The classic song David Crosby wrote in prison: “A completely new world for me”
He might have gotten under his friends’ skins over the years, but David Crosby was an authentic character who led a life following his own sense of the world, largely unimpeded by expectation. While this artistic free spirit would contribute much to the countercultural milieu and see him traverse musical standards to innovate soporific folk far removed from the rock zeitgeist, it also got him into trouble.
Running alongside his undoubted musical nouse was that, for a long time, Crosby had a voracious penchant for hedonism. Famously, this would play a part in his being ousted from The Byrds and would take a much more heartbreaking turn after the death of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in a car accident in 1969. The tragedy destroyed the musician and sent him on a steep downward spiral into more drink and drugs.
Despite what he was doing to his body and mind, the late 1960s were a creatively fertile time for Crosby, with 1970’s CSNY record Déjà Vu being one of the most important of the late countercultural period. For a time, the supergroup were on heat, and despite being internally shattered by the death of Hinton, the music was keeping much of his energy elsewhere. However, what happened to Crosby as the 1970s wore on can be taken as an apt mirroring of what started as a kaleidoscopic and prismatic ideal – the countercultural spirit – collapsing into a wretched husk of its former self as the decade continued. The future looked increasingly bleak for everyone, including stars.
Although Crosby would keep working across the 1970s, with his output of varying quality, and there were many questions about what his and Graham Nash’s vocals would have sounded like on Long May You Run, if Neil Young and Stephen Stills hadn’t deleted them, it was in the ensuing decade that his personal and creative lives would come to a grinding halt. This would kick off a period of intense legal and health issues.
Although his liver transplant in 1994 was nearly a decade away, and attributed to his long-term issues with hard drug use and alcoholism, Crosby hit rock bottom in the mid-1980s when he spent nine months in a Texan prison after being convicted of drugs and weapons offences due to possession of cocaine and heroin and concealing a .45 pistol. Not long after, he was also arrested for drunk driving, possession of cocaine, drug paraphernalia and a concealed pistol again, but after that moment, his life would slowly be on the mend. We can forget the 12 hours he spent in jail in 2004; it was a blip.
Crosby was always frank about his brushes with the law, and in one interview with Mojo in 2018, he explained that he “lucked out” with going to prison, as it forced him to start rebuilding himself. Despite falling back into habits for a time after, when incarcerated, he had to give up being a junkie. He said if given the choice of continuing as an addict or returning to prison, he’d take the second option in a flash.
While Crosby’s time in prison was a learning curve on many fronts, forcing himself out of the throes of addiction produced renewed creativity, supplemented by Young promising him that he would reform CSNY if he got clean. This is why Crosby’s brushes with the law stopped after the late 1980s, and the reason CSNY returned in 1988 with American Dream. Across the record, Crosby was on fire, with his highlight being ‘Compass’, a transcendental cousin to ‘Guinnevere’from CSN’s debut. Opening with the haunting line, “I have wasted ten years in a blindfold”, and sliding, resonant chords, Crosby used the song to reflect on his travails.
Speaking to Vulture in 2021, Crosby named the song the best he wrote when he got sober and offered insight into why he penned it and its significance. He said: “Oh, it’s ‘Compass.’ I wrote it in prison about waking up from drugs. It was when I realized that I was going to come back, I was going to get sober, I was going to be able to handle it, and then I was going to write again — which was crucial. I was sober for the first time when I was released. It was a whole other ball of wax and a completely new world for me.”
Even without knowing that it was written in prison, ‘Compass’ stands among the best CSNY tracks. It is made much more powerful when one learns that it was fuelled by Crosby’s prolonged struggles and a desire to return after a period of sad obscurity. He never was a one-dimensional character, and penning a track of such quality against all odds, speaks to that internal spirit he mentions in the song: “There lives in me a still, sure, spirit part”.
