American Buffalo (Page 3)

Naming themselves after a logo Stills spotted on a steamroller, they were late for the party that was already cresting toward the Summer of Love and Woodstock, but they quickly made up for lost time and joined the central cast. Soul music was their touchstone; it wasn't just an accident that they recorded for Atlantic Records, a big indie label that made its fame by recording black artists from Joe Turner to Solomon Burke. And in the mid-1960s, soul music ruled the dance floors of America. The Rascals and the Righteous Brothers lifted blue-eyed soul into artistic and commercial payoff. Even whitebread folk-rockers like the Byrds were, thanks to Gram Parsons, countrifying soul hits like "You Don't Miss Your Water."

Neil Young, by contrast, wrote "Mr. Soul," a fierce attack on celebrity (including his own) and the record biz; his wispy vibrato rode with metalloid and country guitars over thundering Four Tops-style bass. He also wrote "Burned": "Been burned," he yelps, "and with both feet on the ground," a characteristic verbal incongruity backed by musical incongruity. Chugging Motown bass and honky-tonk piano share center soundstage: The piano takes a just-enough-out-of-tune solo, followed by Hawaiian-flavored slide guitar, which downshifts into a Beatles-knockoff rideout. This was the band's second single.

With its demos and remixed and finished tracks, Buffalo Springfield amply demonstrates how explosive and creative the band's chemistry could be. It leaves a curious fan wanting more when a more casual fan has had more than enough. In me, it inspires a list of highlights:

Two Young demos of early interior dreamscapes--the painfully ethereal "Out of My Mind" and vulnerable "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong." The tight-wound Stills-Furay harmonies and beautiful acoustic simplicity on the demo for "Baby Don't Scold Me," ultimately released as a mix of stiff Supremes' drumbeats, reverb and psychedelic guitar raunch that overshadowed the bittersweet lyrics. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing," an early Young art-rocker with twining guitars, opaque lyrics and a time-signature shift that highlights Furay's unpleasantly blocky phrasing. The massed-guitar country-rock and Miles Standish love triangle of "Go and Say Goodbye." The r&b goodtime feel of Stills's "Hot Dusty Roads," with its heavily treated guitar solo and whimsical genre twist: "I don't tell no tales about no hot dusty roads/I'm a city boy and I stay at home." The Zombies-ish jazz-bossa inflections of "Pretty Girl Why," and the walking bass and jazzy modal drone of "Everydays," cut more than a year before Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. The guitar-orchestra suite called "Bluebird." The drippy psychedelic orchestration and Moody Blues-like choir on "Expecting to Fly." The vocal handoff, straight out of two-tenor gospel groups, on "Hung Upside Down," where Furay's soulful lead yields the chorus to Still's raunchy wails. The gently stinging ironies of "A Child's Claim to Fame," underlined by hired hand James Burton's dobro solo. (Burton played guitar with Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons.) The galloping drive and stinging guitar lines of "Rock and Roll Woman" that leave you feeling like you've just danced with a truck. The Dylan-modeled imagery and phrasing of Young's demos like "The Rent Is Always Due." The art-house melodrama and Sgt. Pepper orchestration of "Broken Arrow." The dark blues of Stills's husky musings and piano on the demo for "Four Days Gone." The punk flipping the bird to convention of "Special Care," where Stills plays all the instruments but drums.

That last cut is from Last Time Around, which was recorded over nearly a year; as time wore on, the band was disintegrating, as the Beatles did during the White Album. Stills and Young started producing their own sessions; Stills sang and played nearly all the parts on cuts like "Questions," here a biting soul-rocker with blues-drenched vocals, later cutely rearranged as a harmony piece for Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Young was out of the Springfield when they appeared at Monterey Pop, the June 1967 fete launching the Summer of Love. He was back for the Topanga Canyon bust. His bandmates would recombine: latter-day bassist/engineer Jim Messina with Richie Furay in Poco; Stills with the Byrds' David Crosby and later Young again. They'd all pursue solo careers: Young most spectacularly, Stills with solo projects and co-op ventures like "Super Session," which joined him with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. Meantime, Buffalo Springfield became a legend.

Is the boxed set an effective representation of the legend? Well, it's got the same middle-finger whimsy the group itself had: The booklet, perhaps as a tipoff to its sensibility, opens with a Wallace Stevens-inspired page titled "Various Accounts of Their Meeting in Hollywood." And it's taken ten years to put together because of the same old egos. It's definitely worth complaining that the twenty-six duplicated album cuts could have been replaced by additional rarities. The booklet's sometimes hard-to-read design, a postmodern swirl of artfully collaged documents and pictures, leaves misinterpretation rampant, though the one-page historical essay by Pete Long is fact-packed. The fan's-eye view by Ken Viola jumps disconcertingly around the booklet. The discographical annotation is complete but could use explication. And there's a complete tour schedule, which ends with Buffalo Springfield opening for the Beach Boys and Strawberry Alarm Clock on the last 1968 tour. It's worth recalling that at just about the same time, Jimi Hendrix was opening a tour for the Monkees.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.