Listen to the David Crosby interview

Years before he became famous, a thin, poor coffee-house singer named David Crosby fathered a child. At the time, it was a huge mistake.

“I was just a kid, man,” he says. “I couldn’t have parented a Kleenex box.”

His girlfriend – the mother – put their baby boy up for adoption, notified Crosby and moved away. Under California law, that was the last they would hear unless the child initiated contact.

“I knew he was out there and had beaten myself up some for it, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it,” Crosby says by phone from Florida between bites of his room-service breakfast. “And then, all of a sudden, there he was.”

James Raymond had started searching for his birth parents three years ago, around the time Crosby underwent a liver transplant. Imagine his surprise to find that his dad was the David Crosby, inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – as a member of the Byrds and of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

At that time, Raymond was a 30-year-old keyboard player.

“He looks at this page,” Crosby says, “and there’s my name listed as father. And he goes, `Oh, so that’s where the weird chords came from.’ I know it was a shock. He told me it was a shock.”

Their unlikely meeting – “If somebody handed it to you as a screenplay, man, you’d toss it,” Crosby says – has resulted in personal happiness for both men and a new band, CPR. The group makes its Indianapolis debut Monday at the Vogue. The next day, its self-titled debut disc will be released nationally.

Along with guitarist Jeff Pevar – the “P” in CPR – they make music that brings to mind the lush collaboration of Crosby & Nash and the jazzy leanings of Steely Dan.

Genetics may well play a part in their sound. Crosby says he sees himself in Raymond.

“Oh, yeah, he’s my kid,” Crosby says. “He’s playing all the stuff I would play if I could play. I’m not anywhere close to him as a musician.”

There’s also the physical resemblance. “He looks sort of like I did back when I used to look good,” says Crosby, who describes his current appearance by saying “I think I look like the happiest walrus you’ve met all day.”

And why not? Crosby’s life has been an alternating series of magical and unimaginably horrible chapters. This is a high point. 

He and his wife, Jan, have a 3-year-old son (Crosby also has a 23-year-old daughter by a previous marriage). CPR is “the best work I’ve done in 20 years.” And Crosby, Stills & Nash recorded six songs last month for an album they expect to release in 1999.

“I’ve made some horrendous mistakes, probably the greatest of which was wasting time,” he says. “There’s no point to regrets. What they teach you in the 12-step thing is to look at it all, learn from it and then set it down, brother. Because you can’t go forward carrying a bunch of luggage.”

So when he looks happy, it’s genuine. “I don’t gotta fake it,” he chuckles.

“You know what Neil told me?” Crosby asks, launching into an exaggerated nasal imitation of his friend and sometimes bandmate Neil Young. “He said, `I’m really happy about this band, man.’

“And I said, `Why?’

“He said, `Because it’s forward motion, man. It’s the direction you’ve always been going.’

“And I said, `It is. You’re right.’

“He said, `I know.’

“He said, `Dave, leave a wake”‘ – meaning the visible track left by a ship moving through water. Or in this case, keep moving ahead musically.

Crosby, ever the musician and sailor, knew just what he meant.