Milking a profitable thing is a fine and honorable tradition in pop music, but like most crass things it tends to lose its charm fast. The past couple of years have seen the ubiquitous nebulas of musicians surrounding Cocker-Russell-Delaney & Bonnie milked almost to death. And if some of this year's best sellers are any indication, the immediate future will probably see both the overtaxed nostalgia for Buffalo Springfield and whatever Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young may ever have represented, throttled by greed and ego right into the same faddist bone-yard as the likes of Grand Funk.
After Dewey Martin's Medicine Ball, it was only a matter of time till Bruce Palmer, long-obscure Springfield
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bassist, recorded an album. And meanwhile, with the Pud Princes' great double live set waiting in the wings, the glories of Stills' solo effort have been followed, sure as a Rolling Stone interview, by an even more personal revelation from Crosby. Similar in several ways, the new Crosby and Palmer albums mainly go to show that whether you take the high road or the low, a super-jammed ego trip remains just that.
Crosby's album, though the better of the two, is not likely to go down in history, but it is not a bad album. While it's true that it all sounds pretty much the same, we must also note that nothing really jars. In fact, it would make a perfect aural aid to digestion when you're having guests over for dinner, provided they're brothers and sisters enough to get behind it, of course. The playing is sloppy as hell, very modal-funky and guitar centered, somewhat reminiscent of Alexander Spence's great Oar except without the genius, the outrageously eccentric vocal style (Crosby's singing here is even blander and more monotonously one-dimensional that Stills' on his solo album) or the originality of composition.
And oh, the song! They may sort of mumble and drone into each other, but they sure got vibes! While never approaching the Cinerama weltanschauung of a Blows Against the Empire, If I Could Only Remember My Name does take a position, perhaps best exemplified by the words, almost childlike in their perfect simplicity, of the tribal chant composed by Crosby, Young and Nash (I think each of them wrote two words) which opens the album: "Everybody's sayin' that music is love/Take off your clothes and ride the sun/Everybody's saying' that music is fun." And I'll bet they do have fun recording these things. It's long been obvious that they all love each other.
The undisputed masterpiece of the record is Crosby's own eight-minute talk-sung fiction, "Cowboy Movie." Musically it's not much more differentiated than a tape loop, but it's got a great plot which I won't reveal because I know how much fun everybody'll have listening extra-close for the 200th time trying to figure it out. I will say that it ends with Dave saying with bitter disappointment: "You know that Indian girl? She wasn't an Indian&#
David Crosby high as a kite in the early 1970s. Say what you will about the guy -- If I Could Only flat-out rules. You get the feeling that these songs were recorded during a period in which Crosby was reading D.H. Lawrence and seducing Mother Nature a lot. Most important, it seems like the dude was really onto something.
