Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it [Hardcover]

David Crosby (Author), Carl Gottlieb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2006

David Crosby, the outspoken founding member of CSNY and The Byrds, turns his wry and unstinting eye to a fascinating, prickly subject: himself.

Known to millions as the trickster poster boy for folkrock utopia and the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's wild-eyed antihero in the film Easy Rider, David Crosby is every bit the quintessential American icon of the counterculture today that he was in the sixties and seventies. Legendary, controversial, beloved, he is never far from the headlines, as the upcoming (Summer 2006) 50-city reunion tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young will demonstrate once again.

Since Then is both a self-skewering look at the twists and turns of an impossibly rich life, and Crosby's confident declaration that it's far too soon for him to don the robe and slippers of Generational Elder. As a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he has an unparalleled legacy as a singer, songwriter, and musician-and few would object if he were to rest on his laurels. Yet despite Crosby's history of extravagant excess, he's never forgotten his great good fortune, and has never stopped using his enormous gifts in service of both his art and social causes to which he is committed.

This memoir shows the contradictory aspects to a personality whose truth-to-power outspokenness, exuberance, and creativity have made him a great and inspirational artist, yet whose struggles with private demons have resulted in arrests, chronic health issues, and ruined friendships. It discusses frankly the people and events that have drastically altered his definition of "family": raising ten-year-old son Django, with lover/wife/partner, Jan; reuniting with his adult son, musician James Raymond, while Crosby waited in the hospital for a life-saving liver transplant; becoming sperm donor to Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher. Above all, it illuminates how, despite a staggering series of personal setbacks-including hepatitis C, liver failure, diabetes, heart attacks, and a crippling motorcycle accident-the music, and the people he loves, keep him young at heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

It's been 18 years since Crosby and Gottlieb's first tome on the former's lurid rock-star life, Long Time Gone (1988), and the Croz hasn't stopped making news. He survived an earthquake and near-death experiences involving a motorcycle, hepatic failure, and arterial disease. He has done exemplary service as a major, major substance abuser who cleaned up; returned to recording and performing with Nash, Stills, and sometimes even Young; been arrested in New York City for possessing a gun and some weed; endured the recovered drug-abuser community's tut-tutting over his "fall" after 16 years' sobriety; and become a celebrity political activist. Less known but well reported here, Crosby lost all his money (his manager-accountant had an investing jones that he slaked with his clients' cash) just as the earthquake hit and a liver transplant loomed. He met a son given up for adoption as an infant in 1961--and formed a new band with him--and then a daughter from another relationship. He and his fellow ex-abuser wife, Jan, finally succeeded in having a child, now 11. His estranged and hermetic older brother died a suicide. He joined a fight (still not over) against a land deal that would put a casino in his backyard. All that, and personal assessments of the popular music biz (interesting) and the political situation (standard so-called lefty ranting, not well informed), with the whole shebang presented in movielike achronology and bolstered by plenty of Crosby acquaintances' interpolated testimonies, makes for a packed but absorbing book. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

David Crosby, the legendary singer/songwriter/ rock-and-roll bandleader from The Byrds (Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the psychedelic classic "Eight Miles High") and the "first initial" of the legendary Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, is a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Throughout his career, from its beginnings in the socially conscious burgeoning California folk scene in the early sixties, his surprising views on gun control, his recovery from drug abuse and deteriorating health, and his influence on a whole new generation of folk-oriented singer/songwriters, Crosby has remained an icon of counterculture, an advocate for social responsibility, and a thorn in the side of hypocrites of all stripes.

Carl Gottlieb wrote the screenplay for Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg; directed the Steve Martin short film The Absent-Minded Waiter, which was nominated for an Academy Award; won an Emmy Award for his work on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour; and coauthored Long Time Gone with David Crosby, a New York Times bestseller. Other writing credits include such classic TV sitcoms as All in the Family, Laverne & Shirley, and The Bob Newhart Show.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; 1ST edition (November 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399153810
• ISBN-13: 978-0399153815
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #626,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Significant Loss of Credibility, May 10, 2007

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o dubhthaigh (north rustico, pei, canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it (Hardcover)

