David Crosby
If I Could Only Remember My Name

I'm not a musician and I can hardly tell a C from a G. Yet this album, listened to for the first time in 1972, about a year after its release (back then this was the "time zone" for overseas LPs to arrive in Italy), immediately fascinated me. All of us aged 15-25 were listening to Anglo-American rock, songwriters, Italian singer-songwriters, Tex-Mex music, folk, ethnic groups... But this album was different, different from its very Californian origins, to which David Crosby belonged with full rights due to his participation on his own, as well as with Stills, Nash and Young, or with Nash alone, The Byrds and various more or less frequent participations on albums by Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and many West Coast recordings.

This album is one of those creations that happen all in one breath, a creation from the unconscious that generates surreal atmospheres, where every note is magically placed in a spot that makes the whole journey magical and unattainable, elusive, yet very close to our auditory sense, magnified by such musical alchemies. It's fluid music, with no interruptions between one track and the next. Even their sequence appears perfectly fitted, as if it existed in the air and was grasped by our musician to make it accessible. All instruments are part of the same plane, they appear skillfully mixed, until they become a single collective instrument. Yet listening to the album again, the sounds can perfectly be distinguished, showing an invincible side to their sumptuous acoustic fluidity.

The beginning is entrusted to the piece "Music Is Love" and it appears as a hippie manifesto, but the other tracks unfold (though they seem to continue one from the other) in a determined and at the same time soft manner. The apotheosis is reached in "What Are Their Names," an urgent song where acoustic guitars duet with the choruses that accompany Crosby's voice (here's proof that one doesn't need to be a great singer to make a voice appreciated). The album concludes with a track, surreal once again, with the voice used as an instrument in which the echo enthralls and fascinates the listener who, for a few moments after the album ends, is spellbound and speechless, wondering how such a beautiful album could have been conceived.

And who knows if David Crosby, when he created it, could imagine that he had written such a complex of emotions. Who knows if he still had a glimmer of clarity to understand it. An eternal, timeless creation. Most likely not just for me.