Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash

  “I truly believe that what David needs at this juncture of his life is help, guidance, and professional supervision,” I wrote. “Confinement in prison may make him suicidal or worse. Please don’t send him to jail.”

  Little good it did. Judge Pat McDowell, who heard the case, sentenced David to five years in prison for the drug charge and three years for weapons possession, to run concurrently.

  I hadn’t expected that severe of a sentence. Five years was a fucking long time, but it was obvious the judge wanted to make an example of him. In a way, I was more worried that David wouldn’t do time—that he’d either make a run for it, as he’d often claimed he would, or blow himself away. He was terrified of going to jail while still using. David told me that, if convicted and sentenced, he’d had plans to sail away: to stock the Mayan with food, take Jan, and head out to sea. But I doubted that he’d be able to pull it off. David needed money—for food, for gasoline for the boat, for repairs, and for drugs—and to get money, you’ve got to come back into society. He might have been able to escape for a month or so, but I think he concluded it was a foolish and untenable idea.

  In the meantime, due to an appeal filed by his lawyers, David was released on $8,000 bond.

  Once again, I needed a rest from all the debilitating bullshit and headed to Hawaii, as far off the scene’s radar as one could possibly get. Occasionally I’d hear from one of the other guys. David called a few times for money or help. He was trying to clean up, but he wasn’t having much success. There were reports from the road that David torched hotel rooms in New York and Connecticut after nodding off while freebasing. Still, intermittently, he attempted to sign in to hospital rehab programs in order to satisfy the terms of his release. At Gladman Memorial in Oakland, California, I wrote a letter at his request so that he wouldn’t be confined to a mental unit. David’s craziness, I explained, was limited to the drugs. Was he wild? Oh, yeah. Was he impetuous? Yeah and a half. Was he stubborn and argumentative? Double yeah. But he wasn’t crazy and didn’t belong in that ward. So I assured the authorities at Gladman he would sign in voluntarily and stay put. David swore to me he would do it, too. But he bolted in a matter of hours. He’d broken his solemn promise to me—not for the first time, and not for the last.

  I spent my downtime with my family, being a full-time dad and husband. It was heaven for me, exactly what I’d been missing. My kids were growing up and I longed to be more involved. I found out I was pretty good at it, too. There was so much joy to be had from their unassuming routines—making them breakfast, buying them shoes, reading them stories, taking them to the beach, watching them grow. They centered me. They were the innocence I needed so desperately in my life to counterbalance all the decadence dragging me down. As Susan pointed out, “Nobody applauds a good father. They don’t give them gold records. But there are other rewards.” And I was reaping them in spades.

  I also managed to find time to do some sculpting and work on my photography collection. Actually, it was Susan who initially sparked my interest in sculpting. Two days after that tree incident when I first met her, she came over to our bungalow at the Chateau to make dinner for David and me. She brought along a piece of alabaster that she was working on, a bird she was sculpting. I was talking to David about which songs we were going to cut the next day for the Wind on the Water album while Susan worked away on the grass right outside the bungalow. Distracted, I looked over at her and realized deep down that, incredibly, I really loved this woman. I was completely enamored of her. She fulfilled all my fantasies of what a perfect woman should be. So I walked slowly over to her, laid my hand gently on her back, and said, “I love you.” That gesture so shocked her that she chipped the bloody head off the bird. It was one of those moments you couldn’t invent if you tried. So David and I wrote the song “Broken Bird” about that incident, which eventually made it onto Whistling Down the Wire.

  There’s a story I’d like you to listen to

  About a lady and a broken bird

  Broken by the hammer,

  She took it so hard she hardly said a word

  I continued to do what I do best: I wrote more songs. I worked on new material, intending to come up with enough stuff to make a new CSN album in the not too distant future. Call it a pipedream, but I truly believed in our ability as musicians, even though the horizon looked pretty damn bleak.

  I MANAGED TO stay out of the spotlight until the summer of 1984, when it was imperative that CSN go on tour. We needed to keep the group in the public eye and earn a little money while we were at it. Crosby, in particular, needed the cash. As usual he was broke, up to his eyeballs in debt, and spending whatever money he had on coke and heroin, all while he was out on bail, awaiting appeal.

  Just before we left, Mort, David’s dealer, talked David into leaving Jan behind in Mill Valley. What David didn’t know was that Mort had moved a couple of coked-up bikers into the house to bring her drugs and they beat the crap out of her. They kept Jan prisoner, sometimes at gunpoint, and stole all of her money. When Jan finally broke free and made her way to David, she had two broken ribs, a dislocated jaw, and many missing teeth. Lucky to be alive.

  And it got even worse. At one point we took a flight from Kansas City to a gig in Denver. We’re all sitting in first class. David and Jan were sitting directly behind me across the aisle, trying to freebase under a blanket, but he’d left his drug paraphernalia and gun in suitcases that were checked. Wouldn’t you know it, the plane was delayed and David got agitated, worried he couldn’t fix. “I want those bags,” he demanded, and ordered one of his guys to recover them and bring them to the cabin. Of course, they X-rayed the bags and found the gun and the stash. When the police came on board, David denied the bags were his. He was out on appeal; another arrest would have revoked his bail and ended the tour then and there. Instead he said, “They’re Jan’s,” and she owned up to them. So the cops arrested Jan for federal air piracy. They took her, David waved good-bye, stared out the window, and didn’t say another word.

