1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 199. Stephen Stills – Stephen Stills (1970)

 

Given his prior output, the direction that music in general has been heading, and the fact that the album cover features Still playing an acoustic guitar in the snow (next to a pink plastic giraffe for no obvious reason), I was expecting yet more country/folk rock.

But instead, surprisingly and pleasantly, Stills leans hard into R&B, with elements of soul, funk, and a lot of gospel throughout. This is most notable on the suitably titled track Church, but also present in the main single Love The One You’re With. And this is the One That You’ve Heard Before from this album, even if perhaps you’re more familiar with, say, the Luther Vandross cover. And the gospel chorus really comes into play for the final track, We Are Not Helpless featuring, among others, Rita Coolidge and Cass Elliott. It’s a call to arms to halt division, about how people are trapped in their echo chambers and keep themselves segregated from each other. Thankfully we know better than to do that fifty-five years down the road….

There’s some barnstorming funk on Old Times Good Times, with guitar provided by a certain Jimi Hendrix, sadly dead by the time this album got released. Eric Clapton shows up on the blues-rock Go Back Home, and talking of which there’s one track, Black Queen, which starts off with some acoustic picking and sounds like it’s going to go in a Louvin Brothers kind of direction, but ends up more like an old Delta bluesman in style.

It feels very much like Stills is drawing together lots of musician pals and influences, and drawing on some styles that he doesn’t normally work in (also on the album; Booker T Jones on organ and Ringo Starr on drums on a couple of tracks, plus Crosby and Nash make an appearance along with a collection of Motown singers for backing vocals). And in that respect, it’s a pretty darn good album, and made a nice change from the expected country rock. It also lives the lyrics of We Are Not Helpless, by drawing together people from different backgrounds and somewhat different genres, all to make music together in order to make people happy. And that, I think, is something to aspire to.