I was thinking that I was in a batch of artists that I’d never heard of, but it turns out that this is the brainchild of Stephen Stills. The rest of the crew – Chris Hillman on guitar and mandolin, Al Perkins on pedal steel guitar, Paul Harris on keyboards, Dallas Talyor on drums, Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels on bass, and Joe Lala on percussion, are all session musicians that have played, and will play, with a whole host of big names too many to mention. Like the inimitable pianist Nicky Hopkins, these guys are the meat and potatoes behind a *lot* of successful songs - John Lennon's Imagine, as you'll recall for example. Many of them also come via The Byrds and CSNY, and have a long association with Stills. Oh, and Bill Wyman crops up on one track with a co-writing credit. Stills reportedly was doing 100-hour non-stop shifts in the studio: I know an ADHDer in the throes of a manic phase when I see one.
What we get for this is a double album and, like with Todd Rundgren, each side has a name and a loose theme. Thus we get The Raven, The Wilderness (mostly country and bluegrass), Consider, and Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay. So for all this talent and all this work, is it any good?
The first track, Song of Love, sounds very like Traffic, to the extent that I had to check if Steve Winwood wasn’t one of the band members. He’s not, but not only is the music similar, but a lot of the times the vocals (mostly Stills but also Hillman) have the same quality as Traffic production, sounding like they’re being sung into a plastic bucket in the room next door. As such, it makes the lyrics for the more country-folk-rock hybrid songs difficult to hear.
Other tracks brought to mind Little Feat (especially Anyway with its Latinesque rhythms), and again I had to check that there wasn’t a personnel crossover. There’s not, but The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers (sources of the members of this band) both covered Little Feat tracks, and there’s a definite “Southern rock” feel to many of the tracks, with that touch of funk.
Only Side Two, The Wilderness, is vastly different to the others, opening with a kind of bluegrass environmentalist hoedown Fallen Eagle, also featuring a bit of honky-tonk with Don’t Look At My Shadow, the rest being slower more ballad-y stuff. And then we’re back to tracks that sound a bit Byrds, a bit Buffalo Springfield for the rest of the album.
There's a weird thing about this kind of music – I enjoyed pretty much every track, even over the course of a whole double album, but also nothing really stood out to me; I got to the end and couldn’t exactly recall any of the songs. Possibly the muddy mix counts against this, as I didn’t have a lyric to hang on to, but then also the musical hooks were nothing that grabbed me either. I suspect with another listen I’d probably pick up on something, but it’s one of those albums that is solid without being truly inspiring.
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