Wild Tales (45 page)

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)

I
T 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 East 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.