Wild Tales (39 page)

The process was easy. I hired an immigration lawyer out of DC and did all my homework, took and passed the requisite tests. So on August 14, 1978, Crosby’s thirty-seventh birthday, I joined fifteen hundred other immigrants in the audience section of the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. It was a stage I had played on several times in my life. In fact, Crosby and I had done a famous show there together in 1971, which became a bootleg called
A Very Stony Evening.
Oh, we’d been stoned all right, feeling no pain. But this time, I was extremely nervous. I knew that I had passed, but until the moment when the officiator instructed us to stand and said, “I now pronounce you American citizens,” I was sweating it out. And I must confess, when the crowd broke out singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I was deeply moved. It meant that much to me. I had made it! I let out a deep breath and gave Susan a kiss. Stephen had also come, for moral support, and afterward he took us to celebrate at Pink’s, an amazing hot dog stand but not exactly gourmet cuisine.

“You want to be an American citizen?” he said. “Then, here, eat this.” And we polished off a couple of hot dogs and Cokes.

I consider myself very lucky to be in a country where I can speak my mind as freely as I do. What an incredible country this is! But I have to admit that the America I live in today is not the country I set out to join, it’s not the country that I fell in love with, and that’s a shocking thing for me to say. I fear America has become a police
state, with a military that uses heat weapons against suspected enemies, a police force that pepper-sprays protesters exercising their inalienable rights (I told you I did my homework), and a justice system that fails to treat its prisoners humanely. So I will continue to speak out against what I consider objectionable and to crusade for justice and equality, only now I do it as an American citizen. God help me—God help us all.

With Jackson Browne at Abalone Alliance concert, January 29, 1979

A
T THE START OF 1979
, I
TURNED BACK TO WHAT
I
deeply loved: making music, expressing myself through song, photography, art, and activism.

I did a number of benefits with
Jackson Browne for an antinuclear group called the
Abalone Alliance. They were to protest and shut down the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s power plant near San Luis Obispo. Since my dinner with
Jacques Cousteau, I was totally opposed to nuclear proliferation and its potential to annihilate the planet. It didn’t make sense to me, what with all the inherent risks and dangers. We knew about the problems at the plants: how they have pipes that crack and stretch from leaks, releasing radiation into the atmosphere and ocean. We knew that containment domes, after thirty or forty years, get brittle and tend to crack. It was time to rally public opinion and to take a stand.

This was the first time I’d ever led a band myself. A kick-ass collection of musicians:
Russ Kunkel on drums,
Tim Drummond on bass (one of my favorite rhythm sections ever),
Craig Doerge on keyboards, and maestro
David Lindley on many stringed instruments. I’d never been onstage before without someone to play off of, whether it was Clarkie, the Hollies, or Crosby, Stills, or Young. Carrying a show on my own was a very gratifying experience. It enabled me to place a different value on who I was and what I’d accomplished.

I went on to do more No Nukes shows with Jackson,
Bonnie Raitt,
John Sebastian,
John Hall, and others, in California. One
concert, on the steps of the nation’s Capitol on May 6, also included Joni and
Dan Fogelberg; it was the first large-scale antinuclear demonstration after the partial meltdown of one of the reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States. (By May 1983, solar-power technology had advanced to the point where I could perform in San Luis Obispo at the first benefit concert at which the electricity for sound and lights was provided by a solar-powered generator, nicknamed the Solar Jenny, that had been put together by
Tom Campbell.)

On a clear day from my kitchen in San Francisco, I could see the Faralon Islands, just off the coast. I learned that, to get rid of nuclear waste, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would take barrels of the stuff and throw them off a ship, close to those islands. But the barrels were watertight and didn’t sink, so they shot them with rifles until they went under. Later, someone sent me a picture of some giant mis-gened sea anemone, some weird distortion of the normal growth pattern. The radiation was affecting the way plants grew, a very bad scene, so I wrote a song called “Barrel of Pain.”

My music was becoming more topical and uncompromising. I’d always been committed to taking a public stand, but it was time, I decided, to turn up the heat. The nuclear madness was a direct
threat to my family and me. Singing was the best way I knew to put myself on the line.

I wanted to record “Barrel of Pain” as soon as possible. There were also other songs—
“Innocent Eyes,” “Love Has Come,” “In the Eighties,” “Out on the Island,” and a number of songs I was working on at the time. While I was collating the material,
Joel Bernstein brought a photo to my attention that he had taken while we were vacationing on
Kauai. I’d been standing on the lip of Waimea Canyon, a miniature Grand Canyon on the island, holding an old bright-green plastic Imperial Flash Mark II camera I’d been fooling around with. The lens wasn’t that great, but when you got lucky it took really interesting blurry pictures. Joel took a panoramic photo with his Linhof Technorama 6 × 17 against that dramatic background. When we checked out the proof sheets, there was a double rainbow that I’d not been aware of in the sky behind me. A gorgeous picture. At that moment, I decided to make an album to fit that photo,
Earth & Sky.

As it happened, David and I both had deals to make solo albums for
Columbia Records. So in February 1979, I booked time at Britannia Studios in LA and assembled a fabulous band:
Danny Kortchmar,
Tim Drummond, Chocolate Perry,
Craig Doerge,
David Lindley,
Joe Walsh, and two drummers,
Joe Vitale and
Russ Kunkel. For vocals, there was no one better than Crosby, who agreed to come down and give me a hand.

