The Souther Hillman Furay Band
Trouble In Paradise

The seventies seem to be tough times for many of the survivors of the golden years of roots music. The standards of that musical genre have softened, sweetened, and commercialized; the models to look up to are indecent, and success smiles upon the undeserving. It's useless for legends like Chris Hillman to adhere to the dictates of current trends or insist on forming new supergroups: this joint venture with surf rocker John David Souther does not yield the hoped-for results. Definitely, the least talented adventure companion, or at least with the lesser artistic ambitions, even inferior to Rick Roberts from the first Flying Burrito Brothers album without Gram Parsons. Worse still than Dallas Taylor, the Manassas drummer with whom he wrote a handful of loud and carefree rock songs. In the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, however, the burden of composition is entirely individual, with no collaborations among them. Souther manages to rise above his mediocrity only with "Prisoner In Disguise," a ballad with the right appeal that grows well, but out of nine songs total, four are his. It's pointless to try: a slowdown or a psychedelic flute-inflected change in the useless boogie of the title track is not enough to take us back to the Summer of Love.

Then Hillman produces a skewed and uninspired country track, to say the least, which makes one think of those who stood by him to write the history of country rock... Nonetheless, he insists it should be summer, if not the summer of love then at least a summer like any other, and so he dishes out his usual carefree beach rock, but the form remains approximate. It's always and anyway the fault of this compulsion to churn out an album every year, two songs from you, two from me, we make an album and a supergroup. The problem, or rather the question is: how many songs did these people write each year? Were Hillman's three songs the only three composed that year? And if they were the best of a multitude, how awful must the rejected ones have been?

In this anxiety to come forth with "one's best," here emerges the very solid Richie Furay, former Buffalo Springfield and former Poco, number three of Buffalo when Hillman was number four-three-two-three of the Byrds, and number one of Poco when Chris was number two of the Burritos. Like the greats who know they are in an environment where mediocrity cannot be escaped, Richie limits himself to just two contributions, which inevitably become forgotten gems. The ballad "For Someone I Love" is incredibly inspired, and "On The Line" is a lesson in rock music.

To the distorted vision of those who attempt to listen to "Trouble In Paradise" after all these years, the record seems to have been conceived to extract some money from the fans of the golden age, to prevent the little root guitar, the pedal steel, and the dobro from gathering dust. But the problem is much worse, as this was more or less the average quality level of those who in the seventies reached glory and topped the charts. And the greats of the past?

The greats were wise to try to remain so. There were those who understood it from the start and those who had to, so to speak, strive harder before understanding it.