he wouldn't talk about it.
So he'd seen some shit.
High Noon.
He won one of the first Oscars they ever gave out for a movie called Tabu,
and he won a Golden Globe for High Noon.
With every swing of the pendulum...
with every second...
a man's life ticked away.
A stunning photographer.
My dad never told me he loved me.
Not once ever. Never said those words.
And that affects you.
I was kind of a lonely kid.
Chubby little kid, not real popular or anything. No good at sports.
I was a class clown.
Disciplinary problem. Got in trouble all the time.
I was thrown out of, I think, just about every school I was ever in.
I wanted attention.
Constantly trying to get attention.
I'm sort of always seeking approval, you know? Scratch me behind the ear, tell me I'm cool?
A girl once told me that I should try to work
At honest labor for just one day
But I said to her with just a little smirk...
My brother was a musician also.
He was the one who gave me my first guitar.
He turned me on to '50s jazz.
That's where I went right down the rabbit hole.
This is Sunset Boulevard.
If you're gonna be on a street in Los Angeles, this is probably the street to be on.
Hello.
I'm David Crosby, and when we are together...
...they call us "The Byrds."
I think we were one of the first electric bands.
I loved it.
We could get the attention of girls,
which, of course, is why all of us started playing music in the first place.
But it's not necessarily always a positive thing when you win early and win young.
I was tremendously lucky, and I don't think I realized how lucky I was.
Being a star, it makes you, you know,
you feel you're more important than you are.
Like, in '65, '66, we were, like, number one,
and met the Beatles and hung out with them, and it was, like, a pretty heady place.
We... We know our real image, which is nothing like our image.
Who is the young man with the lengthy haircut to your right rear?
Right rear.
- Who is it? - That's Dave from The Byrds, a mate of ours.
Ahoy, mateys.
I was just hiding, paying attention to what they were doing. I was trying to learn how to be a rock star.
And they knew how.
Young, cocky, bright,
very creative,
and a caboose to my dick.
Ciro's.
One of the few things our manager, Jim Dickson, actually did correctly.
He got us in there,
and then he called every single person he'd ever met in Hollywood and said:
"You gotta come down here. The chicks are unbelievable."
And they... And...
So they all... Everybody came down there. It got to be a scene to be seen there.
Are these memories in black and white or in color for you?
Color, very color.
Dylan did come and visit us.
He came and played with us live.
I remember when I looked up, when I saw Bob Dylan for the first time,
how entranced everybody was with him.
This is called "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man," please play a song for me.
His words were so good. His songs were so good.
Hey, Mr. Tambourine man
Play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning
I'll come following you...
I remember being jealous.
David said, "I don't like it, man.
It's that folky two-four time. It's never gonna play on the radio."
So we... We rearranged it to, like...
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man...
Dylan came and we played "Tambourine Man" for him,
and you could hear the gears working in his head,
and he went straight out and got an electric band right away.
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man...
Some funny stuff happened in there, man.
I went in there to watch The Doors.
That's probably where my dislike of Morrison started.
He pulled my shades off and said, "You can't hide behind those shades."
And I, of course, was high on LSD.
So I teleported to the other side of the room.
I've never forgiven him for that.
No! Keep going straight.
You want to go up Laurel Canyon, right?
I started being a counterculture, rebellious person...
right about the time I started growing the hair.
We were starting to be hippies.
And at the beginning,
people didn't like seeing us show up.
So I got a good taste of being a second-class citizen, which makes you feel very rebellious.
Your mother gets high, and you don't know it!
At the time, you know, I was becoming a character.
Russian shirt, Russian hat.
Hey, Joe, where you going with your cash?
I know that having political opinions really distressed them.
You know, they're shooting this for television. I'm sure that they'll edit this out.
I want to say it anyway, even though they will edit it out.
When President Kennedy was killed,
he was not killed by one man.
He was shot from a number of different directions by different guns.
The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed,
and this is your country, ladies and gentlemen.
Well, David had become insufferable.
He was just hard to hang out with. You didn't want to be around him.
I didn't think it was our place to... To get out there
and promote these things, like the Kennedy conspiracy.
I'm not sure what was motivating him. He wanted to save the country?
I don't know.
They saw us as a pop group trying to be pop stars,
and they did not think that that involved having political opinions.
I could see potential train wrecks happening
between Roger and David.
This is the house where they fired me.
They came up in two Porsches.
It's just not working. We'd like you to quit the band.
We don't want you in the band anymore.
Too much politics, not enough music.
And when we're trying to do a song that you don't like, you just fall asleep.
Plus, that song about sister lovers and water brothers isn't trippy.
It's just weird.
Let's face it, your heart's not in it.
You have a knack for causing trouble
and not the good kind.
And I said, "I think you're wrong, and I think you're making a big mistake, but it's okay.
I'll go for it. All right.
But I'm taking 'Guinnevere' and my weird tunings with me."
I don't... I don't regret it, obviously.
I was a difficult cat,
and growing leaps and bounds.
And... And...
And not easy.
Big ego, no brains, goofy.
