Wild Tales (47 page)

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 got 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.

But David’s concern always pivoted back to music. Coincidentally, I had a gig booked nearby, at Rockefellers, a club in Houston.
I was beginning a solo tour with three other guys: a ménage-à-tech, Bill Boydston playing patterns on a drum machine and playing keyboards, and Hugh Ferguson on guitar. I asked Crosby, who was turning forty-five that night, if he wanted to come to the show and sit in with me on “Wind on the Water.”

Rockefellers was a tiny club, and it was packed that night with maybe three hundred people. Everyone knew that Croz was out of jail, and since I happened to be playing near the prison, the possibility existed that David might show up. So at the appropriate moment, the lights went down and a tape of
“Critical Mass,” David’s a cappella sig- nature intro to
“Wind on the Water,” came on. Crosby, in the dark, had already crept toward the mike. He had to push a curtain aside to come from the back onto the stage. With the dressing-room lights behind him—it was like seeing the silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock— he was immediately recognizable. And the place erupted, they went crazy, fucking nuts. Crosby had a fantastic grin on his face. He was so happy to be there, to be free, to have paid his debt to society—to have all that shit behind him to some extent. A dark, dark period in his life was ending, and a brighter one was poised to begin.

A
T THE END
of 1986, Neil kept his promise to sing with us again. However, first he wanted to make sure all four of us could handle it. “We should be physically able to take on the job of setting an example for an entire generation that could be halfway to the fucking grave,” he said. “They have to see that we can go through all this shit and come back stronger and sharper than we were before. No matter what has happened to them in their lives, no matter how many good friends have died, how much shit they’ve piled on themselves, how many losses they’ve endured—if we can be so strong after everything we’ve endured, it would be like fresh water running over the entire audience.”

So Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young re-formed to do two benefits.
The first was as part of the bill to raise funds for the
Bridge School, which Neil and his wife Pegi had recently founded for kids stricken with cerebral palsy, from which both of Neil’s sons suffered. Then two acoustic shows—with us headlining—for
Greenpeace at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara, one of the truly great places to perform. The four of us hadn’t played in a long time, and it was exhilarating sharing the stage together again. Especially acoustic, which is when the songs really live.

At the Bridge School concerts, there were two handicapped kids at the back of the stage. Susan noticed that a young boy started to cry, and the little girl next to him slowly put a hand out to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. When Susan described that moment to me, I was so touched that I wrote “Try to Find Me.”

Right after that we began working on a new CSNY album, our first studio record together since recording
Déjà Vu
in 1969. All of us had been writing new songs. I brought
“Don’t Say Goodbye,” about a rough patch that most marriages go through and that I’d hit with Susan when I was panicked that she might be leaving me; “Clear Blue Skies,” which I’d written earlier in Hawaii; my song “Heartland,” and “Shadowland,” written with Rick Ryan and
Joe Vitale. Neil had “In the Name of Love,” “This Old House,” “Feel Your Love,” and “
American Dream,” which became the title of the album. Stills brought “That Girl,” “Driving Thunder,” and
“Got It Made,” and David contributed “Nighttime for the Generals” and “Compass.” We had songs.

We all went up to Neil’s ranch, just south of San Francisco, to record. He has a full studio there, along with multiple houses. I’d been with him the first time he saw that property in 1971. We were
looking for real estate together and saw about five places, most of which weren’t very interesting. But the minute he laid eyes on this spread he was immediately sold, especially after seeing hundreds of red-winged blackbirds on the lake. Utterly beautiful, of course, with giant redwoods, and very isolated, the way Neil liked it. You have to go up Highway 1 to Skyline Drive and then find a little road that gets smaller and smaller until there is only room enough for one car on it. If someone’s coming toward you, you’ve got to pull off into the undergrowth and pray they can squeeze past. It’s a couple of miles to the main road—and God forbid you forget the milk! The buildings are ranch style, funky, and there’s a large barn in which Neil had recorded some of his
Harvest
album. I remember the day that Neil asked me to listen to the record. No big speakers, but a boat. That’s right, he asked me to get into a small boat and he rowed us both out into the middle of the lake. Once there he asked his producer
Elliot Mazer to play the record. Neil was using his entire house as the left speaker and his huge barn as the right speaker. What an incredible record it was, and after the music stopped blaring, Elliot came down to the shore of the lake and shouted, “How was that, Neil?” and I swear this is true, Neil shouted back, “More barn!” That’s Neil, no doubt about it

All of us settled in at the Red House, as it was called. We were doing great, happy to be alive, David and Stephen in good shape. Neil always takes care of himself, eats well, exercises. We were all getting along like a house on fire. The couple of sessions took only two or three weeks, interspersed between April 24 and September 16. No ego problems other than a lot of strong opinions. Neil wanted to do it, wanted to be there, and that was a big problem out of the way. Besides, we were at
his
house, so he couldn’t run away. But, then, neither could we. A pretty clever strategy.

