Making Sweet Music out of Life’s Hard Lessons

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — “This song’s about trying to process everything that’s happened to me in the last few years,” David Crosby said by way of introducing “This Time” on Saturday at the Coach House.

Truth be told, given everything that has happened to him, from drug addiction and his stint in prison to a liver transplant and fatherhood in his 50s, he could justify a triple album trying to process it and still not cover it all.

The important thing is that he’s still learning from his mistakes--and many of his are doozies--and in doing so has created some of the best music of his long, strange career.

He alluded to his 1994 liver transplant and the birth of his son Django, who’s now 18 months old, when he added: “I didn’t realize how hard it would be to write about having a brand-new baby and almost dying, but eventually, several truths appeared to me.”

Then he sang “This Time,” a heartfelt ballad that alternated between feelings of sheer joy and utter powerlessness. With his weathered but sturdy voice, he captured the moment when he realized: “There comes a time when you’ll give anything / To live just one more hour.”

The show started a three-week West Coast tour, which also stops Tuesday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana. Naturally, he dug into the archives for such obligatory Crosby, Stills & Nash staples as “Wooden Ships,” “Guinnevere” and “Long Time Gone.”

But these oldies, despite being the set’s biggest crowd-pleasers, took a back seat to the handful of new songs and more obscure gems from his past that provided the emotional heart of the show.

Other strong new material included “Somehow She Knew,” which explores the emotional cost--but ultimate reward--of facing one’s worst fears, and “Morrison,” Crosby’s take on the tortured soul of Doors singer Jim Morrison (“I knew and detested Jim,” he said in introducing the song, “but I think I understood some of his demons”).

Wisely, Crosby bypassed much of his past subpar solo material to include some rarely played numbers from his duo recordings with Graham Nash.

Of these, both “Homeward” and “Naked In the Rain” fit neatly within the concert’s thematic context. Crosby used a metaphor for his own emotional nakedness when he sang in a fragile, delicate whisper: “Just when you think you’re going insane / You lie naked in the rain.”

Many of the pleasant surprises stemmed from Crosby’s willingness to try something for the first time, and that included his band.

Along with guitarist Jeff Pevar, who has been accompanying Crosby in concert in recent years, Crosby introduced keyboardist James Raymond: “Now James here is a brand-new discovery--and he’s also my son. I’ve met a grown son I’d never known before.” (Raymond, who was adopted as a baby, started searching for his birth parents a few years ago and discovered that Crosby was his biological father. He contacted him shortly before the liver transplant and started a relationship that has continued since.)

Pevar and Raymond provided smooth-sounding vocal harmonies as well as impressive instrumental chops during the 2 1/4-hour show.

Pevar’s modern-sounding guitar stylings used rich, vibrant tones and recalled Larry Carlton with their often jazzy, bluesy underpinnings. Raymond showed a deft touch with nimble flourishes on his keyboards and sang lead on a composition of his own, a passable love song entitled “One For Every Moment.”

The concert also included doses of the famed Crosby wit.

After asking a technician to adjust his microphone, he turned to the audience and confessed: “All [of my] sound men are terrified because I threaten them: I tell ‘em if they don’t do perfect work, I’ll send them to Neil [Young]. And then they come back deaf.”

* David Crosby with Jeff Pevar and James Raymond, plus opening act Anastasia & John, perform Tuesday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $29.50-$31.50 (714) 957-0600. Also Friday at the House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. 10 p.m. $26.50. (213) 848-5100.