by Bob Stanley
As Penny Valentine noted, something had to give. Bands were either getting heavier and hairier or heading to the supper clubs,2 neither of which signalled anything forward-thinking or particularly thrilling. CSN felt both familiar and different. Here were three songwriters with track records, all capable of cutting their own solo material, who also happened to harmonise like the first rays of dawn. Crosby, Stills & Nash, their eponymous debut, was released in May ’69 and went four times platinum as it slow-burned through the seventies.
The singer-songwriter quickly became the most successful economic model in the history of entertainment. They wrote, sang, frequently performed alone, and sold albums rather than singles. Unsurprisingly, record labels saw dollar signs and put out albums by any Californian longhair with a battered Martin acoustic. Most didn’t make it, but many of the real delights were to be found among the also-rans. Karen Beth sang as if she had hearing problems, with a slightly choked, weirdly affecting voice that gave her debut album a lost-in-the-woods quality; for some reason she called it The Joys of Life. Linda Perhacs was discovered by her Kapp Records A&R man while he was having root-canal surgery and his dentist happened to mention that his lithe assistant had written a few songs; her sole album, Parallelograms, outspooked even Karen Beth with its dead space, occasional clashing chords and Perhacs’s fragile, clear-mountain vocals. Bob Brown made a piece of leaf-green folk/jazz and called it ‘The Wall I Built Myself ’; Marc Jonson’s Years crammed every lover-spurning, toe-stubbing incident of his twenty-two summers into thirty-five minutes of primal-scream therapy with added strings and harpsichord; Kathy McCord used jazz legends like Hubert Laws on her one album of lullabies and the odd fuzz-guitar wig-out; Nancy Priddy was very pretty, had a voice to match, was the subject of Stephen Stills’s ‘Pretty Girl Why’, and created a downer folk/off-Broadway amalgam called ‘You’ve Come This Way Before’ shortly after giving birth to her daughter, actress Christina Applegate. None of these records sold enough to break even, and lay forgotten in bargain bins until pop historians re habilitated them in the nineties under the banner of ‘acid folk’.
Why didn’t they sell? Because these records embarrassed the paying customers with too many personal failures, rambunctious emotions, lost moments and memories that were far too vivid. The traumas of the rich and famous are so much more interesting than our own, or Karen Beth’s for that matter. Carole King, on the other hand, had famously split from her Brill Building co-writer and husband Gerry Goffin; she had written beautiful songs that had soundtracked teenage lives and by 1971 she had come out of her destructive relationship with Goffin as a wealthy Laurel Canyon celebrity with a sack full of introspective lyrics and her melodic instinct intact: her Tapestry album was the hit of the year, the single ‘It’s Too Late’ also a number one in the States. We wanted to share her pain. Maybe we could learn from it.
Handsome and skinny but similarly bruised, James Taylor was next in line for a million-selling Laurel Canyon album on the strength of his being King’s sometime beau. His hit ‘Fire and Rain’ (US no. 5 ’70) was a still, small story of a friend’s death and pretty much set the tone for the singer-songwriter confessional. The cover of Carole King’s Tapestry, meanwhile – long unkempt locks, cheesecloth shirt, soft furnishings, softer cat – epitomised both the cosiness and the domesticity of the singer-songwriters. It was a twenty-something equivalent of the womblike hush that had engulfed rock ’n’ roll in 1959, with Taylor and King as the new Fleetwoods. There was no danger, just comfort, and people needed that after a decade of war, assassinations and inner-city turmoil, just as they had needed the balm of Perry Como and Doris Day in the early fifties. There was more sexual openness in Laurel Canyon pop than there was in Calamity Jane, but not necessarily more sex, or indeed insight. The singer-songwriter message was ‘Everybody hurts’.
