Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again

Released - October 1967

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - Ahmet Artegun; Richie Furay; Jim Messina; Jack Nitzche; Stephen Stills & Neil Young

Selected Personnel - Stephen Stills (Guitar/Organ/Piano/Keyboard/Vocals); Neil Young (Guitar/Vocals); Richie Furay (Guitar/Vocals); Dewey Martin (Drums/Vocals); Bruce Palmer (Bass); Hal Blaine (Drums); James Burton (Dobro/Guitar); David Crosby (Vocals); Jim Fielder (Bass); Jim Gordon (Drums); Carol Kaye (Bass); Jack Nitzche (Piano); Russ Titelman (Guitar)

Standout Track - Mr. Soul

The general consensus on Buffalo Springfield seems to be that they were a truly great band in a live context and never quite managed to make a record that was a fitting testament to how good they were capable of being, but that their second effort, the aptly titled Buffalo Springfield Again, is the closest they ever got. Certainly, it's an uneven and frustrating album, one that never coheres into a sense that you're really listening to a great band, but it has sporadic highlights. For me, given the fairly hit-and-miss legacy they've left behind them, getting into Buffalo Springfield was never a massive priority for me, but as a big Neil Young fan (increasingly so over the last couple of years), I was keen to listen to some of what he did before going solo. Based on this album, they were clearly a talented group, but never quite managed to establish themselves as something I'm sorry to have never heard more of.

That "they're great live" statistic seems very relevant here to the thing that I feel is their main failing - in a live setting, it's very easy for a band to put aside ego or preciousness about their own individual role within the group and just jam together to create an exhilarating live experience, so I could easily imagine that in that context the band were able to combat the major problem on this record, which is simply that there are too many people trying to pull it in different directions. The band boasts no fewer than three singer-songwriters in the form of Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay, who had simply played guitar and sung on their first album but now insisted on sharing songwriting duties and contributed three of the album's songs. Having multiple singer-songwriters in the band isn't necessarily a bad thing - Supertramp are a good example, if I'm allowed to default to one of my all-time favourite bands. Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson each wrote about half of every album's songs, with none of them ever emerging from true band collaboration or jam sessions or anything of the like. But Supertramp's output never sounded like two solo projects jammed together, as the songs were carefully crafted to provide showcases for the rest of the band to make their identities felt, while the songwriters themselves had very different sensibilities and styles that complimented one another well - Hodgson's brighter pop songs sitting alongside the moodier, blues-tinged songs of Rick Davies. You could also recognise the instrumental contributions each of them made to one another's songs, and there's a true sense of a band all working together to bring the best out of a song written by one particular member.

On Buffalo Springfield Again, it's very difficult for it to feel like much other than three solo artists vying for attention, and occasionally failing. Two of Young's compositions were basically solo works which the rest of the band didn't even contribute to, while the songs by Stills and Furay honestly sound interchangeable to me - I really feel like the two of them struggle to contribute any of their own personality or style here, and it just feels like everybody but Young is fighting a losing battle to actually make anything that sounds distinguishable from so much other country-folk-rock of the time. It's a similar problem I have with a lot of the subsequent work of Crosby, Stills & Nash, so I feel it's a genuine failing of much of the genre stalwarts of the time, be it Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, or whoever. Perhaps that's just me speaking as a big fan of Young's solo stuff that his style of guitar playing and songwriting (not to mention that unmistakeable voice) is immediately recognisable to me, but I really do feel that he offers something unique and recognisably himself here in a way that Stills and Furay don't quite manage. I find it difficult to pick out many moments that I can recognise as one or the other of them, and the mood of all their songs blurs into a generic, soft-focus, country-rock vibe too often for my tastes.

Still, it's perhaps to be expected that the album doesn't really cohere together given the tumultuous circumstances of its recording. Initially, Buffalo Springfield had been a huge passion project for those involved, and Stills and Young had spent months trying to track each other down to work together having hit it off the first time they met in the mid-60s. As mentioned above, however, their first album had failed to capture the exciting live sound they had become well-known for on the West Coast scene, and fractures began to appear as they tried to record a follow-up. Furay's enthusiasm to upgrade himself to co-songwriter suggests a kind of jealousy to the increased creative control Stills and Young had had over the first record, while bassist Bruce Palmer was soon arrested for drug possession, and his repeated arrests and detainments meant he was frequently absent from rehearsals and recording sessions and needed to be replaced by session musicians. Young began to distance himself more and more from the group, Palmer being one of the very first musicians he had started working with after trying to make it in music, and his absence therefore hitting him harder than the others. Young was also perhaps increasingly aware that his talents far outstripped the other band members, and he no longer required the comfort blanket of being part of a band as much as he once did (Young has often said that he needed to be part of a band initially as he had very little confidence in his singing voice and was too afraid of this to go solo, but once Buffalo Springfield had helped to give him the confidence to sing in front of people, there was little he needed to gain from the band any more).

