Manassas (1972)

When a double-album of adventurous but fundamentally genre-bound country-folk rock music involves distinct titles for all four sides of vinyl, we are facing some vastly over-conceptualized work here. The first side is called “The Raven”; does Stephen Stills think he’s Edgar Allan Poe? Don’t answer that.

Such qualms notwithstanding, Manassas is so easily the best things Stills ever did that it would be hard to reconcile it with the case study in Narcissistic Personality Disorder he so helpfully offered on his previous solo albums, were it not for the obvious explanation: he’s partially drowned out by the six other dudes in the group. Okay, the rhythm section gets a little redundant, but these guys do a pretty good job of holding Stills in check. The sections aren’t as thematically cohesive as he’d like, maybe because what in the history of American iconography wouldn’t fit under “The Wilderness,” but the songs hold tight for a remarkable 70 minutes—that’s at least 65 minutes longer than any other continuous quality run in the Stills oeuvre—and he has the good sense to bury the ridiculous “Love Gangster” at the back of side 3—or, excuse me, “Consider” (co-written by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, it’s really more an anticipation of the lecherous-caveman shtick on his gloriously goofy solo album Monkey Grip a few years later).

When the band stretches out, it’s wholly in the pocket; when Stills claims the spotlight, he’s uncharacteristically tuneful and bearable. Chris Hillman doesn’t quite literally play second fiddle—there’s only one, technically—but acts as consigliere, from guitar to mandolin to occasional lead vocal. He only gets two songwriting credits (one of which, “It Doesn’t Matter,” apparently excluded co-writer and Hillman Burrito-brother Rick Roberts, who later reclaimed it as he began his soft rock descent in Firefall—whose inclusion of Michael Clarke on drums brings some sort of bizarre Byrdsian symmetry to the entirety of 1970s corporate rock), but his presence is felt throughout. Whenever he took the lead, as his later solo albums showed, things swung toward the MOR with haste. But as sidekick, Hillman was impeccable—reining in Stills being a case in point.