Two former members of Buffalo Springfield gave us the best and worst examples of the genre. Neil Young, peeking out from beneath his curtain hair like a cross between a startled deer and an eagle-eyed Action Man, had a definitive line in self-pity, exaggerated fivefold by his high, wobbly Canadian voice: ‘I went down to the radio interview, found myself alone at the microphone.’ Poor lamb. But the whine, the easy shifts from barstool rockers like ‘Cinnamon Girl’ to French horn-haunted oddities like ‘After the Gold Rush’ to gibberish that sounded weighty (‘Don’t let it get you down, it’s only castles burning’) showed a singular strength. And when his 1972 Harvest album sold like umbrellas in April, Young celebrated by recording a live album of previously unheard, uniformly cloud-grey material called Time Fades Away. ‘I’d rather head for the ditch than the middle of the road,’ he said. The result of Time Fades Away and its darker-yet sequels Tonight’s the Night (about a personal apocalypse) and On the Beach (ditto, on a national level) was that, having lost ninety per cent of his fans overnight, he built another audience who twigged that he was America’s Roy Harper, a contrary sod who would later side with Ronald Reagan on Farm Aid and would rarely be less than interesting. If I had to pick two highlights from his career, they would be ‘Like a Hurricane’, a torched rewrite of Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ which features the simplest, fiercest guitar solos of the decade, cleanly volcanic, and 1974’s ‘Albuquerque’, a story of escaping the city in a jalopy, with no particular place to go: ‘I’ll stop when I can, find some fried eggs and country ham.’ Like the Band’s historical fictions, it anticipated an alt-country movement which was decades away.
Stephen Stills made for a less convincing victim. CSN had become instant superstars in 1969 when their debut album was released. By the time of their 1970 follow-up Déjà Vu, they were kings of the hippies,3 but Stills was already struggling with fame. On ‘4 + 20’ he described it as ‘a different kind of poverty’ from that of his father, but one that was enough to leave him ‘just wishing that my life would simply cease’. Stills sings the song very well, with the voice of a weary pioneer, picking out new territory in a post-rock-group world. Even so, he was a twenty-four-year-old millionaire with cars, girls and an endless supply of booze – and fried eggs and country ham – at his disposal. You can understand why the phrase ‘Never trust a hippie’ was coined.
David Crosby ended up, uniquely among these mumbling troubadours, as a spokesman. And he was maddening. Jackson Browne recalled how ‘he had this legendary VW bus with a Porsche engine in it, and that summed him up – a hippie with power!’ Crosby loved the grand statement, no matter how idiotic – ‘the era of the guitar virtuoso is over,’ he told Rolling Stone in February 1969, a few months before Neil Young’s solo-heavy Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere became one of the year’s most influential albums.
Outside of the Hotel California, Vietnam rolled on, the Weather Underground wrecked corporate headquarters and the Symbionese Liberation Army fought the American ‘fascist insect’ that somehow mirrored the ‘many-coloured beast’ of Stephen Stills’s ‘4 + 20’. Some people were still angry, anyway. You can hear a hint of ’68 ire in Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Sunshine’, a US number four in ’72 which emerged as the last vestige of hippie resistance to Uncle Sam: ‘He can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine.’ And there was still Loudon Wainwright III, though he had quickly become bogged down in novelty protest; his sole hit single, ‘Dead Skunk’ (US no. 16 ’73), stank out his back catalogue for years.
Inside the nourishing hive of Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell was queen bee. A muse to both Crosby and Nash, Mitchell was the prototype for pretty much every female singer-songwriter; she was a cut above the winsome likes of Melanie and, boy, did she know it. She was nobody’s fool and proclaimed as much quite loudly. You are not hiding your light under a bushel if you appear on an album cover dressed as Vincent Van Gogh. Mitchell had surfaced in 1967, moving to Los Angeles from Toronto, and written ‘Both Sides Now’ (covered by Judy Collins), ‘Chelsea Morning’ and ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’ (both covered on Fairport Convention’s first album). The girl was talented. The real problem for he
r was that other people always made her songs sound more lovable. She had a habit of cramming more words in than were actually necessary, and delivering them in a flustered schoolma’am voice that killed their radio friendliness – quite likely this was intentional. They ended up sounding rather like this:
The last time I saw Richard
Was Detroit in ’68, and he told me
All romantics meet the same fate someday cynical and drunk and boring-someone in some dark cafe …
It thought it was a little cleverer than it was, and sabotaged a lot of her charms. On songs like ‘Carey’ she would cast nets and pull in lives lived to capacity, in Paris, New York or Venice Beach; her lyrics exuded intelligence (‘You don’t like strong women ’cos they’re hip to your tricks’) and her music was so richly detailed and immaculately laid out that it had no immediacy whatsoever. Once in a while she would use her wordplay to puncture the immaculate arrangements, write something catchy – like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ (UK no. 11, US no. 67 ’70) – and deliver it as if it were a fart gag. Her best record was The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which is also maybe the most self-descriptive album title in all pop, apart from Trogglodynamite by the Troggs.
