Another return for rock 'n' roll's great survivor

David Crosby is on the phone from somewhere in Holland

David Crosby is on the phone from somewhere in Holland. You have a visual image of him in a hotel room smelling of incense as he ambles around and replenishes the joss sticks.

Crosby has teetered on the brink of death for most of the past two decades. After all he has been through, you have an instinctive need to ask the old hippy, now 60 years old, how he is keeping.

"I'm doing great . . . man," he whispers in his laid-back Californian drawl.

Really great man. The good news is that David Crosby is still among us. But only by the length of one of his trademark walrus whiskers. The 1960s superhippy, who played at Woodstock and pioneered West Coast psychedelia, has survived a dangerously excessive cocaine addiction, a prison term, a serious motorbike accident, a seven-hour liver transplant operation and an earthquake which destroyed his Californian home.

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Rock stars are supposed to live dangerously, of course. But Crosby, a founder member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) has been closer to the edge more often than anyone else. If all the rock icons of the past 30 years were forced to take part in the TV series Survivor, you would bet your house on Crosby being the last one left on the island.

He would probably ask you - in his laid-back Californian way - what all the fuss was about . . . man.

Crosby's personal life might also be described as colourful. Two years ago, Crosby fathered a child for rock star Melissa Etheridge and her female lover. Etheridge, a Bryan Adams soundalike, is a lesbian icon in the US. She once joked to David Letterman that Dan Quayle was actually the father. When Crosby's name was revealed, it unleashed a huge wave of comment and controversy in the US, not least because Crosby has been married for 13 years.

Crosby prefers not to talk about it. These things are ephemeral, he says.

There are other tall tales from the Crosby CV. He only discovered in 1995 that he had a son, James Raymond, then in his early 30s. By a wonderful twist of fate - or, perhaps, something more to do with genetics - James was already a well-established singer-songwriter playing music not dissimilar to that pioneered by his father in the 1960s.

These days, James Raymond tours with Crosby and another musician, Jeff Pevar, a stellar guitarist who has played with Ray Charles, Joe Cocker and the hugely underrated songwriter Marc Cohn. CPR (Crosby, Pevar, Raymond) is the latest showcase for David Crosby's extraordinary talent. It is a long way from a supergroup such as CSNY, but Crosby is unfussed. "I know it won't make me a dime, but we are playing the music we want to play and that is what matters. All I care about is the quality of the music. And we are playing great fucking music."

On the phone, Crosby sounds relaxed and mellow. He is very courteous and friendly but his language is frozen in time. Every sentence ends with the term man - as in, hey man, no man, no way man. It is like watching the movie Almost Famous, except this is a real-life hippy from the 1960s, still doing his thing, man, as they used to say.

Crosby, by virtue of his association with super-heavyweights such as Neil Young and Stephen Stills, has always been an underrated figure. He is a father figure of what used to be called folk rock, a pioneer of the shimmering three-part harmonies that propelled The Byrds, CSNY and a host of paler imitations to superstardom. His 1971 album If Only I Could Remember My Name remains a cult classic.

These days, Crosby struggles to get his music heard on radio in the US and, as he readily admits, he is hardly cute enough or young enough for MTV. The classic rock stations will play the old hits, such as Almost Cut My Hair - written in response to the assassination of Robert Kennedy - but the new stuff must seek out its own audience.

Today he is in Holland playing small-time venues. Holland, Italy and Ireland, he says, are the three places where people really love their music. The tour has been going "spectacularly well", he declares with youthful enthusiasm.

His last memory of Ireland was meeting his "old friend" Paul Brady, around the time his autobiography Long Time Gone was published, more than a decade ago. Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, a great many joss sticks have been burnt. He is not planning an update, but has completed a second book, Stand Up and Be Counted, about the interface between politics and music. It includes interviews with such luminaries as Don Henley and Shawn Colvin.

His father may have been an Oscar-winning cinematographer, but there are no plans, he says, for a movie on his life. There was some loose talk about a TV movie, but he was not sold on the idea. He would like the full- screen, technicolour version and Brad Pitt taking the lead. It would, assuredly, have to be someone who is truly larger than life itself.

CPR - Crosby, Pevar and Raymond play Dublin's Vicar Street tomorrow night

Just Like Gravity by CPR is released in the US by Gold Circle