Crosby lives to write about it, again

[Guest guest]

Crosby lives to write about it, again

The folk icon's second memoir rehashes his crazy life, from earthquakes to sperm.

Dec. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM

GREG QUILL

Most survivors of catastrophe get to tell their tale and move on. For catastrophe-prone American folk-rock singer, composer Crosby, the tale apparently never ends. His first memoir, Long Time Gone (1988), chronicled his hedonistic and truly eccentric existence at the epicentre of the California music boom in the 1960s up to his conviction on guns and drugs possession charges and his 12-month term in a Texas jail, where he recovered from substance abuse and found the spiritual wherewithal to pick up the shattered fragments of his career. After reading that harrowing tale — a graphic and brutally candid account of the rise and fall of one of that generation's most charismatic icons, the book became the model for countless tell-all rock `n' roll biographies that followed — you'd think there'd be little the man who coined the phrase "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't there" would have, or want, to share. Wrong. Life goes on. Stuff happens. And, as Crosby has learned, an inordinate amount of it happens to him. In an earlier time it would surely have been fodder for the kind of intensely personal songs for which he became known during his years with The Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. But record contracts aren't easy to come by when you're 65 and suffering from hepatitis C, a poor heart and diabetes, even though Crosby still tours and writes "all the time, mostly love songs about my wife." Besides, the independent music market is overpopulated with younger songwriters spilling more palatable guts. It's easier and more efficacious to surprise us all with a second autobiography, How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It. "So much crazy stuff has happened since the last book," Crosby said in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home earlier this week. "Just in 1993 and '94 a series of events almost blew me away. I found out I owed a massive amount in back taxes to the IRS, money that had been stolen by my accountant. I lost half my house in the big earthquake that year. After being told for years that she could never conceive, (future wife and long-time companion) Jan found out she was pregnant. And my doctors told me my liver was failing rapidly and I was dying." In the new book he also recounts meeting his grown son — also a gifted musician and partner in a new band fronted by Crosby, CPR — for the first time, and the personal circumstances under which he became in the late 1990s the father of Cypher and singer Etheridge's two children. The lesbian couple have since split. "I'm disappointed they weren't able to keep it together, but they're wonderful mothers, and the kids know who I am and where to find us," Crosby said. "The best thing that came out of that whole experience was a feeling of immense love for my wife. and were over for dinner, not long after Django (the Crosbys' son, and the most recent of the singer's six offspring) was born, and they saw how happy we were. They couldn't see any easy way to have a child of their own. "And that's when Jan volunteered me." Asked whether he could be as generous with his wife's genetic material, Crosby was quick to respond: "No. I couldn't do that." Never doubting the world was dying to hear more of his adventures — the liver transplant operation, and the nasty controversy surrounding the sudden emergence of a donor organ at the last minute, account for a 20-page rant — Crosby's only concern was how the second instalment of his autobiography should be written. It fell to veteran TV and movie screenwriter Carl Gottlieb (Jaws, The Jerk, The Bob Newhart Show), who co-authored Long Time Gone, to devise a template that reads like a script for a documentary, with Crosby's narrative offset by fade-ins to second and third opinions, and alternative recollections of friends, family and witnesses to key events in the book. "Shifting between different points of view gives the reader a real sense of the truth," he said, as if the minutiae of his existence are of elemental significance, rather than late-night eyebrow-raisers. There are some surprises. For a child of the 1960s and a member of two of the most outspoken bands of the era, Crosby turns out to be politically quite conservative. One section of the new book focuses on his grievances with government policies relating to Native Americans. "It's not about Native American rights," Crosby said. "It's about casinos, which make bad neighbours, and reservation residents not being subject to income tax and the same building and zoning codes as the rest of us. In America we're all supposed to be equal." Crosby would also like to see welfare — or the American version of it — dismantled. "I don't think paying able-bodied people not to work is the way to go. I'd like to see the (U.S. military) Construction Corps revived." Though he believes the Bush administration has caused America "great harm," he has no faith in Democrats and votes "for individuals, not for parties." Published just in time for Christmas — as is Voyage, the handsome and expensive three-CD box-set retrospective of Crosby's musical oeuvre, as well as the two-disc, DVD-enhanced re-release of his 1971 solo classic If Only I Could Remember My Name — the new book certainly puts Crosby back in the front trenches of gossip mongers. Or not. "It'll pass soon enough," Crosby chuckled. "Next week they'll go back to Britney Spears and her underwear."

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