Outside Counsel

A friend and I engaged in a Facebook exchange about the forthcoming release of a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young live album from 1974. I was... scornful, and the fact that he was so passionate in his defense led me to reconsider the positions I have staked out earlier. Neil Young, it should go without saying, is exempt from this discussion. His body of work is second only, perhaps, to Bob Dylan's, "Southern Man" and a few other, similar clinkers notwithstanding. Back when I was using a different commenting system someone who knew the fellas back in the Laurel Canyon days posted a remark to the effect that Graham Nash was a gentleman, and I'll accept that (even though he is responsible for the song about the two cats in the yard and the most pretentious piece of pedagogy ever committed to verse) That leaves Stephen Stills and David Crosby. I wore out my copy of Four Way Street long ago, and I wore out two copies of Stills' first solo side; the one with "Black Queen" on it. But c'mon. Stills was effectively finished after that (when was the last time you played "Manassas"?). Crosby is, if anything, an even more egregious example of lumpenproletariat hippiedom.

Even so, we try to be even handed at Outside Counsel, so I went back and revisited Stills' first solo album. I find that it holds up. We'd have called it "a good guitar album" then, and why not? It is, as far as I am aware, the only side that features the title artist jamming, on separate tracks, with both Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and if Clapton and Hendrix are a bit buried in the mix, well, who's record was it after all? Stills was, at that point, a powerful player, and an exciting singer. You might say that his songwriting was already on a downward curve, but I'm not so sure. Stills always over-relied on "dig it" and similar hippie tropisms in his song writing, even in his Buffalo Springfield days, but the emotion still came through.

I checked Christgau's evaluation and found that he gave the record a C+. This to me is harsh, but worse was what he had to say about Stephen Stills 2:  "Stills has always come on as the ultimate rich hippie--arrogant, self-pitying, sexist, shallow. Unfortunately, he's never quite fulfilled this artistic potential, but now he's approaching his true level. Flashes of brilliant ease remain--the single, "Marianne," is very nice, especially if you don't listen too hard to the lyrics--but there's also a lot of stuff on order of an all-male chorus with jazzy horns singing "It's disgusting" in perfect tuneful unison, and straight, I swear." I'd forgotten "Ecology Song"-- back then I must have mainly played the side with "Change Partners".

Stills' fall is an impressive thing to contemplate. The world is full of one-offs, but he really was good enough over a brief period to have been a much stronger contender for greatness than he turned out to be. I suppose, from a critical perspective, the key is to value the worthwhile material.