The day we met David Crosby was memorable, partly because it wasn’t exactly likely that two people from the northeast of England would be in the same place at the same time as him, especially when that place is California. But also because it was in a beautiful wooded glade off Pacific Coast Highway.
We were driving to San Francisco and had pulled off that road into a coffee shop. I say coffee shop, it was more like a coffee, bread and pastry supermarket. Carricks, it wasn’t.
We had just got two coffees and were walking out. As I pushed the door open with my shoulder, there he was. Shorter and plumper than me, with a wool hat on. This was 1994. I couldn’t initially say anything. I mean you don’t expect it do you? The weird thing was he looked so familiar but here he was three dimensional, not just a picture on a page and to that extent, unfamiliar.
I held the door for him, I had to say something didn’t I? But at the same time, I knew people must say complimentary things several times a day to him and that it would mean little to him. But then, this was a special moment for us. As I’m the mouthpiece (gobshite, Dawn says) of the pair of us, I had a brief moment to say something. So what did I say?
‘Hi. We’re English.’
Bizarre though it may seem, that’s what came to my mind. ‘Great to see you,’ I added. To his credit he didn’t brush off these lunatics. ‘England? Where in England?’ he said in a surprisingly light voice. ‘Newcastle,’ Dawn said. He nodded. ‘The northeast, right? Good to see you,’ he said, smiling. And that was it. I felt like I should have said something more profound but my mind went blank.
We saw him from the car walking out with some coffee and remarked at how he really could have been anyone, just a regular person, not the man from the Byrds and CSNY.
The same thing has happened to me each time I’ve been near or met a famous person. It’s an odd thing. I'm not normally short of a word or two but I just dry up. Admittedly it’s a short eclectic list of people I’ve met. Randy California, Bette Midler, Simon LeBon, Samantha Fish, David Crosby. That’s the complete list. All except Simon LeBon were lovely, maybe I came across him on a bad day. And I could barely say a word to any of them.
Now that Croz is no more, I hold that coffee shop meeting with him as a treasured memory and one which I can scarcely believe actually happened.
Photo by David Gans. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0
