On May 5, 1968, Buffalo Springfield (Richie Furay, Dewey Martin, Bruce Palmer, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young), the band that launched a thousand — well, several, anyway — bands that would define country-rock music in the late ’60s and early ’70s, performed its final concert. Furay would soon form Poco with Jim Messina, who produced Buffalo Springfield’s final album, and Stills would join David Crosby and Graham Nash in that little trio called Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Young would go on to a solo career before joining up briefly with CSN. In their short three-year life — the band formed in 1966 and had broken up by the time their last album came out in July 1968 — Buffalo Springfield produced a handful of songs — “Go and Say Goodbye,” “Broken Arrow,” Bluebird” — that defined a new sound, and one that is synonymous with a chaotic time in American culture — “For What It’s Worth” — a song that eerily speaks volumes to the political state of America 50 years later.
In celebration of the band’s final concert, Rhino is releasing Buffalo Springfield’s three albums in a box set that includes the mono and stereo mixes of the band’s first two albums — Buffalo Springfield (1966), Buffalo Springfield Again (1967) — and the stereo mix of the band’s final album, Last Time Around (1968). A limited-edition set of 5,000 copies of the vinyl albums will be released at the same time. Neil Young has often said that Buffalo Springfield sounded best live and that its studio albums didn’t capture the band’s music well. Young was behind this project, and the analog tapes of these albums were remastered under his auspices and will also be available for streaming and downloading through his archives (www.neilyoungarchives.com).
The songs on the band’s first, self-titled album, flow with a pure, clear energy that the songs on the later albums lose to a kind of disordered experimentation. Stills and Young wrote all the songs on Buffalo Springfield, and the album opens with Stills’ jangly, electric, frenetic “Go and Say Goodbye” that features some fast-paced vocal modulation. Young’s now well-known waltzing ballad, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” illustrates the band’s ability to move from the straight-ahead rockabilly of the album opener to lush arrangements and more adventurous chord changes. The album closes with the now-iconic protest anthem “For What It’s Worth.”
Buffalo Springfield Again kicks off with Young’s driving psychedelic, bass-heavy rocker “Mr. Soul,” which is, according to the credits, “respectfully dedicated to the ladies of The Whiskey A Go Go and the women of Hollywood.” The album features Furay’s first songs with the band: “A Child’s Claim to Fame,” “Bad Memory,” “Good Time Boy.” You can hear the strains of the music that would become characteristic of Poco in the galloping country rhythms and the sparkling lead guitars of “A Child’s Claim to Fame.” The album’s first side closes with Stills’ memorable “Bluebird,” which combines his characteristically almost-classical guitar arpeggios — he’s always been and still is the best all-around guitarist alive — with his alternating gravelly and tender vocals.
Buffalo Springfield Last Time Around wanders off in several different directions. It opens with Young’s “On the Way Home,” an upbeat, pop-flavored song with lyrics such as “When the dream came/I held my breath with my eyes closed/I went insane/Like a smoke ring day when the wind blows.” Furay and Young’s “It’s Hard to Wait” is a Beatles-esque, jazzy, chamber tune, and Stills’ “Pretty Girl Why” is a “Girl from Ipanema”-style ballad. Furay’s now well-known “Kind Woman” closes the album with its achingly beautiful blend of guitars and vocals. You can hear clearly the musical seeds of Poco’s “I Can See Everything” in this song.
What’s That Sound contains some treasures, and the remastered albums capture the band’s sound crisply. The box set introduces a signature sound to new listeners, allowing them to hear the raw beginnings of a new sound and tracing its development before it scattered into various other forms.
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