I hadn’t seen David in a while. He’d been holed up in Mill Valley, spending time with
Jan Dance, the lovely young woman he’d met at Criteria Studios in Miami. So when he showed up at Britannia, I wasn’t prepared for his appearance. He looked horrible—pale, sweaty, dirty, suspicious, slit-eyed, covered in sores. “A staph infection, you know.” Yeah, right. I’d heard that one before. It was obvious to me he was heavily into freebase. I could see how it was dragging him down. Jan was a mess, too. Just two years before she’d been this adorable, sweet creature with a lively disposition, but those features had practically disappeared. What had happened
to
Nancy Brown was now transforming Jan. Nancy had managed to escape. She’d finally bolted from David’s clutches to get some help. Jan had obviously taken her place. It was sad—and infuriating.

From the beginning, things went badly. David kept nodding out during breaks, then he’d disappear, presumably to hit the pipe. He didn’t seem to be working hard enough, and it was showing up, especially in the playback. His voice was rough, husky; our harmonies were strained. I couldn’t vibe him out, I couldn’t anticipate him anymore. The communication between us had stopped.

I tried broaching the subject with him, explained that the music was suffering, but he blew me off. “Hey, I’m fine,” he insisted. “I’m on top of it.” End of discussion. And I tried pleading with Jan to get him some help. I told her that David was in shitty shape, killing himself. If he was incapable of turning it around, she needed to do something about it. I’d help them in any way I could. I was watching my friend’s drug addiction destroy everything great that we shared—our love of music, to keep playing and change people’s lives. Our careers! It was going down the drain.

Look, I was no Boy Scout. I was snorting, but drugs weren’t a problem for me. I didn’t have an addictive personality, especially when it came to cocaine. I’d done my share, taken enormous amounts. There is a Polaroid picture I have of a rock of cocaine that was bigger than the eight ball sitting next to it in the shot—and
Tim Drummond and I finished it in three days. So I’ve been there, I’ve been out of it at times, but I could walk away from it. And if coke wasn’t around I didn’t go searching for it, and that’s the situation Crosby was in. He
needed
drugs, and he needed the money to pay for them.

David and drugs were always spiritually intertwined. But lately the drugs had become seriously problematic. Ever since Christine’s death he’d been more and more drug dependent, slipping into a state he called “cocaine psychosis,” the paranoia that comes with being too high most of the time. He was so heavily into cocaine that most of Croz’s waking moments were spent figuring out how
to score, where and when to get it, how much he had left, and how much to share with his friends. Behavior like that puts you in a lot of freaky situations. Like this one: David sold his Mercedes for crack. Yes, the very car he’d had since the afternoon he and I both bought Mercedes together. The guy he sold it to promptly OD’ed, and David broke into the guy’s house—while the body was still in the bed—and stole his pink sales slip back. Freaky. Then he had the balls to resell the car to someone else. Like I said: freaky.

He was broke and constantly on our managers’ backs: “I’ve got to find more money. You’ve got to sell this. Find money. I need money fast.” We’d made a lot of dough, millions upon millions. But he’d gone through it all.
All
of it. It was inconceivable to me. But it was all too real.

One evening at the studio, we were working on “Barrel of Pain.” While
Stanley Johnston and the other engineers were setting up and balancing the sound, the band eased into a warm-up jam. That was our usual way of kicking off a session. Someone starts a riff, another musician joins in, the drummers know what to do—and it begins to cook. We had a great jam going, it was rocking like mad. Crosby’s pipe was sitting on one of the amps, and because the jam was going so well, the amp was shaking … and the pipe was slowly but surely moving toward the edge. Both Stanley and I could see what was happening. And sure enough, at a certain point when the band hit a particular chord, the pipe fell off and shattered.

David got very upset about his broken pipe and stopped the jam, trying to put the pieces of the pipe back together. He was angry because it meant he couldn’t get high that day, and he needed the crack to stay awake.

I shot a look at
Craig Doerge and saw the disbelief on his face: What happened to the music? Which is when it all came clear to me. It’s the moment I realized that drugs were more important to David than music. He was in deep shit. And I’d had it, I had to do something. “Fuck you, I’m done,” I told him. “This is not making me happy at all. This sucks. I can’t work with you anymore.”

I wheeled away from him, but before I did, I pulled Jan aside and told her: “If I were you, I’d get that son of a bitch to a doctor right now.”

I was hurt and angry. Resentful that this fucking drug was more powerful than our music. Up to now, the music always saved our asses, but not this time. This was a tumultuous event in my life, moving away from Crosby like that. I was strong, but it terrified me. I figured that my relationship with David, on a musical level, was probably over. It was the end—of Crosby/Nash,
Crosby, Stills & Nash, the end of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The mothership had a huge, gaping hole in the hull.

Crosby was in much deeper trouble than I thought. I learned that after the blow-up, when he’d left the studio, he refused to let Jan drive him home. Instead he sped off in his Mercedes, up into the densely packed hills, with Jan desperately pleading with him to slow down. Inevitably, he nodded out at the wheel and plowed into the back of a parked car. No one was hurt, but when Jan insisted they get out and find the owner, David refused and took off. That’s the kind of nightmare he was living. There was nothing else that I could do.

I
SPENT THE NEXT
couple of months finishing
Earth & Sky
, keeping my distance from Stephen and David as best as possible. I loved making that album. All the songs were close to my heart. In the middle of the session, I moved my home studio from the basement of my house in San Francisco to LA, a beautiful old Hollywood place called Crossroads of the World, on Sunset Boulevard. The space had previously been a restaurant that failed. The minute I saw it, I knew it would make an incredible studio, so I leased it, added soundproofing to the walls and ceiling, redid the floors, built a control room, and moved all my equipment down there. I asked Rick Griffin, the well-known underground artist, to design the logo, a silhouette of
Leo Makota’s dog Rudy howling, with the name
rudy records
coming out of its mouth.
Stanley Johnston and I finished and mixed
Earth & Sky
there.