“There’s only four answers if you get really, really strung out—you die, or you go into a mental institution, or you go to prison, or you quit.”

David Crosby

All recovering drug addicts. Not sure you can actually ever be a recovered drug addict, you are recovering all the time, no matter how long it’s been since you had your last dose.

This weekend has had so many unexpected signs from BMF. So much 57.

I was randomly scrolling through Amazon Prime looking for something interesting. BAM! I watched the movie “CBGB”. We had watched it before and liked it. It’s still good. It flooded me with BMFisms and it made me sad sometimes. Not so much because of him but more because that was a time that isn’t likely to happen again for me in my lifetime. I had my punk rock life with him and it’s not the same without him.

But then I came across a documentary about Betty Blowtorch. This is a story about a hard core female band. At the time there was a filmmaker documenting them as they blew fire and were the female version of Motley Crue. During that filmmaking the lead singer was killed in a car accident in New Orleans while on tour with Nashville Pussy. It’s a poignant story. Watch the film.

Watching this sent me into a torrent of research trying to determine the exact information for our timeline. Funny how I couldn’t find anything about that exact date. But it all matches up now and finally located it on one of their archived websites. But how it relates to us is that when BMF arrived in Atlanta the day after Thanksgiving in 2001, we went the very next night to go see Nashville Pussy at the Echo Lounge. Betty Blowtorch and The Evils were on tour with them at the time. We didn’t know anything about Betty Blowtorch until that night and we ended up partying after the show. BMF was smitten to say the least and she was a very sweet person and happy to give anyone attention who liked her band. And he did like her band. It was a fun time that I had memories tucked back but couldn’t remember the dates and time sequence and seeing the movie put that all together for me. I remember we learned she was killed just a couple weeks after we saw her band and how BMF became friends with Ritchie the roadie that Nashville Pussy had loaned them. What we didn’t know is she was a recovering drug addict and her history is full of tragedy. And she wound up dying on the fringe of her disease and lifestyle, not by her own, but by someone else’s. I remember she was a happy and smiling after the show, flirting with everyone, male and female but she wasn’t drunk or high. She was just living her dream. My god now it makes sense in the sequence of everything and everything relates back eventually. What happened to her could have happened to us more than once, drunk driving, but it wasn’t our path to destruction. This is 18 years since her unexpected death and 3 years since his unexpected death. Both of these people trying hard every day to stay recovered from the lowest point of their drug addictions. I’m pretty sure that’s how he ended up coming to me. He was strung out and had to get somewhere safer and I was his predestined chance.

Then last night I went to see David Crosby at Variety Playhouse. I bought these tickets about 3 months ago for some reason. I never really was a huge Crosby, Stills, Nash fan. But of course I appreciated their mad musical skills and song writing. But David Crosby is 77 years old now. I did not know what to expect. So we went and what we got was incredible. The man might be 77 but if not for his white hair and his old man clothes I could see his youth in the music. It was beautiful and David Crosby is a genuine person. I’ve added him to my wish list of dinner guests and topical conversation. I’m not sure how he and John Lydon would get along but I think he and Jimmy Carter would be earth shaking.

During the show he told a story about how every junkie gets to a point of being so strung out they realize they have to do something. It took time in prison for Crosby and he doesn’t understand why he is still here when so many of his peers didn’t make it. David Crosby should be dead but he’s not.

This song made me feel so emotional and in tune with how it must have felt for BMF when he was at the end of strung out self, abandoned at a Walmart in Texas by a drug dealer who took his car and all his possessions and disappeared. He called me in desperation. He needed money to get somewhere. He needed to start putting one foot in front of the other to get somewhere. I told him I would send him $150 by Western Union and I did. I didn’t know what he would really do. I just knew I needed to help him at that exact moment in time.

The song was “That House”. (finally I found it thanks to Christie!) The song is only poignant because of the story Crosby told about getting tired of being strung out. I wish I could have recorded his words. The song makes all the sense in the world to me now. This was BMF at that moment he was tired of it too. It’s true lightning strikes again and again.

That House (5:25)
Words: David Crosby
Music: CPR

You could have heard a pin drop in that house
Someone was crying somewhere
Into a pillow that it wasn’t fair
It got lost somewhere
You couldn’t take your heart out in that house

It just might not want to beat again
A storm is pounding on the roof outside
Like something died

You couldn’t take you heart out in that house
Water dripping in the sink
I’m tired of crying you start to think
The sound leads to the kitchen
Kitchen leads to door and you think I must not live here anymore

Repeat Chorus (3x)

Then you walk
Walk on down to the street
Keep walking

You put one foot down, in
Front of the other (repeat)

David Crosby Buddha on the Hill

‘David Crosby: Remember My Name’

This is not last night’s concert but from the same tour in 2017. Its the playlist and video connections to the songs. This is what happens when I’m trying to find that one song that connected. He said the name of the song when he finished his story but I did not hear it. I’ll find it.

“Eight Miles High” from 5/26/19 show at Variety Playhouse.

3. “Carry Me”
Drawn from the circumstances surrounding his last hospital visits to his mother as she faced her final gruelling battle with cancer, “Carry Me” is one of the most beautiful songs of Crosby’s cannon. The sense of liberation, of setting oneself free from these earthly bonds, becomes anthemic in its own way, its chorus an uplifting call to arms, a beckoning for every restless spirit yearning to separate from the bonds of Mother Earth and soar towards new heights, if even in a metaphysical sense. David Crosby – Carry Me 03/17/1984 00:26 / 04:46

“Put one foot down in front of the other. You could have heard a pin drop in that house. Someone was crying somewhere. I must not live here anymore.”

And he started walking, one foot down in front of the other, walking out toward me. I never want to forget how this feels in my memory. How did this man get to me? My angel.

He was able to take his heart out for me, especially when I needed it so much I wouldn’t know then that he needed it more.