How David Crosby quit drugs — but never got over Joni Mitchell

It took going to prison in 1986 for David Crosby to finally kick drugs, but the rock legend could never quit his beloved ex Joni Mitchell.

When I interviewed him in 2019, Crosby — who died at 81 on Thursday after a long illness — revealed that decades after Mitchell broke up with him and went on to date his Crosby, Stills & Nash bandmate Graham Nash, he still had a bad case of Joni.

“I do still love her,” Crosby said of the songbird, whom he discovered when she was playing a small Florida club in 1967. “Our relationship has always been thorny but good.’’

Indeed, it became a rocky romance for Crosby and Mitchell after he brought her back with him to Los Angeles. In fact, it was at her Laurel Canyon home where Crosby, Stills & Nash formed and wrote their classic “Our House.” 

But as Crosby details in his 2019 documentary “Remember My Name,” there was heartbreak after harmony when Mitchell dumped him by singing out her feelings in a new song she’d written. Then, in a twist making for one of rock’s greatest love triangles, Mitchell moved on with Nash, famously writing about him making her “weak in the knees” on 1971’s “River.”

Still, some 50 years after that “Blue” beauty left him, Crosby remained loyal and loving to Mitchell. Once she became reclusive, “I do see her and talk to her,” Crosby told me. “I had dinner with her at her place a couple months back.”

But quitting drugs was an uglier challenge for Crosby. While addicted to cocaine and heroin, he was convicted on drug and weapons charges in 1983. He fled, but later turned himself in and served five months in prison in 1986.

Crosby told me that prison helped him to finally kick drugs. “It’s the only thing that really worked,” he said. “I had tried going into treatment, and it didn’t work. I went into prison, and it worked. It was a s—tty way to do it.”

And when I interviewed him four years ago, Crosby was surprised that, given his drug addiction, prison stint and health issues — diabetes, a couple heart attacks and a liver transplant necessitated from hepatitis C — he had survived to see 77.

“Nobody has any clue why,” he said. “A whole lot of my friends are dead. I think my new motto is gonna be ‘Only the good die young.’ ”