(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not so recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)
I first read about David Crosby's 1971 masterpiece in a British music magazine notorious for exaggerated, aggrandizing pieces on middling solo albums made by peripheral members of famous bands. I'd been burned by Dennis Wilson's solo efforts (Pacific Ocean Blue) which had been lauded as being as good as, even better than, anything Brian Wilson had ever conceived. And I was just as disappointed by the misunderstood and underrepresented genius of the Byrds, Gene Clark, and the records he made after he left the group. So I bought David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name with a grain of salt, certain that it couldn't be worse than "Wooden Ships" or "Almost Cut My Hair," songs he'd composed with CSN and CSN and Y respectively. And definitely not as bad as "Mind Gardens" or "Dolphin's Smile," songs he'd written and sang as a member of the Byrds.
Put plainly, If I Could Only Remember My Name are the mellow noises of a high (not stoned, exactly) musician explaining his good vibes to the universe.Though mostly jammy and unstructured, the album is entirely listenable, which has to do in no small part with the musicians that have contributed to it: Neil Young, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, and various members of the Jefferson Airplane.
These contributors. vocal and instrumental, stand out with such definition that it almost seems that David Crosby is only partially contributing to his own album. Some of this has to do with his guitar-playing proficiency, which has always been overshadowed by Roger McGuinn and, later, Stephen Stills. The rest of it has to do with Crosby's voice, which, as the important harmonic glue that held other vocalists together, was rarely recgonized as being particularly resonant on its own. Though he had the better set of pipes in the Byrds, McGuinn's reedy, nasally drone always stood out above Crosby's. And in CSN he became more invisible, where three voices blended sometimes unnervingly into one. Even the most discerning listener, at times, has trouble extracting David Crosby's voice from Graham Nash's. While listening to If I Could Only Remember My Name I first picked out Neil Young's singing, or Joni Mitchell's, and once in a while I recognized David Crosby. Overall, the music is very pretty, in a half-baked way (and I mean that in the best possible sense)--"Tamalpais High (at About 3)" wordless and flowing, and "Cowboy Movie" reminiscent of a better take of "Almost Cut My Hair."
The theme of uncertainty is consistent throughout the record--and you get a sense that David Crosby isn't really joking, that he really doesn't know what the hell is going on. Aside from the tentative, unsure tracks of "What Are Their Names" and "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here" there is an overall sense of ambivalence in all the lyrics. The first song, "Music Is Love," is not the definitive statement one might expect--when the band sings "Everyone's saying that music is love," Crosby either doesn't know (or care) whether music is love or not. And in the track "Laughing," the first line goes "I thought I met a man who knew a man who knew what was going on / I was mistaken." By the end of the album, you aren't sure if he's figured things out or stopped trying. Or if he was trying at all--or if he even tried to try. Crosby exists in a state of constant bewilderment, and you hope he might get just one of his questions answered.
