It’s high time for Songs of the Day to pay more attention to the wonderful and sadly short-lived Buffalo Springfield, a band so extravagantly talented that the Rolling Stone Record Guide once pronounced them “potentially an American Beatles”. Hard to believe, but we’ve only covered them once before, in an instalment praising On the Way Home, one of Neil Young’s finest compositions. If you haven’t heard it, really, you must:
Today’s selections exemplify what made Buffalo Springfield so great and so fascinating, showcasing such levels of songwriting skill, instrumental prowess, and sheer musical ambition that it’s hard to believe that these young men were only at the beginning of their recording careers. Just as impressive is how little the songs have to do with each other. It’s rare for two compositions from the same band, off the same album, to sound so dissimilar; heard separately, they’d probably strike most listeners as coming from different groups, which, in this case, they actually did. You never really knew what you were going to hear from this band. Like the Beatles, Buffalo Springfield was blessed with multiple talented songwriters, each capable of writing in different styles, and like the Beatles, they really had no fixed, definable sound.
Expecting to Fly is an extraordinary early masterpiece composed by Neil Young, a beautiful, melodic, lushly orchestrated, deeply melancholy meditation on loss and failed relationships that showcased an astonishing level of artistic and temperamental maturity for somebody aged only 22 years. The spacious, dreamy production, courtesy of the legendary Jack Nitzsche, was far ahead of its time in 1967, and rivalled the best work then coming out of the Beatles (amazingly, the track was unreleased but already in the can when Sgt. Pepper blew the music world’s collective mind, and Neil worried that it sounded too much like A Day in the Life, especially at the end). Jack also wrote the string arrangement, and, though released as a Buffalo Springfield song, it was actually a solo effort, recorded by Young with Nitzsche and various session musicians.
According to Nitzsche, the song was mainly about “Neil’s fear about getting it on with women”, but it digs a whole lot deeper than that, describing what sounds to be an exceptionally painful breakup and the ensuing heartache. The final verse says it all:
If I never lived without you
Now you know I’d die
If I never said I loved you
Now you know I’d try
Babe, now you know I’d try
Babe, now you know I’d try
…and then, having moved almost imperceptibly into waltz time, the song ends with mournful grace, the strings providing one last flourish, sounding almost like weeping, before everything dissolves into a final resolving note, much as it began.
Hard to believe this is the same guy who wrote Cinnamon Girl, Mr. Soul, and Rockin’ in the Free World. As highly as he’s regarded, Neil is still underrated.
Bluebird was written by Stephen Stills, and it’s probably the best thing he ever produced. Conventional wisdom is that it began life as a tribute to his then-muse, Judy Collins (as, so I’ve read, did Rock and Roll Woman, another Buffalo Springfield gem, and Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, composed when he was with Crosby Stills and Nash). The lyrics portray a woman who’s mesmerizing, inexplicably sad, and essentially unknowable, while musically it’s structurally complex, multi-layered, and played with remarkable assuredness. Stills’s expert work on the acoustic is complimented by Young’s on the electric, the two guitar lines intertwining, weaving in and out of each other with easy fluidity, while Bobby West, standing in for Bruce Palmer, lays down one of the better bass lines of the rock ‘n roll era. Then, perhaps best of all, it’s graced with an unexpectedly sweet and sadly philosophical coda, played by Stills on banjo, that’s simply gorgeous.
Soon she’s going to fly away
Sadness is her own
Give herself a bath of tears
And go home, and go home
The song blends so many elements and styles, with shades of Rock, Folk, Bluegrass, and traditional Country mixing, almost impossibly, with something close to psychedelia. In lesser hands such an attempt at musical fusion would have come out as an incoherent mishmash, yet it all hangs together seamlessly, while at times what AllMusic critic Matthew Greenwald called the “intense guitar tapestry” woven by Stills and Young is almost hypnotic; in concert, their renditions often turned into 15 or 20 minute jams (there’s a nine minute version available on record), the two guitarists improvising extended riffs and playing off each other in a manner that’s been likened to modern Jazz.
Bluebird was highly praised by the critics and made a huge splash at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival, but peaked on the Billboard charts at only 58 when released as a single in 1967. Ritchie Furay later described this disheartening failure as a turning point for the band:
I was sure that we had the follow-up to “For What It’s Worth”… I thought ‘Bluebird’ was the song that was going to make our mark and take us to the top … ‘Bluebird’ was a Top Ten hit in Los Angeles but it couldn’t get out of town. But that was always a problem with the band … Had maybe a hit single appeared, it might have been a different story.
Buffalo Springfield disbanded in 1968. Its members all went on to other things, and generally flourished, especially Young, whose solo work consistently lived up to the standards he’d set for himself so early on. Still, we can’t help but wonder whether the special synergy of their combined efforts had made the group even greater than the sum of its parts, and imagine what wonderful music we would have heard, if only they’d persisted.
the needlefish 
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