It stung.
So I did what you do when you get fired from your band.
I took off.
I thought I was gonna go find a sailboat and go sailing.
This beautiful schooner, I saw it right away.
So I tried to find out about it. And it had been there and been for sale for a while.
What we did was, I started a rumor...
in Lauderdale through a couple people that there was rot underneath the mainmast
where it would cost a whole lot of money to go and find out.
And then I offered them 25 grand, and they took it.
And I got the 25 grand from Peter Tork.
I said, "Peter, I don't have any money, and they threw me out of The Byrds. Can you...?
I want to go sailing.
Can you loan me 25 grand?"
Sailing...
Sailing out in the Pacific or sailing the Caribbean,
waking up feeling the motion...
She's loping along,
waves coming up, slowly picking us up and giving us a shove.
She's doing this big slow dance, you know.
And she's graceful.
Everything, sensory, visual, auditory...
Every kind of information.
Louder, cleaner, brighter.
And, you know, it's beautiful.
When we're here on the shore,
there's so much data impinging on our senses all the time that we filter it down.
When you go out there,
lots of space and very little information,
and it's a really delicious feeling.
It's a truly magical part of my life,
and, of course, I wrote a lot of great music there.
I wrote "Lee Shore" there. I wrote "Page 43" there. I wrote "Wooden Ships" there.
The ocean's totally real.
The opposite of Hollywood.
Yeah.
I think I was the first one to move here.
First musician that I knew about.
Probably, there was somebody else, but I don't know who it would have been.
The first day I got to California,
first celebrity I saw was David Crosby.
He was standing on the porch
of the Laurel Canyon Country Store,
and he had on that flat-brimmed hat that he wore on the second Byrds album,
and he had a little leather cape on.
And I just looked, and I thought, "Oh, my God, there's David Crosby."
You guys are nuts.
There's no cinematic value here at all.
There isn't a shot. It's... It isn't here.
When we started moving up here, it wasn't because there was a community.
We were trying to get above the smog.
Back in the '50s, the smog was really terrible.
And then people would see musicians up here
or know musicians were living up here,
and they would start to hang out to run across a musician.
What is something that you wish they knew
about what this place really did represent?
You know?
What did it do? All... It was just where we got the groceries. It wasn't like we hung out here.
- Where do you get coffee here? - Okay.
How do you get coffee?
Let's talk about these photos right here, Croz.
I'm not in them.
I'm definitely not in any of those photos.
- Okay, well, I know that, but... - All those people showed up here after I was here.
- Okay. - Take pictures.
The only people I know are... Are The Doors, and I didn't like them.
I don't think any of The Doors ever lived up here.
Morrison, what a dork.
Well...
Cass. Cass lived up at the top.
On Woodrow Wilson. She lived here.
Cass and I got to be very tight friends.
She had good weed. I had good weed.
We knew what was important in life.
Very, very, very bright.
Lonely.
Fat girl.
Wishing... Wishing she could be loved.
She was loved, but not the way she wanted to be.
Turning that on yourself, do you feel like you've been loved the way you wanted to be loved?
I think I didn't have a clue.
I don't think I was a good lover. I don't think I was a good person to...
Companion. I don't... I think I was selfish.
And...
And wacko.
And I got more wacko as time went on.
There were a lot of women that I made love to.
Hundreds.
Drugs make you different.
And cocaine tends to make you be obsessed with sex
and stuff.
There was boundaries I crossed that you haven't thought of yet.
I'm surprised that any of the women that put up with me did put up with me.
But they did.
I hurt a lot of girls. I hurt a lot of people.
And I dragged several young women
through a lot of stuff.
Dana.
And Debbie Donovan.
Nancy was really hard
because I was fully addicted.
You know, she had to get out.
Save her life.
But I didn't want to be left alone.
And she had become addicted, being in that lifestyle?
You betcha.
Did you feel like you had addicted her?
Yes.
Were...? Were these girls addicted? Yes, they were.
And, yes, I did it.
I turned them on to it.
Cocaine and heroin, both.
What you do to yourself is what you do to yourself.
You can be proud of it or disgusted by it,
but it's not really a moral thing.
What you do to other human beings...
that counts.
And I went back, and I was able to build bridges back.
All of the women that I seriously cared about in my life, except my daughter Donovan,
I've been able to repair it with.
I should thank them all for loving me. I should thank them all for expanding my world.
They all taught me something. Each of them taught me something.
And each of them loved me,
you know, the best they could, and they did love me really well.
Better than I loved them.
I think.
Did Joni feel like forever when you...? When you...?
- No? - No.
When I first met Joni down in Florida,
she was singing, you know, at a coffeehouse,
and I was pretty much stunned by her.
You know, I fell for her, which was similar to falling into a cement mixer.
I can remember laughing and crying within the same half hour.
Now, Joni has said that,
at that point, she felt like you were parading her around.
I did exactly that.
She's totally right, but the way she puts it makes it like it was an imposition
and not like I was opening up all the fucking doors in Hollywood for her.
