“Slowly and painfully”: The song David Crosby was forced to write
By the 1980s, David Crosby was crashing out. Buckling under the pressure of fame but mostly of drugs, the lifestyle that fueled so much of Crosby’s music was now the exact thing that was ruining it. That’s when people stepped in, sat him down and would not move from their forceful watch until he finished one song.
So often in music, drugs end up romanticised. The ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ image is pervasive. It’s everywhere, and throughout history, it has claimed so many tragedies. Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin; if drugs hadn’t been involved, who knows what might have come next for these idols or the music the world might have got to hear if their lives had been healthier, or if there were people to step in.
Crosby was almost one of them. In Crosby, Stills, Nash and, sometimes, Young, it was Crosby’s drug taking that arguably ruined it all. In Nash’s eyes, that’s what “tore the heart out” of the band as Crosby’s addiction was unchecked and only getting worse and worse. It was a constant cycle, the need to feed his fix, then the comedown, and in between those points, the time allotted to music was getting slimmer and slimmer.
So often, drugs are talked about as fuel for art. They’re undeniably an important cornerstone to the countercultural scene, as so many artists credited these mind-altering and mind-opening substances for introducing them to new corners of their creativity. But, it hits a point where they become a detriment. At the height of his addiction, it was the drugs that meant Crosby simply could not write a song – and his band needed him to.
They needed him to be for the group, but they also needed him to be for himself. The moment Crosby seemed unable to do the work, that’s when his friends became incredibly concerned about his state and stepped it. It wasn’t just for the sake of the music, it was for the sake of the man himself as they needed to remind him what he was on the earth to do.
But at the time, Crosby himself admitted he had the attention span of a “drunken butterfly”. He could not focus long enough to get stuff down onto paper of his own accord, so Jackson Browne stepped in. One night, at Warren Zevon’s house, Browne stood like a bodyguard until a song was finished.
“Jackson wouldn’t let me up or let me at the pipe,” Crosby remembered, “He just stood there, looking over my shoulder, holding me at the bench, forcing me, slowly and painfully, to give birth to the song, not the lyrical fragment or the convenient phrase.”
The song that emerged was ‘Delta’, with the lyrics reflecting his mind in that period as he wrote, “Waking stream of consciousness / On a sleeping street of dream / Thoughts like scattered leaves / Slowed in midfall to the streams”.
But the song was really besides the point. What was important and special was the act of it being written and the act of Browne standing there, ensuring it happened. “It was an act of love and great caring; he showed concern for me, for my work, for seeing me get my work done,” Crosby said of his friend’s actions, adding tenderly, “Without Jackson, the song would never have happened.”