  He was too far gone to have a conversation about the reality of what had happened. The rest of us wondered how a man did that—let them take his girlfriend and not say something or go with her, any of the things that someone in his right mind would have said. But David was not in his right mind. The freebase had completely transformed him into something almost inhuman.

  I was shocked. Of course, I was equally to blame. I didn’t do anything to intervene or defuse the situation. The CSN tour was an enabler for David, and so was I. Absolutely. I enabled David because I wanted him to be able to make music. I tried to confront him, to prohibit the drugs. He’d say, “Want me to sing tonight? Want me to be there, man—awake?” So to appease a junkie, you say nothing while he is getting stoned and happy. And I have to take a certain amount of responsibility. I wanted the music. The music was always the most important thing for me.

  Somehow, we soldiered through the tour. It was strangely reassuring. Comforting. There was a lot of good music. And nobody died. On December 9, 1984, at the after-tour party at the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, we were all looking forward to moving on. Beforehand, in my room, I got loaded, smoking and snorting. The party was in a huge suite, everyone was getting completely whacked. When I came down to it and took in the scene, I realized that everyone there seemed to be faking having a good time. They seemed like marionettes, their faces fixed with superficial smiles, pretending to connect. Then I realized that I was like a marionette, too, the coke pulling my strings. Despite the drugs, it was a moment of extreme clarity. I thought that if this was how it appeared to me, then they must be seeing it in me as well. It made me cringe; it did a number on my head. Plus, David was a walking poster boy for the devastation of coke. He was bloated, some of his teeth were missing, his face was swollen, and he was in serious denial, insisting that he had his shit together. So I decided there and then: no more cocaine for me. It had been a part of my life from 1968 through 1984. I’d done enormous amounts of the stuff
—enormous amounts. But I didn’t want or need it anymore. It wasn’t a very difficult decision. I’m a pretty determined man. So I swore off it for good. There has been no cocaine in my life since that night.

  DURING THE NEXT YEAR, David hit rock bottom. He was arrested for drug and weapons possession, and after he failed to appear at a court hearing in Dallas to discuss his appeal bond, a warrant was issued for his arrest. It was a few days before Thanksgiving. For nearly a month, from mid-November to mid-December 1985, David Crosby was on the run. He sold his grand piano for $5,000 in getaway money that he immediately blew on dope, and he headed to Florida, a fugitive from justice, which also made him guilty of interstate flight. Ostensibly he was looking for the Mayan, which was somewhere in the Bahamas. But the boat proved to be unseaworthy; it was in complete disrepair. Meanwhile, the FBI began a search for Croz and Jan. They were hopscotching around the state, from one drug dealer to the next, one relative to the next, being turned away at every location. Somewhere in this madness, David realized it was over. He ran out of money—and hope. The drugs were killing him and he knew it. There was nothing left but to turn himself in.

  On December 12 at around 3:30 in the afternoon, he walked barefoot into FBI headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida, and surrendered. I watched the news reports from my home in Kauai, heartbroken at seeing my best friend led out of a building in handcuffs, photographers swarming around him, being stuffed into the back of a squad car. At the last moment, before the door closed, he turned to the camera and said, “Wish me luck.”

  Needless to say, I wished him all of that—and more. In a way, it took guts to turn himself in, but I think it was inevitable once he hit bottom and decided he needed help. That was the point at which he made the decision to live. But I admit, I was secretly hoping to see him go to jail. I thought it was the only way he could stop this downward slide into oblivion. How many of our friends had died in the grip of drugs—Jimi, Brian Jones, Cass, a half dozen crew members? We almost lost Stephen and David any number of times. Those guys must be built like fucking bulls! Like Keith Richards. I didn’t want to see anything happen to Croz. I really loved the guy.

  DAVID SPENT SEVERAL months at Lew Sterrett County Jail in Dallas before being transferred, on March 6, 1986, to Huntsville, one of the most onerous state prisons in America. He wrote several letters to me from jail, and they were fucking bleak. I know that Jackson and Stephen wrote to him, too. And Neil—he told David that if he cleaned up his act and got straight, then he would gladly come back into the fold. Re-forming CSNY was a powerful incentive. It was all we could do to keep David’s spirits high.

  While David was in the joint, Stephen kept busy making Right by You, one of his less-appreciated albums for Atlantic, with help from Jimmy Page; I was making Innocent Eyes, another solo album that I fear was inadequately conceived. I felt as though I had to do something more contemporary and probably pushed that concept too far. The music, much of which was written by other artists, was outside of my comfort zone. I used a drum machine on a lot of the tracks, which threw some longtime fans and reviewers off. In hindsight, there was probably less of me on that record than the music required.

