Freedom to Music
Posts tagged David Crosby
Hot Tuna – Burgers (1972) (@256)
06 Oct 2008
(Review from allmusic, wikipedia)
Begun as an acoustic spin-off of the Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna eventually became the full-time focus of founding members Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, emerging as a popular touring act of the 1970s.
“Burgers” is the third album by Hot Tuna. It marked a crucial transition for the group. Until then, Hot Tuna had been viewed as a busman’s holiday for Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady. Their first album was an acoustic set of folk-blues standards recorded in a coffeehouse, their second an electric version of the same with a violinist and a drummer.
“Burgers” sounds more like a full-fledged work than a satellite effort. It was Hot Tuna’s first studio album (the previous two being live albums) and Kaukonen wrote the bulk of the material, not all of it in the folk-blues style that had been the group’s métier. “Sea Child,” for example, employed his familiar acid rock sound and would have fit seamlessly onto an Airplane album. And “Water Song,” one of his most accomplished instrumentals, had a crystalline acoustic guitar part that really suggested the sound of rippling water.
On the material that did recall the earlier albums, Hot Tuna split the difference between its acoustic and electric selves, sometimes, as on “True Religion”, beginning in folky fingerpicking style only to add a rock band sound after the introduction. The result was more restrained than the second album, but not as free as the first, with the drums imposing steady rhythms that often kept Casady from soloing as much, though Creach’s violin made for plenty of improvisation within the basic blues structures.
With this album Hot Tuna had evolved its own sound and music, and seemed less a diversion than its members’ new top priority.
Line-up:
* Jorma Kaukonen – guitars, lead vocals
* Jack Casady – bass, vocals, eyebrow
* Papa John Creach – violin, vocals
* Sammy Piazza – drums, tympani, other percussion, vocals
with
* Nick Buck – organ, piano (1,5)
* Richmond Talbott – vocals, slide guitar (3)
* David Crosby – vocals (2)
Track List:
01. True Religion – 4:42
02. Highway Song – 3:14
03. 99 Year Blues – 3:58
04. Sea Child – 5:00
05. Keep On Truckin’ – 3:40
06. Water Song – 5:17
07. Ode for Billy Dean – 4:49
08. Let Us Get Together Right Down Here – 3:27
09. Sunny Day Strut – 3:14
Link in comments.
Crosby, Stills and Nash – Crosby, Stills and Nash (1969) (@256)
26 Feb 2008
(Review from wikipedia)
The genesis of the band lies in two 1960s rock bands, The Byrds and The Hollies, and the demise of a third, Buffalo Springfield. Friction existed between David Crosby and his bandmates in the Byrds, and Crosby was dismissed from the Byrds in the fall of 1967. By early 1968, Buffalo Springfield had also disintegrated over personal issues, and after aiding in putting together the band’s final album, Stephen Stills found himself unemployed by the summer. He and Crosby began meeting informally and jamming. When the Hollies ventured to California in 1968, Nash resumed his acquaintance with Crosby. Creatively frustrated with the Hollies, Nash decided to quit and throw his lot in with Crosby and Stills.
The trio presented a new wrinkle in building upon rock’s roots, utilizing folk, blues, and even jazz without specifically sounding like mere duplication. Not only blending voices, the three meshed their differing strengths, Crosby for social commentary and atmospheric mood pieces, Stills for his diverse musical skills and for folding folk and country elements subtly into complex rock structures, and Nash his knack for radio-friendly pop melody, to create an amalgam of broad appeal.
Released in 1969, their first album was a very strong debut for the band, instantly lifting them to stardom, a sparkling set immortalizing the group’s amazingly close. Strong sales, combined with the group’s emphasis on personal confession in its writing, paved the way for the success of the singer-songwriter movement of the early seventies. Their utilization of personal events in their material without resorting to subterfuge, their talents in vocal harmony, their cultivation of painstaking studio craft, as well as the Laurel Canyon ethos that surrounded the group and their associates, established an aesthetic for a number of acts that came to define the “California” sound of the ensuing decade.
Line-up:
* David Crosby / rhythm guitars, vocals (except on 11)
* Stephen Stills / guitars, bass guitar, organ, vocals (except on 12 & 14)
* Graham Nash / vocals, acoustic guitar (on “Lady Of The Island” & “Marrakesh Express”).
with
* Dallas Taylor / drums, percussion (except on 11-14)
Track List:
01. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes – 7:25
02. Marrakesh Express – 2:39
03. Guinnevere – 4:40
04. You Don’t Have to Cry – 2:45
05. Pre-Road Downs – 3:01
06. Wooden Ships – 5:29
07. Lady of the Island – 2:39
08. Helplessly Hoping – 2:41
09. Long Time Gone – 4:17
10. 49 Bye-Byes – 5:16
Link in comments.
Byrds – Notorious Byrds Brothers (1967) (@256)
22 Nov 2007
(Review from rollingstone.com)
The initial genius of the Byrds had to do with marrying the sensibilities of Bob Dylan and the Beatles out in sunny Southern California. Changes came quickly for the band, whose stylistic evolution could be tracked not just from album to album but from single to single. The surfeit of talent that made such accelerated growth possible also doomed the Byrds to fly apart, as visions and egos collided. Only three of the group’s five original members — guitarist Roger McGuinn, bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke — are pictured on the cover of The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and by its release, in January 1968, even Clarke was gone. Fired midway through the recording sessions, David Crosby is a spectral presence, having co-written a trio of the record’s most trenchant songs and casting angular shafts of light onto others with his otherworldly rhythm guitar and harmony vocals.
