The army had my father and my mother was having me

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

20/06/71 : Songs For Beginners - Graham Nash

Having recently had our first visit with Stephen Stills, we get to see what Graham Nash was getting up to at the time - I'm guessing it's not going to be wildly different.

Yeah, we're not wildly different - but, on first listen at least, this just has a bit more oomph and variety to it. It felt to be somewhere between John Lennon and Simon & Garfunkel with some pretty decent tracks on it - it's probably not as musically accomplished as a lot of the albums we're heard this year, but he's put the effort into making decent tracks with interesting lyrics. And who can argue with that as an approach - it feels that it would be a grower given multiple listens (which hasn't necessarily been the case for a lot of the "better" albums we've heard). All in all, I really quite liked it.

We're at #13 in the charts this week on the start of a seven week run, with this being as high as it got (amusingly CSNY are at #12). The top five this week were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Rolling Stones, Paul & Linda McCartney, Simon & Garfunkel and Motown Chartbusters Vol 5 with the highest new entry being Free (#7).

Wikipedia tells us this is his debut album (one of four debuts from the members of CSNY released over an eight month period) and a lot of the tracks are about the time Graham spent with Joni Mitchell, who he'd recently split up with. As often seems to be the way with this lot, he's called on several of his mates to help him out - David Crosby, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Rita Coolidge, Phil Lesh (also from The Grateful Dead), PP Arnold and Dave Mason (from Traffic) were all involved to some degree. Critically, it was pretty well received at the time and commercially, it did way better than I expected getting to #11 in Canada and Australia, #10 in Sweden, #4 in The Netherlands and #15 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a version for a fiver but the most you can spend on it is £40, which gets you some fetching red/plum labels, apparently. My expectations weren't particularly high for this album but it was a surprisingly interesting listen which feels it warrants further visits (which I can assure you it will never get).

27/06/71 - Well done, but not for me

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