The one drug David Crosby said destroyed the music business
The credence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll doesn’t exist by accident. There’s a lot of myth-making throughout music history, but no band member was meant to be a choirboy behind the scenes throughout their time in the spotlight, but David Crosby knew the dangers of flying too close to the sun as well.
Then again, Crosby, Stills, and Nash were never a band known for throwing up their drug endorsements in every one of their songs by any means. They approached serious topics every time they made a record, and while their tunes could get a bit more heavy-handed now and again, there was never a moment where the band felt like a bunch of hippies trying to tell everyone to forget all their problems.
If anything, songs like ‘Ohio’ and ‘Teach Your Children’ were reminding people of the problems with the world. They knew that everyone should keep in touch with current events and be in touch with the times when listening to any of their records, but that’s simply not how everyone listens to music. That can come off as preachy, and most people are out there to have a good time.
And that’s probably why everything shifted towards bright colours one decade later. Crosby had already spent his time going through a drug stupour throughout the back half of his career, but in the age of MTV, all anyone was concerned about was watching the next bold new music video that Michael Jackson had out and how much people like Poison and Europe could tease up their hair.
But in that age of excess, Crosby could also see that people were starting to overdo it a bit too much. There was still some fantastic music being made, but outside of his own personal struggles, Crosby knew that everything wrong with the music industry could be traced back to everyone in the business getting involved with cocaine.
While Crosby is far from the first person to preach to everyone about drug dependence, he knew that cocaine was always going to be bad news looking back on how the industry shifted, saying, “The 70s were pretty interesting times. We had not gone too far down the long downhill slide of coke. I’m talking about the entire music business when I’m talking about cocaine. Everybody went down the tubes buying that. Everybody in all the companies. Everybody in all the agencies. Everybody in all the management companies. Everybody in every band. They all went down the tubes with it.”
Crosby got a firsthand education of what life was like at the bottom, but it’s not like it was prevalent everywhere else, either. Aerosmith eventually tore themselves apart of doing too many drugs and lashing out at each other, and looking at the final years of Eagles, the torture of getting The Long Run came from all of them trying to get away with getting high in the studio half the time.
Despite everyone thinking that it would have been a creative tool in the beginning, Crosby learned that it could steal away some of the best years of your life if you’re not careful. The songwriting legend might not have been trying to make an anti-drug PSA by any means, but the only reason why he felt the need to speak on it was because he understood how low things could get.
