byrdsongs, lii

Those of you who've been reading me for awhile now - thank you, btw - probably know that I have certain rules for music... Harmonica always makes a song sound bad... Tambourine always makes a song sound good... The shorter a song is, the better... Double albums can and should always be pared down to two sides... Avoid saxophone, horns, and flute...  Politics don't mix well with music... Covers are never as good as the originals... If faced with a choice between heavy and light, go with the latter... And Steve Stills made everything he participated in worse than it would otherwise have been, including Buffalo Springfield...  There are, of course, exceptions to some if not all of these rules.  For instance, I love Bud Shank's hep cat flute solo in California Dreaming. I also love a few of the covers of Chet Powers' Get Together, particularly those by the Youngbloods (their's is a guitar-spangled anthem with cross-generational appeal), HP Lovecraft (their's is another exception to the flute rule), and the Jefferson Airplane (their's shows how great the Airplane were in the beginning, when they were just a simple beatnikish folk rock band)...  As far as Steve Stills goes, he did a pretty good job with Manassas.  Their music was ccr with pretensions of being something better than that, but I think one has to accept that ccr was simply the coin of the realm within a particular milieux of early 70s rock. I'm not really sure why Chris Hillman wanted to be in Manassas. I guess he'd grown tired of the Burritos and needed a new outlet. And when one of the biggest rock stars in the world - if not the biggest - invites you to join his band, I imagine it's hard to refuse.  The first Manassas album is way too long and does that pretentious 'conceptual' thing where each of the four sides has its own supposedly unifying theme (The Raven, the Wilderness, Consider, and Rock 'n Roll is Here to Stay...Oy vey). But there's some good music in there if you're willing to put in the work required to find it.  I think I might even have two or three good Manassas tracks buried somewhere within the deepest recesses of my iTunes, to say nothing of my unconscious...