crosby stills nash

A Long Time Gone
Rolling Stone Magazine
November 21, 1985, p. 46
He's been called rock's favorite threat to society. But David Crosby is a bigger threat to himself.
by Mark Christensen

He hates being an addict. He fights it as much as he can, and I know that he knows he's losing. He has a self-hatred deeper than any man I've ever known. He looks in the mirror and sees a guy who is fat, ugly, and forty-five. He only sees the self he chooses to see. This is not anything he's enjoying. This is not a joke. He's sick.
-Graham Nash

Freebasing is the worst addiction ... It's not too late for him to come back from a bad problem, to be very strong and show young people how you can beat drugs. Either that's going to happen or he's going to die.
-Neil Young

Autumn 1985. Dusk at David Crosby's. His brown clapboard house is perched high on a hill above Mill Valley, near San Francisco, at the end of a mouse's maze of skinny avenues and asphalt switchbacks. As the sibilant squawk of an alto sax floats from the thick tangle of woods below the house, Jan Dance, Crosby's girlfriend, comes down to the pool. She is very thin, and her skin is nearly translucent. Several of her teeth are missing, and a long, red comma of ruptured skin curls down her cheek. She serves Cokes in paper cups, then slips back inside the house.

Twenty minutes later, David Crosby comes out the back door, acoustic guitar in hand. Big and bearlike, a ski hat pulled low over his eyes, he sits down beside the pool and plays a new song. It's lovely, complicated. "I've gotta come up with a lot more like this," he says when he finishes the song. "Capitol rejected my last album. Said it wasn't enough like Devo or Elvis Costello or something. Stupid jerks. I spent damn near every last cent I had just buying back my contract. I gotta make a statement. I can't hack this. I'm such an easy target. I've obviously had terrible problems with drugs. But I'm not a vegetable or some vacant-eyed lump of flesh in a corner, with disarrayed clothes covered in blood and spit. I'm a human being with a mind, a spirit, a soul and a heart. It's when . . ."

Suddenly, the startling sound of a woman wailing comes from the house. Crosby gets up, strides around the pool.

"It's Jan," he says. "She's just real upset now all the time." Crosby takes the steps to his back door three at a time. "Things have been real bad for us lately, man."

Back in the summer, as Crosby, Stills and Nash prepared for a tour, the stories were terrible: that Atlantic Records had dropped CSN; that their voices were so far gone that ghost vocalists had to be employed backstage to counterfeit their famous harmonies; that David Crosby was freebasing $600,000 of cocaine a year and that the Hell's Angels had assumed ownership of his Marin County house to cover his drug debts; and finally that Crosby would be arrested and jailed by the Texas police the minute he set foot in the state on the nationwide tour--this in the wake of his cocaine and illegal-weapons conviction in the summer of 1983.

Crosby, Stills and Nash seemed to be in trouble. Crosby, especially. During the last several years, he had been tracked by police and press and plagued by coke busts, an assault-and-battery suit, arrests for possession of illegal guns and knives, you name it. Said to be living like a wino and dubbed "rock's favorite threat to society," Crosby was portrayed as a fanatically unhappy man, too zonked to engineer a successful overdose, his life an endless strip of trials and tribulations substantial enough to earn him a place in the Bible.

What had happened? This was the man who was a founding member of the Byrds, whose spacey Sixties folk-rock is still emulated in the Eighties. This was the man who formed Crosby, Stills and Nash, the last and longest lived of the Sixties supergroups--and the most successful. (With Neil Young sometimes joining them, they sold more than 20 million records within sixteen years). This was the man who wrote classics like "Guinnevere" and "Long Time Gone" and helped voice the concerns of the Sixties peace-and-love movement. "Wooden Ships." "Triad." You remember.

"I have literally gone home and cried over that poor guy," says one Crosby associate. "He is going to die. He has to have those drugs. He can't deal with people without them. When he's high, he's fine. He's normal. It's when he's straight that he has problems."

"But isn't that the way it is with all addicts," says Graham Nash, at Rudy Records, his studio in uptown Los Angeles. "They are fine so long as their drugs are fine. This has been a very sad episode. I've tried everything--extreme anger, extreme compassion. I've gotten twenty of his best friends in the same room with him. I've tried going one-on-one. I've tried hanging out with him. I've tried not hanging out with him."