One of the pivotal scenes in the DVD, "Daylight Again," occurs when Stills pours a full cooler of ice water on a coked out Crosby and calls him a hyppocrite. Midway through this amusing follow up of sorts to his harrowing and hillarious first book, Crosby wonders why anyone would be in a band with Stephen Stills if they didn't have to. I suspect that's the pot calling the kettle....
While I await Stills' rebuttal, I'll tell you that this book again is suffused with Crosby's ironic sense of humour and interesting insights on what life on the road is really like. He is also genuinely lucky and knows it. His brother was tragically off his rocker, yet David seems to have an aura of charm that rescues him at very nearly every moment. He is not ungrateful, yet he also comes across as picking and choosing what he wants to learn from his close encounters of the terminal kind. I have an aunt like that. Anyway, seriously concerned that there is an abiding perception that he got a liver transplant because he was David Crosby, he is also very forthcoming in explaining the process and the anxieties, especially in his case as they were interwoven with IRS and management issues, and earthquake and fire, and a slew of children who were surfacing or being conceived at unprecedented rate, even for Southern California.
Julie Cypher's account of being inseminated with David's sperm is almost like I Love Lucy in its preposterousness. Chris Hillman's loyalty to Crosby at a financial low point is strianed because they are diametrically opposed politically and socially. Crosby loves contradiction. I can think of no better partner for Stills. Even Nash intones that being David's friend is not the hippie picnic one imagines. Unrelentingly in love with himself as well as his wife and many children, Crosby is the perfect bad boy that you can not help but adore. And he knows it. It seems that urge to get in trouble has been his life long mantra for attention.
It surfaces towards the end of the book when he admits to going back on the weed and toting guns. What is a fat, balding, out of shape, diabetic singer songwriter with the finest voice in music still smoking dope and carrying a .45 for? Has he latent desires to move into hip-hop. You get the usual apologia - it's safer than alcohol and doesn't damage your liver. True enough, fatso, but it does impact your pancreas and you are a diabetic... His most inane, and typically dope-addled statement, comes when he states that he would rather his beloved song Django (jayzuz, I hope that kid gets through school OK) smoke dope, his dope coz he has the really good stuff, than drink. How about not at all, genius? That's not in the program.
Crosby is perfectly correct in stating that you can not base your sobriety on someone else's. Exactly. What's disappointing is that he doesn't get it that having been through what he has been through, he needs to be clean and sober and straight. FOR HIM. and then maybe for his wife and son. DC gets busted in NYC for carrying pot and a gun and the wind it takes out of your sails is palpable. You feel very disappointed in him. Again.
Mind you, of the four of them, his songs ahave always had the most depth and intricacy and have been the most compelling. It is no accident that as he has gone back to weed, he's also stopped writing. That he had to be arrested in front o his son, James Raymond, as gifted a writer and singer as his father, led to the demise of CPR. How you live with yourself after that embarrassment, how that doesn't convince you that you must change, I do not know. It undercuts the compelling ideological positions he takes, and while an ad hominem argument is not a valid counter attack on a position, he is clearly dancing on marbles.
I get it that he is in pain, that he doesn't want to be addicted to narcotic pain killers. Still, he is the one who has inflicted all of his ailments upon himself, and you'd think he would put that same effort into taking care of himslef for whatever number of years he has left so that his expanding brood might look at him as a man who overcame the demons he once embraced.
In both this book and the last, Crosby declines to name who in his circle of acquaintences are the dealers, the gophers. Maybe that's why he carries a gun. He speaks of a break in and talks of how ready eh and his wife were to return fire. Nice. Wooden Ships. Moving to someplace like Nova Scotia must be out of the question. He wants to be near the mouth of the monster and must get some vicarious thrill from it. More's the pity. He is genuinely a very gifted and bright artist. His music is sublime. But how anyone would be in a band with David Crosby unless they had to be, I don't know...

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Backstory, December 19, 2006

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S. Bove "sbb" (Mill Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it (Hardcover)

In Aspen Colorado a few years ago at xmas, I came across a poster advertising a concert given by CPR featuring David Crosby. CPR? CSN+/-Y, yes, but...Pevar and Raymond? Hmmm. MUST be sold out. Box office lady: tickets are available. Hmm, doesn't that mean this will suck? "No, its because it's the 23rd and most folks don't show up in Aspen till the 26th, and this concert was a last minute booking, it should be a real treat." I buy two tickets.

Night of the show, sold out, killer crowd, my date bailed due to a dinner party, i gave the other ticket to someone on the street (proves I had no idea what was in store, bc if I had I would have been calling friends all over town), went inside, worried, what will Mr. Crosby's voice sound like these days. Didn't he almost die about ten times over the past years, and who are these guys he's playing with?