I love her, and she's the best singer-songwriter of all of us, no question, hands down.
I'd say, "Here, smoke this. Joni, want to sing a song?"
And then you'd watch their brains fall out because nobody had heard anybody like her.
Joni and Clapton and that, that happened all the time.
I produced her first record, and I don't think I did that great a job.
I didn't get a great sound on her, but I did manage to catch her essence.
She thought that Judy Collins was, like, success.
As much as she deliberately...
When she found out she was going over people's heads, she went further.
Take a left.
And said, "Fuck you."
But the truth is that's what happened. She went right over people's head.
Getting close. There it is.
Okay. Pull in.
Let's get out and walk around. It's quiet up here.
- Until they throw us out. - Yeah.
- Well, we're trespassing. - They won't throw you out.
Artists are fascinating.
Joni, Cass, Janis.
I got a dozen of them.
And they were all damaged, and they were all brilliant,
and they were all lonely,
and they were all...
fantastic.
And why would you fall in love with Joni and not any of the others?
She wanted me to.
She had strong mojo.
One night, we were all having a big dinner, and there was 20 of us there.
She comes stomping in with her guitar
and sits down, and says, "I've got a new song."
And we all went, "Oh, fantastic. A new Joni song.
Unbelievable. This is so great. Sing it for us. Sing it for us."
And it was obviously her...
"fuck you and goodbye" to me.
And then she finished the song
and looked at me.
This intense, angry expression on her face, and then she sang it again.
There's no one like Joni Mitchell.
I think probably the best guy for her, and the best guy with her, was probably Graham.
And I was glad that they were together.
I had already fallen in love with Christine.
That's the house "Our House" was written about, right there.
See that interior light there?
The yellowy-white one back through that window? That's the kitchen.
That's where Crosby, Stills and Nash was born, right under that light.
That's where we were standing when we sang our first song together.
Cass introduced me to Graham.
I didn't know who he was at first.
And... But I liked him.
He put the top harmony on.
And we went:
Blink! You know.
We knew what we were gonna be doing for the next few years, right then.
Whatever sound Crosby, Stills and Nash has
was born in 40 seconds.
Not years.
Not months of rehearsing.
Forty seconds.
There's a little space for a garden out in back.
To be fair to you guys, I should shut up until the Greek Theatre,
or whenever our first gig is, because I know I can step in and put my part in,
but we can't get a blend that way.
We can't rehearse it so that it all makes sense together.
See, man, they've got to be on. Like Dallas, they don't play just to the track.
They listen to the vocal, man.
- He's conscious of the vocal. - What you gotta do
is play acoustic now and get it down, we'll try and get a big place as soon as we can.
Look, David and I have been sat here for at least half an hour
because we were told that we were gonna play acoustic guitars right here.
- Right. - So where's Stephen?
I'm not gonna cop out an inch to fear.
And you've walked out two fucking days in a row, you fucking hypocrite.
- You piss me off. - Hello. Test.
Forty-nine. Sixty-five. Hi.
Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome with us
Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Thank you. We needed that.
This is our second gig.
This is the second time we've ever played in front of people, man. We're scared shitless.
Everybody always asks me about Woodstock, right, because it's grown hugely,
and the further away from it we get, the bigger it gets.
It was about spirit.
It was about humans being nice to each other.
I saw this girl...
Blond girl, pretty, short dress, good legs, pretty, walking in the mud.
She cuts her foot on a piece of glass in the mud.
Cuts it pretty badly. It's really bleeding.
See this guy, he's a New York State Thruway cop.
And I notice his shoes are all polished and shiny, and his pants are creased real sharp.
And he looks pretty dapper.
He, without any hesitation at all,
walks right over to the girl, into the mud, picks her up,
and gets the blood and the mud all over himself,
and carries her to the car.
Lays her gently.
And 15 hippies step forward to push that police cruiser out of the mud.
All of a sudden, it's working for me.
We ran on that field.
You could see us. When we came back and we did that TV show with Dick Cavett,
when you see us all, we're running on that field.
A lot of the people in my audience are very tired because they came here,
I understand, from Woodstock, right here.
And the festival, people are still...
You see the spirit in all of us, how we're feeling right there,
how happy we are, how confident we are.
All of a sudden, our world's making sense, and we feel like we're winning.
I still have my mud.
We're gonna stop that damn war.
Can I describe what it looked like flying in on a helicopter?
It looked like an encampment of the Macedonian army on the Greek hills,
crossed with the biggest batch of gypsies you ever saw.
We're gonna make it different.
- We're gonna fix this damn thing. - ...room upstairs.
- I got one, and I don't even think it's wrong. - Okay.
The air we're all breathing is not clean, right?
You're aware of that, right? Everybody is. Anybody that looks out the window.
Consider this.
The only way to solve it seems to be
to convince GM, Ford, Chrysler, 76, Union, Shell, and Standard to go out of business.
All right.
Which is... Which is merely a setup for the punch line, which is fat chance.
Yeah.
Especially since four of them are my sponsors.
I don't know who lives here now.
