Originally published in Issue 8 of Crawdaddy!, March 1967

Let me tell you about popsicle sticks.

To me, a major aspect of rock ‘67 is the tightness of the new groups. By tightness, I mean the feeling of wholeness a group projects when they’re onstage (or in a recording studio), and I’m thinking of Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, the Youngbloods, the Buffalo Springfield, the Doors. An individual, an audience, can react to one of these groups as a unit, can feel a group personality reaching out from the stage. I never listen to Neil Young, the way I might listen to Mike Bloomfield or Jeff Beck, because Neil Young isn’t onstage; the Springfield is, and the brilliant things Neil does are an inseparable part of the music Springfield is making. And Neil’s excellent playing isn’t just Neil soloing away; it’s Neil reacting to, working with, each Buffalo; and more than that, feeling a certain way about the gig and the song and the run and whatever because of a sense of his place in things, because of his awareness of himself as a Buffalo Springfield. It’s a somewhat different feeling from the feeling of being Neil Young, and as a result what he contributes to the group’s communication is different from what he’d contribute were he in a different group. Basically, tightness is a matter of finding the right people to work with, people who can form a tight emotional unit with you as well as a musical unit; a group must have a stable personality, and its personality must relate well to the type of music it works with, for that group to be tight. That doesn’t mean everyone has to be best friends—it means the members of the group have to be interacting creatively toward a common goal, a certain sound, for the audience to be able to interact with the group as a whole. Conflict—competition—destroy wholeness.

Tightness comes in many flavors. Jefferson Airplane has a dark solidity to its sound, as though each member were a thick black line and the six so close musically that all you see/hear/feel is a deep solid rectangle of sound and personality. The Youngbloods, perhaps the tightest group in the country are nonetheless four very distinct musicians. You hear four separate things, but you feel one feeling. They are four quarters, working in perfect unity but with a very different oneness from that of a dollar bill. The Buffalo Springfield resemble neither of these groups in their tightness; more distinct as personalities than the Airplane, they are at the same time not as separate as the Youngbloods. If you see the Airplane as a solid rectangle, and the Youngbloods as four separate lines standing together, then the Springfield is/are a crisscross, a Popsicle stick construction held together only by the force of each stick on each other’s stick, a subtle and seemingly delicate wholeness which nonetheless communicates itself extremely powerfully to a receptive audience.

Buffalo Springfield (italicized because that’s the name of their album) is a lovely, moving experience. You have to be into it, however; chances are you won’t even like it on first hearing. All the songs seem to sound alike, and the group sound is quite thin. These are valid criticisms. There are certain samenesses in the Springfield’s material, and if you hear them on one of their rare off nights, you’ll be quite bored. But what the Springfield do is rise above these samenesses, employing beautiful changes and continually fresh approaches within their particular framework. The more you listen to this album and become familiar with it, the more you’ll hear in each song. As for the thinness, the production job on this LP is sadly amateurish. The bass is under-recorded, the drums misunderstood, and the guitars tend to tinkle when they want to ring. On stage, the Springfield have a deceptively full sound: they’re not as loud or as solid as the Airplane, but because every note each man plays is so perfectly directed—like the Popsicle stick construction—they project a richness and a fullness which is more satisfying than one could possibly imagine. It’s a delicate balance, however, and it wasn’t achieved in the recording studio. This is partly for production reasons—poor miking, poor mixing, and the wrong studios for Springfield’s sound—but it’s also because the group wasn’t completely on when they did these sessions. Much more can happen to these songs on a good night than did happen in the studio.