Nash is trim and nimble and looks less like a rocker than a rugby player slightly long in the tooth. Off the road, he spends most of his time with his wife and kids in Hawaii and tools around L.A. in a fifteen-year-old Volkswagen. For almost two decades, he has served as friend, banker and one-man family to Crosby, whom Nash credits with "saving my life." It was Crosby who brought Nash into what was to become CSN after members of Nash's previous group, the Hollies, decided Nash's songs, like "Marrakesh Express," were "not right" for the band. It is a debt Nash remembers. Lately, though, he has become fed up with being, as one associate puts it, "the forty-three-year-old father to his forty-four-year-old son."

"David has pushed his karma so far to the wall," says Nash. "I'm a great believer in cause and effect. But he's made me question my belief. Maybe you can go trash yourself over and over and over and destiny finally doesn't go, Naughty boy. Zap!'"

The next CSN album is scheduled for release after New Year's, and Nash is working on a solo record. He has written thirteen songs, three of which he will contribute to CSN. Will he let the band have the pick of the litter? "I must confess that in the past I've done so," he says. "But I'll also confess that I see CSN on a downward slide. Not musically. Not energetically. But I'm worried about David, about his ability to contribute. CSN is equal energy. Equal thought. And that's not happening now."

A situation that also became apparent to Atlantic Records. "We had an [eight-album] deal for $1 million per album and have only completed four," Nash explains. "They look at David and don't know if he's going to be alive next week. So we agreed to take less per album, with a chance to win big if an album really takes off. And it can! Music is David's most motivating force, aside from his drug habit. I don't think he has the stamina he once had, or the voice, or the patience. But he still has the fire."

Stephen Stills is seated on concrete steps outside soundstage 3/8 at the former Zoetrope Studios. As he waits for David Crosby to arrive for a CSN rehearsal, he explains his inspiration for his composition "For What It's Worth," the Buffalo Springfield classic that many people consider to be the best song about paranoia ever written.

"This was, what, 1965? And it turned out to be kind of indicative of what was about to happen. But it didn't have anything to do with Berkeley Free Speech or Mario Savio or any of those guys. I mean, I thought he was a bore . . . not to mention a fucking communist! Heh, heh, heh! I mean, I'm just a musician."

In the triumvirate of Crosby, Stills and Nash, Stills was the one who wrote the most forceful songs, the tunes with the harder, rawer edges. He also cultivated an image--what with his horses and cowboy boots--as a sort of Marlboro man of rock & roll. Tonight, however, outfitted in wire-rimmed glasses, a navy flight jacket and a sailing shirt emblazoned Tex, he looks less like a cowpoke than, say, a renegade orthodontist.

To Stills, the relevant questions about the band today are simple: "Are we awake? Are we alive? Do we still sound real good? Are we still a valid entity in showbiz?" And he doesn't care much for all the attention Crosby has been receiving of late. "Dave'll be fine," he declares. "Pity the man who says another word about him. I'm sick of this Perils of Pauline attitude in the press. It really makes me ill. It's not like this is some rare disorder or something. You got ballplayers with the same problem."

Stills is beckoned back inside the soundstage, a structure big enough to house a 747. He finds Graham Nash waiting, a tad impatient.

"Stephen, have you talked to David?"

"How come?" Stills asks.

"He's late."

"He'll show."

"That's not the point. The point is, I asked him to be here on time. It's important that we start maintaining a reasonable schedule for this, or we're in trouble."

Nash talks softly and carries no stick, but it only takes thirty seconds of watching his dealings with the band to figure out who is at the helm. While Stills' music may be more thrustful and vertebrate, and Crosby's the most beautifully melodious, it was Nash who delivered the most CSN hits--"Teach Your Children," "Our House" and "Military Madness" among them. And it has been Nash, especially of late, who has found a finger for every hole in the dike.

Moments later Crosby strides into the room accompanied by a bearded man seven feet tall. Big John Bloom, star of The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant and bad guy in many television shows, has been hired to "watch over" Crosby. Built along the lines of Santa Claus but wearing his usual attire, a work shirt and jeans, Crosby looks more like Ben Franklin gone to seed. He is greeted enthusiastically by the band. CSN assembles onstage, and rehearsal commences. By the time they are into "Long Time Gone," David Crosby is singing like a bird.

