By the fall of 1970, David Crosby was still thunderstruck by the sudden death [in a traffic accident] of his girlfriend Christine Hinton [Author’s note: she was the subject of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ song Christine’s Tune (Devil in Disguise)]. His means of coping with tragedy involved living on his sailboat in Sausalito, drinking lots of alcohol, doing hard drugs and creating music in his “safe space,” the recording studio. The recording studio in question was Wally Heider Studio in San Francisco, where CSNY did the bulk of recording 1970’s Déjà Vu. By this time Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had gone their separate ways. Stills, Nash and Young had each recorded solo albums [Stephen Stills, Songs for Beginners, and After the Gold Rush respectively]. Each album had the same radio-friendly accessibility as Déjà Vu. The album David Crosby would make, the only album under his own name for eighteen years, would be a different story.
In that fall of 1970, Wally Heider’s was a busy place. The Grateful Dead were recording American Beauty. Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner was recording his first solo record, the science-fiction themed Blows Against the Empire. It featured musicians from the Grateful Dead, Santana and the Jefferson Airplane – when assembled it was the San Francisco musical collective known as the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. These people were all friends, and these friends were all hitting their respective peaks of success at the same time. Not only did these musicians pool their resources for Blows Against the Empire, they also featured on If I Could Only Remember My Name. While Stills' and Nash's albums both produced enduring Top 40 hits ("Love the One You're With" and "Chicago," respectively) and After the Gold Rush became a “stone cold classic,” Crosby’s album would become, to borrow a phrase, a stoner classic.
David Crosby’s music had always been different. He would use alternate tuning to great effect on songs like Everybody’s Been Burned, Guinnevere, and Déjà Vu. The somewhat exotic qualities of each of these songs made the albums from whence they came a bit more interesting. With this album, Crosby got to indulge himself for an entire album. From start to finish, Jerry Garcia was the album’s midwife. He helped Crosby arrange and produce the record. Whether it was his transcendent guitar solos or his keening steel guitar, Jerry had a sense for what each song needed. This period saw Jerry Garcia at his absolute best as a musician and as a creator of music. Jerry was a true musical foil for David Crosby. Croz would later say this about Jerry - He’s a decent human being with a nice heart, and he’s funny and stoned and good and can play like God on a good day. Every time he sits down with a guitar and I sit down on a guitar with him, magic happens. Magic. Not bullshit. Magic.
As much as I don’t care for Graham Nash as a singer, songwriter, or as a person, I have to give the devil his due on this album. His harmonies with David Crosby throughout this album are exquisite. He and Crosby are consistently in a vocal sweet spot. This album is a masterclass in harmony singing. Sometimes the voices are Crosby and Nash in harmony. When Nash isn’t singing, Crosby harmonizes with himself, recording stacks of harmonies that are simply breathtaking. It isn’t for nothing that Crosby’s voice was considered one of the very best of his generation. Sometimes, Joni Mitchell’s voice is thrown in the mix. If that wasn’t enough, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner would also chime in. There are no vocal missteps on this album.
To call each of the individual tracks on this album “songs” is a bit of a misnomer. A “song” would imply lyrics with a verse- bridge [maybe]-chorus-verse structure. That structure does not apply here. It was this lack of song structure that would baffle some, including me. I didn’t “get it” until roughly fifteen years ago, then suddenly the light went on. Without sounding too cliché, this music is cosmic. It has a “CSNY meets the Dead” vibe. The opener Music Is Love is a folky communal hippie campfire singalong. Two of the songs have wordless vocals - Tamalpais High (At About 3) and Song with No Words (Tree With No Leaves). Imagine CSNY harmonies matched with acid-drenched music from the Grateful Dead. Laughing has one of those alternate tunings [DGDDAD] with lyrics written for George Harrison where Croz cautions Beatle George to take the Maharishi with a large grain of salt. Jerry Garcia’s otherworldly steel guitar takes the song into the stratosphere.
Cowboy Movie is my absolute favorite David Crosby song. It’s the only song on the album with any kind of narrative, but still no verse-chorus-verse structure. Clocking in at just over eight minutes, this “CSNY meets the Dead” epic is Crosby’s narration of the first breakup of CSNY, told as if it was an Old West story. The four members of the outlaw gang in the song were celebrating a train robbery [CSNY’s last tour before their implosion] that is complicated by a love triangle which began when an Indian girl named Raven appeared at their camp. The characters of the story:
Fat Albert – the story’s narrator with a twelve-gauge shotgun (a 12-string guitar) – [Crosby]
Eli - the gang’s “fastest gunner [guitarist], kinda young and mean, from the South” [Stills]
The Duke – the gang’s dynamiter [Nash]
Young Billy – the gang’s sentry with a sixth sense of
impending doom [Young]
Raven – the Indian girl [Rita Coolidge]
After Raven wandered into their camp, Eli and the Duke each wanted Raven for himself. Fat Albert cautions them about her, saying “she might be the law.” A fight broke out between Eli and the Duke, with Fat Albert being the only gang survivor. As he lay dying in Albuquerque, Fat Albert confirmed that Raven really was “the law.” If you know the history of CSNY, they really did bust up because Stills and Nash fought over Rita Coolidge. A clever bit of storytelling this one.
On Traction in the Rain [a song about loss], Croz puts the listener in a trance without a band, just his voice and acoustic guitar [with some autoharp for coloring]. He injects politics once with What Are Their Names. If Neil Young’s Ohio has a cousin, it’s this song:
The men who really run this land
And I wonder why they run it
With such a thoughtless hand
What are their names and on what streets do they live?
I’d like to ride right over this afternoon and give
Them a piece of my mind about peace for mankind
Peace is not an awful lot to ask
The album concludes with two short pieces, the first of which is a traditional French song – Orleans. Croz layered many vocal parts, all in French, with only two acoustic guitars for accompaniment. At less than two minutes, it’s over almost as soon as it begins. The final piece, I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here, is Croz singing a cappella. This was David Crosby experimenting with the studio’s echo booth. As Croz told it many years after the album’s creation:
I don't know where that came from. It was a hallucination. I've always been drawn to strange vocal works. I overdubbed six tracks a cappella, with echo. Later I was left with a persistent feeling it was about Christine Hinton, my girlfriend who was killed. I was very much in love with her, and she went away very suddenly. I was not equipped to deal with the loss. This piece was a sudden, improvised, overwhelming requiem.
If I Could Only Remember My Name can be described with many adjectives, all of which are equally valid – psychedelic, ethereal, hazy, hallucinatory, ghostly, dreamy, floating, and loosely coherent. David Crosby suffered for his art on this album. He wouldn’t pull out of his downward spiral until he was a guest of the Texas prison system. This album is like John Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band in that it is one an artist can make only once. David Crosby would later make records with Graham Nash that were listenable, but they were nowhere near as this creative, or interesting. In the last eight years of his life, David Crosby would finally rediscover his muse and make some of the best music of his life.
