David Crosby’s debut solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name, was recorded during a traumatic time for the musician. Following the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton in a car accident, the musician hunkered down in San Francisco with numerous key collaborations from Laurel Canyon and West Coast scene, such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and created something of a musical love-in. Croz’s sublime vocals and languorous approach gives the album a blissful, ethereal, and freak-folk charm, with a dark heart. He would not issue another solo album until 18 years later.

If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971) found a new audience towards the end of the musician’s life, but the story starts with Crosby, Stills and Nash. Almost as soon as they had released their first hugely successful self titled album, the Californian three-part-harmony, and later with the inclusion of Neil Young on the timeless but much darker follow up Déjà Vu (1970), the individual members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were already working on solo projects.

Piqued into action by their incredibly talented colleague’s release of the stunning Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969), and After the Goldrush (1970), Stephen Stills, buzzing with ideas, was the first of the original trio to release his first proper solo (self-titled) album in late-1970. These are all straight ahead, rock singer-songwriter albums. Crosby’s self-produced If I Could Only Remember My Name is a wonderful counterpoint, and so different. It’s jazzy, meandering; a unique and experimental collection of dreamy Californian ambience, featuring angelic chorale-vocal experiments, cosmic storytelling, and effortless rock guitar noodling over transcendental melodies.

Very few albums have as good an acoustic guitar sound as this album, and Crosby’s voice is wild, sleepy and soothing throughout, and while scratchy and at times strained, is always note-perfect. Recorded concurrently with the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty in 1970 at San Francisco’s Wally Heider Studios, the album features a key contribution from exceptional Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, adding his gorgeous pedal steel and electric guitars all over Crosby’s album. He also helped arrange and produce the material for his buddy, adding a resonating warmth and musical joy throughout.

Garcia, Crosby, Young

The album opens with the mantra song ‘Music is Love’, summarising the collective vibe of the album: a bunch of friends in the studio, there for each other, making the music they love. It’s a beautiful sentiment, basically a jam, originally recorded as a warm up number. It ushers in the sound of the album and features accompanying vocals by Nash and Neil.

The shaggy eight-minute ‘Cowboy Movie’ is a groovy folk-rock allegory about Rita Coolidge, but doesn’t really fit the feel of the album, a white-boy blues that drags, unlike the warm embrace of the next track ‘Tamalpais High (At About 3)’, which finds our hero multi-vox folk-scatting over a jazzy arrangement and Garcia’s mesmerising electric guitar outro. The album really starts here.

Side one closes with the Byrds-ian ‘Laughing’ the centrepiece of the album, and If I Could Only Remember My Name‘s most complete track, it features the luminous Joni Mitchell on vocals, some slide from Garcia, and a singularly incredible multi-layered guitar sound.

The brooding ‘What Are Their Names’ opens side two with a slow build finally hitting something of a vocal pinnacle towards the end, although it sounds longer than it’s four minutes and for what it really is; a nice mood-setter. The delicate beauty of ‘Traction in the Rain’ is a stunner. It’s not just the autoharp, but Crosby, while no Neil Young on guitar, loves his crazy guitar tunings and he’s essentially made up his own here; try not to get lost in this song. The next track ‘Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves)’ is very pretty, but could sit on a CSN album, has no lyrics (spoiler alert), but has exquisite harmonising between Crosby and Nash.

The album closes with two sublime moments. The first is the traditional moment ‘Orleans’, sung in French acapella-style and multi-layered, a lovely arrangement, essentially listing Parisian cathedrals. Crosby’s voice providing a sweeping and swooning effect like an ocean, then halfway through some beautiful guitar joins in. The last song on the album, the moving ‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’, is short but is the essence of the whole album. Crosby is all about vocal stacking, and clearly an incredibly instinctive harmony singer, he improvises a wordless ‘spirit-in-the-room’ musical wake for his late girlfriend; a ghostly and chillingly powerful album closer.

TRACKS:

1. Music is Love
2. Cowboy Movie
3. Tamalpais High (At About 3)
4. Laughing
5. What Are Their Names
6. Traction in the Rain
7. Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)
8. Orleans
9. I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here

Further Listening:

1. Neil Young – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969)
2. Neil Young – After the Goldrush (1970)
3. Graham Nash – Songs for Beginners (1971)
4. Stephen Stills – Manassas (1972)