David Crosby's parents were blue bloods from New York, denizens of the Social Register, who moved to California before David was born so David's father could pursue a career as a cinematographer. Floyd Crosby would go on to win Academy Awards for his work on both High Noon and Tabu.

David's childhood seems to have been as tempestuous as his later years. "His older brother, Chip, was tall, thin, handsome," says Nash. And the obvious comparisons were made. "David comes home from school one day, and there's a note from his mom: Chip, your dinner is in the fridge. David, stay out of here, fatty.'"

Crosby was not an early achiever, either. "Without exception," he would later recall, "I was thrown out of every school I ever attended." Deciding to call academia a wash, he quit college to get a head start in life. He began burglarizing houses, an activity that ended when he got caught and was confronted by one of his victims. "I'd stolen the last remaining picture of this woman's old man . . . and lost it. . . . I thought I was gonna die."

In the early Sixties, he found a job singing at the Unicorn, in Los Angeles, where he met folk singer Travis Edmundson. "Travis was also the first person ever to give me a joint," he told CSN biographer Dave Zimmer, "which was really a wonderful thing for him to do. I've got to thank him a million times for it. I took a toke and just went to heaven. I thought, "This is for me!'"

After Crosby abandoned his pregnant girlfriend, he bounced all over the country, sleeping by roadsides, introducing himself to Bob Dylan in new York and eventually to LSD in California. He showed up on the album Jack Linkletter Presents a Folk Festival. And while playing solo at the Troubadour, he was approached by Jim, soon to be Roger, McGuinn and Gene Clark. Did he want to be in a band? Sure.

The band was the Byrds, and Crosby was to become a prince in the blooming L.A. rock aristocracy. It was 1964. Local clubs like Pandora's Box, the Whisky-a-Go-Go and the Troubadour were becoming legend-making venues, and the Byrds were there at the beginning. Bob Dylan would stop by to watch them play at Ciro's, on Sunset Boulevard. Crosby, for one, felt the Byrds had become a better interpreter of Dylan songs than Dylan himself. The title track of the band's first album, Mr. Tambourine Man, was a Dylan cover, and it was an almost immediate success.

"We were all cruising down Sunset Boulevard in a black 56 Ford we'd bought from Odetta," Crosby remembers. "All of a sudden, we hear "Dum-de-da- duddle-de-dum-de-a-dum-dum-Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.' They play it once, then they play it again!"

During the Byrds' trip to London in 1965, they were feted by various Beatles and Rolling Stones, and when they returned to America, they released their classic album Turn! Turn! Turn! They were certified stars. "David handled success better than any of us," says Byrds leader Roger McGuinn. "He was very idealistic, looking for love and recognition--but smart. He didn't go out and blow all his money on cars like Gene Clark and I did."

"I remember back when Roger McGuinn was still singing Beatle songs by himself at the Troubadour," says Henry Diltz, folk singer turned photographer, "and David came up one night completely impassioned and said: I envy you so much. I want so badly to be in a group and be able to sing and just have something.' The next year the Byrds exploded, and he did. He was so pleased. He'd walk around in his Borsalino hat, with a little smile on his face. He would give away the greatest things. And he had unbelievable women! One on either arm. And they loved him! He also had the best dope in the world. Two tokes and you were boxed. He was a leader of that whole Get high and there'll be no more hate or war.'"

Success with the Byrds brought Crosby validation as a musician, as well. "He became one of the best rhythm guitarists in the business," says music publisher Kenny Weiss. Even more impressive was the power of his voice. According to former Byrds bassist Chris Hillman, "He had an astonishingly innovative sense of harmony. Not church or barbershop but jazz. Something that Brian Wilson picked up on, too. Unfortunately, David always loved being the bad boy. And when he'd get scared, he'd lash out. We were booked on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was going to be live, and David got scared. So he started in on Sullivan's producer, who also happened to be Ed's son-in-law, telling him, You fucking asshole, you don't know da-da-da ... and the boy just looked at him and said, You may be right, but you and your friends will never appear on this show again as long as you live.'"

