David Crosby represents the darker side of the Hippie existence. If I Could Only Remember My Name is mostly a gorgeous album with exquisite Crosby vocals. Beauty crawled out whenever he opened his mouth in the past to sing. It’s hard to find fault with the instrumentals on the album, especially with the multi-track vocals and the distinctive guitar playing by Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, and Jorma Kaukonen, each adding their textural playing along with Crosby’s rhythm guitar. It’s very much vocal and guitars (plural) driven music. And you can hear each contribution by a specific musician because their sound is so distinctive. This is a very ‘clear and clean’ sounding album, and one can separate the vocal blend to identify the voices of Crosby, Nash, and Young. The second track Cowboy Movie is a 1950s Anthony Mann noir western set as a Crazy Horse vibe-like song. Its paranoia is set as a tune about train robbers who come upon the Indian girl, who happens to be the law. Whatever that means she worked for the Federal government, or due to that, she’s an American Indian, is not clear.
Songs With No Words (Trees With No Leaves) makes me regret that there is no full album of Crosby’s work with the Exotica/Lounge King Les Baxter. Crosby toured in a Les Baxter band Les Baxter’s Balladeers, before The Byrds’ fame, and this is the period of his life as a musician that I find the most curious. All I can find of that period is a single, Linin' Track, released in 1963. At least on If I Could Only…, I feel Crosby is going for an Exotica Hippie sound, filtered through the landscape of the early 1970s San Francisco music scene and his superb skills of making the very air around him into music. And there is something spiritual in his approach to making songs. What sets it off on a strange inclination are the paranoid-orientated Crosby lyrics. Doubting the issues of identity and trust, he comes off as a Hippie gang leader who shares skepticism with the people at his party or staying in his home.
If I Could Only Remember My Name is a work of musicians of great talent, with the Crosby presence, but it is why I find this album so uninspiring. It’s interesting to note that around the same time, Syd Barrett made his two solo albums, and though some say he was out of his mind, those two discs, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, are remarkable works of genius. Despite the weirdness, the Crosby album is skillful but doesn’t go for greatness. It’s a nice record, easy on the ears, but his cranky attitude is a bit much. Even the song titles expose sourness that can be over-the-top funny, like the album title, but also What Are Their Names without the question mark, by the way) and I’d Swear There Was Somebody There. As the Joker said to Batman, Why so serious?
The seductive pull of that era of Laurel Canyon/Mill Valley/Northern California music outlaws who were really at the peak of their powers, both in music sales and in their artistry, yet they couldn’t touch the flame they desired to consume. And perhaps this is one of the reasons at the time that I craved the sounds of British Glam Rock, which was right around the corner from the dreck that Crosby and company produced.
For my taste, I prefer Les Baxter’s Balladeers: Here is David with his brother in the band.
A brilliant solo effort by a brilliantly gifted, if slightly troubled, artist for sure. A favourite album of mine.