“A pretty terrible state”: David Crosby used Jackson Browne and a song to escape from drug hell
The 1970s were a wild ride for all the musicians involved, not least David Crosby.
As a proud representative of the counterculture movement, Crosby was no stranger to the substances that fuelled its burning creativity. When Crosby, Stills and Nash formed in 1969, their relationship was unlike any of the other musicians who occupied that postcode, where a healthy balance of marijuana and hallucinogens fuelled some of the great liberal songwriting of the era.
But soon that bled into the ‘70s, a decade which offered unlimited hedonistic resources for the musicians at the very top of the tree, both as a means of career celebration but more dangerously, as a vehicle of societal escape for artists grappling with the turbulent waves of their career. Crosby fell firmly into the latter category, relying heavily on drugs to cope with the myriad professional and personal troubles he faced.
For an artist pre-disposed with a hair-trigger temper and general proclivity for addiction, all of these circumstances swirled around him in a perfect storm, to a point whereby 1980 rolled around, and he was on his last ebb. This was also at a time when Crosby, Stills and Nash were looking to reboot and capture some of that songwriting genius that sparked their promising careers at the beginning of the decade, so grappling with both a desperate mental and creative state, it was clear that Crosby needed some encouragement to be able to move forward, which he received in the form of Jackson Browne.
The songwriter corralled him into getting his life back on track, and he started by helping him complete a song that would go on to become a classic for the band.
“It’s possible that this is the last song I wrote,” Crosby explained, of his 1982 hit ‘Delta’. “I was in a pretty terrible state at the time, which you can tell from the song; it sounds lost”. But Browne saw the potential in it and forced him to continue, acutely realising that Crosby’s wider issues could be salvaged by the songwriting process.
He continued, ”Jackson Browne came by the house where I was. I didn’t have a piano, so I just sang him what I had, and he said, ‘Jesus, that’s a really good one David, you need to finish that’. I was in the middle of a downhill slide involving freebase cocaine. I didn’t especially want to go outside because I didn’t want to bother with anything except taking more drugs, but Jackson really insisted and brought me to Warren Zevon‘s house, where there was a piano.”
Browne reportedly sat Cosby down in a sort of creative jail at the piano, ignoring his pleas to even take bathroom breaks, which would actually be dope breaks, keeping him at it until the track was fully fleshed out. “He kept me there until I did it. Now, when we sing it, I thank Jackson for helping me get it out,” Crosby said.
The question of where Crosby’s career would have taken him had it not been for Browne’s intervention rings relatively strongly. ‘Delta’ was a pivotal moment for him in regaining the brilliance of his songwriting career while, similarly, getting his personal life back on track.