Crosby was eventually fired by the Byrds, but he left, essentially, a happy young man. He bought the sailboat he still owns, the Mayan, with his settlement and left for Florida. There he "discovered" Joni Mitchell playing in a club in Coconut Grove; he would go on to produce her first album. "That was the best time in his life," Mitchell recalls. "He was clean as a whistle, his eyes were like star sapphires. He was a great appreciator. When he liked something, you could almost hear him purr. He'd left the world to go sailing. He was so good at it. Those were very magical times. You could make a whole evening out of just going down to the docks and listening to the masts clink. The calm before the storm."

Meanwhile, Stills had found his way to Los Angeles. He had auditioned for the Monkees before forming the legendary Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young and Richie Furay. While playing at the Whisky, the group caught Crosby's eye and soon found themselves opening for the Byrds. Shortly thereafter, Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas introduced Crosby to Graham Nash, an established phenom with the Hollies. Both Nash and Stills were having problems with their respective bands. What would they think, Crosby asked, about forming a trio?

Less grubby than the Grateful Dead, less fun than the Beach Boys but lots more fun than the Doors, CSN provided soundtrack for a generation at war with authority. But between the time Steve Stills confessed to 400,000 at Woodstock that, "We're scared shitless" and Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia, CSN began their long history of family feuding. Crosby and Nash were angered by what they felt were Stills' attempts to dominate the band. Stills, in turn, felt Crosby and Nash were not sufficiently committed. "If a voice of reason could have cleared that fog," Stills once remarked, "we would have realized our full potential and CSN&Y would be mentioned in the same breath with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. . . . So we all lost, right there, to indulgence. We lost it all."

Crosby was feeling the pull of other gravities. He had found the love of his life, Christine Hinton, a beautiful blonde who would inspire his ballad "Guinnevere." But, in 1969, she died in an automobile accident. "It was the worst thing in my whole life," he says. "I was on top of the world. She goes to take the cat to the vet and never comes home. I wanted to die. Nash stayed with me the whole time. He practically wouldn't let me go to the bathroom by myself. He was afraid I'd kill myself."

Although Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young went on to record the highly successful Déjà… Vu, the bloom was off the rose for Crosby. More and more, he relied on pharmaceutical diversions. "For a while," recalls a friend, "the drugs were there to make the music better. Finally, though, the music was there to make the drugs better.'"I'm not ashamed," he once said, "of being stoned. . . . Everybody's been on my case so long, saying I'm so smashed, so stoned, strung out. But I was stoned for every bit of music I've ever played. Every record, every performance. . . . If they can match the music, let them criticize it. Anybody who can't ain't got no fuckin' right to tell me nothin' about gettin' high. . . . I want to get high."

"I should have seen it all coming," says Nash. "David was always the world's ultimate consumer. He always had to have the best. The best wines, the best pot, the best women, the best guitars. He just could never get enough out of life. I mean, after Christine Hinton died, the two of us literally went around the world smashed."

But the extent of Crosby's problems didn't strike Nash until the late Seventies. "We were jamming with some guys, really getting into it, when David knocked his freebase pipe over. It shattered, and he stopped the whole session to pick it up. That's when it hit me that this whole thing was out of hand."

Nash, along with Jackson Browne, concert promoter Bill Graham and the Jefferson Starship's Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, got together and confronted Crosby. "We did it AA style and got him into a rehab center," says Kantner. "It was nothing but a turnstile. He went in, then walked back out." More and more, the music community perceived Crosby as a wastrel, a relic, a prophet for a future that never happened.

Crosby's legal difficulties over drugs began in 1971 when he was arrested for allegedly jettisoning pot from the bilge pumps during a police visit to his yacht in Newport Beach. But things didn't start to snowball until a decade later, when he plowed his car into a freeway divider on his way to sing at an anti-nuke rally in March 1982. The police extracted Crosby, cocaine residue and a .45 automatic from the vehicle. His explanation for the gun: "John Lennon."

