Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash

  I wasn’t worried for a New York minute.

  WE TRAVELED ON three individual buses that had been converted into spacious living quarters. In a way, they enabled us to stretch out in privacy, and in another way they enabled David to get high. He could smoke his way from one gig to the next with no interference from Stills or me. He was now traveling with his drug dealer, a pretty shady character named Mort,* who’d taken over most of David’s business affairs. They worked out a deal whereby Mort would supply Croz with enough credit for the drugs in exchange for a large chunk of income and royalties. Mort had a piece of everything David did: albums, publishing, tours, concessions, the works. It was sickening to watch it all go up in smoke. Croz kept promising that he would clean up his act, but that part of his act got darker and dirtier. There were plenty of crack addicts who made that sad scene, hangers-on who’d score off him and split. Croz sold one of them the publishing to “The Lee Shore” for dope.

  Come showtime, things didn’t improve. It actually got so bad, we had to build a room adjacent to the stage so Croz could wander off and freebase between songs. Often, David walked offstage, threw up from the drugs, and was literally dragged back to sing. In Philadelphia, on August 11, he had to leave the stage because he wasn’t functioning. On the fly, Stephen and I did a couple of songs together, then Stephen did a solo set—we were creating a show spontaneously, as was needed. When it was my turn to solo, Stephen left the stage while I sang. He found Crosby nearly comatose on a couch in the dressing room, threw a bucket of ice water on him, and when David came back he was completely soaked.

  Because of David’s arrests, we now became targets. I remember going to a small airport somewhere in the Phoenix area. In those days, you could get counter-to-counter service. Let’s say you wanted a lawyer’s letter that needed to be signed. You could arrange for someone to go to the United Airlines desk in one city and drop off the letter to be picked up on the other end of the flight. David had arranged to receive some dope that way. We got to the airport and picked up our bags. He went to the airline counter and said, “Is there a package for David Crosby?” The attendant said, “Just a minute, let me go and see.” Immediately David’s antennae went up, and so did ours. It wasn’t “Mr. Crosby? No problem, here it is.” “Let me go and see” was weird. Something was wrong. When the guy brought the package out, it had already been opened. David was smart about it. He said, “No, that’s not for me. I’m expecting a letter.” And we left—but we all got the message fast.

  It was getting hairier and hairier, no doubt about it. And too bad, because the concerts were all sellouts and really well received. It was just as I’d thought; we had no problem connecting with the kids. Our audience actually expanded. Even the press was largely enthusiastic. We weren’t classic or mainstream or adult—just relevant.

  But we continued fighting our own demons. On September 6, at the final gig of the summer portion of the Daylight Again tour at Irvine Meadows in California, we hit the end of our last song, “Teach Your Children,” put our guitars down, and took bows, which is when the police came for Crosby. They’d been looking for any excuse to bust him again, using an old arrest warrant from 1980. It was a bogus charge and eventually dismissed, but it wasn’t going to help that ongoing charge in Dallas. In fact, that case resulted in a formal indictment, which meant Crosby was going to trial.

  It made us reconsider continuing the second part of the tour in November. As always, David had promised to clean up and get help, but the reality of it was far from that. Some of my friends thought I was crazy for putting up with this shit. We were always in jeopardy of busts—or worse. In a way, we’d always been walking a tightrope, walking over a chasm with a lake at the bottom, and in the lake were sharks. But it’s one of the things that makes us an interesting band to observe. Everybody knew what Crosby was going through. Once again, I chose to see the light, because I knew in my heart that David was worth saving.

  Besides, we had to tour because, suddenly, we had another big hit that needed promoting. “Southern Cross” was originally a song called “Seven League Boots” by the Curtis Brothers. Stephen heard it and said, “It’s got the essence of something good. Let me try to do something with it.” He transformed it, as he’d altered Joni’s “Woodstock”—changed it musically, put the chorus in there, souping it up, new title. And it became a smash. We were back on the road, back on the tightrope … over the shark pool.

  This time out, the cities may have changed, but the offstage scene was painfully familiar. The shows were great, capacity crowds, one encore after another. Great energy, great vibe. A lot of magic—and a lot of pain. For the most part, Crosby was well behaved. The rampant drugs somehow didn’t disrupt our performances. But by the time we got to the end of the tour, the onstage facade was beginning to crumble.

