byrdsongs, li

Time redeems everything in popular music. That’s what I’ve learned.  Once upon a time, David Crosby’s If Only I Could Remember My Name was a hippie relic and a running joke. The scorn Christgau heaped on the record in his Consumer Guide review was fairly typical: “This disgraceful performance inspires the first Consumer Guide Competition. The test: Rename David Crosby (he won't know the difference). The prize: One Byrds LP of your choice (he ought to know the difference). The catch: You have to beat my entries. Which are: Rocky Muzak, Roger Crosby, Vaughan Monroe. D-“  …I never thought the album was that bad. I've always kind of liked it, to tell you the truth. I mean, Crosby’s got the Grateful Dead and Neil Young and Stills and Nash and Mitchell and the Airplane and seemingly every other member of the West Coast hippie rock aristocracy sitting in with him. It’s pretty cool. Sure, it’s a bit of a ridiculous show of pious countercultural communality, but the music is groovy and swings with off-the-cuff open-endedness. I normally don’t go for stuff that meanders without a tightly conceived plan. I like my music to have its sphincter squeezed shut with vice-like force. But there's always exceptions, and the music on If Only works. Why shouldn't it work? There was tons of talent laboring underneath the dense cloud of reefer smoke that undoubtedly hung over the proceedings. It's not a record I’m gonna wanna hear all the time, but I never thought it was anything other than a fun West Coast jam session with some freely associated words attached to the music as it emerged spontaneously. So I was quite pleased when Barney Hoskins spoke of the album favorably in his books on Los Angeles music.  And then the other day I found the record on Spotify, and it came with an attached review by one Stanton Swihart, who says (rather breathlessly) that If Only is “among the finest splinter albums out of the CSNY Diaspora (and) one of the defining moments of hungover spirituality from the era.”  Maybe not quite, but it’s definitely worth hearing…