Buffalo Springfield - Bluebird - recording minutia

Buffalo Springfield Again

The Buffalo Springfield have once again produced a musically and vocally interesting album. The songs on this album are not always as distinctive as those on their first effort, but they are done well. What Buffalo Springfield Again though obviously lacks is cohesiveness.

Diversity is an advantage but some times goes too far and becomes disunity. This album sounds as if every member of the group is satisfying their own musical needs. Each of them have produced songs in their own bag. Together there is no blend, only a rather obvious alienation among the compositions.

Richie Furay has produced some pretty compositions that are suitable for his voice: "Sad Memory" and for Dewey Martin, the drummer, which comes off as an affected attempt at the Tamla-Motown sound with a touch of Otis Redding.

Neil Young, a very capable and original guitarist, should be strongly commended for his composition, "Mr. Soul," a gutsy contemporary blues. The song hangs together well. His second composition, "Broken Arrow," is an attempt at the latest trend in contemporary song writing — the Beatle-esque freak out. The song is over six minutes long. It goes through changes of tone, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocal quality. The song begins with the screams of fans and a rather raspy vocal of "Mr. Soul" and moves to a slower tempo and a different song. Although he incorporates some excellent string tracks and piano tracks, the song, nevertheless, is unsuccessful. It doesn't hold up, it becomes tiresome and loses impact.

Steve Stills' songs and arrangements dominate the album. "Bluebird" is an earthy, original bluesy number with great drive. At the end of the track Stills changes the style turning it into a sort of folky, banjo-picking tune. In "Rock and Roll Woman" the group is at its vocal best and the instrumental track is perfectly coordinated.

Buffalo Springfield Again is hardly a failure. Far from it. It is simply a very good, but not great, second effort by a highly talented group.

They were definitely energetic, but the live recordings I've heard suggest that perhaps they tended to let adrenaline (or stimulants) get the better of them. Definitely lots of great energy, but also lacking some of the grace and finesse of the studio recordings.

 

Yes for sure.

There's this thing that constantly irks me about Mr. Soul live....Mr. Soul single/acetate...Mr. Soul on "Again". Neil has (I think) always contended that he shouldn't have screwed with the track for the "Again" release...ie, the new solo he overdubbed....doubled lead coming out of the break.

To me...the "Again" treatment of Soul is the best of all of them....Neil actually spent some time thinking about how to snap the track into a more effective pop thing. But, whatever.

I'd see them ragged by themselves... and I'd see them on top of their game when they were slotted with other acts and only 20 minutes to get their point across.

I've also said...and I go down in the minority on this one for sure...Jim Fielder's fairly long stint on bass resulted in the BEST gigs. Bruce was a constant thud. Fielder was completely tight with his fingering....in the pocket with Dewey ..and very melodic. With what was going on with the guitars, Fielder's playing was a massive breath of fresh air to get both low end and space into the sound. imo. Plus, Fielder knew the material better than Bruce ever did. Had Fielder not been booted the week before Monterey, the Monterey set may have been slimly better. Hopeless as that set was.

 

I finally sought out their full performance from Monterey after hearing the version of For What It's Worth on the Record Store Day "Iconic Performances" vinyl sampler, and I love it, looseness and all! The version of Clancy is killer. The Palmer/Dewey rhythm section is pretty exciting to me - and hearing their songs done live in their original context is so cool (with the caveat it'd be even cooler if Young had been there, though Crosby was no slouch on vocals). Kinda wild that Stills was on such a hot streak he dropped massive songs like Bluebird and Rock and Roll Woman in the aftermath of the Springfield breakup. CSNY would've totally done those songs justice.

 

Unfortunately it’s not clear what their full performance was. For What It’s Worth, Clancy, and Rock and Roll Woman/Bluebird were part of the 1988 radio show, and lower quality transfers of A Child’s Claim To Fame and Pretty Girl why circulate (the latter only partially to my knowledge), but as with a lot of the festival, it’s not clear what the complete set list was.

 

Oh, man - interesting! I'm curious if there's ever been interest on Stills' part to release the full thing, if for nothing else, posterity's sake. Seems like a real disservice to their place in the historical narrative to hold this stuff back at this point.

 

That release would had done nothing to their legacy. Pretty uninspiring performance overall. Hollywood Bowl tape is whole other league in comparison

 

The banjo was unquestionably added later. If you listen to a digital recording of the finished track, you can hear print-through of the first couple of notes of the chaotic guitars from the long version just before the banjo begins.

 

Exactly.

 

Yeah, but given their live shows are relatively undocumented, at this point in history, I'd argue that the Springfield are important enough that any existing live recordings in good sound should be released. Plus, this was a part of an historically important festival, so all the more reason. I've always heard their set at the festival was less-than-stellar, but I dig what I hear!

Gonna have to listen to Hollywood Bowl now. If it has good sound and is in another league, as you say, then I'm gonna be miffed all over again x2 that we don't have an official release!

 

I gotta say I never noticed that!
Cue: Bluebird from my minty tan/purple label "Again" LP.....................

 

Is there a better sounding version than this?



Because the quality is pretty bad. Vocals way too loud and extremely distorted.

The Monterey recording, like all of the Monterey recordings, is less than ideal, but it's much better.

Monterey can be a bit ragged at times, but I've never call it uninspiring.

You almost certainly won't notice it there. It's *very* low in level; if you're even able to hear it under the surface noise, be careful about blowing out your ears when the banjo comes in.

But yes, you can hear a few notes and Stills' initial vocal there.

 

I was typing nearly the same thing when @lukpac beat me to it. It's easiest (and safest) to use a program like Audacity to make a digital edit from a CD or high-res download source, so you can really turn up the volume without blowing everything out when the banjo comes in. It's a faint shadow of a sound, like it's coming through a closed door across the room, and it would be further submerged under surface noise, turntable rumble, or cassette hiss. And it's literally about two notes long, but anyone familiar with the long version would recognize those two notes. The only real significance of this minor, easy-to-miss print-through is that it confirms that the long version came first and the banjo coda was an afterthought. I'm assuming that the banjo was spliced on at the end, in which case there wouldn't be any more print-through underneath it, even if it were somehow detectable.

 

Nope but it's the best live recording of them with Neil and it's very listenable. He even released Mr Soul from it as bonus tracks for Archives box set. Monterey totally pales in comparison.

Until Neil is alive, don't bet on any Springfield live release (especially on live recordings WITHOUT him).

 

Agreed. Ideally we'd have multi-tracks of a show with Neil but I've yet to see any proof such a thing exists. Monterey is imperfect but it's the best we're likely to have. Hypothetically the new isolation software like MAL might be able to improve the sound balance on some of these other recordings, but it can only work with what's there and if the vocals are an overloaded mess there's only so much that can be done to restore them. (They should have let the band use the MC's microphone, which sounds fine on the Bowl tape.) My barely-educated guess is that Neil is suppressing a release of Monterey because he's not on the tape, or maybe he just doesn't like the sound. He seems to be the one with the hair-trigger veto pen on such things. At least we got "For What It's Worth" on the Razor & Tie release and the Criterion Blu-ray, but I'd be happy to see a release of their full set.

 

Neil vetoed all live recordings when he was compiling box set. The mythical Jennifer Starkey tapes from early 1967 is literally unlistenable.

 

Neil certainly is quirky at times, but I think that he has been alive for a pretty long time now.