Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It – Stephen Stills

This new feature may well be the most challenging yet for the poor AUK writer. Previous tasks have required them to write gushingly about their favourite artists, both high profile and those under the radar, along with ordering their most treasured albums and songs. As difficult as we’ve claimed these labours of love to be in truth there are few things more enjoyable than waxing lyrical about the music we are so passionate about. However, taking one of your heroes and focusing as much on the negative as the positive has an altogether different degree of difficulty, one that repeatably jars the narrative flow, and leaves a taste of betrayal and a faint whiff of guilt.

Having said all that, the first priority is to find an artist who has had a lengthy career, with a large recording output, whose reputation is unlikely to be tarred, and might possibly even agree with your studied observations. This approach quickly narrowed down the contenders, and it wasn’t long before my attention turned to a singer-songwriter, and musician extraordinaire, who has been one of the most loved and influential artists throughout the last fifty years of my personal musical pilgrimage. Whether it be with his first band, the highly influential Buffalo Springfield, who blended the genres of folk rock and country rock, his pivotal role in the supergroup C.S.N.Y, or Manassas, the outfit he formed with ex-Byrds bassist Chris Hillman that would release two seminal albums combining such diverse musical styles as rock, country, blues, bluegrass and latin, that would create the blueprint for the genre that today we call Americana.

That artist is of course Stephen Stills, who with a recording career that dates back to 1964 with the Au Go Go Singers, and has at the last count released close to forty albums, be that studio or live, as either a band member, solo, as a duo, or most famously as a trio. With such a mass of recordings to choose from, I decided to make things a little easier on myself, and focus purely on the albums released solely under his own name, which brought the number down to a more negotiable eleven, and suddenly the task that had seemed initially so daunting now very quickly fell into place.

So below are what I personally believe to be Stephen Stills’ finest solo recording, the one I truly can’t live without, and his poorest offering, the one I can live without. Hope you enjoy and I look forward to reading your responses, whether you agree with me or not.

Can’t Live Without It:  “Stephen Stills” (1970)

Recorded in the wake of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s chart-topping release “Deja Vu”, this album mainly came together at Island Studios in London, where Stills had just bought ‘Brookfields’, a large mansion in Surrey that had previously belonged at different times to Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers. The purchase was made on the suggestion of Ahmet Ertegun, who at the time was head of Atlantic Records, under the pretext that the move away from L.A,  and his deteriorating relationship with the other members of the quartet, would allow Stills time to concentrate undisturbed on his first solo release. Now, you might understandably assume that, with the success of his two previous musical collaborations, Stills really had nothing left to prove and yet his talents were still under-appreciated in comparison to either Crosby, Nash, or Young by many of the critics of the time. That would all change come the release of this album in November 1970.

Opening with the irresistible Latin rhythms of ‘Love The One You’re With’, and inspired by a remark made by American keyboard player Billy Preston, the song would go on to be Stills’ biggest hit single, reaching No. 14 on the ‘Billboard Top 100’, and 50 years later still sounds as infectious as it ever did.  The second track ‘Do For The Others’, was written for Crosby in the aftermath of the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton who had been tragically killed in a road accident a year earlier. Such is the positive message and beautiful melody of this track it could easily have come straight from C.S.N’s renowned debut album. The gospel infused r’n’b of ‘Church (Part Of Someone)’, with its glorious high harmonies and string arrangement by Arif Mardin marks this as one of Stills’ finest compositions, whilst fourth track ‘Old Times Good Times’, is renowned for featuring Jimi Hendrix on lead guitar. The musicians had first befriended each other at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and at the time of recording the album were both residing in the UK. Hendrix contributed with one of his finest guitar solos but it is Stills’ performance on the organ that simply blows you away. As if having one guitar god on your album wasn’t enough, the following track, ‘Go Back Home’, features none other than Eric Clapton, who according to Stills recorded his solo for the track in one take, and marks this album out as the only one on which both Hendrix and Clapton supplied guitar.

Side two of the original vinyl recording starts off with ‘Sit Yourself Down’, with its vibrant gospel-based melody adding the juxtaposition to Stills’ lyrical narrative, torn between his artistic impulse to push himself harder and a maturing desire to settle down with his new girlfriend Rita Coolidge. Here again the combination of the backing singers along with Stills on both the bridge and refrain is absolutely mesmerising. Next track ‘To A Flame’, is one of two tracks to features another A-Lister in the shape of The Beatles drummer, operating here under the pseudonym of ‘Richie’, which is followed by the show-stopping ‘Black Queen’, that was reputedly recorded whilst Stills was completely drunk on tequila slammers, though his guitar mastery of his Martin acoustic throughout the track makes the claim dubious at best. Next ‘Cherokee’, another track inspired by Coolidge, is classic Stills, with its kaleidoscopic score, including flute courtesy of Sidney George, along with organ from the irrepressible Booker T Jones, all swept along by the rhythmic pulse of Dallas Taylor’s drums and Stills’ guitar before fading into the distance to be replaced by the final track ‘We Are Not Helpless’. Wrongly assumed to be in response to the Neil Young penned ‘Helpless’, one of the iconic tracks from ‘Deja Vu’, this positive narrative is typical of the counterculture of the late 60’s, of which Stills was undoubtedly one of its finest musical exponents.