  On Thanksgiving weekend, CSN played three shows at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA, which we filmed for a two-hour TV special. For some unknown reason, David freaked out. He hit the pipe extra hard before we went on, and the effects of it were all on film. His eyes were completely dead; he wasn’t reacting to the music. And his singing wandered off-key. Now, I’m pretty good at the console in the studio. I can fix anything—move vocals from one side to the other, fine-tune voices, and there was a lot of that going on. But with film, combining all three nights into one show, the thing I couldn’t fix was how David looked. He looked like death warmed over—barely—so I couldn’t show him full-face. It was an engineering and editing nightmare.

  By the new year, 1983, I needed a break, something tension-free to take my mind off the CSN upheaval. The Hollies seemed like just the right antidote, so I headed to England to work on their album. Once again, it was a little awkward between Allan and me, and I understood it. I knew how he felt. After fifteen years, I come back into a band that had been his baby since I split. He’d put his whole adult life into it, keeping them in the spotlight. It was a pretty delicate situation at first, but once we got into the studio it was like old times. It was the Hollies, my old mates, and everything just clicked. No one had to explain anything. Singing with Allan and Tony was flat-out fun. We just opened out mouths and all of us were right there.

  We cut a number of songs just like the old days: fast, no fuss, bang-bang-bang. Then I was trapped. I’d done the record, as promised—and now what? “Hey, we’re going to have to tour in America.” So I agreed to go with them. Part of me felt that it would be a lark, great to hang with Bobby, Tony, and Allan. After what I’d just gone through, it would put the fun back in touring, not having to look over my shoulder for police all the time. And part of me felt absolved of guilt—the guilt of having left the Hollies. Honestly, I wanted to resolve my relationship with Allan Clarke. I still loved that guy and wanted to make things right.

  While I was in England, I decided to visit my mother, whose health had been in a steady decline. She was living above the pub in Pendleton with another husband, Alf, a decent man who made her laugh. Only sixty-five, she looked frail, more delicate than I’d expected.

  In my family, growing up, we’d never talked about feelings. Everything was on the surface; we never dug down or explored personal issues. A lot of that had to do with the postwar recovery process. You know, that shining English attitude: “Let’s just take a deep breath, luv, it’ll be better tomorrow.” That was the attitude we needed to survive. It was the way I was brought up, and to a certain extent I subscribe to it to this day. One of my survival tools is that it will always be better tomorrow, and working with Stephen and Croz, it’s come in pretty handy. But I’d been carrying around a vexing question for twenty-five years that my mother could only answer with some serious reflection.

  I wanted to know why all my friends had been forced to get a real job when they turned sixteen, and I’d never gotten that pressure, especially from my mom, who ran the family. “Why was it you encouraged me?” I asked her all these years later. It must have caught her off guard, because she hesitated, glancing away, not sur
e how to respond.

  Finally, she looked at me, sitting at the end of the bar in the pub, and a thin smile creased her lips. “Because, Graham,” she said, “you are living the life I wanted for myself.”

  Man, you could have knocked me over with a feather. She’d never said anything like this before. This was the first I’d ever heard about her ambitions beyond being a housewife and raising a family. I hadn’t realized she had her dreams, too.

  “What do you mean, ‘I’m living your life’?”

  She said, “Believe it or not, I thought I had a pretty nice voice and wanted to be on the stage, to be a singer like you. I thought I had something to offer with my talent. But World War II came along, I married your dad, I had three kids—and the dream was over for me. So you are doing what I wanted to do.”

  This turned me inside out. While I was enjoying my life, getting the girls, living out the fantasy of a young rock ’n’ roller, my mom was watching and taking it all in. Inadvertently, I had pulled off my mother’s dream.

  “Your dad and I were always so proud of you,” she said.

  Wow! To hear my mother say that was incredible. Of all those teach-your-children moments that I’d been singing about, it took this conversation to put it in perspective. It answered so many questions I’d been grappling with for so long. It dawned on me that my parents were some of the characters I’d written about in “Cold Rain,” stuck in their jobs, forced to accept certain circumstances. They sacrificed their dreams for mine. I’m eternally grateful.

