Wild Tales (51 page)

I can tell that our political opinions disturb a small fraction of our audience. They either don’t want to hear it or don’t want to get involved. And some people just flat-out disagree with our positions.
Fair enough. Everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion, even if it occasionally disrupts our shows.

That’s what happened in 2006, when CSNY went back on the road. It began with a phone call from Neil to David and me. “Hey, fellas,” he said in that all-too-familiar twang, “want to come over to the hotel and listen to my new record?” That’s an invitation we’ll rarely refuse. He was staying at the Bel-Air hotel in LA, and when we arrived I expected to be ushered into his suite to hear
Living with War
through a set of big-ass speakers. Not this time. Nah, this was Neil. He wanted us to listen to a CD on his car stereo—new songs that he’d just finished recording. So we got into Neil’s car, driving up through the canyons, smokin’ it, listening to his incredible, heartfelt music. It was political and powerful, no punches pulled. The way I interpreted it, Neil’s songs argued that the powers that be in this wonderful country of ours generate an industry for war and profit with companies like
Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and KBR. At the end of listening to the CD, David and I looked at each other and said, “We’re in. We want to help you say this.”

Neil, as always, was pretty smart about it. He is an incredibly popular artist with a huge fan base, but he realized that CSNY saying these things would attract a larger, more diverse audience to hear what the songs were saying. He wanted to get his message across to as many people as possible, and our involvement would pump up the volume.

That was the crux of the 2006 tour, and quite frankly I’d never experienced people walking out of a CSNY concert before. At least 10 percent of the audience walked out every night, especially in Atlanta and places across the South. They didn’t agree with us that
George W. Bush was the worst president ever, or that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, and all the other neocons had lied us into the Iraqi war. They deplored the way we criticized the Bush administration. What really pissed them off was a song of Neil’s called
“Let’s Impeach the President,” which came almost two and a half hours into the show. We’d start to hear
catcalls, then see a gradual exodus. But 10 percent is not a majority of the audience. And, for God’s sake, if you buy a ticket to a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert, what the fuck do you expect? At least, the way I see it, we were waking people up. The people who left our concerts were expressing their opinions, even if those opinions showed they despised us. No matter what they thought, I agreed with their right to say it. Truthfully, I realized there were still plenty of people in the South trying to figure out why the North won the Civil War.

When it comes to such notions, I just don’t have the time. Time is the only true currency we have. Even if Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined their billions, they couldn’t buy an extra second of time. I was reminded of just how precious a commodity time is before we left on the
Living with War
tour with Neil. On the last day of 2005, I got a call from my lawyer, Scott Brisbin, in LA. New Year’s Eve—strange time for him to be talking business, I thought. But I could tell by his tone that something was horribly wrong.
God, not Crosby
, I prayed. Nearly as bad:
Gerry Tolman, my friend and manager of fifteen years, was dead—he’d crashed his Porsche 911 coming off the Ventura Freeway in a rainstorm. Gerry gone, it was too hard to believe. So young and vital. I was heartbroken. I dealt with the terrible news by writing “In the Blink of an Eye” on New Year’s Eve, a song that was only performed once, at Gerry’s funeral.

There’s no way to turn back time when a tragedy like that happens. The way I see it, you’ve got to make every minute count, even when it comes to something as fleeting as songwriting. I’m not interested in wasting your time or singing you a song that I don’t believe will move you or make you think. I really don’t have a minute to waste.

My life has become a battle against time. I have so many pursuits that bring me pleasure that, often, I feel like an air traffic controller, trying to give each its rightful space. I am constantly writing. If CSN or CSNY isn’t recording, then I’m working on my
own material. Always writing. Because songs drive me crazy. If they are on my mind and unrecorded, I need to get them out of my system. I can’t rest while some speck of lyric or melody is rattling around inside my head. It’s like a form of foreplay when you just need to come; otherwise the experience is too frustrating. And even in my seventies—
my seventies
, holy shit—I can still get it up for a song.
James Raymond and I, with some help from Marcus Eaton, wrote a new song called
“Burning for the Buddha,” about the 128 Tibetan monks who have immolated themselves as a response to the tensions between China and Tibet. When I saw the first image of a burning monk it was his protest against the
Vietnam War and it appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world. No longer. Those sorts of actions now are ignored. Quite honestly, we’ve been conditioned to think more about the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass. Surprisingly, though, the song goes down rather well.

All of us—David, Stephen, and I—remain extremely prolific writers. So many songs! There’s no stanching the flow. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time or wherewithal to record even half of our new material. It’s not logistically or economically feasible. And today’s recording contracts aren’t what they used to be. Back in the seventies and eighties, we basically had carte blanche in the studio. Atlantic gave us fantastic advance money, underwrote the sessions, and turned us loose to create. That doesn’t happen much anymore.

In the summer of 2003,
Joel Bernstein and I began production on a series of eleven major CSN-related
archival projects, beginning with a three-CD box set retrospective of David Crosby’s life in music. Over the next ten years, Joel and I completed seven of these projects, including similar retrospectives for me and Stephen.

In between the business with CSN, writing, recording, and performing, my art and photography have taken center stage. If I’m not making music, I’m painting; if I’m not painting, I’m sculpting; if I’m not sculpting, I’m drawing or taking pictures. I direct my energy in whichever direction I want. If I can create a fine song, why can’t
I make a fine painting or take a good photograph or sculpt a good piece? I keep trying to touch the flame any way I can—without getting too burned.

