Music |
Buffalo Springfield
By
Published: Jul 09, 2014
Category:
Rock
Crosby, Stills & Nash are on tour and playing in my city this week. I made no effort to see them; the way tickets work now, if you’re not “with the band,” you’re with StubHub. This week I’d rather spend hundreds of dollars less and see Boyhood.
There’s something else. CSN takes me down Memory Lane. But not quite far enough down Memory Lane — I blow past those terrific harmonies, the fraught relationship with Neil Young and the bravery of “Ohio,” and I find myself thinking about Buffalo Springfield, which is, in the history of CSN, the Book of Genesis.
Stephen Stills and Neil Young were in Buffalo Springfield, a legendary band that took off fast, cratered two years later and then morphed into CSNY. “We thought we were going to be together for about 15 years, because we knew how good it was,” Neil Young said later, and as is so often the case, he spoke simple truth: Buffalo Springfield invented a kind of harmony that gave birth to a dozen super-groups. But they came before video, before tours in arenas; if I challenged you to name half a dozen of their songs, you probably couldn’t.
Let’s correct that.
Some bands are destined. Some are accidents. The musicians who’d form Buffalo Springfield had been circling one another for a year. In Los Angeles, they meant to meet up — and missed. But Neil Young owned a black 1953 Pontiac hearse in those years, and as Stephen Stills and Richie Furay were about to leave LA for San Francisco, they spotted Young driving on Sunset Boulevard. A few weeks later, they were writing songs and giving performances that became LA legend.
Their first hit — the song you probably know — was “For What It’s Worth.” Stills wrote it: “I’m a songwriter, and I’m here to spread the news, like the minstrels of the 15th Century. And the news is that the straight world has been getting worse and worse since World War II. Those boys that won the world by fire were great, but now they’re trying to do it again. Except they’re going to lose this time, because the fire’s too big.”
If you want the greater hits, the collection to get is “Retrospective: The Best of Buffalo Springfield.” [To buy the CD from Amazon and get the MP3 download free, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
But you can, with this band, make the claim for individual CDs, especially its second release, “Buffalo Springfield Again.” On the first album, Neil Young’s voice was considered too weird for him to sing lead. But watch him here — was he really that young?
The thing is dotted with classics:
And, OMG, “Expecting to Fly,” with its gossamer opening: “There you stood/ On the edge of your feather/ Expecting to fly.”
[To buy the CD of “Buffalo Springfield Again” from Amazon and get the MP3 download free, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Over and over, as I listen to this music, I find myself looking up the lyrics.
Like “Four Days Gone,” which is how a lot of young men felt in l969:
I met two kind people on the road
I was parched and dry from the cold
I’ve been traveling four days and nights, sir
and I do want to thank you for the ride
and the soup your wife made tasted fine
if it’s all the same, I’ll be on my way at the next turn
’cause I’m four days gone into running
And my baby is waiting, I hope, sir
After fifteen trucks and an old Ford
and the government madness… I ran away
and I to say, I can’t tell you my name
’cause I’m four days gone into running
I can’t even go home
Take my baby and run
I got reason to live
I got things I can give
That was from “Last Time Around,” their final album. Talk about being “done” — these guys had seen more of one another than they could stand.
And “Kind Woman” — “Kind woman, won’t you love me tonight/ The look in your eyes/ Kind woman don’t leave me lonely tonight/ Please say it’s alright.”
[To buy the CD of “Last Time Around” from Amazon and get the MP3 download free, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
I love Renaissance choral music because I’m drawn to the idea of singing in harmony in praise of the divine. In the last century, that unthinking adherence to religion went the way of the buggy. Now it feels as if we only have each other and our patchy allegiances and shared questions and longing for love. So the sweet voices of these songs and the tenderness of the lyrics — at the height of the Vietnam War, these CDs were major comforts. And more: they told us we weren’t nuts to want to be gentle with one another. CSNY did that too, but they were bigger egos, brassier entertainers; no wonder the drugs and groupies and personal entourages made Neil Young flee.
And yet.
Let’s leave Memory Lane a few miles closer to now, with a song by Neil Young, performed solo at a school benefit in 2010. It’s called “Buffalo Springfield Again” — the title of the band’s second album — and its lyrics couldn’t be more wistful:
Used to play
in a rock ‘n’ roll band,
But we broke up.
We were young and we were wild,
It tore us up.
I’d like to see those guys again,
And give it a shot.
Maybe now we can show the world,
What we’ve got.
But I’d just like to play
for the fun we had.
Buffalo Springfield again.
One giant talent with a guitar and a harmonica. Compelling. Maybe you too will sense what was lost — and cherish what there was.