Three weeks later Crosby was surprised by Texas police in his dressing room at Cardi's nightclub in Dallas, where he was performing. Their booty? Another .45 and more cocaine residue. Then he was picked up in September of the same year for an assault-and-battery suit brought by two women in Culver City, California. The following summer he appeared in Dallas for the Cardi's nightclub charge, and according to an account in the Dallas Times Herald, "Several times he fell asleep and snored loudly, his head tilted back and his mouth open. When the snoring became too loud, one of his attorneys leaned over and shook him awake."

Judge Pat McDowell his Crosby with five years in the Texas state penitentiary. Crosby told reporters from People magazine, "I'm being treated like a murderer. They put manacles on my hands and put me in solitary. And I didn't do anything to anybody. I didn't. . . . This is now. This is happening to me. . . . They got me for a quarter of a gram of pipe residue. For that I'm going to spend five years in the state penitentiary? . . . Please just say this isn't fair, okay?" He began to cry. "If I ever made you happy with my music, if I made anybody happy out there ... help me. If there's anybody out there who loves me, please, try and do something."

"We got money and Bibles for six months after that," recalls Crosby's press agent, Wayne Rosso.

While out on appeal, David was arrested in Marin County on a motorcycle, carrying a dagger and a pharmaceutical buffet consisting of heroin, cocaine, pot and codeine. Then, good news. In December 1984, Judge McDowell agreed to allow Crosby to enter a drug-rehabilitation program in lieu of serving time in jail. Next, his charges were reversed on the grounds of illegal search and seizure, though McDowell ordered Crosby into detox anyway, pending the state's appeal.

Right after Christmas last year, he entered a drug-treatment program at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. But within seven weeks, Crosby had "eloped," in McDowell's words, from Fair Oaks. He simply jumped into a waiting car and split. He was arrested the following evening at a friend's New York City apartment.

Though Crosby immediately volunteered to go back to the hospital, McDowell said nothing doing. Crosby waived extradition and returned to Dallas. He went to jail March 7th and was released in late spring. His conviction was reinstated. He is now out on an appeal bond, on the brink of spending his emeritus years eating fish sticks and mashed potatoes at a Texas penitentiary--a first-class candidate for hard time.

"Ho-ly Shit!" Steve Stills grips the bars that separate him from the gathering crowd at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, California. It's one of the largest arenas in the country, and it's full to the gunwales. "I don't believe it," says Stills, grinning. "We're gonna kill em. This is fan-tas-tic." He wrings his hands conspiratorily. "Wait'll you hear this," he says to no one in particular. "My mediocre is better than your best. Heh! Heh! Heh!"

So far the 1985 tour is going well. On their first two nights out, CSN broke the house attendance record at the Concord Pavilion--and tickets for the rest of the two-month tour are selling quickly.

From song one, it's an enthusiastic house. High on the lawns this early evening, people engage in--get this!--tribal dancing. Hippies. Yes, hippies. New ones. Young boys with hair down their backs, girls in granny dresses. They undulate like seaweed in a changing tide as CSN whirls through "Wind on the Water" and a slew of other chestnuts.

Nash performs with a passionate calm, setting the pace of the show. Stills vamps like a bandit on "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." Crosby remains impassive, playing almost as if he were underwater. Suddenly, though, during "Long Time Gone," he comes to life. In seconds, he looks ten years younger, beaming like a jack-o'-lantern as the crowd goes crazy. A group of stoned fans has made a long banner that reads, David, We Love You.

"You have to consider the Bad Dave factor here," says Crosby's agent, Jay Jacobs. "A lot of these people figure this is the last time they'll see him alive."

After the show, Stills sits in his dressing room, a drink in hand. "Crosby's problem with his drug treatment was he got this too-cool-for-school mentality," he says. "I asked him, Why would you walk out of Fair Oaks after you had everything beat?' And he says, "Because I realized that others were controlling my life.'" Stills leans forward on his chair. "Welcome to the human race, man."

"I'm like a guy who does everything right nine days in a row, then stumbles on the tenth day. That's all anybody ever wants to talk about, the tenth day. It's not fair, it's just not fair."

It is night in Las Vegas. David Crosby sits in the Lab, as the band calls his bus. The Lab's decor can be best described as Attempted Holiday Inn. Formica. Dim fabrics. His entourage includes the bus driver and . . . that's about it. No family. Few friends. While Nash remains the genial tour director and host, and Stills banters with anyone who will listen about everything from Shakespeare to his tax problems, Crosby keeps to himself. In the Lab. Alone.

