“I lucked out”: why David Crosby didn’t regret going to prison
Rock music has always been full of rotters and rascals. While you might be wondering what the difference between these two seemingly synonymous descriptors is, there’s a subtle way of separating the two that is largely defined by the severity of the individual’s misdeeds. A rotter, for example, is someone whose acts are so reprehensible that they can’t be excused and often lead to what we might now call ‘cancellation’, while rascals are those who often get themselves into hot water through occasional outbursts or mischievous acts that don’t warrant quite the same level of public scorn.
Given my flimsy explanation of the semantic difference between these two identifiers, you might now be questioning whether your own musical idols are scoring high on the rascal-o-meter or if they’re flying too close to rotter territory through their transgressions. For anyone who is a fan of the late folk icon David Crosby, I unfortunately have some complicating news for you – he flirted with being in both camps over the course of his career.
Crosby’s drug use was nothing unusual for the big names in rock music to have indulged in, and nor was his predisposition for being outspoken when it came to sharing his views on artists that he quite simply didn’t have the time of day for. However, while his cannabis advocacy and tendency to slag off other artists are the sorts of things that only deserve a slap on the wrist at most, Crosby did have a number of scrapes with the law during his career that might have been a lot more concerning to his fans.
In 1982, the songwriter was sentenced to a nine-month prison stay in Texas for possession of heroin and cocaine, and in 1985, he was arrested again for causing damage while driving under the influence of alcohol and being in possession of drugs and a firearm. If you think that he might have learned his lesson in his older age, he was searched by hotel employees who found more drugs and weapons on him and spent the night in jail before being released on bail, escaping only with a $5,000 fine.
It’s up to you whether you perceive these as being forgivable acts, but if you were to ask the man himself what he thought of having to spend time in prison for his actions, he would have told you that he had zero regrets about his experience. In an interview with Mojo in 2018, Crosby reflected upon his past errors and said that given the options he was faced with, jail time was the far more appealing solution.
“If I had the choice of going on as a junkie or going back to prison, I’d go back to prison in a second,” he told the publication. While many would question why you’d sooner want to spend time in a cell over your freedom, the freedom was Crosby’s biggest issue and was ultimately what made his addictions spiral out of control. “It only goes four ways,” he continued. “You die, you go to prison, you go crazy, and you’re incarcerated, or you quit. Those are the four options. There are no other options. So, I lucked out. I went to prison. That changed it all. All of a sudden I was no longer destroying myself, I was rebuilding myself.”
Rotter or rascal, if jail time set Crosby on a path to self-improvement, then it was ultimately one of the best things that could’ve happened to him. The harsh reality of the situation was enough to open his eyes to the error of his ways, and had he not come to this realisation, he could’ve ultimately done irreparable damage to himself and his reputation.
