The ByrdWatcher Interview: David Crosby Part 1

BYRDWATCHER: A Field Guide to the Byrds of Los Angeles

THE BYRDWATCHER INTERVIEW:
DAVID CROSBY -- PART ONE

On June 20, 1998, David Crosby was in Cleveland for a CPR show that night. He very graciously agreed to do an interview for the ByrdWatcher site; it turned out to be a wide-ranging conversation that lasted more than 80 minutes. In order to keep from bogging down your browser, I've divided the transcript into six parts.
I could easily have spent the whole day asking questions if time were unlimited -- and in fact he set no time (or subject) limitations on the interview. But on the assumption that I would not be able to interrogate him all day, I tried to focus on topics that had not been covered as much in Crosby's earlier interviews. For that reason, you won't find anything about his lost years, his jail term, or the ups and downs of CSN here. But you will hear about CPR, Stand and Be Counted, the Byrds, science fiction, and a few surprises. (Of course, afterward I thought of dozens of things I wished I had asked, or followed up on better.) Throughout the interview, he demonstrated the charm, enthusiasm, humor and intelligence that put him at the center of the Los Angeles musical fraternity in 1965. It should go without saying that the views expressed by David Crosby in this conversation are not necessarily those of this site or its author.

Anything You Want to Know, Just Ask Me

BW: You're here tonight to perform with CPR...

DC: Yes.

BW: It must be exciting.

DC: Yeah, it is. It's amazing to have found a son at all, let alone found one that's a musician, and then let alone find one that's really a great musician.

BW: And then for that to happen all at the same time as all these other big events in your life, too.

DC: Yeah, it's kind of a trip. I think I wrote my autobiography a little too soon. (Chuckles.)

BW: Do you envision an update, since so much has happened?

DC: Yeah I do, I think it would be silly not to. I'm going to sit down with Carl Gottlieb, the guy that I wrote the first one with, and we're going to either write a second volume or redo the first one and add several chapters. We haven't decided yet. We own the first one now, we got it back -- it went out of print. So we can do pretty much what we want. We'll have to decide how much material comes in. There's really an awful lot.

Mind Gardens

BW: I just saw you using your new lap top...

DC: My new G3, yeah.

BW: You spend a lot of time online now.

DC: I do, yeah. For a lot of reasons. I love talking to people. People fascinate me... and you know the entire world is a local call on there. And there's something about doing it in print, you know, which means you have to compose your thoughts. It requires a certain degree of literacy, and I like that. And there is a particular thing about it that I like, which is that people who, if they ran into you in the street or in a market or in a restaurant or something, might be flustered. They can be a person who has never left there home in Duluth their entire life, but online they can become just a mind and a keyboard. And they can tell you what they think, where they might have trouble doing it in person. And to me, information is a pearl beyond price. You know, finding out what people think is fascinating to me, and you really can on there.

And you can actually form friendships. I have a number of friends now that I have met online. I had one guy e-mail me saying he noticed that some of my postings that I was learning to fly. He said, "I'm a pilot and I have an instructors rating and a commercial rating, and I have a Bonanza A36," which is a very hot airplane, a really classy airplane. And he said, "I'm also a guitar player, and I've been trying to figure out that beginning of 'Carry Me' for, oh, two years now, and I'll let you fly my Bonanza all afternoon if you'll show me the damn beginning of that guitar lick." (Laughs gleefully.) I said, "You have got a deal." And he flew down and we became friends. He's now a very close friend of mine. Wonderful guy. He's a professor of economics and writes technical books about flying. He's a brilliant guy. And I talk to a guy in Japan about Martin guitars; I talk to a guy in Ireland about songs. I talk to people all over the world all the time, and I think that's a plus. I think it's a huge wonderful thing.

BW: For someone at your level of celebrity, I imagine, it provides you an amount of access to your fans that otherwise would have been impossible.

DC: It would have been very difficult, because to get that kind of access otherwise, you have to lay yourself open to not having any privacy. And I want my privacy, and I also don't want some nut case showing up at my house. I have a little boy, you know, I have a wife, I have a life. This way I can have contact, very good contact, with people -- very revealing, very insightful contact with people -- and still maintain some privacy.

BW: I noticed that CSN has been altering its play list to add in suggestions from CSN fans that came in online.

DC: Yeah, that was my idea. What happened was that people would suggest things. They would say, "Gee, I wish you'd play 'Turn, Turn, Turn.'" And I would go to the guys and say, "You know what, somebody said on there they wish we knew..." Nash thought that was a great idea, so we added "Turn, Turn, Turn" to the list. And people loved it. So I said, "Hmmmm..." (Laughs.) "Okay, I'm gonna ask people." So I did, on the CSN website [www.alpha.nl/CSN/index.html], which is a purely fan based website runned by a wonderful guy named Hans Veldhuizen."

