Wednesday, September 23, 2009
It’s hard to like David Crosby I have to say. He wrote Almost Cut My Hair didn’t he? – that almost ruined Déjà vu. He’s obviously full of himself. He’s the father of Melissa Ethridge’s child. But he was in the Byrds and he made If I Could Only Remember My Name. Probably the best sounding record of the 60’s/70’s. It’s just a beautiful thing. It sounds great on cassette but it sounds amazing on high end gear. A good friend of mine was looking to spend serious money on a high end stereo (totally wacky stuff. The cables are the EQ for these things – the signal from the disk to the speaker has to remain pure!) and we went round a bunch of places that sold this stuff in NYC and NJ a few years ago. The most interesting thing was to select music that would test these systems – some of which ran to 100 grand (for the record I have to say that I have a crappy stereo – and indeed for many years played everything through a Fender Twin Amp). We’d take some jazz (Bill Evans was good), the stooges (good to hear what a terribly recorded album sounds like), Pet Sounds (are you surprised), some Chic or electronica (amazing how bad this sometimes sounds on these systems, and we’d take David Crosby. As an aside by far the most awful thing we saw was a guy who was looking to buy some crazy expensive system testing it out with Carly Simon. Oh well. The phrase more money than taste came to mind. Anyway IICORMN sounded amazing. Like Crosby was sitting next to you. How they got that sound I have no idea. It must have been luck or the stars aligned. Nothing else from that studio, those players or that era sounds as good. And the songs aren’t bad too. Obviously having the Dead, Joni, and rest of the gang there helped but if you think Crosby is an irrelevant old hippy give this a listen. It will blow you away. Guaranteed.
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