I was sitting here...
drunk in my car.
Neil drove by.
He saw me.
This was when we were trying to decide whether we wanted him in the band or not.
We were Crosby, Stills and Nash, and we had the number one record in the country.
He turned around and pulled up here, pulled in next to me.
He sat down on the trunk of the car...
and he sang me, I don't know, three, four songs.
You know, "Helpless," "Country Girl," stuff like that.
And that's when I decided I really wanted him in the band.
The whole idea of starting the group in the first place,
it was to build a mother ship group
that would allow us the freedom to do what we wanted to do.
All four of us are still slaves to the music.
Still.
And I can't tell you how great it was to be in that band.
And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Time
Such a long, long time
Before the dawn...
The relationship was a bunch of guys...
just getting something together for the first time in the spotlight.
You know, attention that they never had before.
We were crazy. There was no... You know, there was a lot of pressure.
Stephen, talented guy, man.
Very impressive dude.
Synthesis is when you take widely separated things
and put them together,
create something new.
That's what happened.
For years at the beginning, every time we'd go on stage, fantastic.
We could sing together.
Nash is a fantastic harmony singer.
I think we might have been the first American supergroup.
That tour in '74,
we were packing in huge numbers of people.
More than anybody, probably, since The Beatles.
They see human beings up there.
We don't have high heels. We don't have sequins. We don't have smoke bombs.
All we have is these buddies and songs.
That's all we have. That's all we've ever had.
That's all we've ever felt was important, was the music.
Bottom line, I think, really, we thought
that forcing four guys into a space that was only big enough for three would be explosive.
And we were right.
I think he just wrapped himself.
Open the door and get in the car. That's all we want.
Mic drop, mic drop.
Good morning, David.
Kind of early, huh?
- What's happening? - Good to see you, man.
I wasn't a photographer, I was a musician with a camera.
So I didn't have a studio and lights. I've never used lights. I've never developed a roll of film.
I just frame it up and push the button when the moments are right.
And, you know, the trick is to be there, you know.
And so these were all friends of mine, and I was hanging out.
You were asking about all those classic pictures. I mean, who knew?
That day we did the photo on the couch there for your CSN album cover...
After that, we drove around the corner to a used clothing shop
and did a bunch of pictures in clothes.
We didn't know we even had an album cover.
And we did go back a day or two later,
but the house was gone.
I'm a Virgo. I analyze.
You're a Leo.
You just say what you feel.
- See, he believes that bullshit. - Right?
- It's unbelievable. - Well...
- Don't even. - What year were you born? '40?
You're not gonna tell them about the Chinese animal, are you?
What is your Chinese animal?
- Please don't tell them about the Chinese... - I know you're a...
I think you're a snake. Please, we got to know this.
- '41. - '41.
Let me tell you this: A snake is very lucky in Chinese astrology.
Wouldn't you say your life has been sort of a lucky thing?
- Drastically. Really drastically. - I mean, you're sitting here now, right?
- That's why. You're a Leo snake. - Has nothing to do with astrology.
- Nothing to do with... - I'm a Virgo tiger.
- You are so full of shit. - You got to know that.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
If I... If I...
You know, I'm pointing a flag gun at my head,
it's sort of saying me against the United States of America's government.
- Wait. Don't puff, though, okay? - Why not?
Because it makes too much smoke.
I like the smoke.
The fact he was smoking the joint with the flag gun was like sticking it to them.
- Yeah. Sort of saying... - When I talk about that picture
and I say, "Well, it looks like we had a plan.
Let's make a flag gun, and let's get a white backdrop, and let's have David pose."
No. It was, I mean...
CSN was in Minneapolis.
I think you were talking to Bob Dylan on the phone,
- smoking a joint. - Our plan...
And there was a knock on the door.
Graham Nash opens the door and throws that flag gun on the bed.
- He says, "Hey, Croz, a fan made you this." - Henry, you're so full of shit.
- It was a really good shot. - I've never been to Minneapolis.
- I don't even... - It was a good shot.
- Voilà. Here. - One.
- I'll take this. - This is...
This is going to great lengths with your meds.
Crap.
And, kid, you need to get another dealer.
- God's herb. - I'll get you some decent weed.
One of my favorite quotes is Garcia. You know, the first time he took acid, he said:
"I knew there was more going on than they were telling us."
I remember we always used to say, "Someday, the lawyers and the politicians...
We will be those. We'll be the, you know, the guys that...
That got high and really understood what life was about."
Drugs are cool, and I'm going through a trip right now.
I like to feel good.
So you get locked into one kind of a thing and you don't realize there's a lot of things you can get into.
- Religion. - Music.
- Dealing. - Cosmic pudding.
- God. - Benign anarchy.
It sort of happened. Not quite. Maybe it's still gonna happen.
The old hippie feeling is still alive in the, like, Greenpeace,
in the environmental people, right?
The mustache became very iconic very quickly.
What is the Dennis Hopper story?
He had used me as, like, the template for the guy that he played in Easy Rider.
Oh, yeah, man, like, I'm stoned, you know, man?