Crosby, who had rallied his energy again and again during tonight's concert, is subdued. Staph infection has raised hell with his skin, and in this light he looks like an eighteenth-century pirate sorely in need of vitamin C.

"Look, man, I've never hurt anybody in my life," he says. "I don't do bad stuff to people. But I've had my name dragged through the dirt. Those two girls that brought that assault-and-battery charge?" he continues. "I'm a gentleman. I've never hit a girl in my life. Not once. They filed a civil suit to make money. They saw their chance to make big bucks."

Crosby swallows. "I'm not violent or dangerous. All I ever wanted was to make people happy." As for his fracas in Texas, he says, "Apparently the whole thing was bought and paid for in advance, cause the guy just walked into my dressing room and said, 'You're under arrest.' A dozen cops were there instantly." He sighs hoarsely. "Right now I'm on appeal bond. If we lose, I'll probably have to do three years in the Texas Detention Center--40,000 guys. I've been a good boy, man," he goes on. "I went through such a long period of time in jail kicking, getting clean. . . . It's an immense psychochemical readjustment, okay? I've been getting high for twenty years. Constantly. And I stopped. The readjustment was turbulent. Like being in the center of a cyclone. I was very crazy."

"The other thing was, they were so hard-nosed. Wouldn't let me have a tape recorder of a Walkman or the synthesizer Nash sent me. I asked to form a band, cause there was a drummer, bass player, lead guitar. They said no. I said, "Look, you don't understand. I have to play music. Music is the best thing in my life, the strongest faith I have, the most positive force. It gets me much higher than drugs ever will. It's my salvation, man.'" Crosby's voice starts to crack. " Why won't you let me play music?'"

He takes a breath. "They said, We think it'll get in the way of therapy, and besides, it's against the rules.' So I vented my anger and frustration by leaving. It was a mistake. I was getting better every day. But I was frustrated and feeling crazy."

So goodbye, New Jersey, hello the Dallas County Jail. "Jail is hell on wheels, man. Guys made it hard on me. Imagined I was rich. Imagined I was a star. They think a star is real. They don't know that it's nothing. It was really bad. I cried myself to sleep every night, man."

Which apparently has led him to change his tune about freebasing. "Don't do it," he admonishes. "It's a blind alley, a definite dead end. I think reefer is the only thing that doesn't fuck you up. I can't recommend hard drugs to anybody. I've been through 'em. I've seen too much pain, too much suffering, too much death. Just look at all the friends I've lost. Cass, Jimi, Janis. I'm decent. I don't want anybody to think I'm just some outlaw rebel giving America the finger." Minutes later Crosby begins to weep.

"Freebase is the most addictive substance we know about," says Dr. Mark Gold, director of research at Fair Oaks Hospital, where Crosby spent seven weeks last spring. "It's the ultimate euphoric. Far worse than heroin. Lab animals will freebase till they die."

Nash wants Crosby to get back into a drug-treatment program. Crosby's claim that he has cleaned himself up cuts little ice with Nash. "David's father, Floyd, is dying," he says. "As a parent myself, I think I'd find it terribly sad at eighty-four, when you're knocking on heaven's door, to know that what you've created has turned into a total piece of shit."

Henry Diltz is more optimistic. "The frog has taken over the prince, but the prince is still fighting to get out," he says.

Other friends and associates aren't so sure.

Paul Kantner: I used to get whole songs just from David's tunings. But the freebase has made him a total horror show. Robbed him of himself. Success has destroyed him. That drug would be too expensive otherwise--unless you're somebody out every other day sticking up banks.

Kenny Weiss: Musicians want to sustain the high they achieve onstage. Some start chasing that euphoria. But David's been overwhelmed. He's lost control. The evil is winning. If he goes, people will say, His friends should have tried harder.' Wrong. His friends have tried everything. Seriously self-destructive people will seek out the thing that will do them in. David has found his.

Chris Hillman: David was seduced and ruined by the myth he helped to create, that getting high would make a better world. It was the biggest fraud of all time. Want to know how to cut drug problems by half in this country? Have David go to the schools and just display himself.

