1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 208. David Crosby – If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971)

 

In the unlikely event that you’ve actually been following this series, you’ll know by now my thoughts on the ubiquitous nature of David Crosby, and now here he is completely undiluted. And while the sound is unmistakably his, seeming sometimes like The Byrds, sometimes like CSNY, it’s also quite a departure in many ways. 

It’s a very mellow sound, evoking Californian sunsets, red deserts, a mixture of warmth and loneliness. This probably stems from the tragedy of Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton dying in a car accident in 1969, and when this album was recorded the grief was still quite strong with him. Much like George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, the album is chock full of Crosby’s musical friends, including Nash and Young (but not Stills). On the track Tamalpais High there is some guitar soloing that I thought was either Santana or Jerry Garcia, and it turns out to be the latter; much of the recording of this album overlapped with the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. Also featured on the album are Grace Slick, Joni Mitchell (at this stage in a relationship with Graham Nash), and various other members of Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. It’s a veritable Californian-Canadian cornucopia of collaboration. 

The music is a paradoxical mix of sparse and dense at the same time. Some tracks such as Song With No Words (which ironically is one of the few tracks that does actually have lyrics) utilize a lot of instruments, but each instrument is only playing a simple motif, these all become blended together like the more recent Miles Davis works, to provide a really beautiful soundscape. It’s a little bit folky, but elements of Eight Mile High era Byrds creep in as well – the term “psychedelic folk” is used, but that seems a bit reductionist for it. 

Elegiac, perhaps. What Are Their Names? asks who the people are that run the world and stir up wars (I think we know who they are these days as they’re doing it in plain sight…) and turns into a huge choral round, and I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here is almost like a shamanic ritual. The overall downbeat nature of the album works in its favour in my opinion (unlike that of contemporary critics who slated it). 

I rarely comment on the album covers unless they’re particularly iconic, but here it matches the style of the music well – an orange sunset superimposed over a close-up of Crosby staring wistfully to the side, that’s kind of the synesthesia of how the music “looks” to me.