But, like, you know, I saw a satellite, man.
You know, it was a great film just because it had reference to me in it.
If I'd been in it, it would have been much better.
A much more serious film. Yeah.
The last stronghold of mother, God, home, and apple pie, and they're full of shit.
What?
And on the other side, you got a girl...
running through a field of flowers, man.
Half naked and high and laughing.
In the sunshine.
And you offer those two alternates to...
a child,
and a child is too smart to make that mistake.
Well, I sure could use that.
And we're off!
This is our first show.
Yeah, Croz!
The last few years have been fantastic for me.
I've made four solo albums.
I'm... I'm going for five.
I did something you're not supposed to do in show business.
I left a big group, CSN,
which has a solid paycheck.
...Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, founding member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash,
singer and songwriter David Crosby.
We're all huge fans.
- Your voice is incredible. - Thank you.
- How have you taken care of it? Because... - I haven't.
- What? - I totally have not.
That's what surprises me because we've heard stories about you through the years.
- Absolutely. - We're like, "He's still alive?
- How in the hell am I...? - He and Keith Richards are still alive?"
But not only are you alive, your voice.
- God has blessed you with an incredible voice. - Thank you.
Yes, exactly.
You see, this life is fine
Even, even
With these ups and downs
And you should have a sip of it
Else you're gonna find
That it's passed you by
- "Almost Cut My Hair." - Don't do it.
- Don't do that. - Don't.
I just have to warn you, there's a thing...
What happens when you cut your hair...
My bass player is making fun of me right now.
Oh, God, it's a funny band, man.
They torture me all day long.
This is a love song.
You won't know it till the third verse.
How can I sweep
These words into a cluster?
Put 'em in a pile
Like feathers on your floor...
Did you ever have a person you love get killed?
Well, afterwards, you know, you can't go back in and fix the stuff.
Can't make up for any mistake.
Frozen in time.
I was going with Joni,
and it was, you know, on-again, off-again.
And Christine was very stable, very wonderful.
You know, vivacious...
very alive girl.
And... And full of energy
and full of...
whizbang and joy.
Nash has a pretty amazing quote
where he says you went to identify Christine's body
and really never were the same.
He's... He's right.
I never was.
Seems like she's shouldering a load in your mind.
Why her?
I loved her.
Christine Hinton was a very beautiful girl who loved The Byrds.
Christine and I wound up together
and discovered that we actually cared about each other.
There's a thing from the book Dune
called the litany against fear.
"Fear is the mind-killer."
Creator of rage.
So she wrote it out for me in this beautiful little script.
I've got it framed.
She did a lot of stuff.
You don't get to pick who you fall for and you don't get to pick why.
I have a couple pictures of her where you see her smile.
And there you can see the spirit in the person.
She was a very spirited girl.
Christine was 21 years old.
Just starting her life.
She was just taking the cat to the vet...
and she didn't come home.
When someone is killed...
Not, you know, they got sick and then there was a long, agonizing process.
They got killed.
"Oh, so-and-so has been in a wreck. Come quickly."
And you go to the hospital, and they're dead.
I... I spent a long time crying.
Just because I didn't know what else to do.
You know, they don't...
They don't prepare you about death at all.
Death is not something that we can talk about.
You know, nobody talks about death.
There's just this emptiness.
This:
Gone. You know, it's like a rip in the fabric.
An empty place.
Leaves a big hole.
And you want to fill it, and you...
Of course, if you're like me, you torture yourself about it, going:
"I wish I had said this. I wish I had done that."
So it kind of rocks your world.
What do you want to say to her?
I'm sorry.
Could have loved you better.
Neil and I were out driving around in one of his woodies.
And we'd heard about it on the radio, and we just couldn't conceive of it.
Tear gas first started down the commons.
Then the guard moved up on both sides of Taylor Hall
and forced the kids off the commons, and all of a sudden, I heard them shooting.
Then I saw people dropping to the ground.
Today, the guardsmen opened fire on the students,
killing four of them, two young men and two young women.
Three were shot in the chest and one in the head.
A dozen or more others were wounded,
some by gunfire and some by bayonets.
The students were protesting the American invasion of Cambodia.
And I watched it hit Neil.
It was like he'd been punched.
Crosby came up, and he had the magazine
with the Kent State killings cover on it.
And I'd heard it on the news, what had happened, and...
But Crosby always has a way of bringing things into focus.
That's what really woke me up.
Neil picked up the guitar and wrote the song right in front of me.
And I called Nash and said, "Get a studio. Now."
And our record company president, a wonderful man named Ahmet Ertegun,
he told everybody, "Look, this record has to go out tomorrow."
As soon as I heard the song, it felt right.
It felt like it said what I was feeling.
It made me feel...
good that I was actually able to stand up for what I believe.
I think that's probably the best job of being troubadours
or being town criers that we ever did.
Hell, no, we won't go!
It lit the whole country on fire.
There were protests on every campus in America.
This guy, sergeant...
swore he never fired his gun.
The slide's racked back right there.
