Loggins & Messina
Native Sons

…And very few people remember Loggins & Messina, a country rock duo who had their five years of glory more or less in the first half of the seventies. The album in question is their sixth and last studio album, released in the early days of 1976.

Both were songwriters, with Loggins being more the singer and frontman and Messina more the guitarist and producer; together, they blended and complemented each other perfectly. In the golden country rock season of the seventies (Eagles, Poco, Dan Fogelberg, Firefall, Manassas…), they were among those who achieved the most success.

Kenny Loggins’ voice, hailing from near Seattle in the US West close to Canada, is clear and tenor, joyful and resonant, well suited both for pop and… for soundtracks (see below). His instruments are acoustic guitar and harmonica.

Jim Messina’s voice is also clear, less driven on the high notes though not by much, well-structured and smooth. Thanks in part to his jazz-blues phrasing, at times he sounds like an eighteen-year-old James Taylor. As an instrumentalist, he’s the typical Californian musician who can handle a wide range of string instruments with ease, including banjo and mandolin and so on, but where he truly excels is on electric guitar, thanks to a style and sound that are instantly recognizable, very percussive and clean, the source of a kind of funky country all his own.

The formation of the duo was accidental. Messina, after years spent touring as a member of Buffalo Springfield and Poco, intended to move into full-time producing, and in this role he had taken on the task of putting together the debut album of a promising singer-songwriter named Kenny Loggins. However, by the end of the recordings, his contribution—in terms of songwriting, backing vocals, guitars, arrangements, sounds—was so substantial that the record label forced the two to present themselves as a pair of equals, thus delaying Loggins’ solo career for a few years.

The album in question is the last studio work of their career. A live "epitaph" would follow, and then, much later, a few sporadic reunions for some concert tours. It’s the weakest of their story… the early country rock has by now turned into a mainstream pop rhythm & blues lacking special bite. It’s evident here that Loggins has grown tired of always handing over his arrangements to his friend, inevitably making them sound so country rock—since his partner is one of the founding fathers of the genre—and now prefers to entrust them to some professional orchestrator, making the songs much more “adult.” De gustibus.

There are no particularly remarkable tracks except for the lush “Pretty Princess,” mainly thanks to an overflowing sax solo. Still, class is not something you can fake, and the album is very listenable… People who know their stuff, especially Messina. Anyway, too much orchestra for me, too little rock for my taste.

A few years later, Loggins would make a truckload of money with his solo albums and, in particular, with songs included in hugely successful soundtracks (like “Footloose”). Messina did not, nonetheless he remains decidedly my favorite of the pair: he’s a guitarist you can recognize in five seconds, for those who know about guitar playing.