Bill Graham: To the media and a lot of his fans, David Crosby is just a product. They eat him when they are hungry. But to the people who love him, he's a man worth doing most anything to save.

"Hi Texas! I came back! I came back for you!" Crosby shouts into the microphone from the stage at the Southern Star Amphitheatre in Houston. Crosby, Stills and Nash are still soaring from their appearance at the Live Aid Concert in Philadelphia the night before. They had played five songs altogether--three by themselves and two with Neil Young.

Crosby was jetted into Texas by charter. The plan was cautious and simple: get him in, get him out. But even Judge McDowell, the man who sentenced Crosby, now seems conciliatory. Shortly before Crosby's arrival, he had said, "He has a very realistic chance of beating this charge. He was arrested because of a provision of the Texas Alcohol Beverage Code which pretty much allows the police to search a club anytime they want. If he gets this overturned on grounds that the code violates a citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy, well, that'll be it. You can't have rabbit stew without the rabbit."

Outside the arena after the show, Crosby is deposited in a limo aimed for the airport. Asked about the rumor that the Hell's Angels have taken ownership of his house, he begins to laugh. And laugh. "You have to be kidding! I swear to you on my mother's grave, the Hell's Angels do not own my house." The chauffeur slides into the driver's seat. "Goodbye, Texas," Crosby says. "I'm about to leave a great smoking hole in the sky."

With pancake makeup smeared across his face, Crosby sits in his driveway on his Harley-Davidson, pumping the throttle. He has returned from placating Jan, who remains inside the house. Friend and photographer Henry Diltz is choreographing Crosby for some pictures.

"People say I've let all my cars go to hell. I don't own one of these things," he says, pointing to a beat-up Audi and Peugeot and a Mercedes with the entire front end missing. "None of em." As he speaks, color comes to his face. Anger almost makes Crosby look healthy.

"Want to know the latest wrinkle?" he continues. "That I'm already dead. Not a dope addict anymore, not even a zombie or a vegetable, but already dead. Man, that hurts. Reading that shit. You know people who take a lot of drugs get paranoid. Start thinking people are out to get them, start seeing people at their windows, bugs on their arms--millions of bugs. I try to avoid that. It's hard, though. I've been living my whole life in the public square. People think you're a star, you're fair game. Guys came sneaking up here one night, screaming, "Crosby! We're gonna kill you!' Scary. I feel like a bug on a wall. You hear about the time I shot the place up? Guy at my bedroom window, wearing a ski mask. His gun lines up on me, right? Got a bead. But he's got to bang the glass out. Numskull. I pull my piece. A .45. Ka-pow! Ka-pow! Ka-pow! I stitch the whole clip frame to frame. That son of a bitch fled the entire area."

The CSN tour is almost over, forty-six shows down, a handful to go. There have been only a few glitches. In Virginia, for example, Crosby walked offstage in the middle of a show. "Daddy was pissed," recalls one of the CSN entourage, referring to Nash. "The Croz just cruised into the band's hospitality room and lay down on a couch and said he was too sick to play. Stills ran offstage and dumped a bucket of water on his head. Then Graham came in and nearly killed him." Nash says it was less dramatic than that: "David caught the stomach flu. It's tough to sing, vomit and shit all at the same time."

Now Crosby is feeling and looking a whole lot better. "I love this motorcycle," he says. "Rice rockets--Jap bikes. God, they're fast. Incredible! But Harleys are the best. Why is riding a Japanese bike like fucking a homosexual man? Cause it feels great until somebody sees you." Crosby parks his Harley, says, "Back in a sec," and goes inside the house. He is gone twenty minutes.

When Crosby reappears, it is night, and he's up for some dinner. He decides to drive into town in a big, new Lincoln Continental he's rented and invites Diltz along. On the way, Crosby checks his mail. " Dear David,'" he says, mocking a recent missive. " Jesus told me to write you. . . . Myself," he continues, "I talk to God. I call God Ernie. Less pretentious. Ernie,' I says, Why?'

Crosby speeds through the narrow, twisting roads into Mill Valley, pulls into a parking lot, spots a diagonal slot marked Compacts Only and whips the Lincoln right in, front tires bumping up over the curb. Its snout sticks three feet across the sidewalk. "Just another Pinto, officer," he says, getting out.