That's a Colt.45 Automatic.
The barrel is protruding because the slide has racked back. It is ejecting a shell as he fired.
Swore he never fired his weapon.
Right there.
In the picture.
Never went to court.
Nobody even tried.
Him.
Him. Him.
Idiot kids.
The person who gave them that live ammunition
should be in prison still,
right now,
for murder.
This lying son of a bitch.
"I never fired my weapon!" Really?
Funny, we got a picture of you doing it.
Belief is good.
Didn't work out.
Yet.
But we're trying.
Christine's death, I couldn't deal with at all.
I was in a terrible place.
Pretty freaked out.
There I heard this story...
I'd just finished making Déjà Vu,
during which I, a number of times, wound up sitting on the floor, crying.
Ten minutes.
A number of people, Nash in particular,
stuck with me for a long time, in order that I not...
you know, do something really dumb
and give up.
Was living on my boat in Sausalito and I was going up Tamalpais
to this spot that I had up there
and just crying for hours.
And I had these songs
because they'd only taken two of my songs for Déjà Vu.
And I just stayed in the studio, in Wally Heider's,
because it was...
somewhere I felt safe.
I present to you an album that escapes all categories
that was born from the suffering of its author
and was destined to become a "stoner classic."
If I Could Only Remember My Name.
David didn't seem to have a plan at all.
It was like free-form.
It was... I mean, he had these songs in his head.
Some had been cooking since The Byrds' days.
But he never revealed them to too many people.
I felt kind of privileged to peer into this world because I liked this world that he inhabited.
It was the most innocent, unplanned,
follow-your-heart...
kind of experience...
you could imagine.
He laid out no rules.
"Here are my songs. Do whatever the hell you want."
Whoever showed up that night was who was making the record that night,
and I would sing them a song.
There was a presence in the room.
You could taste it.
It was a playground.
It was an audio freaking playground.
Jerry Garcia.
He'd just show up. "Hey. What? What are you doing?"
If he and I had two guitars and we would sit in the same room,
we were happy.
He just wanted it to happen. He wanted to coax it into happening,
any kind of way.
If it meant get down on the floor and lick the notes off the floor, he'd do it.
He'd do whatever.
He knew it was waiting to happen right around the edges of the picture,
and he wanted to invite those notes out.
"Come on. Come on, little notes. Come on out, come on out."
And he was the most...
pure music guy.
Actually, the way it starts is:
He was just in sky-high heaven
with all his friends there
and even Neil backing him on this bizarre record.
The friendship that they showed me
and the support that my friends gave me
was one of the best things in my life.
That record was a turning point.
Injecting drugs, they say...
first time,
your life changes, no matter what comes after.
Yeah.
Yeah, a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, gave me a shot of heroin.
And...
Just great.
First one feels truly wonderful.
It's why it's so deadly.
All of a sudden, nothing hurts.
You feel...
exalted and wonderful.
Only the first time.
After that, you're just trying to catch it.
You're just trying to go back there.
And you never get back there.
Ever.
Addiction takes you over
like fire takes over a burning building.
And I went completely off the rails.
It's a weird kind of spiral, man.
You are mad at yourself for being a dick,
so you do more drugs, which makes you more of a dick, which makes you more mad at yourself.
But what's the high phase? What's the phase that keeps you going back?
It's... You don't get it. They're not to get high. They're for anesthesia.
That's why people get smashed on hard drugs,
is they don't want to be here.
They want to suppress here and now.
They want to live more inside of their dream.
Or their nightmare.
I was warned by many, many people.
In fact, some close-up-to-him people...
begged me not to get near him.
And I was already smitten.
I was already in the dance.
When I saw him doing drugs,
I thought, "What...? What is that?
Why is everybody so scared of it? Wait a minute. Give me some of that. Let me see what it is.
Maybe if I can figure that out, I can pull you out."
And that was really all I meant to do.
Croz, do you ever wonder why you are still alive?
I don't know.
No idea, man.
I... Why me?
Look at all these people, buddies of mine, that died, man.
Janis. Cass. Hendrix.
Those are friends of mine. They all died from the same thing the same way.
How come I didn't?
I was doing the same drug.
I overdosed.
They had to bring me back a couple times.
How come?
How come I'm not dead?
At a certain point there, the drugs became more important than anybody or anything,
including music.
I let those guys down terribly, man, when I became a junkie.
I went right down the tubes in front of them,
and they watched the band go all to shit because I couldn't pull my weight.
I had already decided that someday I was gonna get that call.
"Did you hear about David?" And that would be it. He'd be dead.
You'd go. Because you can't live that way and not, you know, pay the consequences.
Did I ever tell you about the time Neil came and offered me to come to his ranch and stay there and get sober?
He was genuine about it. He wanted to help me.
What were you using?
Coke and heroin. Both.
Nash and Jackson were both very concerned. Tried repeatedly to get me to quit.
They were two of the key people running the intervention on me.
It was... It was quite a... Quite a gathering of people.
Jan, who was just as bad a shape as he was. I mean, they were addicts, you know?
