The debut album of Nils Lofgren's trio, Grin, brilliantly closed the quartet of albums that had begun with the Neil Young/Crazy Horse collaboration, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and had then progressed through Young's After the Gold Rush (the intense moodiness of which had been colored by Lofgren's gorgeously muted piano playing) and the Young-less Crazy Horse (on which Lofgren, with two of his songs, had been present).
second song, Lofgren made explicit what Young and Crazy Horse had only hinted at: that this Western landscape they had all been moving through wasn't the seemingly authentic frontier of the Band, but the set of a Western movie. A third song, "Take You to the Movies Tonight," expressed the idea that by going to a picture show, one could change his life around, at least for a few hours:
If you're gonna be lonely, be it tonight.
If you need a friend, need one tonight.
Put your Saturday night dress on,
Don't call me at home 'cause I'm gone.
I'll be right over
Gonna take you to the movies tonight....
By taking his girl to the sanctuary of the picture show, the singer was carrying out a rescue. So the mature acceptance of "Pioneer Mary" ("It's only a movie") was counterpointed by the innocent hopefulness of "Take You to the Movies Tonight."
Through these representations of the movies as unreality, Lofgren turned the album into an examination of the fundamental conflict between the real world and the world of the imagination. His other songs served to illuminate other aspects of that conflict, particularly in the sexual ("See What a Love Can Do," "18 Faced Lover," "Open Wide") and romantic-utopian ("We All Sung Together," "If I Were a Song") areas.
This preoccupation with fantasy in its various shapes made Grin a sort of aural daydream. It worked not only because of Lofgren's remarkable little songs, but also because of his reedy, fallen-choirboy voice, full of innocence and worldliness at the same time, and set off by bassist Bob Gordon's husky, mature singing. At the time they made the album, Lofgren, Gordon, and drummer Bob Berberich were still teenagers; with an album as sophisticated as this one for openers, Grin might be really amazing, after gaining some experience and maturity.
Well, they haven't made it yet. 1+1 is a well crafted album, put together much more painstakingly than Grin, but it has little of the first album's charm, and none of its substance. It seems more an exercise in flashy production than an album of songs with a distinct identity.
The fault lies not with David Briggs' production, but with 1 of gren's inability to put all that crisp sound to some dr
If this 1971 recording reminds you a bit of Neil Young's country rock tones, it could be on account of the fact that Young's longtime producer David Briggs mixed it. That's not to say that everything sounds like Crazy Horse. "Slippery Fingers" is more like a backwoods Aerosmith and "Moon Tears" sounds a bit like Roky Erickson.
