The story of how David Crosby became The Beatles’ drug dealer
It might not come as much of a surprise, but a lot of David Crosby‘s interactions with The Beatles occurred when the folk legend was completely out of his gourd.
In fact, the moment that their music truly rocked him arrived when he stumbled around to see them with smoke practically coming out of his pores, creating a marijuana miasma that marked him out as a fellow firmly from Laurel Canyon. “The best thing that ever happened to me was visiting The Beatles when they were making Sgt. Pepper,” he once recalled.
The stoned as a bat musician continued: “I came in, and I was very high. They sat me down on a stool in the middle of the studio and rolled up two six-foot-tall speakers on either side of me. Then, laughing, they climbed the stairs back to the control room and left me there. And then they played ‘A Day in the Life.’ At the end of that last chord, my brains just ran out my nose onto the floor in a puddle. I didn’t know what to do, I was just stupefied.”
In some ways, this mind-dripping moment was kind of a paradigm of the three-way relationship between The Beatles, Crosby and “hippy salad”. Crosby supplied the substance, the substance inspired the band, and then the band inspired Crosby. It’s the perfect cycle of venture capitalism.
All of this eventuated in the biggest group in history, shifting the centre of popular culture towards something a little more avant-garde, a little less safe, and a little more stoned, and they just so happened to have a preeminent peer as both a dealer and a living portent that you could also take things one toke over the line.
“In England back then,” Crosby told The Los Angeles Times, “They had only hash, and they would mix it with tobacco.” But this all changed when the folk singer went touring on the other side of the pond, and inadvertently changed the nation’s drug habits forevermore. “Now, I get there, and I’m used to rolling joints with really good weed,” he continued.
As an eternal socialite, Crosby was also used to sharing his supply with his friends. So, when he met up with The Beatles, he had a lasting impact. “I give George Harrison a joint of really good weed, and he likes that a whole shitload better than hash and tobacco,” he continues. High on a heavier, cleaner supply, Harrison begins telling anyone who will listen that there’s another way to toke.
“George was like really [into it], John was even more. And then when they came over to California, of course, I was the first call, ‘Hey Cros, we need some of that! You’ve got to get over here right now’. And I did,” the ‘Music is Love’ singer recalled. For years, he was their trusted stateside supplier of smoke.
In fact, whenever the band could, they turned to Crosby for all manner of substances – who in his later years turned to growing his own array of cannabis – and they asked if he had any of his special ‘crystallised’ cache going spare. Lord knows which hits were written under the influence of his carefully honed ‘art supplies’, but in the ‘sharing is caring’ cycle, he was also the “stupefied” benefactor.
As he told MusicRadar: “I liked pop music because of The Everly Brothers, but seeing The Beatles made something else click. It changed my life. They changed my life. Let’s be very specific about that.”
But beyond the music, they also changed his life with their companionship. While he saw the Stones as “a grotesque, negative ego trip”, he saw the Fab Four as a symbol of community and harmony. And he got to witness that first hand as he floated in a swimming pool while the Liverpudlians absconded into the press-free Malibu hideaway and blew their own minds for a change.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.