  A few years later, after my mom passed away, I found myself describing this conversation one night while Crosby and I were playing Carnegie Hall. For some reason, David needed to leave the stage. (No, not that reason—he probably just took a bathroom break.) So I began talking to the audience, explaining about my mother’s ambitions.

  “My mother wanted to be on the stage,” I said, “and I thought about how great it would have been if she had made it to Carnegie Hall.” As I spoke, I reached into my right-hand jacket pocket, into which I had slipped a few of my mother’s ashes, and I started to sprinkle them on the stage. “Mom, you finally made it.” It was an incredibly satisfying moment for me. And the audience went nuts.

  Incidentally, she also made it to the Greek Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Royal Albert Hall. She’d helped to fulfill my dreams. I couldn’t do much in return, but it was a gesture; it was payback.

  Lunch with Cass at Café Figaro, New York City, 1967 (© Henry Diltz)

  My portrait of Johnny Cash, Nashville, 1969 (© Graham Nash)

  With Jackson Browne, backstage at the No Nukes concert, Madison Square Garden, 1979 (© 1979 Lynn Goldsmith)

  With the Everly Brothers, 2005. On the same stage where I did the Carroll Levis Discovery Show with the early Beatles in 1959 … forty-six years later, almost to the day. (© Ralph Starkweather)

  Me and Jerry Garcia, Berkeley Community Theater, October 15, 1971 (© Joel Bernstein)

  Leon Russell and Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangladesh, Madison Square Garden, 1971 (© Graham Nash)

  David Geffen after we threw him in the pool at Stephen’s house, Laurel Canyon, 1969 (© Graham Nash)

  With Joni, on our way to Big Bear. She is writing her song “Willie,” 1969. (© Henry Diltz)

  With Joni, backstage at Carnegie Hall, February 1, 1969 (© Joel Bernstein)

  Joni listening to music, Laurel Canyon, 1969. I shot this through the back of a kitchen chair. (© Graham Nash)

  Judy Collins kissing Stephen, Sag Harbor, 1969 (© Graham Nash)

  Christine Hinton. Her death in a car crash devastated Croz. (© Robert A. Foster)

  With Rita Coolidge, 1971 (© Henry Diltz)

  My portrait of close friend and photographer Joel Bernstein, 1971 (© Graham Nash)

  My portrait of Susan (© Graham Nash)

  Susan, Hawaii, 1983 (© Graham Nash)

  My son Jackson feeling his brother, Will, 1979 (© Lynn Goldsmith)

  My two sons, Jackson and Will, talking about penises, 1984 (© 1984 Graham Nash)

  My daughter, Nile, Hawaii, 1988 (© Graham Nash)

  David’s wedding and my “re-wedding,” 1984 (© Henry Diltz)

  Singing “Our House” at my fiftieth birthday party at the Continental Trailways Club, LA, 1992. We’re dressed like old people. (© Joel Bernstein)

  My beautiful granddaughter, Stellar Joy, Hawaii, 2013 (© Susan Nash)

  Performing solo, 2010 (© Buzz Person)

  *A pseudonym.

  chapter16

  IT WAS TIME TO MAKE SOME HARD DECISIONS.

  After the Daylight Again TV special was in the can, Stills and I began work immediately on a live CSN album drawn almost entirely from that show. Croz was in no shape to make a new studio record, and lately he’d been making himself scarce. We couldn’t count on him for much of anything to do with business. Meanwhile, there was plenty of new, unreleased material to work from, so it wouldn’t seem like a cut-and-paste job made up of loose ends.

  It was pretty difficult getting it together. Croz’s vocals were too lifeless on most of the tracks. We could isolate and soften them, but we needed more of him on a CSN album. So we added a couple of tracks—“Shadow Captain” and a version of Joni’s “For Free”—from a gig in Houston that we’d done in ’77. The patch job we did was remarkable, if I do say so myself. So with all of that, we had an album we called Allies. I chose the cover, a picture of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill with our heads superimposed, but it got scrapped at the last minute for photographs of us performing live.