  Afterward, I did a string of small shows with Joan Armatrading, mixing a lot of CSN standbys into the set. I also joined Neil in performing at a Vietnam Veterans Benefit at the Forum in LA. We’d been such outspoken forces against the war—all war, in fact—that this gig felt strange and uncomfortable to me. Could I, in all good conscience, support those who had fought? Did I have any business being on that stage? I’d followed the war closely over the years, all the horror stories about the senseless brutality, the napalming of villages, leveling a gorgeous country that had defied America’s imperialistic interests, condemning so many thousands of American soldiers to their deaths. Yes, I was opposed to the Vietnam War, as I still oppose it, vehemently, to this day. But I began to realize that many of the soldiers sent into battle were forced to go there over their own personal objections. They were either drafted or felt a duty to serve. And now that they had returned they were treated indiscriminately like dirtbags, which was unfair. Not only weren’t they given the standard hero’s welcome, they never received even basic assistance in reentering society. Many were regarded suspiciously, forced to deal with the hatred expressed toward them. They sure as hell didn’t deserve that kind of disrespect. This forced me to reexamine my position about the men and women who had served. And so I joined Neil onstage to raise money for the veterans, singing spirited versions of “Ohio” and “Teach Your Children.” My days as a vocal antiwar activist weren’t over, not by any stretch of the imagination, but when it came to veterans there were so many complicated factors. I learned it wasn’t all so black-and-white.

  One of my greatest thrills as an ardent antiwar activist was singing “Teach Your Children” in Hiroshima, Japan, at exactly 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1986, forty-one years to the minute after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. It was a benefit for Children of War, an organization that helps kids who have lost their parents to war. As I stood before that crowd, I said, “I sincerely hope that in some small way this concert represents the hopes and dreams of millions of people throughout the world who struggle to balance the madness of war with the sanity of peace. As individuals, we must never forget that we are not alone. We are not helpless and we must work harder together to ensure that the tragedy that occurred here forty-one years ago is never repeated.” As I performed the song I’d sung hundreds of times, I was struck anew by its inspirational meaning and the power of the lyric to transcend all cultures. It humbled me, especially when those kids sang along with the chorus. It was incredibly emotional, which I’ll never forget.

  I rushed home from Japan for another emotional event. Crosby was being released from prison—after eight months. There had been rumblings that he might be paroled early. I’d even written to the Texas Board of Pardons on his behalf. “No one has been affected or more deeply hurt than I by the hold that drugs had on him.” Really laying it on thick. “I fully realize that his imprisonment most probably saved his life. I feel that his release at this time would allow him to get back to the more positive side of his life and once again become the creative and sensitive human being I have missed so much throughout this painful ordeal.”

  It seemed unlikely that he would make his first parole. Usually that first one lays the groundwork for others that follow. They mess with you a little to test your sincerity. But whatever luck had kept David alive through those grisly years continued to serve him at this latest crossroads.

  On August 8, 1986, Bill Siddons, our manager, and I collected him from prison. We parked outside Huntsville and waited, just like in the movies. Soon enough, David came strolling through the gate, carrying a little brown paper bag of his possessions. He was wearing shades, his hair was still short, and his mustache had not yet grown out. He looked pale and overweight. But with a huge shit-eating grin on his face. He was out—finally! And there we were, his manager and his best friend. It was an indescribably exciting moment. Immediately we took David to the nearest restaurant and bought him the biggest steak he’d seen in a year.

  Naturally I was worried that he might try to score, but everything seemed on the up and up. It wasn’t until a few days later that Siddons told me David actually did score freebase after the steak dinner. I was clueless. So Croz wasn’t cured. But he was definitely on some kind of upward path.

  There was so much positive stuff for us to talk about. Jan, for one thing. She had gone through a rehab program and transformed herself, gaining about twenty pounds and improving her appearance. Her hair was clean and styled, her scars had mostly healed, and her eyes sparkled. Give that girl credit. She looked radiant, alive.

  And David was beginning to focus on music again. We made plans to make records and do shows together. He’d been writing inside, a great song called “Compass,” along with sheets and sheets of lyrics. And he remembered Neil’s promise that if he ever go
t clean there’d be a reunion of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That was a huge carrot.

  Money, or the lack of it, was on his mind. Croz was broke and owed the IRS nearly a million bucks in back taxes; it was clear that he’d have to declare bankruptcy. That was the last thing I wanted David to think about. I assured him that his friends were willing to help get him back on his feet. Susan and I would certainly contribute—anything he needed, just as he’d done for me when I moved to America. Before David went to jail, I knew the IRS would come for every asset he had: his boat, his house, whatever possessions hadn’t been sold for dope, and eventually they would come for his publishing. To stem that possibility, Susan suggested that our financial guy Gil Segal and I buy his publishing, with the intention of holding it for the year or so it took to unwind David’s debts. Then we’d give it back to him. So he had some income coming in from his songs, which helped, considering the circumstances. I also cosigned a lease on a house for him and Jan around the corner from us in Encino, and fronted them for a couple months’ rent. They needed a home, a nest. They needed dentists, clothes, and other essentials—they needed. So I was happy to be there for them any way they wanted. Friendship means friendship, no questions asked.