Crosby leads the way into D'Angelo's. "This is a fantastic place," he says, stepping into the large, airy restaurant. Waiters constellate around his table. He orders a steak, a salad and several kinds of pasta. Then he pulls a walkie-talkie from his herringbone jacket and calls Jan. "Hi, listen, we're at D'Angelo's," he says. "You want me to bring back something? Veal Parmesan? Antipasto? . . . Anybody call? . . . Linda from Sausalito? Never heard of her. Love you. Bye."

Then Crosby says: "The other day I read that Graham tells this guy I'm going to die. How could he have said that? He's my best friend. He said I was just going to die." Crosby's voice wobbles. "How could he have said that? So cold. I would never have said something like that about Graham in a million years, man. It was so crude, so out of hand. What does Graham think, that I'm so stupid he's gonna shock me into some perception I haven't already attained? You think I haven't thought about this every minute of every day? There's not a damn thing he's gonna teach me about this that I don't already know! I know more about freebase than anybody! You think you plan to become an addict? It sneaks up on you. Oh, I'll just get a little high. I've kicked cigarettes, heroin, booze, everything. But this is the most horrible drug in the universe. It stays with you. I was in jail four months. Want to know how long I stayed clean when I got out? Two days. It never lets you alone. All I want to do is be clean, man. But I'm scared I'm gonna crave it forever."

Crosby sits there, breathing noisily in and out, as if exhausted. Then, an epiphany, of sorts: "Hey, John Coltrane was a junkie. And who could ever make better music than him? I'm gonna beat it. Really I am."

The food arrives, and Crosby passes the plates around. "I love fish," he says." Last time I sailed to Hawaii, we had hand lines trailing out. Three days out of the islands we caught three mahi-mahi.

A waiter appears. "Cheese for the pasta, David?"

"Just for the fettucine. Whack it on there. Lots." He knifes his steak in half. "This is not quite medium. Just a couple minutes more, please. . . .What a trip. Beating the windwards--motoring the windwards lots of times--Mexico to Hawaii, 3000 miles in the trades."

Crosby plans to return to the South Seas next year, a trip to Australia for the America's Cup. "Tahiti. One of the few things on earth as good as you thought it was going to be. Their music is crazy. Sexy. Wonderful people. All they want to do is get smashed and fuck. That's their whole program. Ooooooooh, let's get drunk! Make schooner, baby! Fuck the white boys, get the bloodlines mixed up. Paradise. Crosby, Stills and who? Whaaat ess you name? You are one auf Bing's boys? Trade winds at ten knots. Baby's breath, man. No circular storms. No typhoons. So rich with life. You'd have to be blind, deaf, dumb, ignorant and have a lot of enemies to starve there. Ocean's not fished out. Air so clean and sparkly . . . "

Crosby picks up his walkie-talkie and calls Jan again. "I love you," he says. "I love your skinny little ass. I wanna grab ya! Sounds like a good idea, huh? Well, I'm gonna come home and stuff ya. All right, sweetie."

His steak returns. "Money is fun, but it'll trash you out," he says. "I've got guys who've invested in me, yeah. Saved me from the IRS. I give em what I can. That's it. Sometimes things get hard. Jan was crying last night. Called it eyelash soup. But there are good things, too . . ."

Crosby falls asleep. Instantly. His eyes are closed. They look as if they're about to slide off the side of his head. He begins to snore.

"Gimme something hard and heavy," Crosby says to the clerk at the Mill Valley 7-Eleven. The clerk hands him a hammer. Crosby has just bought forty dollars' worth of cat food, soda pop and ice cream and discovered he's locked his keys inside the Lincoln. Diltz' flight is the last one for the night and only an hour away.

"Maybe we should call somebody," says Diltz.

"At this hour?" says Crosby.

"But . . . "

"You don't want to miss your flight, do you?" Crosby raises the hammer, his arm comes down in an arc. Wham! The Lincoln's window is history. Little diamonds of smashed glass everywhere. Then Crosby carefully cleans out the car and sweeps the parking lot.

"Don't worry," he says, "I'll pay for it. It'll just get stuck on my bill with everything else."

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