Buffalo Springfield

A fate shared by so many bands of the era, Buffalo Springfield didn't last very long. Three years and three albums, but enough to secure them a place in legend. What sealed the band's fate in 1968 was drug use and, no less significantly, the stormy relationship between the group's two creative souls, Stephen Stills and Neil Young (the fallout from their clashes would also mark the experience of the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). Two frontmen locked in eternal conflict, whose artistic union nonetheless yielded overflowing results.

In truth, Buffalo Springfield could have stopped at just one album and still gone down in popular music history. Namely their eponymous 1966 full-length, home to the immense "For What It's Worth," quite possibly the most famous protest song of all time. A track inspired in Stills by the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots (better known as the Hippie Riots), yet indissolubly tied to the Vietnam War, its solemn, aching arpeggio destined to echo through film after film, documentary after documentary, for all eternity.

Buffalo Springfield truly came close to the dramatic scenario of a career ending after just one record. In fact, it was a very near thing that "Buffalo Springfield Again," the most influential and important album by the American-Canadian outfit, ever saw the light of day at all.

The Buffalo Springfield of "Again" were, all things considered, a band on the verge of splitting up. Young and Stills could barely stand each other, bassist Bruce Palmer had been arrested for drug possession and deported back to Canada, while singer-guitarist Richie Furay, who hadn't written or credited a single song on the first album, lacked the charisma to take the reins, and drummer Dewey Martin even less so. Indeed, shortly before the album's release, both Young and Palmer officially left the group for the first time. The tense, complicated situation made the recording process painfully slow and convoluted: nine long months, where a few weeks had sufficed to bring home their debut album.

Even though Palmer was smuggled back into the United States illegally to take part in the sessions, he was replaced on numerous tracks by various session players. Young and Stills preferred not to work together, so that neither appeared (in the same recording room) on the other's songs, with Furay reluctantly acting as go-between. The heavy atmosphere, the shadow of drug use, the difficult relationship between two divas like Stills and Young, and the logistical headaches — the album was recorded across no fewer than three Los Angeles studios (Sunset Sound, Columbia Recording and Gold Star) — turned the whole affair into a sort of dress rehearsal for CSN&Y's "Deja Vu," another album legendary both for its music and its anything-but-smooth gestation.

Produced over the course of 1967 by Furay, Stills and Young alongside well-known producers of the era (we'll credit them as they appear, track by track), "Buffalo Springfield Again" is a genuine cornerstone of American folk-rock, one whose maturity and character mark a clean break from much of the carefree, hedonistic rock of the time. The band members' distinct, and as noted, at times conflicting personalities make for an uneven listen, but never an incoherent or fragmentary one. It's a harmonious mosaic of songs eager to climb in the most disparate directions: country and blues roots, orchestral pop, harder-edged rock, and inevitable forays into psychedelia. The album came out, after all, at the height of the golden age of California psychedelia, and even as it pushed rock back toward tradition rather than that kind of experimentation, it couldn't help but be shaped by it.

The cold-fusion operation between rock and American musical tradition on "Buffalo Springfield Again" never loses sight of its members' political mission, channeling their attitude as frontline activists. Yet the album's lyrics don't live on politics alone, drawing often from the personal experiences and inner lives of their authors, who were just as free-flowing and unsynchronized on the page as they were musically.

Although it only reached No. 44 on the Billboard chart, the album set in motion the conquest of the American record market by rock rooted in country and folk tradition, a process that would reach its peak only a few years later with the work of Crosby Stills & Nash and Crosby Stills Nash & Young. Though uncredited, David Crosby does make an appearance, strongly wanted by his friend Stills, on the latter's track "Rock And Roll Woman", on which he sang backing vocals and co-wrote the lyrics.

The record opens entirely under the sign of Loner Neil Young, who with "Mr. Soul" brings the Rolling Stones to America, folding the British invasion into the DNA of the new American rock. The driving guitar riff is irresistible, the searing finish of the other guitars - which foreshadow the roars and effects of certain hard rock to come - is overwhelming, while the countermelody Stills and Furay offer Young is pure theatrical expressionism, injecting the song with just the right dose of madness and surrealism needed to pull off its narrative.

Written and sung by Young, the song's lyrics are entirely autobiographical, recounting an epileptic seizure the songwriter suffered during a concert with the band. Many in the audience believed it was part of the show, turning an already terrible incident into something grotesque and Kafkaesque, and pushing the Canadian to reconsider his already shaky relationship with fame and his audience.

