Stephen Stills - Just Roll Tape: April 26, 1968
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CD Details
Artist: Stephen StillsEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2007-07-10
Music Label: Rhino
Soundtracks:
- All I Know is What You Tell Me
- So Begins the Task
- Change Partners
- Know You Got To Run
- The Doctor Will See You Now
- Black Queen
- Bumblebee (Do You Need A Place to Hide?)
- Judy
- Dreaming of Snakes
- Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
- Helplessly Hoping
- Wooden Ships
- Treetop Flyer
Music reviews of Just Roll Tape: April 26, 1968
Music Review: catching the sparrow
Rating: 4 Stars
It must have taken guts for Stephen to release this raw collection of tracks culled from an impromptu recording session in April of 1968. Stills was in a musical limbo, having just taken flight from the Buffalo Springfield, the nest that had nurtured his talents, and not yet soaring with the vocal and songwriting talents of David Crosby and Graham Nash. Several of the songs included here would receive their definitive treatment only under the auspices of their compelling harmonies.
Despite taking guts to do it, I'm unsure why Stephen chose to release these recordings. This is the type of stuff that bootleggers aspire to getting their hands on. Yet this tape somehow managed to evade the greedy hands of those Audio Treetop Flyers. They have survived to see a day when studio out-takes and alternates of pristine, overdubbed-beyond-reality, officially released numbers have become the stuff that paychecks are made of. But Stephen doesn't really need another paycheck, now does he? The artist's brief comments in the liner notes state that the songs "now feel like great friends when they were really young". Perhaps that statement gives insight as to why Stephen has chosen to grant these tracks their liberation. Great friends don't let great friends languish in a vault. And have subsequent versions of `Wooden Ships' and `Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' begun to feel old and haggard, and this is Stephen's way of infusing them with a renewed essence? Is it an opportunity to revel in the creative process that yielded timeless masterworks? How about blind nostalgia?
Regardless of Stephen's motivations, I appreciate him delving into what must be a huge cache of audio recordings spanning decades. If nothing else, Stephen's 1968 impulse to "make a tape of my new songs" puts a number of his compositions into a chronological and social context. There are four, forty-year-old new songs (`All I Know Is What You Tell Me', `The Doctor Will See You Now', `Judy', and `Dreaming of Snakes'). Of that quartet, only `The Doctor Will See You Now' strikes me as a song that may have evolved into a composition challenging for grooves on a Stills album. With lyrics like "how can you think when you've thought everything through", the song possesses a `Positively 4th Street' feel, and features an intriguing melody as well. All four songs are compelling in their own right however. `Dreaming of Snakes' sports cryptic lyrics, and `Judy' serves as a precursor to the major heartbreak that would be `Suite: Judy Blue Eyes'. This lesser ode to Judy Collins offers intimate fare such as, "I'll do anything to please you... will you let me try? Running around in circles like a bird in flight, just above my head you hover like you want to light... but you can't decide where".
Among the tracks since recorded and released are abridged versions of `Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' (sans the vibrant and familiar coda), `Wooden Ships' (sans the imaginary dialog between two soldiers as the opening stanzas), and `Bumblebee' (suffering an all too bootleg like, tape-malfunction-induced termination). Versions of `So Begins the Task', `Change Partners', and `Helplessly Hoping' seem finished, while the definitive acoustic version of `Black Queen' will always be found on Stills' first solo project (check out Stephen's `Supershow' performance of the song for the definitive electric version). `Know You Got To Run' would undergo the most drastic revision, being performed later at a slower pace and adapted to banjo. The gem in the bunch, even minus its coda, is the intense, even spellbinding Suite to Judy Blue Eyes. This is likely the earliest recorded version of the song, and having the opportunity to hear it in its embryonic form, perhaps being performed for Judy herself, is nothing less than startling.
The entire disc times out at only forty minutes, and seven of those are devoted to the bonus track, `Treetop Flyer'. This is clearly a rehearsal take, probably not more than ten or fifteen years old given Stephen's raspy voice, and the omission of the "....I'll fly guns..." lyric, which has more recently been abandoned. It's not a particularly sturdy version, suffering from a false start, although the take does get `into the zone' from time to time. It's inclusion is a bit curious. Given that these are essentially demo recordings, it's no surprise that almost half of these undeveloped tracks time out in less than three minutes each, with five more in the two minute or less range. The liner notes don't add much weight either, but Graham Nash does contribute four period photographs, and reportedly gave Stephen the kick in the butt to release the disc. It's nice to have. Thanks Graham. Thanks, Judy. Thanks, Stephen.
Description of Just Roll Tape: April 26, 1968
Stephen Stills found himself in a New York recording studio, laid down a few hundred dollars, told the engineer to roll tape, and this collection of songs is what came about. Finally remastered and released to the public, this album shows the beginnings of Crosby, Still, and Nash.The title and cover art effectively tell the story of this dusty gem. Captured fly-on-the-wall style in an impromptu live-in-the-studio burst after a Judy Collins session on which the 23-year-old Stephen Stills played, the soon-to-be ex-leader of Buffalo Springfield (and Collins's ex-boyfriend) unleashes unplugged, occasionally incomplete versions of songs he had recently written and wanted to get on tape. Discovered in 1978 and nearly discarded, the reels found their way to Graham Nash in 2003, who encouraged Stills to release them. He finally did so in 2007, nearly 40 years after the original session, and the result is the most revelatory album in Stills's bulging catalog. Even with remastering, the sound is on the crude side. Nevertheless, early takes of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," "Helplessly Hoping," and "Wooden Ships," all of which would appear in far more polished versions on Crosby, Stills & Nash's self-titled debut, are sung with a passion and honesty seldom exposed by the singer/songwriter. Stills's voice sometimes cracks, his guitar work intermittently sounds muddy, and these are definitely works in progress, some of which never appeared on an official release. Yet the artist is caught arguably at the peak of his substantial talents, laying down soon-to-be-classic melodies while they were fresh in his head. Folk/rock historians and Stills fans will surely be thrilled with this nascent, unvarnished set. Though Just Roll Tape may be too raw for some, it finds Stills at the crucial stage right before superstardom changed his--and popular music's--future forever. --Hal Horowitz
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