The opportunity to make music with Neil is always enticing. He always was and remains an utterly brilliant musician. When we play with Neil, I expect the unexpected. We make a different kind of music with him than we do with Crosby, Stills & Nash. It’s got a
harder edge; there is tension and darkness in it. He pushes us into a different direction. And when you write for CSNY, you push back harder, hopefully giving him something to bite into. I never wanted to be in a band that demanded the same solo as the night before, the same one you played on the record and on the last four hundred shows. I’d rather stand there with my mouth wide open, and that’s what I got when Neil joined the group. As difficult as our relationship sometimes is, it was hard to argue with what he brought to the mix.

Even though we were getting along, musically I felt we were walking on eggshells. Croz was used to dominating a recording session, he was usually unflappable, and now it seemed, at times, that he was taking a backseat, letting the rest of us call the shots.

Stephen was a little fragile, too. He didn’t feel that he had great songs to offer. “Got It Made” was a decent number, but he didn’t have a lot of what I considered CSNY songs. I thought Neil indulged Stephen a little too much.

Music was changing a lot at this point. There was still a ton of
disco on the airwaves, a lot of
Donna Summer and the
Bee Gees.
New wave and electronica were each attracting their niche. But I have to say that none of it influenced us as we were making
American Dream.
We didn’t take any notice of that stuff. We just did what we do, made our music the only way we knew how. We weren’t following any trends.

David, if a bit fragile in the sessions, was straightening out his life, to my utter delight. He devoted himself entirely to Jan. It took all of us by surprise when he dropped the big one: that he and Jan were going to get mar … mar … mar … C’mon, Croz, say it!
Married.
Yeah, you heard that right: Crosby getting married, three words I never expected to use in the same sentence. But it was cool. Jan and David had come back from the dead. They were a team, inseparable. They held on to each other for dear life.

Don’t get me wrong, we gave him a lot of shit about it. There was a stag party where things got pretty raunchy. The usual shit—guys
getting drunk, a couple of scantily clad ladies. Lots of unrepeatable roasts and toasts directed at David. The wedding was the next day, May 16, 1987, at the Church of Religious Science in LA, where Susan and I had gotten married ten years earlier. In fact, Susan and I decided to renew our vows, making the event a double wedding.

When I first married Susan, she gave me ten years. She was perfectly clear about her intentions, saying, “At the end of those ten, if I still like you I’ll renew.” It wasn’t a joke or said lightly. She’s an incredibly strong, independent woman. When those ten years were up, if she hadn’t been happy, she’d have been gone in a shot—and I knew it. Even though we had three kids together. If I wasn’t pulling my weight, she was out of there. And I always worried about it. Was it going to last? Would there be any magic left? I didn’t know. So it was a relief when she decided to re-up with me. And Jan and David were generous to share their ceremony with us.

It was a memorable affair, with equally memorable company. Stills and Jackson, of course—even Neil turned up—with guest appearances by
Roger McGuinn,
Chris Hillman,
Paul Kantner, and Warren Zevon. The reception was in the yard of our house in Encino, during which we all jumped into the pool with our clothes on. Silly shit.

We deserved this, and we savored every minute of it. There’s no question that we had come through the madness. CSN, not just David, had gone off the rails, and for a while it seemed certain we were headed over the cliff. Smart money was betting we’d self-destruct again, but somewhere in the insanity we turned the mothership around. Don’t ask me how. David’s going to jail? Possibly that sparked things. My quitting cocaine? It certainly helped. Stephen’s coming to terms with his magnificent talent, no longer being intimidated by Neil, as he’d been in the past? All of this figured into the turnaround. Huge relief. From here on out, we stopped trying to live life to the extreme and, at long last, were looking to live life well.