Just as it opens "Buffalo Springfield Again", Neil Young also closes it: with "Broken Arrow". Far more theatrical and experimental than the euphoric opener, the track unfolds in three sections, each introduced by recordings of applause or jeers, in which the songwriter's emotions take shape once again in surreal images (like that of a Native American wielding the broken bow of the title). Musically, the song presents itself as a confessional piano ballad, where the Canadian's plaintive voice rides piano or acoustic guitar as needed - now rippling its notes into thrilling crescendos (first and second sections), now indulging in a wandering jazz feel (final section).

Young's most miraculous feat, however, comes at position number four in the tracklist, when, completely detaching himself from the rest of the band and instead placing himself in the hands of legendary producer Jack Nitzsche (a man who, among countless prized credits, produced the orchestral parts of Young's own "Harvest" and worked on numerous Stones hits), he delivers one of the most dazzling songs of his career, "Expecting To Fly". Arranging the song for a string section and oboe, Nitzsche gives Young's disillusioned, melancholy lyrics - which equate the end of a love affair with death - a magical, weightless setting, in which the Loner's voice seems to float like a faint light hidden in fog. In short: on this track the pair anticipate by a good thirty years the bucolic dream-pop of Mercury Rev.

Stills's contribution - and he is the band's true leader and main creative engine - is more classic and disciplined than Young's, but it's Stills who here pens at least three immortal classics of American folk-rock.

First there's "Everydays", a track mumbled by Captain Manyhands as if wrapped in the smoke and darkness of some futuristic live club, while the group blends hushed jazz passages (credit also to Jim Fielder, who replaces Palmer on bass here) with venomous blues-guitar jabs.

An atypical love song co-produced by Ahmet Ertegun (a producer who would prove crucial to the work of CS&N and CSN&Y), "Bluebird" is a phenomenal folk-rock piece in which Stills strings together blues guitars, a wild acoustic-guitar passage with Spanish overtones and, to close, a long banjo solo (played by Charlie Chin). Here too, the vocal harmonies - already central and refined on the previous album - reveal themselves as an avant-garde element; no longer mere ornament or technical showing-off, but a tool capable of giving the lyrics depth. This happens when the band, chanting the simple words Do you think she loves you/Do you think at all like a mantra, makes them emerge as if from a void, as though they were truly part of an inner dialogue.

Far cheekier, but simply textbook, are instead the harmonies of the brief "Rock & Roll Woman", a track on which Crosby goes uncredited yet makes his presence felt from the very first dudu dudu. The song is a genuine hippie anthem which, amid tangled guitar lines and bursts of organ, betrays the influence of Californian psychedelia while claiming it with real personality and renewing energy.

Written by Stills, who nonetheless sings only the chorus (the verse vocal is Furay's), "Hung Upside Down" gives no quarter. The guitars are bristling and pugnacious, never resting for a second between wails and frontal assaults, while Palmer's bass gallops through a groove brushed with drive and care by Dewey Martin. The atmosphere is so incandescent that toward the end Stills, usually less over-the-top and theatrical, allows himself yelps and hollers like a rodeo cowboy.

The long-distance duel between Stills and Young, who thanks in part to their rivalry reach (here as on "Deja Vu") unusual peaks of creativity and genius, risks overshadowing the work of the album's third mind and pen, Richie Furay. His songs, certainly the most traditional on the record both in structure and reference points, are nonetheless - besides being impeccable and crystalline in their beauty - crucial to the album's balance, lending it breathing room and country-folk grounding. Just think of the languid ballad "Sad Memory", whose crystalline calm and airy arrangements let the record's muscles rest after the unbridled "Hung Upside Down". Furay is also behind the following, spirited "Good Time Boy", sung however in Dewey Martin's bluesy voice and enriched by the spirited horns of the Memphis Horns.

Young's genius, Stills's obsession with perfection and his relentless searching, the rivalry between the two, the synergistic work of era-defining additional producers (Nitzsche and Ertegun above all), and a team of session players as sensational as could only be found in Los Angeles in those years (James Burton on dobro, Chris Sarns on guitar, Don Randi on piano, Jim Fielder on bass, Charlie Chin on banjo, Bobby West also on bass) - all these came together in an unrepeatable set of conditions that produced a landmark album in every respect, both in the intrinsic, absolute beauty of its songs and in their foundational charge for the rock still to come.

Completed solely to fulfil contractual obligations with Atco, "Last Time Around" came out the following year, an album whose epitaph-like title alone makes official the end of the Los Angeles band. The record features the group playing together on only one track ("On The Way Home"), and despite containing fine songs such as "Kind Woman" (certainly Furay's most famous song), Young's "I Am A Child" and Stills's "Questions" (a genuine bridge toward "Carry On" and thus CSN&Y), it doesn't match - nor even come close to - the genius of its predecessor.

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21/03/2021