Father Dearest

08/13/2001 8:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Sylvie Simmons

It's been said before but, sitting across a coffee table from him in a hotel room, LAUNCH feels compelled to say it again: John Lennon was wrong; the walrus is David Crosby, a hippy sultan in blue jeans and with a fine brace of silver mustache, bright eyes, razor-sharp mind, and a new album with his current band CPR to promote. Tonight Crosby, Jeff Pevar, and James Raymond are playing one of two sold-out shows in London. What keeps the 60-year-old rock legend going is an equal dose of music and that alarming pile of pill bottles on the dresser opposite. "If I stop taking them, I die," he says matter-of-factly. It's the aftermath of his liver transplant six years ago.

He was getting prepped for the operation when he received a letter that began, "Hi, we're John and Madeleine Raymond and we raised your son James. He's a really wonderful boy, and we know that there's a pretty good chance you won't make it and we think it would be a terrible shame if James didn't get to meet you." When he had recovered enough, Crosby called them up, and James came to the hospital to meet him. James resulted from a brief affair when Crosby was still in his late teens with "a nice lady who now lives in Australia. James and I linked up very heavily. I think some of it has to do with being able to speak two languages: We talk English and we talk music."

His son was already a successful working musician and producer and about to get married when he decided to find out who his genetic parents were. "When he saw my name on the birth certificate he went, 'Ah, no, come on!' And then he said, 'Well, maybe it is.' We arranged to meet when I was having my stitches taken out. I was very worried. He could have shown up with bright orange hair and a bone through his nose and said, 'WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME AND MOM?!?' But he didn't. He gave me a clean slate. I, needless to say, was kinda choked up and said, 'Er...er...er', and he said, 'I've had a good life, my parents loved me, I've never been hungry, no harm has come to me.' In essence, he was going, 'Let's see, you hurt right here.' For all those years I knew there was a kid out there and I had wondered if he was OK, and he assuaged all of that. Of the two of us, there is no question that he is the more mature!"

Getting together in a harmony group was only natural. "I started singing harmony when I was about 6 years old with my family. We had The Fireside Book Of Folk Songs and my brother played guitar, my father played mandolin, and we used to sit around and sing--in Los Angeles, of all places! It wasn't even Appalachia!" Blood relations, he says, make perfect harmonists: "Listen to the Everly Brothers! James and I can edge up into a tone together, and it's pretty scary."

Crosby's reunion with his first-born came around the same time that his wife Jan gave birth to their son Django. The proud father shows off photos of a beautiful young boy. As well as having a much older half-brother, Django--"who loves to sing"--has two younger musical half-siblings courtesy of Melissa Etheridge and her onetime partner Julie. Unable, as lesbians, to find a sperm donor, Jan Crosby volunteered her husband's services. "Which kinda shocked me, because she didn't ask me first! I thought about it for a couple of seconds and I said yeah. I like both of them a lot and I was perfectly willing to do it. And after they had Bailey, a spectacular child, they said, 'Er, could we maybe...er, do you think you could...?' And I said sure, and they had a second."

Has there been a rush on his services since? "$50,000 for a straw of David Crosby's sperm? No, he laughs. "They haven't put me out at stud yet!" Nor have they put him out to pasture. Later that evening, after playing a stunning two and a half hour-set, the crowd was still baying for more.

Explains Crosby, "There's a certain point, if you do it really well, where the people in a band submit their individuality and ego to something bigger--they link up and all of a sudden this bubble pops into existence where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's magic."