And the drill was to try to convince them
that they should, you know, like, really:
"Take it from us, you're heading for the wall.
You got to stop. You got to do something. We don't want to lose you."
It was an all-night thing.
He agreed to go into Scripps, like a hospital.
And he stayed there exactly one day and split the next day.
After that, they pretty much stopped trying.
He was convicted of drug and weapons charges in 1983.
Since then, he's been arrested on additional drug and hit-and-run charges.
He had been forced by the courts
to go to a rehab center and left without permission.
And at that point,
he became a fugitive from the law.
It was just a matter of days before somebody put my picture up in the post office.
We fled. A dealer guy got us a plane ride.
On a single-engine airplane.
All the way across the country. Took us three days.
Guy was a good pilot.
I think he'd been a drug runner.
And I went and found...
my boat.
Because I thought somehow I could go back and touch my touchstone,
and it would somehow save me from what I knew was coming.
I went to the boat, and she was in terrible shape.
Nobody had been taking care of her at all because I hadn't given them any money to.
I lay there and lay there, and days passed.
And I gave up.
Big moment.
And I got a ride to the local FBI agency.
And I walked in. He said, "Yeah, can I help you?"
I said, "You're looking for me. My name's David Crosby."
He said:
"Step over against the wall."
I think I'm probably facing some time,
but I would like to get it done with and go back to playing music.
That's all I really want to do.
When I gave myself up,
Jan D. came back,
and a doctor friend of ours got her into a treatment place in Monterey.
Do you have any comments for us?
Wish me luck, huh?
When I went in prison, cut both ways.
"Hey, rock star, how you feel now, huh? I.
Bet you wish you was out there getting laid and having a lot of money now, don't you, huh? I."
When I went into prison, I was nearly dead.
I'm kicking two major, heavily addictive,
really terrible drugs without even an aspirin.
I'd lost pretty much everything.
I'd hit bottom, blown my money.
I spent four months in solitary. They lock you in a steel box and feed you through the door.
And in prison, I woke up in a cell,
remembered who I was and started writing again.
And that was the beginning of the road back.
"Compass" was the first decent song I wrote.
When I got out of prison,
I thanked the judge for sending me away because it got me off hard drugs.
He's now on probation for four years and has to submit to regular drug testing.
Are you off drugs completely now?
Yes, sir, I am.
Happy to be.
His first gig out of prison was in a small club in Texas.
He'd never before played on-stage without drugs.
Mr. David Crosby, ladies and gentlemen!
Feels wonderful!
Jan D., God bless her,
she waited.
When I got out of prison,
we were under orders from a judge not to see each other.
Forbidden to see me.
But then we got ahold of the judge and said, "Hey, please.
We're... I'm out of prison, I'm sober, and I'm gonna stay that way.
Jan is sober and going to meetings and is trying, and we'd like to get married."
And he was a decent guy, and he let us.
Jan loves me in ways that I...
didn't love myself,
and she taught me to love myself.
She taught me a lot about how to love, period.
This song...
if you know who's who,
this song is the story of the first time
of many times that CSNY broke up.
What held CSN, CSNY together was Nash and I being so locked
because we can sing so well together.
Nash and I, as a pair of voices,
hard to beat.
Everly Brothers. Indigo Girls. Couple other people, not many.
I have been around
The world
Looking
Looking for that woman girl
Who knows love can endure
And you know it will
Ladies and gentlemen, Crosby, Stills and Nash.
For a guy who was supposed to be dead a couple of years ago, I'm doing pretty well.
I want to thank the two men standing next to me
because they've been brothers to me.
They've stuck with me through thick and thin.
They waited. They helped.
They cried sometimes.
They swore at me sometimes.
But they've been my brothers all the way down the line.
Without them, I could not have made this music, and I love them dearly.
And I thank you both, guys.
We have made really good music together,
and I'm very grateful for every bit of it.
I think CSNY is a completely different band than CSN,
completely different,
and should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its own, by the way.
I should be in there a third time,
just to make Clapton jealous.
We really did like each other when we first started playing,
and we were thrilled by each other's songs.
Bands get together, and you're in love with each other, and it's all wonderful and it's exciting,
but 40 years later,
it devolves into just turn on the smoke machine and play your hits.
Almost
Cut my hair
Got to the point where we didn't like each other,
didn't ride the same bus.
We were competing all the time.
If I'd bring in one of my new weird songs, they didn't want to learn it.
And we've been so unkind to each other.
We've hurt each other. All of us have hurt each other.
We've done terrible things to each other many times.
Everybody in the band has, at many times.
Me probably more than anybody else.
My big fuck-up is getting mad.
You didn't ask me, but I'll volunteer it.
Biggest mistake I make: getting mad.
Once the adrenaline hits my system,
it's just, like, instant asshole.
- What's the get-off for you? - There isn't any. There's no good about it.
There's no pleasure, there's no enjoyment. There's nothing except...
Once the adrenaline takes ahold, you're...
in the grip of it,
and you say stuff and do stuff that's just awful.