Carole King’s crossover notwithstanding, entry into the hallowed inner sanctum of Laurel Canyon was not automatic for the singer-songwriters of an earlier era. Though Joni Mitchell accepted Jimmy Webb, the author of ‘Up, Up and Away’, singing on his Letters and Land’s End albums, others were snootier. ‘I wasn’t welcomed with open arms everywhere I went,’ Webb said. ‘I came into a Joni session one night and Eric Andersen was lying under the piano having had a bit too much to drink. He raised up on one elbow and said, “Oh, it’s Mr Balloons.” I mean, you had to prove that you were a dyed-in-the-wool left-winger and that you had been to the barricades, whereas I’d achieved fame with very outspoken middle-of-the-roaders like Glen Campbell, who had John Wayne on his television show. I came into this world of exquisite artists having to explain that I used drugs and was really very hip.’
Other oldies tried their hand at moving with the softer times: Ellie Greenwich’s ‘Let It Be Written, Let It Be Sung’ was tasteful, dull, and a depressing failure for the queen of Brooklyn songwriters. ‘People wanted conversational,’ said Jimmy Webb. ‘People like Joni were fishing beneath the thermal clime.’
Time moved slowly in this sub-thermal environment. As glam came and went in Britain, CSN became CSNY and expanded the singer-songwriter sound back into conventional band form. The diffuse LA edges blurred soft rock and singer-songwriter. One new band had the gall to call themselves America. They ripped off the CSN sound wholesale and were hated by the press but, as they were still teenagers, their wide-eyed innocence on songs like ‘Ventura Highway’ (US no. 9 ’72) and ‘Tin Man’ (US no. 4 ’74) was rather more endearing than the twenty-something navel-gazing of their elders. Besides, they had a great back story, being rich kids who had met at school in England, initially managed by mod DJ legend Jeff Dexter and later produced by George Martin. ‘Horse with No Name’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’72) was an ecology song that was quite the most dreamlike single of the year, clip-clopping past burnt-out cars across the endless plain of the future. Crosby, Stills and Nash would have thrown in a reference to Nixon, or Stephen Stills’s milk bill, but America kept everything clean and sunny and effortless and, for this most pop of reasons, they had racked up six US Top 10 hits by 1975.
CSN’s immediate legacy was that everyone mimicked their name. You had Cashman, Pistilli and West; Cotton, Lloyd and Christian; Loggins and Messina; in Britain the Shadows morphed into Marvin, Welch and Farrar.4 You half expected Peter, Paul and Mary to grow their hair and re-form as Yarrow, Stookey and Travers. The slightly blunter Seals and Crofts wrote the era’s finest, most sun-kissed CSN-alike. ‘I come home from a hard day’s work and you’re waiting there, not a care in the world’: ‘Summer Breeze’ remains the ultimate commuter dream. Seals and Crofts were Texans and, like America, their lighter touch came from being able to ape the Laurel Canyon sound without being close to the inner sanctum.
As the decade progressed, modern pop began to putrefy, partly because the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters got richer and, consequently, lazier; LA provided them with a plateau of self-celebratory success. As it had been before rock ’n’ roll, pop music was just there, like buildings, or roads, or other things of permanence you take for granted. Even in these bland times some things jumped out of the kitchen and tasted less like vanilla blancmange: Seals and Crofts came up with another beauty in the mantra-like, blue-eyed soul hit ‘Get Closer’ (again, it’s a whole summer inside three minutes thirty); Cliff Richard used pop’s new smoothness to relaunch himself with his best-ever hit, ‘Miss You Nights’ (as singer-songwriter confessional lyrics go, ‘children saw me crying’ is among the rawest); while Fleetwood Mac reinvented themselves with the addition of a young Californian couple.
