Rock’s greatest father figure: The never-ending saga of David Crosby’s super sperm

Folk supergroup Crosby Stills and Nash famously posed for the cover of their 1969 debut album on a battered couch discovered in an abandoned house in West Hollywood. But the group’s mutton-chopped bad boy David Crosby was just as notorious for his activities in the bedroom, sleeping with hundreds of women and once telling filmmaker Cameron Crowe: “There are boundaries I crossed that you haven’t even thought of.”

With a track record like that, it is no surprise that Crosby fathered a larger-than-average number of offspring. His first child, James Redmond, was born in 1962 – long before the future folkie superstar had even found fame. The baby was placed for adoption by Crosby and James’s mother, Celia Crawford Ferguson, and would not meet his natural father until adulthood.

The twinkle-eyed troubadour was just starting and would go on to have children with his partners Jackie Guthrie and Debbie Donovan and his wife Jan Dance. And that was merely the beginning of the reproductive adventures of an artist who approached fatherhood much as he did folk music, seeing it as a special gift he wanted to share with the whole world.

Crosby, who died in 2023 aged 81, had his demons – in particular a long-running struggle with substance abuse that culminated in the 1980s in a nine-month prison stretch for possession of heroin and cocaine. However, as a songwriter he was remarkably clear-eyed. His lyrics were direct and had little time for opacity – as is obvious from his famous ballad Guinevere, where he compared a love interest to King Arthur’s significant other (“Guinevere had green eyes/Like yours, milady, like yours”).

Yet when it came to his passing on his genes, he was considerably more elusive. This explains how he came to have a leading part in a long-running and ultimately tragic mystery that gripped America in the late 1990s – one that still has a few twists left in its tail.

The saga revolved around singer Melissa Etheridge, the subject of a new Paramount+ documentary, and her then-partner Julie Cypher. They had two children by artificial insemination, with Cypher giving birth to daughter Bailey Jean in February 1997 and son Beckett in November 1998. Understandably, the couple were initially reluctant to publicly discuss the identity of the biological father, prompting enough speculation to fill an entire binder of gossip columns.

“It was beginning to get ridiculous: the speculation… the rumours… the jokes,” began a February 2000 Rolling Stone piece. “For three long years, Melissa Etheridge and her partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher, were asked the same question over and over: Who is the biological father of your two children? Once, the couple found it amusing. Then, with the release of Etheridge’s album Breakdown, the famous US rock singer’s first in more than three years, the badgering intensified.”

Badgering was one word for it. When Etheridge went on the David Letterman show to plug her record, the host was more interested in sperm than songs. “Now, I’m no geneticist, but in some regard, there must have been Daddy somewhere,” he said. “Who’s Daddy?”

Reckoning humour was the best defence, Etheridge threw her hands up in mock exasperation (concealing her genuine exasperation). “All right,” she replied, “it’s Dan Quayle” –  the much-mocked former vice president.

Nobody believed Quayle was the donor. Why would they when there were so many other potential candidates? Brad Pitt’s name was mentioned. When Etheridge jumped on stage to duet with Bruce Springsteen, everyone leaped to the conclusion that he was the biological father. At one point, the smart money was on Tom Hanks  – a Hollywood chum of Etheridge’s. This was long before the internet had entered widespread use - but the question of the parentage of Bailey and Beckett nonetheless went viral.

“Did Brad Pitt father your children?” columnist Joel Stein asked her in an interview. Etheridge let a few things slip, confirming the donor was “famous”.  “So it’s Brad Pitt,” said Stein. “Come on, it’s better if it’s Brad Pitt. It’s good for his career, for your career.”

Etheridge and Stein could take a joke – but this was ridiculous. They also resented being portrayed as secretive when they believed same-sex couples should be free to live openly and without prejudice. “We just got so tired of this secret,” Etheridge told Rolling Stone when Bailey had turned three and was about to begin school. “It wears you out. And keeping this big secret goes against how we are choosing to live our lives: very openly.”

Cypher agreed. “It was becoming a joke, more than it should have been”. And thus came the big reveal in early 2000 – that the biological father of Bailey and Beckett was… David Crosby (not that going public would do the relationship much good – Etheridge and Cypher split that September).

Crosby knew how painful it could be to struggle to have a child. He and his wife Jan Dance – to whom he had been rigorously faithful since their wedding in 1987 – had required extensive fertility treatments to have their son Django. Having been at the coal face, he wanted to help others – and it wasn’t just Etheridge and Cypher, as Etheridge would reveal following Crosby’s death. He was a donor with plenty to give, and in a new interview, Etheridge has hinted that there may be many more mini-Crosbys out there.

“They had just had help having their son and they appreciated that,” Etheridge said to People magazine. “They wanted to pay it forward. We’re still finding kids from David Crosby out in the world. My daughter’s like, “I have another half-sister”.”

Crosby kept in contact with Etheridge – but did not feel he needed to be in the lives of Bailey and Beckett on a daily basis. “To me, I didn’t want someone who wanted to be a father… I didn’t want all of a sudden my children to have…” Oh, there’s dad.’ And who am I? That sort of thing,” said Etheridge in the People interview.

“He [Crosby] not need to be [a father]. And that’s what really made it clear for me, was that he was willing to say, ‘Yeah, I was the biological father.’ And my kids call him bio dad, so he’s the biological father, but they didn’t need a relationship with him.”

Alas, this is a happy story with a tragic twist. Several years ago, Beckett became addicted to opioids – the scourge that has devastated so many lives in the United States. He was found dead in his apartment in Denver in May 2020, the victim of an overdose. Following the death, experts suggested Beckett might have inherited from his biological father’s propensity for addiction.

“Research tells us that 40-60 per cent of the risk for developing an addiction is driven by genetics,’ Emily Feinstein, the chief operating officer of the Manhattan-based Centre on Addiction, told the Daily Mail.

Just as heartbreaking was the fact Beckett’s struggles were in sharp contrast to the achievements of sister Bailey, who studied at Columbia University and became an analyst at Goldman Sachs. He, on the other hand, had gone to a school of academically challenged students and worked in a holiday resort when he passed away.

Crosby would pass away just three years later – at the conclusion of a late-career golden streak that had seen him release an acclaimed run of solo albums. In one of his final interviews, he recalled with happiness how his oldest son, James, had been shocked to learn that the father who had put him up for adoption was none other than the folk legend from Crosby Stills and Nash. In a life that contained its share of tragedy and messiness, that reconnection was an all-too-rare moment of uncomplicated joy.

“He found out it was me, which he didn’t really believe at first!” he explained. “We met up at UCLA, and normally those meet-ups go badly. One or the other brings too much anger, too much pain. He didn’t do that. He gave me a clean slate, and let me earn my way into his life. We became very, very close, and that’s a f___ing gift of gigantic proportions, man. It’s f___ing wonderful.”