I'll deal with Young's compositions first - "Mr. Soul" is quite simply one of the finest hard-rocking songs he ever wrote, and easily the stand-out of the whole album. Its fearsome guitar riff immediately grabs the attention and won't let go, shaking the listener into submission, while the strange, alien reediness of Young's voice set to such a blistering guitar riff creates a genuinely unnerving effect. The other two Young songs really convey how little interest he had in the group dynamic, as both of them are orchestral experiments recorded only with assistance from Jack Nitzche, an arranger who had worked with Phil Spector and would go on to be one of Neil Young's frequent collaborators. "Expecting To Fly" is a ghostly and ethereal song, which utilises Nitzche's string arrangements not to create a full, bombastic warmth as orchestral accompaniment was so often used at the time, but instead to lend a fragility and strageness to the song. The strings are thin and sparse, and create a ghostly atmosphere. "Broken Arrow," meanwhile, is downright weird, and, to the best of my knowledge, totally unique within the Neil Young canon is that it's barely a song and more a sound collage, switching from fragments of one recognisable tune to other random bursts of circus-esque music and all sorts of strange oddities, including a very brief extract from a live performance of "Mr. Soul" featuring somebody else (presumably Stills, but I still can't tell who's who) on vocals. It's perhaps not the most listenable thing on the album, but really marks out Young as the one member of the band interested in doing something new.

The rest of the album, as I've said, struggles to ever really escape a fairly generic folk-rock vibe, but that's not to say it doesn't have its highlights. "Everydays" has a sort of interesting spookiness to it (and, interestingly, was covered by Yes a couple of years later on their 1970 album Time And A Word - Yes seemed to have an odd remit on their first two albums to cover songs by West Coast folk-rock bands as their self-titled debut album featured a cover of the Byrds' "I See You,") and "Hung Upside-Down" has an amusing sense of fun and bombast to its choruses (though Stills' faintly embarrassing grunts of "Ooh! Yeah!" over the song's closing moments descend into self-parody). "Bluebird" is a fun, sprightly folk rock song whose highlight is its frenetic acoustic guitar solo, but its status as being the "peak" of Buffalo Springfield's recorded output is highly suspicious to me considering it doesn't even hold a candle to "Mr. Soul." I also quite like some of "Rock & Roll Woman," whose "ba-ba-ba" backing vocals and quick-fingered acoustic guitar work make it sound like an inferior prototype of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills & Nash a couple of years later. Furay's compositions, meanwhile, are the truly forgettable ones, with only "Good Time Boy" doing anything to linger in the memory, and even then only thanks to a fun turn by guest vocalist Dewey Martin.

Altogether, then, just as its legacy suggests, Buffalo Springfield Again is a piecemeal affair, something that strikes occasional highs but really struggles to find much of an identity as a piece of work in its own right. Too much of it just relies on the same tropes and sounds long-established by countless West Coast country-rock groups of the time, with only Neil Young willing to do something that sounded original or heartfelt. A shame, as all the musicians involved are obviously very talented - Stills' songs really do provide a showcase for his guitar abilities, and in places there's a gutsy rawness to his vocals that remind me of the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty. But the band just never manages to really listen to one another and try to make the best of each other's individual talents and make it more than just a collection of soloists trying to outdo one another.

In the wake of Buffalo Springfield Again's critical success, hopes were high for the band, but the continued drug charges levelled at Bruce Palmer, and Young's continued disinterest in the group, meant that it wasn't long before they disbanded barely two years after they formed. Furay and Palmer, by and large, faded into obscurity, but Stills went on to found Crosby, Stills & Nash with the Byrds' David Crosby and the Hollies' Graham Nash. The supergroup would achieve great success, while Young quickly rose to become one of the most successful singer-songwriters in folk rock. Occasionally, when he felt the inclination, Young would drop into Crosby, Stills & Nash recording sessions to contribute material, such as the brilliant "Ohio," a song about a school shooting and one of his very best. Young's attitude to the supergroup has long amused me - he only agreed to join it at Stills' insistence, as apparently there was great fan demand for him to be involved, and Young agreed to sporadically join the band, but only on the insistence that he be given equal billing and they be renamed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That he managed to get away with this and still only occasionally drop into recording sessions to lay down something effortlessly great before disappearing and letting the other three get on with whatever else they wanted to do was perhaps Young's final joke at the expense of Stephen Stills and the band he no longer felt he needed.

Track Listing:

1. Mr. Soul (Neil Young)

2. A Child's Claim To Fame (Richie Furay)

3. Everydays (Stephen Stills)

4. Expecting To Fly (Neil Young)

5. Bluebird (Stephen Stills)

6. Hung Upside Down (Stephen Stills)

7. Sad Memory (Richie Furay)

8. Good Time Boy (Richie Furay)

9. Rock & Roll Woman (Stephen Stills)

10. Broken Arrow (Neil Young)