  Yes, we had to tour, and for the life of me I don’t know how we managed to pull it off. David was more than a mess. His health had deteriorated, which hardly seemed possible. He was freebasing around the clock. He was filthy, always sickly, irrational, covered in sores. And blisters—he and Jan would nod off while using a torch to light their pipe and were constantly burning their furniture and bodies. He had trouble speaking because his windpipe was coated. David was also broke, heavily in debt to drug dealers of all shapes and stripes. He went through all his cash, including the money set aside to pay for income taxes. And he’d been selling off his prized possessions in order to score. Guitars and collectibles from two decades of rock ’n’ roll went for small amounts of cocaine. The Mayan lay in disrepair. The Mill Valley place was a ghost house, overrun with drug dealers and hangers-on. I was paying for the schooling of his child, Donovan, named after Debbie. God only knows how he got through these days.

  Even so, we were going on the road, touring Europe. Right before we left, David’s Texas court case came up on June 3, 1983. I watched it on CNN from my home in Hawaii, with Croz falling asleep and snoring loudly in the courtroom. And, I later learned, freebasing in the bathroom. The judge got pissed because of David’s fame, notoriety, and lack of respect for the legal system—and found him guilty, convicting him of two felonies. Two felonies! He faced up to thirty years in prison. In Texas! Hardball. I was pretty freaked. My heart sank as I watched the reports. For his mug shot, David wore a CSN jacket. Could it get any worse?

  Sentencing was postponed when we came back from Europe. I phoned the guy who was chaperoning David and said, “Get out of Dallas, baby!” Simple as that.

  We did the entire Allies tour on a Viscount jet prop. No wives or girlfriends came along. We didn’t need any additional distractions. Jan’s appearance was awful and would have attracted attention at passport control. She was pale and frail, with sores and burns—dreadful. So sad. We were nervous about being busted, afraid about being associated with Croz. We had an advance man who had to travel ahead, buying dope for Crosby from local suppliers. If Croz didn’t have drugs, he couldn’t function. The dope was kept in safe deposit boxes in local banks so no one had to carry. Crosby was too visible, an easy mark. Officials were just looking for him, waiting to pounce.

  Somehow, the tour functioned. Music, as usual, wiped out the bad feelings. We did decent shows across Europe. In Germany, we ventured into Eas
t Berlin. I was always fascinated with the Berlin Wall, watching home movies of courageous people trying to escape from east to west, getting caught on barbed wire or shot. So I wanted to see Checkpoint Charlie. Man, was it different over there, like going from Hawaii to North Korea: sunny on one side (the west), gray and miserable on the other (the east). Bleak cement buildings, awful architecture.

  Even though Daylight Again had been a hit, ticket sales at our shows were soft. Many times we booked three nights in a city, but demand was such that we only played one. Venues were too large, prices too high, expectations too great. Who really knows the reason? Shows in France and Spain were canceled at the last minute. Many of the shows in Italy were rained out. Out of the original twenty-five or so dates that were booked, nine were canceled.

  That’s how we dragged ourselves back to the States, overcast and with restlessness galore.

  I WAS DREADING Crosby’s sentencing in Dallas. It didn’t look good. He’d been arrested too many times to skate, and the judge in the case had run out of patience. The thought of David going to prison scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t sure he had the strength to get through it. And it conjured up all the shit that my dad had endured. I couldn’t help remembering how much my dad had changed upon his release, the humiliation and loss of self-esteem, and I didn’t want to see that happen to Croz.

  There was a chance to enter a plea on his behalf, and if anyone was going to speak, who better than me? Who knew more about David and his true worth, apart from all the bullshit that tarnished his image? I viewed him like one of those shiny metallic balls you put in a garden. It gets handprints all over it, then more handprints, and more—obscuring the reflection with each successive touch. But if you cleaned all that shit off, the shine was still there, which was very much how I viewed Crosby. I explained how, at his heart, David was a good man. He’d helped a tremendous amount of people through his music and had done countless benefits for worthy causes. At the moment he might be going through a dark time in his life, but have some faith and trust that his core humanity was still there.