I shot my mouth off about Neil's girlfriend.
I didn't realize the guy was gonna put it on the Net. I thought the interview was over.
So Neil's pissed at me, and he's not gonna work with me.
He says, "No more CSNY ever!"
So my dream of you guys reuniting, having a little concert, maybe doing Déjà Vu...
- That'll never happen. No. - Never happen?
If you make a mistake,
you got to fix it right away.
Yeah. I shouldn't have said it anyway. I apologized for it, but it doesn't do any good.
And it just... It just went downhill from there.
The Graham that I have in my head
is on-stage with me in Scandinavia someplace, Norway or somewhere,
and he's screaming at me...
in my face, from about this far away, spittle hitting me in the face,
and he's screaming:
"You don't get it, do you?!
You mean nothing to me now! Nothing!
Ihateyoui.
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!"
Spit.
Punching in the chest.
On-stage, in front of an audience.
He was, on that tour, coming on-stage and not looking at me.
The whole night, he would sing facing Stills and just try to pretend I wasn't there.
I always wanted to have a buddy, a brother,
a, you know...
partner.
It is my pleasure to introduce two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.
We were singing for the White House Christmas tree lighting.
Silent night
Holy night
Shepherds quake
At the sight...
We were fucking terrible.
And it's having the guts to say:
"Okay, it's dead.
Don't prop the corpse up.
Don't make its mouth move with a string.
Leave it. Let it die a decent death.
Go on and do the next thing."
Sleep in heavenly
Peace
Sleep in heavenly peace
Happy Christmas, everybody.
It's so sad that the last song CSN sang together was "Silent Night."
He tore the heart out of CSN and CSNY in the space of a few months.
That's what "Encore" is about.
I wrote that for David Crosby.
The song is about, who are you?
Who are you when you're not famous?
Who are you when the lights have gone out and the audience has left?
Are you a decent person?
Or are you a fucking asshole?
Who are you?
Thank you.
This is you speaking in 1974.
This is the first interview that we ever did.
My father's 74, man. He says, in the long run, none of it counts.
Money, glory, fame, chicks, nothing.
He says the only thing counts is whether you got any fucking friends.
All the rest of it is bullshit.
I think I made that up.
The reason I think I made it up is...
my dad didn't have any friends.
Did he ever comment on this quote?
- So, in a way, you're talking to yourself? - Yeah.
- And quoting your dad-ish. - Yeah. Yeah.
What happened to your friends?
That's really hard.
See, I have to look at it in context.
I still have friends, but...
all the main guys that I made music with won't even talk to me.
All of them.
One of them hating my guts could be an accident.
McGuinn,
Nash, Neil, and Stephen all really dislike me.
Strongly.
I heard a quote about you. You said, "David ripped the soul out of Crosby, Stills and Nash."
- Yeah, well... - You couldn't still feel that way.
You know, you say things in anger, and you try and take them back,
and you can't sometimes because words are very powerful.
- David and I haven't spoken in two years. - Yeah.
Having spoken to him probably almost every day for 45 years.
- Yeah. - It's just sad.
And I don't quite know how to undo it, you know?
Maybe... Maybe it just all...
I mean, if we never played another note of music,
CSN or CSNY, look what we did.
I'm telling you, what a body of work.
- Really. - It's true.
But there's more.
- Always more. - There's more in there, you never know.
I know. You never know...
What comes to mind in terms of something like, "Man, I wish I could wipe that right now"?
Just listening to you talk about Neil, for example.
- What do...? - I'm not mad at Neil.
- Neil's mad at me. - Understood.
But in terms of making a situation right...
why won't you just show up on his doorstep?
Because I don't even know where his doorstep is.
The one thing I can do...
is make music myself.
So I'm trying really hard to do that.
To prove to yourself...?
That I'm worth a shit.
I just can't give up.
Putting you on speaker for a minute here.
Okay. I love you, Jan Crosby.
I love you too.
Honey, I'm... I'm so far away.
I'm just so tired, exhausted.
Eight stents in my heart.
That's as many as you can put in.
They can't go any more.
Heart attack...
sometime in the next couple years.
I bit off more than I could chew.
I can't do five dates in a row.
So I lost my voice, and I had to cancel a couple of dates.
It's hard.
- Thank you, sweetie. - You're welcome.
Boy, that tree's pretty. That's the first thing I fell in love with here was the trees.
All these trees.
They're wonderful.
I see the rest of the world, the rest of what's going on, but I don't really focus on it.
I can admit to you that...
it's gonna be hard, whatever happens.
I might just disappear.
I'm sorry to say that on camera,
but I don't know how...
I could take another breath when he's gone.
I want to be a guy who is loving.
So, yeah, that's what I'm striving for. That's what I want to be. That's who I want to be.
I like loving my children and my wife and my dogs
and my music.
I like how it makes me feel.
And at least I...
have enough guts to be honest.
- Right now. - That's what this is.
Maybe. Maybe I've conned you into it.
Maybe this was all a clever plan.
I think you should be able to say goodbye and tell them what they meant to you.