With over half a century hindsight, the second album by Buffalo Springfield (released 11/18/67) belies its title more dramatically than ever. Buffalo Springfield Again was hardly a sequel to its fairly uniform predecessor and while the internal fractures damaging the group might have been rightfully inferred from the wide diversity of production values and musical styles on Again, the fissures only widened around, and in the wake of, the album’s release.
Rather than simply repeating the mellifluous blend of voices and an instrumental mix of folk, country, and rock from the self-titled debut, Springfield took a quantum leap of ambition beyond the three guitars, bass, and drums of that first record. As such, the roster of session musicians is a reflection of the variety of song styles and production in the thirty-four minutes of playing time. Likewise, the individual cuts are largely solo efforts by a once-unified band as depicted on its first album (though many personnel credits are in dispute, few if any of the tracks would appear to actually feature that fivesome).
That’s not to say all of Again is a radical departure from the folk/country/rock amalgam of the eponymous debut. At least some faint glimmers of early Springfield even crop up in the extravagant production of Young’s, “Expecting to Fly,” right alongside orchestration and sound effects within the composition. Meanwhile, his dissection of the pros and cons of celebrity, “Mr. Soul,” borrows its relentless attack from the riff of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction:” it’s a natural advance from (appropriately enough) “Burned” on the prior record.
In its own way too, Richie Furay’s “Sad Memory” is a natural progression from the fully-formed Buffalo Springfield style as documented on the 1966 long-player. Resembling nothing so much as one of his early demos for the group (see the eponymous Buffalo Springfield box set of 2001), his dobro-dominated “A Child’s Claim to Fame” also sounds like it could very well be an outtake from the previous album (and arguably more of a starting point for Poco than “Kind Woman” from the following album).
Stephen Stills also hews to the fundamental Springfield eclectics, at least some of the time. On “Bluebird” and “Rock And Roll Woman,” he mixes sharp acoustic and electric guitars with smooth vocal harmonies. But he also expands his reach with “Everyday,” where prominent piano buoys a hazy stream-of-consciousness vocal, and the author takes that pleasant air of disorientation to another level altogether in the fittingly-titled “Hung Upside Down:” he amplifies the atmosphere of psychic dislocation with layers of distorted guitar sustain hovering over a walking bass from Jim Fielder (who was the first replacement for original member Bruce Palmer upon his deportation).
Complete with its pumping R&B horn section, drummer Dewey Martin’s composition “Good Time Boy,” would appear to be the one bonafide non-sequitur here. Except that his role as lead vocalist seems meant to assure he’d be recognized singing “Mr. Soul”–during one of the Springfield shows from which Young was absent?–at the start of the very next track: the cryptic, multi-part finale called “Broken Arrow” might well be a comment on Buffalo Springfield’s state of being at the time of its recording.
In the end, however, Again proved to be no more of a patchwork than its successor. Bonding in a way that would lead to the formation of the aforementioned country-rock pioneers in 1968, Furay and bassist/producer Jim Messina assembled Last Time Around from tracks recorded at various times and places under the supervision of the respective songs’ authors, some of which might’ve been intended for the aborted attempt at another group effort called Stampede.
With fifty-five years’ perspective, it’s more than a bit odd to hear both these LPs, knowing the end results hardly differed from the sequence of events that produced them. But as much as the cover of Around foreshadowed the faux antiquity of 1970’s Deja Vu by CSNY, so did the pastiche of images topped with script lettering on Again echoing the iconic poster art of the late Sixties.
The experimental undercurrent of the music as well as the packaging thus renders this second Buffalo Springfield record as accurately representative of the times, if not more so, than many albums with much greater recognition as such.
