Rock musician Stephen Stills turns 80 | EUROtoday

Auf dem Rückcover der ersten Buffalo-Springfield-Platte von 1966 findet sich der Vermerk: „Steve is the chief, however all of us are“. Stephen Stills war nicht der einzige, der sich in der Hippie-Ära damit konfrontiert sah, dass sein Führungsanspruch besonderer Rechtfertigung und Durchsetzungsfähigkeit bedurfte. Die daraus entstandenen Reibereien führten nicht nur zu Verlusten, sondern setzten auch eine produktive Hitze frei, für die Stephen Stills in dem halben Jahrzehnt zwischen 1966 und 1971 prototypisch steht. Im Quartett Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fand die alsbald sich im Laurel und im Topanga Canyon bei Los Angeles breitmachende Mischung aus Hippie-Seele und auf keine Annehmlichkeit verzichtendem Superstarstatus wahrscheinlich ihre glanzvollste Verkörperung.

So war Stephen Stills schon in seiner Funktion als Multiinstrumentalist und vielseitiger Stilist, der in seiner Jugend in Mittelamerika die Latino-Musik und während seiner Zeit in New Orleans den Blues in sich aufgenommen hatte, in zwei maßgeblichen Rockbands der Alpha-, Beta-, Gamma- und Deltamann. Der Mundharmonikaspieler Tony Glover hat über eine andere Virtuosenansammlung jener Zeit, die Allman Brothers Band, gesagt, sie kämen ihm vor wie „ein Meistermusiker mit 30 Fingern und sechs Instrumenten“. Stephen Stills nannte man captain manyhands und meinte damit etwas anderes als das sprichwörtliche Mädchen für alles.

Buffalo Springfield generated its innovative power largely from the encounter between two very different but equally stubbornly ambitious characters: the Texan Stills and the Canadian Young. Young was certainly the more original, more poetic; Stills is the more complete, more mature and, with his rock-typical, ideally roughened voice, also the better singer. Their rivalry already created high pressure in this pioneering but not significantly commercially successful band, which sometimes erupted into fistfights on the open stage and only kept Buffalo Springfield alive for a year and a half.

If this band, in addition to the misfortune of being too far ahead of their time, also had the merit of having actually invented country rock, before the Byrds and especially before Poco and the Flying Burrito Brothers, then that was it that on Stills. He was responsible for the first real country rock composition “Go and Say Goodbye” in 1966, just like he mastered the Springfield debut with seven tracks, before appearing on “Buffalo Springfield Again” with songs like “Bluebird”, “Hung Upside Down” and ” Rock & Roll Woman” totally demonstrated his mastery.

His most important piece from that time, however, is “For What It’s Worth”, which succinctly expressed the social unease that was growing in the face of street fighting and was subsequently also articulated by other rock musicians: “Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep”. These were the words of a 21-year-old who, when he sang them live on television, wore a Stetson, just as provocatively as Clint Eastwood wore his “show-off hat” two years later as a southern deputy sent to New York in Don Siegel’s “Coogan’s Bluff”. The fact that Stills is said to have written this song in a quarter of an hour could lead one to believe that the spirit of the times had invaded a precocious rock musician. That’s why what he later said during his historically unique double induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 was true: they made the area unsafe “with electrical guitars and phrases of knowledge.” It must have been something like wisdom that prompted him at the Altamont concert in December 1969 to tell Crosby, Nash and Young after just four songs that they should now take their instruments and get on the waiting helicopter – the Rolling ones Stone’s Hells Angels, who had been hired as stewards, were already out of control.

A lot has already been said about CSN (&Y). The debut of this absolute super group was under the dominant influence of Stills, who wrote most of the material and played almost all of the instruments. The legendary, soon-to-be-sterile harmony singing is one thing; the other is Stills’ profound musicianship, which was more powerful than that of the others. Here, as on the following album “Deja Vu” (1970), he created a (folk) rock whose density and complexity could only be compared with Cream, which and especially Eric Clapton Stills was based on.

Since then he has belonged to the aristocracy of rock and prefers to only hang out with members of it. The “Super Session” that he held with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper in 1968 already showed three young musicians at their peak technically. Remarkable, not only because of Clapton and Hendrix, but also the celebrities that Stills recruited for his first two solo records. At least in his heyday, he paid careful attention to his own authorship and usually stayed away from third-party material. He soon left the concentrated impeccability behind him in the casual seven-member group Manassas, with whom he released a double album in 1972, which in the rock annals is only known as “Further Runs”, but as a raw, extraordinarily palatable rock encyclopedia it is hardly less impressive than “Exile On Main St.” by the Rolling Stones from the identical 12 months. The relaxation that he introduced by the tip of the last decade additionally impressed with a solidity that the sooner fireplace had misplaced, however nonetheless demonstrated essentially the most profound authority.

While Neil Young, satisfied that an artist ought to current himself to his viewers in any situation, launched and continues to launch one file after the opposite, Stills has lowered his output because the Eighties, however has additionally been much less uncovered by refraining from idiosyncratic experimentation. His structure suffered no much less from numerous addictions than that of David Crosby, who’s not alive. What he has produced within the final decade is all of the extra exceptional: two information with laborious electrical blues recorded within the trio The Rides and “Everybody Knows”, a touching duet along with his outdated nice love Judy Collins, for whom he as soon as recorded the “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes “has devoted.

The New Year brings many days when nice rock musicians flip eighty: Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, John Fogerty, Debbie Harry, Van Morrison, Ritchie Blackmore and Roger Glover of Deep Purple, John McVie, Bryan Ferry, Don McLean, Neil Young, the 2 Abba males and, subsequent week, Rod Stewart. But beginning this Friday is Stephen Arthur Stills.