BW: Hans and I are net.friends.

DC: Yeah, he is a wonderful guy. Brilliant cat. And it's a wonderful website; it's one of the best websites I've ever seen. And he helped me do it [the poll]. We solicited suggestions from the entire world (laughs) -- 'cause obviously if you've looked through the guestbook in there, there're people from every single country in the entire world. I'm perusing that website every day. And we got a pretty good sample, hundreds of people sending in suggestions. And then Hans tallied up the suggestions, and we said, "Hmm, gee, they'd rather hear "Delta" than "Long Time Gone." I was kind of like, "Well, isn't that good." So I put "Delta" in and took "Long Time Gone" out, gave it a rest. We learned a lot. It's something that I do on an ongoing basis, all the time. You know, now I'm out with CPR. I give a lot of attention to all the postings and reviews and stuff, to see what people really like. 'Cause we change our set every night.

BW: I noticed that you have a new CPR site [www.crosbycpr.com]; Steven Barncard has his new Crosby, Stills & Nash site [www.CrosbyStillsNash.com]; Stoney Evening, that's on Barncard's site...

DC: Yeah, that's a good record too.

BW: ...So your Internet presence is really expanding.

DC: Yeah, well, it's a natural thing, man. I really love it. For those of us that really enjoy it, it's a wonderful way to communicate. It's a natural. I mean, there is a lot of stuff about the Byrds; there is a lot of stuff about Crosby, Stills and Nash; there is a lot of stuff about CPR; and I am proud of all of them. And I am happy about all of them. I enjoy communicating with people about all of them.

For Free

BW: You started to talk about Another Stoney Evening, your new beat-the-boot release.

DC: Yeah, well we thought -- and obviously we're doing it with CPR too -- that, in the case when something is really good, why not bootleg it ourselves, in essence. We used to be prevented from doing that by contractual obligation, but we found a loophole in it and Nash and I at least, for certain years, have complete ability to do that. And, gee, we did a lot of shows, Crosby and Nash. Some of them were very good... he said humbly. (Chuckle.) They were. And we see no reason not to put 'em out. That one was, obviously, a very successful bootleg, just as an audience tape, and people loved it. But we had an eight-track running, so why not?

BW: I think the tape trading culture, with the help of the Internet, is putting a bigger dent in bootleggers than any kind of enforcement mechanisms that any governments have been using.

DC: I think so too, and I totally approve of it. I think tape trading is cool. I think it works very well for the fan and very well for the bands. What I don't like is when somebody takes a tape to Italy or Thailand and presses up a few thousand of them and doesn't pay us any money. I think that stinks. But tape traders? Nah, tape trading's cool. That's a wonderful thing for the fans.

BW: Yeah, and it was really the first modern example of this economic idea of increasing returns. Now you see Netscape and Microsoft giving away their software to build market share, just like the Grateful Dead were letting people trade their own performances on tape as a way of building their fan base. And the idea has been adopted by everybody.

DC: Well, you know, I think it was an alien concept to them to give anything away, but I think they're learning, slowly.

BW: Another example of you being on the vanguard of economics is this idea of selling bonds against your songwriting royalties, a la Bowie. You've talked about that in interviews; is that still something that's on the drawing board?

DC: We explored it. We had a number of the leading financial groups come to us and do presentations about how it would work. And personally, I don't think it's attractive. In essence, what you're doing is taking a huge advance. You pay taxes on it. Probably more taxes if you take it all in one lump like that, than you do if you simply let your royalty stream come to you over a long period of time. But it takes it out of your control. I have fought to gain control of my destiny, so to speak, in terms of royalty stream, and particularly publishing, and I don't feel comfortable giving it up to somebody else's control. I'm probably in a minority. I think Stills would love to do it. Nash doesn't need to do it, but I think he's interested in it. Personally, I'm pretty leery of it. David Bowie was in a particularly good situation to do it, because his record company wanted him to sign -- re-sign -- desperately. He was the big brass ring to them. And so he was able to force them to guarantee the bonds, and sort of co-sign for him. And that put him in a different situation than we would be, I think. It's fairly creative thinking and I haven't completely crossed it off.

BW: It boils down to a mortgage on your intellectual property...

DC: Kind of. Yeah, exactly.

BW: And with a mortgage, you can go out and buy something great with the money, but then you have a mortgage.

DC: Yeah. And also, the tendency is to take that money and get yourself in over your head. You know, buy the 300 acre ranch and the $2 million dollar house, which you would then have to make payments on. I have five acres and a two-bedroom adobe house, and I can afford it, and I like it that way.

Onward to Part Two.

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This page was last revised on August 23, 1998.

THE BYRDWATCHER INTERVIEW: DAVID CROSBY -- PART ONE

THE BYRDWATCHER INTERVIEW:
DAVID CROSBY -- PART ONE