Since the time Joni first encouraged me to express myself in photography and painting, I’ve been working feverishly in all forms of media: acrylics, stone, linoleum cuts, lithography, collage, a variety of printmaking, and, of course, ink-jet art. Painting released some skill I never knew was there. During the early tours, CSN didn’t stay in particularly great hotels. We were still rock ’n’ roll dogs. The scene in those days was a lot of Holiday Inns, places that had strange wall-size drawings of, say, a Roman ruin or the depiction of a lady in crinolines, that kind of generic stuff. Because I was doing a tremendous amount of cocaine at the time, after our shows I would paint those drawings. Just took out my brushes and went to work. I painted at least seventeen walls in motels around the country so that an untrained eye wouldn’t notice they’d been altered. Looking at them, it would never occur to you: “Hmm, that should be black-and-white.” They were delicately colored. I even signed them. I can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse in a second.

Those hotel and motel walls served as my apprenticeship in art. I’ve gotten better since then: I’ve graduated to bona fide galleries, with exhibitions of my work shown all over the world. Mostly painting and prints mixed harmoniously with my photography. To this day, a camera is never far from my reach. I get such a unique perspective looking at the world through a lens, an outlook that has captivated me all of my life. My dad knew what he was doing when he put that Agfa camera in my hands. He was giving me an enormous gift—the ability to look at things in a different way, simply, imaginatively, magically, with open eyes. He unleashed my curiosity. Learning how to see that way has been a lifelong education. It has taught me to become more aware of my surroundings, to see the beauty that exists around us all the time, to appreciate all forms of imagery. I’m amazed anew every time I look through a lens.

S
OMETIMES MY LIFE
seems to take place in the air. I’m constantly traveling, either with the band or to an event that benefits a cause or for my art or some session I’m producing. But in between all the madness, my refuge is Hawaii. It’s always been my idea of paradise. A sanctuary in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, miles from anywhere, stunning scenery, and all that rainfall—
water
, precious water. Guests are always amazed at all the rainbows, but where I live they’re an everyday occurrence. Even double rainbows (up yours, Walter Yetnikoff).

When Susan and I moved there in 1979, our land was almost third-world primitive. Just a tiny shack with no glass on the windows surrounded by lots of lush, untamable growth. Kind of like a Gauguin landscape without the wild beasts and bare-breasted women (too bad). I’m surrounded by acres of unspoiled mountain scenery, with countless waterfalls sluicing down the banks. Over the years, Susan, with our friend Bill Long, has turned our property into an extraordinary Balinese-style compound, with four houses—ours and one for each of our children—a studio for my ongoing musical and artistic experiments, a studio for Susan, and a heated pool. What a great craftsman Bill is, and what a fine road manager. With all that pristine beach just minutes from the house, you’d think it would satisfy our recreational urge, but the beach is anathema to this pasty English lad. Susan practically has to put a gun to my head to lure me onto those stretches of white sand, and since you already know my feelings about firearms, you can imagine how seldom a beach outing occurs. No, I’m content to sit on our patio and watch nature conspire right before my eyes. I’ll leave walking in the sand well enough alone—or to the Shangri-Las.

My son Jackson, an artist, an activist, and a world traveler, and his lovely soulmate, Melissa, both have an infectious, positive spirit. They live on a five-acre piece of land just up the road; they
live humbly and quietly in a repurposed shipping container with our
first grandchild, an extraordinary baby girl called Stellar Joy. They’re conducting an experiment in permaculture, a form of ecological engineering that emphasizes natural and sustainable ecosystems. Some of my environmental proselytizing must have rubbed off, because Jackson and Melissa seem to do their best to strike a balance between focusing on their family’s well-being and concentrating on the well-being of the planet.

Will, his younger brother, is an equally brilliant young man, so grounded, so levelheaded. He’s a whiz at math, golf, and chess and for a while went to MIT. Years ago, when Will was twenty, he accompanied Susan and me on a visit to a friend’s office on Wall Street, where we got a firsthand look at the chaotic trading scene. In one room, where forty computers lined the walls, Will happened to glance at a machine and said, “Ah, the Fibonacci formula.” One of the traders sitting there spun around, openmouthed. “No one has ever noticed what our software is producing and understood it on sight,” he said. “Give me this kid for two weeks and I’ll change his life.” So Will wound up working for a very successful Wall Street firm in Los Angeles, one of the youngest stockbrokers in the country, but eventually bailed when the economy turned sour. I always wanted him involved in the family business, so these days he works alongside me, managing the details of my affairs, which I guarantee you are more complicated than that Fibonacci formula. A few years ago, Will met a beautiful young woman from Omaha named Shannon, and they got married in 2012 year in a joyous ceremony at our home in Kauai.

Nile’s life is more serenely composed. When my daughter was seven, Susan took her along to visit a friend who was in the throes of having a baby, and Nile watched the process from beginning to end with wide-eyed interest. None of the gory bits seemed to have an impact on her. While everyone else was distracted, Nile talked soothingly with the mother in an adult, compassionate way. After graduating summa cum laude with honors from UCLA, all she
wanted from life was to bring babies safely into the world. In addition to being a nurse practitioner of women’s health, she is also a registered nurse and a certified nurse-midwife. Her services are in great demand. And every time I check in with my managers, Buddha and Cree Miller, I have the distinct pleasure of knowing that Nile chaperoned their daughter Marta’s birth. On my birthday. Now that’s what I call managers. Did I say pleasure? Make that pride. That’s my kid facilitating childbirth. What could be more meaningful than that?

I was really touched when, in 2010, Nile and
Britt Govea coproduced an album of my music called
Be Yourself.
All the songs on my first solo album,
Songs for Beginners
, were performed in sequence by an astounding variety of younger musicians. What CSN always believed—that the music is far more important than ourselves—is borne out by this project. To think that much younger musicians are eager to play our songs today is very moving to me.