David Crosby’s tips for surviving a prison sentence
As a member of The Byrds, CSNY, and a countercultural icon, David Crosby had a plethora of unbelievable tales to tell. After all, his life had an extraordinary course; he went to places everyday folk do not.
Drugs and hedonism were core features of Crosby’s story. Alongside his musical talent, for decades, he had an appetite for hard living. This played a role in being ousted from The Byrds and reached severe levels after the heartbreaking death of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in a car accident in 1969. Such an unimaginable tragedy sent Crosby spiralling into more intoxicants.
Remarkably, despite the travails of his personal life and the heightened presence of drink and narcotics, Crosby still succeeded in creating the era-defining 1970 record Déjà Vu with CSNY, which captured the spirit of the late countercultural period. However, after this peak, Crosby’s life and output sharply declined as the new decade wore on.
Crosby kept working across the 1970s, but as the years went by, his lifestyle started to take its toll, and in the 1980s, legal and health issues compounded his physical and mental struggles. So began a period in the wilderness, with him languishing in obscurity as the dream of the counterculture faded deeper into the past.
While the debilitating 1994 liver transplant was still years away – which spread the word of his struggles to the world and saw him revitalise his status – it was in the mid-1980s when Crosby hit the nadir of his life. During this period, he spent nine months in a Texan prison after being convicted of drug and weapons offences due to possession of cocaine and heroin and concealing a .45 pistol. This would have been enough for most people to change, but not long after was arrested for drunk driving, possession of cocaine, drug paraphernalia and a concealed pistol again. However, this second brush with the law was pivotal; after that, Crosby started to mend his life.
Crosby was always open about his legal struggles, and in one discussion with Mojo in 2018, he maintained that he “lucked out” in being sent down as he was forced to come off drugs. He asserted that if he had to choose between continuing as an addict or returning to prison, it would be the latter every time. While in prison, he even wrote the classic CSNY song ‘Compass’, which refreshed him creatively.
The Californian’s candour about his addiction and time in jail proved to be invaluable for fans who found themselves struggling with similar things. In 2019, when answering questions for Rolling Stone, a fan wrote to him and asked for prison tips to give to their brother, who had just been sentenced to five years on a drug charge.
Frankly, Crosby explained: “Nobody is made for life on the inside. Trust me, I’ve been there. Tell him, mind his own business, a lot of people in there looking to pick a fight because they really have nothing else to do.”
Pointing to the salvation it offered him, but also the struggle of getting clean while incarcerated, Crosby was forthcoming about the reality of life behind bars: “Well, course it changed my life; that’s how I kicked drugs. The worst possible way to kick drugs is in prison. They don’t give you any aspirin. They look at you and go, ‘Hey, rockstar! How you feeling now?’ Wasn’t any fun at all.”
