‘I should have been dead about nine times already’ — David Crosby on ‘The Gift of Life’
David S. Jackson
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David Crosby was a notoriously prickly man, even with his closest friends and bandmates. His angelic tenor voice lifted the vocals of The Byrds and, of course, Crosby, Stills & Nash (and later Young) to the supergroup level, but his abrasive personality made his stints with those groups rocky and short-lived.
There was a time, however, when Crosby suddenly, if temporarily, mellowed, and for good reason. In 1994, after years of hard living, his liver was failing and he desperately needed a transplant. At the time, he was spending an increasing amount of time online on The Well, a private online bulletin board service based in Sausalito, California, that was frequented by computer scientists, academics, journalists, and utopian techies.
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Crosby’s posts on The Well (he was identified only as “Croz,” but most Well regulars who spent time on the music boards knew who he was) became more poignant and personal as his health deteriorated. And then one day in November, 1994, he announced that a liver donor had been found.
There were a few days of silence, then he was back online — this time from his hospital bed. He began posting on his post-op recovery and thanking everyone who had sent him online messages of support.
After watching all this, I thought it would make a good story for Time magazine about the then-new phenomenon of online communications and community-building. And it did. But this week, after hearing about his death, I dug up my notes from that old interview with him and was struck by his comments about facing death, and how sobered he was then by his brush with it.
What follows is a condensed version of that interview:
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How did you first get interested in going online?
Crosby: “A friend of mine … turned me on to it. He told me there were over 100 subjects about music alone. He said, ‘There’s a CSN (Crosby, Stills & Nash) topic that will fascinate you.’ It’s sort of like being able to sit in a stall in a men’s room at your own concert. … This is a perfect interface for being able to talk to the world that doesn’t threaten my privacy but does give me access to people all over the world, and they can say what’s on their mind. … Uncensored information is a pearl beyond price. You actually find out what people think, which is completely fascinating to me.”
What made you decide to stay online through your hospital stay?
Crosby: “It helped me through it. I would be there at three or four in the morning, unable to sleep, in a lot of pain, very lonely, and I’d log on and all of a sudden there’d be all these other sparks out there in the darkness. … It really put wind in my sails.”
Was there anything that was particularly helpful?
Crosby: “There were several people who were transplants, who emailed me after the postings, who were very helpful and supportive. But the strongest thing was the emotional support in general. This is just a rough spot. I’m not a Superman. I needed that, man.”
How did your wife and friends feel about your being online so much?
Crosby: “Everybody thinks it had a very positive effect. One of the problems of spending 50 days in the hospital is you become emotionally debilitated. … You have tubes going in and out of you; the immuno-suppressants make you so jittery sometimes you can’t even read. … I had a bunch of friends who visited. Jackson (Browne) and (Graham) Nash probably came a dozen times each. …But in the middle of the night, man, that (online) network of people really meant a lot.”
How did you communicate from the hospital? From your bed?
Crosby: “Nash loaned me a brand new (Apple) 540C (PowerBook). … I just sat there and pecked away. I’m a very slow typist.”
Did nurses ever come in quietly in the middle of the night, expecting to find you asleep, and there you’d be, your face illuminated by the glow from your computer screen?
Crosby: (Laughs) “Every night! I had a terrible time sleeping. The nurses would come in in the middle of the night and they’d say, ‘David, don’t you think you might want to finish it tomorrow?’ And I’d say, ‘No, no, I’m talking to this guy from Japan! I can’t log off now!”
What did the doctors think?
Crosby: “They wound up asking me what kind of computer is that? There’s probably two or three of those surgeons logging on right now.”
Had you been an organ donor before?
Crosby: “No, but I don’t think anybody would have taken them, they were so saturated with illegal substances, diabetes, and hepatitis C. Organ donor awareness is something I want badly to work on. I was told that less than 25% of people who are eligible actually do it. … Once the spirit departs, this is just a meat suit. It has no intrinsic value other than the incredible value you can give by giving somebody else’s life from it. The kid who saved my life saved four people’s lives that night. (Note: His donor had been in an auto accident.) But just marking a card is not enough; you also have to make your wishes known to your family. … Anybody who could not give the gift of life, well, I’m completely flummoxed by that.”
Do you know of other celebrities who have gone online?
Crosby: “I don’t, but I think it’s because they haven’t realized how perfect a forum it is. If you’re a celebrity — I hate that word — and you have a privacy problem, this is an absolutely perfect way to talk to someone. They can’t show up at your house, but they can be absolutely fearless. It’s not like coming up to you at a concert and getting turned away by security guards and brushed off. … They can actually talk to you as an equal. You’re both just a mind and a keyboard. That’s it. It’s an ideal forum for people with a privacy problem, and it keeps you from having the dreaded ‘isolation’ problem.”
Things seem to be looking pretty good right now for you: new liver, a new album (“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”), and a baby on the way. How do you feel?
Crosby: “I feel more than anything else intensely grateful. I’ve been through so much, and I’ve come so close to the line so many times: gunfights, overdoses, motorcycle wrecks, Seizures and car wrecks and prison. I should have been dead about nine times already, and here I’m getting another chance to live life and make some wonderful music. The overriding feeling in my life is gratitude.”
My last e-mail exchange with Crosby was two months later, on April 6, 1995. I wrote him a message about a mutual acquaintance, and at the end added: “I’m glad to see you’re on the mend. Now shut down that computer and go take a walk outside. it’s stopped raining….”
Crosby: His response: “Thanks for the good advice. I’m getting out walking and fooling around in the garden and stuff … I feel like I’m going to make it.”
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Crosby did make it, for nearly 28 more years, thanks to his organ donor and a few more emergency medical interventions. But a resumption in his feuding would also later end his friendship with Graham Nash, the man who had once helped put him in touch with the world at a time when he most needed it.
David S. Jackson was a Time magazine correspondent for 23 years, covering stories around the world from eight bureaus. From 1992-1998, he was Time’s San Francisco bureau chief.