All of the ladies attending the ball are requested to gaze

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

15/08/71 : Stephen Stills 2 - Stephen Stills

Crosby, Stills and Nash have popped up on all sorts of albums over the years, but this is the first time we've ever met one of them in a solo capacity - and I'm kinda looking forward to it because I feel it's going to be different from most of what we've seen this year.

Yeah, I didn't mind this - I think I'd struggle to say any of the songs are exactly top-notch, but none of them are dreadful, he's got a nice enough voice and there's some very fine guitar playing going on. If I had to quibble, I'd say the production isn't quite as clean as it could be in places, which is a bit of a shame because it's distracting at times - but generally it passes by pleasantly enough. James Taylor is the only thing we've had this year which is anything close to this and this just has more oomph to it, which was appreciated.

We're at #22 in the charts this week on the second week of a three week run with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were TOTP Vol 18, Hot Hits 6, The Moody Blues, Simon & Garfunkel and yet another Elvis Presley compilation (why did people keep buying them?) and the highest new entry was Black Sabbath (#14).

Wikipedia tells us it's his second solo album and it's fair to say he wasn't having the best of times in this period - Rita Coolidge left him for Graham Nash, which allegedly lead to the break-up of CSNY, he was arrested for possession and he also overdosed! But this lead to a productive time musically because he wrote a load of songs and recorded them almost non-stop, needing two sets of studio engineers working in shifts to support him. He had some interesting people supporting him on the album as well with Eric Clapton, Nils Lofgren, Billy Preston, Doctor John, David Crosby, Jerry Garcia and The Memphis Horns all putting in an appearance.

The tour wasn't blessed with a whole lotta luck either - the opening night was in Seattle just after the Boeing factory closed, so only 3,000 people turned up at a 15,000 seater stadium. Which caused Stephen to lose confidence and start drinking heavily - which didn't exactly help the reviews or the attendance for the rest of the tour. It does point out that he sold out Madison Square Garden - but then balances things by also telling us that a roadie died falling off the rigging and the whole thing was overshadowed by George Harrison's Concert For Bangladesh the following night. For which Stephen "donated his stage, sound, lighting system and production manager, although he was not invited to play at the event" - and then he fell off his motorbike a couple of days later, which meant he barely made it to the end of the tour.

Critically, people were nice enough about it over here, but the US critics really took a dislike to him with Rolling Stone declaring he was "a solid second-rate artist who so many lower-middlebrows insist on believing is actually first-rate" and our old mate Robert Christgau saying "Stills is of course detestable, the ultimate rich hippie--arrogant, self-pitying, sexist, shallow. Unfortunately, he's never quite communicated all this on a record, but now he's approaching his true level...Keep it up, SS—it'll be a pleasure to watch you fail". Blimey! Commercially, it did well in the US getting to #8, but also got to #2 in The Netherlands and #5 in Sweden.

discogs.com tells us this is one of the cheaper albums of the year, with a fiver picking you up a decent version and you can't spend any more than £30 on it. Which I won't be doing because this isn't, by any objective measure, a great album - however, it's provided something nicely different in the overall patchwork of '71 so I was quite happy to visit it.

22/08/71 - Quite an interesting listen