David Crosby’s days on the road are over. The 80-year-old musician declared in a newly published interview that “I’m too old to do it anymore. I’m too old to do it anymore. I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength.”
The revelation came as an almost casual aside in, of all things, a meeting with a high school class. Crosby had agreed to be interviewed by a journalism class at Golden High School in Golden, Colorado, taught by Mark Brown, the former music critic for the Denver newspaper the Rocky Mountain News.
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When one of the students asked, “Are you going to tour anymore?,” Crosby said flat-out, “No.” He elaborated: “I’m not, because I’m 80. It’s because I’m old. Being on a bus tour is a daunting task. It’s very hard. It takes it out of you.”
Crosby also said that coming down with COVID had been tough on him. “It has been awful. COVID is a very weird disease. It makes you feel absolutely freaking awful. It has been thoroughly unpleasant…it’s no fun at all. You want to avoid it if you possibly can.”
The musician was also his usual blunt self in answering other questions from the class, like one about why he has been so prolific in the recording studio in recent years, which he said was also age-related.
“I’ve been making records at a startling rate. I’ve made five albums in six, seven years. It’s an absurd rate to be cranking albums out,” he conceded. “The reason being is that I’m gonna die. I mean, we all… everybody dies. I’m sure someone told you. And I want to crank out all the music I possibly can before I do. Now I’m 80 years old so I’m gonna die fairly soon. That’s how that works. And so I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it’s really good…I have another one already in the can waiting.”
The last full show that Crosby is on record as having done on the Setlists.fm site was pre-pandemic, at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Sept. 17, 2019, where he opened for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. But he’s still up for guest appearances: Crosby sat in for a couple of numbers on Isbell’s set in Santa Barbara in February of this year.
The bulk of the interview conducted by the high school class can be read at the Best Classic Bands website, here. But the newsworthiness of Crosby telling the class he was done with touring led the site to break that out into a separate story, here.
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