The best word to summarize The Notorious Byrd Brothers is transitional. It was also their first record to exhibit overt country leanings – by the Sixties’ end, everybody was getting back to the country, but the Byrds were there first, and on Notorious Byrd Brothers you can hear them saddling up the horses.
The album’s ethereal, fresh-scrubbed sound owes much to producer Gary Usher, the auteur behind countless Sixties surf-pop records and co-author of Beach Boys classics like “In My Room.” Burbling Moog synthesizers and purring steel guitars join in on the Byrds’ minty-clean folk-cosmic odes. Utopian idealism commingles with darker visions: Spiritual yearning is evident in songs that look to nature (“Dolphin’s Smile”), childhood (“Goin’ Back”) and the group mind (“Tribal Gathering”) for guidance. Stones in the pathway include hard drugs (“Artificial Energy” elliptically warns that speed kills) and war (“Draft Morning” peers inside the mind of a young man being shipped off to Vietnam). The reawakening of consciousness is ecstatically, psychedelically celebrated in “Natural Harmony.” The aura of a world in upheaval is caught like lightning in a jar on “Change Is Now,” with its evocation of hope and uncertainty, familiarity and daunting strangeness. Those combinations make Notorious Byrd Brothers a brilliant window onto an unforgettable place and time.
Line-up:
- Roger McGuinn / vocals, guitars, moog synthesizer
- David Crosby / vocals, rhythm guitar, bass
- Chris Hillman / vocals, bass, rhythm guitar
- Michael Clarke / drums
with
* Jim Gordon / drums
* Clarence White / guitars
* Red Rhodes / pedal steel guitar
* Beaver & Krause / moog synthesizer
Track List:
01. Artificial Energy – 2:18
02. Goin’ Back – 3:26
03. Natural Harmony – 2:11
04. Draft Morning – 2:42
05. Wasn’t Born to Follow – 2:04
06. Get to You – 2:39
07. Change Is Now – 3:21
08. Old John Robertson – 1:49
09. Tribal Gathering – 2:03
10. Dolphin’s Smile – 2:00
11. Space Odyssey – 3:52
12. Moog Raga (Bonus Instrumental) – 3:24
13. Bound to Fall (Bonus Instrumental) – 2:08
14. Triad (Bonus) – 3:29
15. Goin’ Back (Bonus Version One) – 3:55
16. Draft Morning (Bonus Alternate End) – 2:55
17. Universal Mind Decoder (Bonus) – 13:45
Link in comments.
Byrds – Fifth Dimension (1966) (@256)
26 Jun 2007
(Info from wikipedia, amazon)
Byrds were founded in 1964 by singers and guitarists Jim (Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark, and David Crosby. Bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke joined soon after. Bridging the gap between the folk music of Bob Dylan and the hybrid pop of The Beatles, Byrds were popular and influential through the 1960s and early 1970s despite several line-up changes.
With their third album “Fifth Dimension”, Byrds planted the seeds of psychedelia – -and not just the San Francisco kind — in pop culture. The gray, dark trip of the Velvet Underground and the fuzzed-out minimalist boogie of such garage heroes as Count Five and the 13th Floor Elevators can also be found within these grooves. “Fifth Dimension” recognised that musical higher consciousness had to be manifested in a dark side as wellas a brighter one.
Gene Clark’s departure from the band prior to these recording sessions, and the decision not to cover any Bob Dylan songs, streamlined the Byrds’ sound and made the group’s vision clear. “Eight Miles High”, a highly-charged sonic release, evokes both Velvet Undeground’s “Heroin” and John Coltrane’s jazz explosions. The higher consciousness of “Eight Miles High”, the harmony-driven stomp of “2-4-2 Fox Trot”, and the CCR-meets-Stax boogie of “Captain Soul”, all drenchedin heavy guitar distortion, were unlike anything the pop world had heard. For the next three years, sounds inspired by “Fifth Dimension” would make up the soundtrack of a cultural revolution.
Line-up:
* Roger McGuinn – vocals, guitars
* David Crosby – vocals, guitars
* Chris Hillman – vocals, bass
* Michael Clarke – drums
with
* Gene Clark – vocals, harmonica, tambourine
* Van Dyke Parks – keyboards
Track List:
01. 5D (Fifth Dimension) – 2:33
02. Wild Mountain Thyme – 2:30
03. Mr. Spaceman – 2:09
04. I See You – 2:38
05. What’s Happening?!?! – 2:35
06. I Come and Stand at Every Door – 3:03
07. Eight Miles High – 3:34
08. Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go) – 2:17
09. Captain Soul – 2:53
10. John Riley – 2:57
11. 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song) – 2:12
12. Why (Bonus B-Side Single) – 2:59
13. I Know My Rider (Bonus) – 2:43
14. Psychodrama City (Bonus) – 3:23
15. Eight Miles High (Bonus Alternate Version) – 3:19
16. Why (Bonus Alternate Version) – 2:40
17. John Riley II (Bonus instrumental – includes hidden interview) – 16:53
Links in comments.