Songs: Love The One You´re With, Do For The Others, Church (Part of Someone), Old
Times Good Times, Go Back Home, Sit Yourself Down,
To A Flame, Black
Queen, Cherokee, We Are Not Helpless.
Type of
Music: Late
Sixties Country-Rock/Folk
Comments:
Some of my
all time favourite music was created by David Crosby, Graham Nash, Neil Young
and Stephen Stills, not necessarily in that order. With the possible exception
of Neil Young I usually found that the combined musical strength of these
four produced better results than their individual efforts. Not unlike say the
Beatles.
That does
not mean that Stephen Still´s first solo Album is not worth listening to. In
1967-1970 he had certainly been the driving force behind Crosby Stills Nash
(& Young). His Bruce Springsteen alike No Non-Sense attitude is apparent on
this Album. It was still 1970, and free love, protest and reflections
on life in general were hot items. Some of the lyrics are therefore outdated by
now.
As for the
music I strongly suspect that Stephen is a perfectionist. He must have spend
hours in the studio building layer upon layer, using organ, a gospel choir and
overdub.
Sometimes it
works like in the well-known single Love The One You´re With and Old
Times Good Times that features Jimi Hendrix on guitar. But songs like Church
(Part of Someone), We Are Not Helpless and, to a lesser extend, Sit Yourself Down suffer under this burden.
But Stephen´s
more intimate songs like the probable Crosby/Stills/Nash left-over Do For The Others, the country-blues Black Queen, that shows that Stephen
is vastly underrated as a guitar player and the jazzy Cherokee are certainly
worth listening to.
Who should
buy this Record: Stephen would issue a number of solo
albums in the Seventies. None would come close to this effort.Therefore
if you like Stephen Stills, this is the one to go for.
Rating: *******1/2 (7 1/2 out of 10)
Green = Excellent Songs
Black = Good Songs
Red = Could Be Better
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