The day David Crosby swapped a Mercedes for cocaine: “I was crazy”
Looking back at the 1960s and ‘70s, the folk stars feel like the least of our problems. When thinking about the sex and drugs of the era, it usually stays with the rock and roll crowd: Jim Morrison, The Stones, those great looming, ego-fueled frontmen of the moment. But in reality, those brandishing acoustic guitars were just as wild – you only need to look at the life of David Crosby and this one insane anecdote of when he sold a car for drugs, stole the car back and then sold it again for more drugs.
With his kind face, writing songs like ‘Teach Your Children’, it’s easy to forget that Crosby was a complete menace. Out of the whole lineup of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, he was the liability who, in Nash’s eyes, later “tore the heart out” of the band as his addictions got worse and worse, and his need to feed it got more and more insane.
But it was the ‘70s, or even into the ‘80s, and there still was no awareness or language around these things to help. It was a pre-rehab time, a moment where drugs were simply all part of the glamour of being a musician and being somewhat of an addict seemed to just be part of the job description. That’s why the era held so many casualties – there was no sense of responsibility as there was still barely any sense of consequence. No label executives were stepping in to help Hendrix or Joplin because, in a period of celebrated hedonism, no one knew yet that they should.
So instead, there are just stories of wild antics told with a distinct heroism, just like this one.
“He sold his Mercedes for cocaine to a dealer,” Nash recalled of his bandmate. Despite their music bringing him riches enough to get a nice car, Crosby needed money for a fix. So, he traded one for the other, handing over the deeds to his wheels in trade for his bump. But then it gets crazier; “The dealer OD’d and while he was dead in the bed,” Nash continued. Seeming to see this albeit pretty evil opportunity, the musician went to get his car back as Nash explained, “Crosby broke into his house and stole his pink slip back to the Mercedes.”
Later down the line, Nash wrote a fair amount about his friend’s issues. While the music world as a whole had yet to wake up to the severity of addictions, those closest always see and suffer the brunt. As Crosby’s reliances tore the band apart, Nash wrote of it again and again, even reflecting on it as recently as 2016 as he sings poignantly in his song ‘Encore’, “And how you gonna feel if friends follow fortune? / How you gonna feel if the music dies?”
But by that point, having made a recovery from his addictions, Crosby was more than willing to own up to it all. Recalling a phone call about one song or another, Nash remembered his old friend saying, “Hey, do not change a word; I did it. I’ll totally own up to what I did. I was crazy. I did put you guys through insanities.” But in the final second of that phone call, he delivered a new and even crazier update on this whole Mercedes debacle, adding, “One more thing before you get off the phone: I resold the car for Cocaine.”