1st thing, Pevar is playing with the warm up band, and he's just amazing even though I don't know its him till intermisson. Then the show. David emerges...a white haired sage from a medieval movie, his buddha's "Hello" as he walks onto stage just somehow instantly heartwarming. There's a big drum set, a bass player, a young keyboardist. Great energy in the room. Then, an explosion of pure voices in the high altitude air, jazzy, complex, rich music, David's voice faltering every once in a while due to the altitude (8,000 feet), but lent a clarity in the upper registers that I've never heard before. The drummer is killer. The bass player solid & perfect. Pevar, spectacular. And the keyboardist is James Raymond, Crosby's son (!?) -- and there is a palpable loving energy between them. Song after amazing song, one of the nicest musical nights of my life. All a suprise.

That evening was a gateway for me into the world of Neil Young's solo work, the many CPR recordings, a few more CPR concerts, a benefit concert with Crosby/Nash/Raymond/Pevar in Solvang, and all the non-hit CSN/Y stuff I'd never really listened to. But ever since then, I've been wondering: how did David have a son by a different last name and what is their relationship beyond their wondeful musical collaboration? How did he find Pevar? Who is Pevar? How did drummer Stevie Stanislau find them? What is up with Neil Young? What complex and amazing story was playing out on that stage that made it so magical? Was it magical, or was I just imagining it?

Well, for me, this book is a continuation of the gift I received that evening. It explains the remarkable story of David's recent years picking up around the Jan. 1994 Northridge earthquake. Like Crosby's music, the life is complex, authentic, maddening, hilarious, uplifting, and unimaginable -- which is why you have to read the book. So many great moments and stories. So interesting to watch this man evolve and wear his life's mantle as a messenger/sentinel with such humor/wit/grace through triumph and tragedy alike. So wonderful to get to know all the incredible people in his life. I loved it!

Ps: The story about how, recently reuintied, James plays David a tape of a song he composed to accompany some lyrics David tossed to him about Jim Morrison...David goes to Jame's house and they listen to the tape in James' beat up pick up truck b/c his house stereo isn't as good while his wife watches them, heart in throat, from inside the house, and David is blown away and realizing his son is a very gifted man who he really wants to work with alot more. Well, that was one of the sweetest things I've ever read.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Still on the Planet, But this Book lacks the Soul of his First, June 11, 2007

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PHILIP S WOLF (SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, CA. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it (Hardcover)

I had purchased two tickets ( At $201.00 a Piece, from Ticketronarrippoff ) to see CSN & Y play in the Harveys Casino parking lot ( ANOTHER RIP-OFF ) as it is a LOUSY VENUE with HORRIBLE ACOUSTICS.
After parking the car, as close as we were gonna get, my wife, two friends and myself walked through Harrahs Casino towards the show. Passing the smoke shop, one of our friends gasps: "I just saw David Crosby in the smoke shop and he was snorting something." Like a flash, I backpedaled to the scene of the crime, and there he was: The Cros', this was my third encounter with the man in person. After 37 years, and dozens of shows, and still in awe of his powers, all I could muster up was: "Have a great show, David." His reply was: "Thank you, it's hot out there today".
Needless to report, the concert was great, and David, bravely stood his ground on the right side of the stage and spent most of the show watching Neil Young play and sing like a man possessed... ( Against George W. Bunk ).

David's third book: "Since Then" is mainly about the events in his life since the publication of his first book: "Long Time Gone", (released in 1989.) To put out there and be frank about it, this one is not the: "gripping yarn" the first book was. There is still a lot of controversy surrounding such events as his liver transplant, when a normal guy would have not been 'bumped-up' on the transplant list like a big name celebrity such as David, and that normal guy would be dead now.
The entire "sperm-donor" incident was only news because David & Melissa Etheridge, dropped that story on the doors of Rolling Stone magazine. The: "David, and the gun story" is as dumb as anything that happened to Crosby during his: "crack fiend" years. It's harder to connect to David's big mistakes and mis-steps, after everything that we already know about him, and if he want's to snort, smoke or shoot-up anything today, that's his personal business...BUT if he want's to write additional books of his life I hope they will be more interesting than: "Since Then".

I am still a fan of David, I do hope he will continue to release great music, such as CPR, and tour and give us those nights of magic on stage. But, I will be just a little slower on the draw in purchasing his books if they are like this one... it's just O.K.
Three Stars.