Though most of the music for this album was recorded in the UK, the bulk of the backing vocals were added back in LA, and would include most of the usual suspects including David Crosby, Graham Nash, Cass Elliot, John Sebastian, as well as Coolidge and her sister Priscilla Jones, while the iconic cover was shot by legendary photographer Henry Diltz at Stills’ cabin in Colorado during a snowy September day. On its release the album was dedicated to the memory of Hendrix who had passed away two months earlier.

With these ten exemplary songs, so intrinsic to the overall sound and message that it would be unfair to single one out, Stills didn’t just manage to create an album for the times, combining all his idiosyncratic grit, melancholy and musical craftsmanship, but also shone a light on what was possible when multiple musical genres were skilfully brought together. More than fifty years on it still continues to be one of my favourite albums.

Can’t Live with: “Thoroughfare Gap” (1978)

The following few years would prove to be a fertile period for Stills, releasing a second solo album to mostly positive reviews, if not quite up to the quality of his debut, before putting together a new band with former Byrds bass player Chris Hillman entitled Manassas that would record two studio albums of the highest order. It was whilst touring with Manassas in France that Stills would meet a local singer-songwriter called Veronique Sanson, who he would eventually marry in 1973.  During this period the original success of the band had begun to wane, with sales of the second album “Down The Road”, considerably lower than its predecessor to which Stills blamed Atlantic Records for their poor promotion, that would ultimately lead to him signing a three album deal with Columbia.

In truth the writing was on the wall from the start, with the quality of the three Columbia albums diminishing with each release, culminating with “Thoroughfare Gap”, in October 1978. By this point his marriage to Sanson, which had produced one son Chris Stills, was on the rocks, and they would divorce the following year. Now he found himself caught between both a spiralling depression and a desperate attempt to revive his career just as a seismic musical land shift was taking place, with rock music being replaced by disco at the top of the charts. Stills had, to be fair, already played on numerous songs by the Bee Gees and had long considered Barry Gibb a close friend; however his own album would prove a rather poor attempt at creating what he ominously described as a mix between “disco and swamp rock”, which ultimately was just a collection of uninspired songs riddled with self-pity.

That said, it’s not without a few redeeming moments. Stills, even at his lowest ebb, could offer up flashes of his brilliant past. The opening number ‘You Can’t Dance’ as the title suggests throws itself wholeheartedly if somewhat disastrously onto the dance floor, complete with backing vocals from the youngest of the Gibb brothers Andy, who was at the time, at the height of his own popularity. The second number is the title track and by far the best song on the album having initially been written and recorded back in 1972 as part of the first Manassas record without making the cut. The title refers to a water gap in the Bull Mountains located on the border of Prince William and Fauquier counties in Virginia, which became an escape route used during the American Civil War. Here Stills creates a song that echoes of his halcyon days, both lyrically and musically, with Al Gould’s fiddle playing providing the icing on the cake.

Almost all of what follows should come with a health warning, disintegrating as it does from the overtly pop mush of ‘We Will Go On’, to the plodding attempt at cajun-flavoured New Orleans jazz of ‘Beaucoup Yumbo’.  ‘What’s The Game’ and ‘Lowdown’ offer a little respite, particularly the latter which sees some fiery fretwork from Stills supported by the exquisite backing vocals from Kitty Pritikin, Verna Richardson and Lisa Roberts. Unfortunately the decline from grace is completed by a laborious attempt at Gregg Allman’s classic ‘Midnight Rider’, whilst the cover of Buddy Holly and Norman Petty’s ‘Not Fade Away’, is simply pointless. If all that wasn’t bad enough the album closes with the embarrassing ‘Can’t Get No Booty’, a co-write with esteemed guitarist Danny Kortchmar to which both artists should be eternal ashamed.

In later years Stills would admit that “some tunes weren’t as good as others I’ve written, but I’m just messing round trying to find something new, I can’t do the same thing for eight years, that’s called artistic suicide”. To be fair, some might conclude that releasing an album so below the heights of his previous standards to be just as suicidal, and a better defence might be offered up by citing the fact that in 1976 Stills was diagnosed with having developed a severe hearing problem. That said, cynics might just as well conclude that repeated listening to ‘Thoroughfare Gap” would likely leave us all with a similar ailment.