Their story is maybe the most extraordinary and unlikely in all pop. From a position of being the biggest group in Britain in 1969, a series of catastrophes had befallen them. After Peter Green had lost his fragile grasp of the rope he quit the group, soon after the terrifying ‘Green Manalishi’ went Top 10. Next, the cherubic Jeremy Spencer went out to buy a paper while they were on tour in the States in February 1971; en route, he was hijacked by a cult called the Children of God and left the Mac on the spot. There was a year-long gap between ‘The Green Manalishi’ and ‘Dragonfly’, the forgotten jewel in their catalogue, a 1971 single with a heartbreaking guitar line and warm pillow of percussion, the sound of the saddest Sunday. It was the work of Danny Kirwan, who by now was their main guitarist, but he liked to drink, so much so that one night he smashed his Les Paul to bits, refused point blank to go on stage and got the boot. In stepped Bob Weston, who quietly began having an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife; his position soon became untenable.
By now it was truly a miracle the group still existed. The original rhythm section of bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood remained a constant, bolstered by ex-Chicken Shack singer Christine McVie (née Perfect) in 1970 and a year later by American singer/guitarist Bob Welch, who, after a few albums of diminishing commercial returns, convinced the group to relocate to California in 1974. When Welch quit (for once, not in a haze of sexual or opiated confusion), the rump Mac came across a curly-topped, wild-eyed, saturnine character called Lindsey Buckingham, who had made one album with his high-school sweetheart, Stevie Nicks.5 Somehow, Buckingham’s guitar-playing – never showy, melodic, abrasive but melancholy – felt like a continuation of all the Macs that had gone before; in spite of Nicks’s full Hollywood persona, they still frequently sounded like a walk beside a sea shore on a windy day, collar pulled up against the spray. 1977 album Rumours was all about love affairs, seen from different angles (the two couples in the group were both separating as they wrote and recorded it – they couldn’t resist making life difficult for themselves). Like Pet Sounds, it was perfectly cohesive, with various shades of optimism (Christine’s ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘You Make Loving Fun’) set tight against the weary (Stevie’s ‘Dreams’), the anxious (Lindsey’s ‘Second Hand News’) and the desolate (‘Gold Dust Woman’ – Stevie again). The production, given their lush harmonies, is remarkably spare – the intro and guitar break on ‘Dreams’ (US no. 1 ’77) are as stark as the production on 1968’s ‘Albatross’; Lindsey Buckingham, like Peter Green before him, knew how to wring maximum emotion from a few notes.
The Buckingham/Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac proved to be a starting point for a new soft rock. It was smooth, and ticked as precisely as an atomic clock. This west-coast sound may have lacked the ba-ba-bas of its sixties forebear, and the American economy wasn’t yet out of the woods, but people no longer needed anything quite as intimate and overly sharing as James Taylor.6 And it soundtracked America – there was no escaping the forty-million-selling Rumours; you couldn’t listen to the radio for thirty minutes without hearing something from it. Apocalypse had been postpo
ned. Whatever might be happening in Britain, also at a financial breaking point, it wouldn’t affect the States just yet.
The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ (US no. 1, UK no. 7 ’77) was meant to be a damning description of the self-regarding, suffocating freedom of Laurel Canyon life, one that Crosby, Stills and Nash had unintentionally nailed with a cute, troubling couplet on their first album in 1969: ‘You are living a reality I left years ago, it quite nearly killed me.’ Pop is escapism, but transfer this ethos into an entire community and it quickly stagnates. The post-Woodstock cosiness that created Tapestry became incrementally more crafted, more precise, more balanced, and the music got duller and duller. Sat on a yacht on the cover of their 1977 album CSN, the incredibly wealthy Crosby, Stills and Nash looked just like the enemy of 1967, just like the Man.
The LA sky in 1976 was flawless, as if a nip-and-tuck surgeon had removed the creases. LA was the industry. And CSN now looked and smelt like the industry rather than the underground. The Laurel Canyon scene was rank, sloppy and happy to peddle such weak fare as James Taylor’s gutted version of the old Marvin Gaye hit ‘How Sweet It Is’ (US no. 4 ’77). Desiccated, devoid of joy, it was time for pop to go back home to New York.
1 After driving en masse to Crosby’s house in late ’67 to tell him he was out of the band, the Byrds cut one more great album – the segued, soft and dreamlike psych Notorious Byrd Brothers, maybe their best record – before getting sidetracked by country rock. By 1969 they featured no original members bar Roger McGuinn and were once again reliant on Bob Dylan (‘Ballad of Easy Rider’) for their A-sides.
