Buffalo Springfield
Last Time Around

THE REVIEW

When Jim Messina is given the task of assembling the third and final album of the group, the Buffalo Springfield in fact no longer exist and already belong to history. Months of tensions within the band, due to the constant and bitter quarrels between the two leaders Stephen Stills and Neil Young, both on stage and off, have caused the premature end of this seminal group.

When "Last Time Around" sees the light, Stills is already busy with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield in the famous "Supersession" and, in his many free moments, starts spending time with Crosby and Nash; his friend and rival Neil Young is recording his first solo album with the help of Jack Nitzsche and David Briggs; Richie Furray has just formed Poco; Bruce Palmer, who has been on the run for a long time, has released the splendid and dark "The Cycle Is Complete", an unrepeatable example of an incursion into free-folk territories; drummer Dewey Martin tours in concerts usurping the glorious name of the group.

At first glance, "Last Time Around" may seem a collection of disordered tracks, a fragmented and rather incoherent work, the result more of the personal contributions of individual musicians than of a true collective effort. However, a more attentive listening reveals interesting insights, and the work proves consistent with the rest of the discography of the Stills and Young band. The work naturally suffers from the lack of involvement from Stephen and Neil, and from the cover image itself, where the face of the Canadian looks in a different direction from his companions, it becomes evident the tense and precarious atmosphere that was breathed inside the band. Despite everything, the collection of tracks works remarkably well and offers a significant and interesting cross-section of the art of Buffalo Springfield. The album is varied and spans from rock to country, from ballads to Latin American rhythms, from jazz atmospheres to orchestral arrangements. Stills, as a true rocker, gives us excellent songs such as the determined "Special Care" and "Questions", the rhythmic "Uno Mundo", the delicate "Pretty Girl Why", and the splendid "Four Days Gone", a small classic to rediscover full of blues aromas. Neil Young towers with the classic "On The Way Home" and "I'm A Child", two historic tracks that need no comment. Richie Furay emerges in the delicate and romantic "It's So Hard To Wait", composed with Young, in the melodic "Merry-Go-Round", and in the famous ballad "Kind Woman", a sort of debut of Poco and revisited in 1971 on the excellent live album "Deliverin'".

There is no shortage of useless fillers and minor episodes like the country-flavored "Carefree Country Day" or the redundant and boring "The Hour Of Not Quite Rain", two episodes rightly excluded even from the beautiful retrospective box set rich in spectacular unreleased tracks released in 2001. When the album came out, it was hailed by the authoritative Rolling Stone magazine as the best work of the group and was even exaggeratedly compared to "Music From Big Pink" by The Band. Over the years, this judgment has been rightly scaled down, and the last effort of Buffalo Springfield has maintained its state as a makeshift collection of tracks realized almost in solitude by the individual musicians and completed with the help of skilled session men. Despite lacking the spontaneity of the first eponymous album or the creativity of "Buffalo Springfield Again", "Last Time Around" remains the final chapter of the brief and intense musical adventure of one of the most talented groups of the Sixties that, in addition to giving us immortal songs, paved the way to one of the brightest and most exciting musical seasons in the history of modern music. The brief adventure of this folk-psychedelic bulldozer had come to an end. Now the real gold rush was beginning.