Desert Rose Band, True Love (1991)

I remain slightly mystified by the Desert Rose Band: how did Chris Hillman shake off two decades of the doldrums and step into slick Top 40 country-pop so seemingly effortlessly? After years spent mostly coasting through covers, what reignited his songwriting muse (he had a hand in all but one track here)? And why are he and fellow old-timer Herb Petersen paired up with a dude who looks like he should be playing Patrick Swayze’s character in a Road House sequel?

Whatever questions, or reservations about the style, one may hold, it would be hard to deny that Hillman & Co. play this game well. Four albums in, the DRB still brings it; no timeless classics here, but not one dud either, and the whole album flows along swiftly, aided by nicely constructed melodies and crisp, if time-bound production (big drum sounds crossed genre lines during this era, it seems). 

Despite this, and a quite lovely (as always) duet appearance by Alison Krauss, True Love also marked the band's abrupt fall from commercial grace. Perhaps the lackluster title and cringeworthy cover art played a role; for content, Hillman hadn’t been this on since the Byrds.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Wooden Nickel (1969)

No sense rehashing my grievances with the main characters here—Crosby and Stills remain unbearable egomaniacal prigs, Nash a bobbleheaded proto-himbo, and Young the only real songwriter of the bunch (albeit also something of a hippie meathead, just a really talented one), so that’s off my chest.

Bootlegged at Big Sur, this seems to circulate in pricy but cruddy faceless vinyl. I scored a five-dollar copy at South Philly’s Beautiful World Syndicate, and will say this: within the constraints of the group’s insufferability, it’s a strong document. Audio purists might wince at a version of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” that sounds like a 90s lo-fi 4-tracker, but to me, it’s a step in the right direction from the pointlessly airless studio perfectionism of the album take. And fortunately, Young takes over the running length—his first-side “Birds” is loose (“close enough for jazz,” as he puts it) and wondrous, and then on side two, he elbows the geezers out of the way for a 19-minute “Down By the River.” Sure, Crazy Horse did it with more muscle, but the thought of a pouty Crosby and Stills sulking because nobody’s paying any attention to them (they add nothing to this song) more than compensates.

David Crosby/Graham Nash, Whistling Down the Wire (1976)

Cultural historians of the future will have a tough time explaining 1970s rock stardom. Did it depend on songwriting skill? Musical virtuosity? Charm? Good looks? Crosby & Nash defy all of the above; they plod along inexplicably, dropping LPs with no legitimate grounds for existence. Like this one: Nash continues to strain for poetry and profundity, consistently achieving neither (he’s clearly been listening to frenemy Neil Young, but just can’t get it right; “And the cannibals are waiting on the edge/to eat the meat that they can smell” is just . . . dumb), while Crosby churns out more vaguely song-like temporal chunks of sound. The best moments come in spite of the nominal figureheads: when Crosby finally shuts the hell up on the wordless “Dancer,” or when “Mutiny” achieves a second-class Steely Dan sound that nearly drowns out Nash’s insipid lyrics. I remain baffled by this entire phenomenon. 

New Riders of the Purple Sage, New Riders (1976)

I’m not much of a betting man, but here’s something I’d lay money on: close your eyes, point your finger to a map of the continental United States, head immediately to the nearest dive bar, and whatever random ragged band is playing there will offer more spirited renditions of “You Never Can Tell” and “Dead Flowers” than these lazy bums, coasting into a new contract with MCA that must have just thrilled the suits. Truly, this is one of the most phoned-in albums I’ve ever heard, major label or self-released. Not for one flickering instant does it spring to life; they don’t write songs (there’s one paltry original, and it ain’t much to speak of), and the otherwise all-covers track listing seems mostly chosen to allow Skip Battin to do nothing but ride bass scales for a whole LP. Nobody else does anything, either; there may be legitimate metaphysical questions as to whether this album even exists. God knows I can’t vouch for it, and the damn thing is playing as I type.

The Flying Burrito Bros, Burrito Deluxe (1970)

Less heavy-handed than the debut, it also weighs less, sometimes threatening to float away into jangly pop-rock—which is fine with me; frankly, I wish Parsons and Hillman both had taken more interest in that side of their work. GP had been kicking “Lazy Days” around for years before putting it on record here, and it sounds it—if Gilded Palace of Sin strove for the strains of 1938, this one eases into those of 1967. “High Fashion Queen” is sneering but effective, though the FBB—bros indeed—wallow in garden-variety rock misogyny that includes a zippy cover of Dylan's "If You Gotta Go," not one of his more charming moments.

They beat the Byrds to “Farther Along” by a year, though the two versions are largely interchangeable, and Parsons fumbles slightly on the closing “Wild Horses,” failing to bring Jagger’s depth of longing. Still, this brief excursion into a sort of power-pop country charts a direction not otherwise taken for this group--when Hillman dug "Down in the Churchyard" back out several years later on a solo album, it lumbered in at twice the length and half the impact. 

Nashville West (1976)

Before becoming Byrds, Clarence White and Gene Parsons bummed around the bar and studio session circuit for years, recording this live in 1968 but leaving it unreleased for about a decade. Hardly a lost treasure, it mostly shows a strong bar band belting out tight covers. Well-curated overall--their “Green, Green Grass of Home” stands nearly on par with the other Parson’s take, though “Greensleeves” is taking things a mite far, fellas—probably the most interesting interpretive trick is the way they dodge the sexual and gender roles of “Ode to Billy Joe” by turning in an instrumental rendition, with some terrifically bleary fretwork from White, a harbinger of things to come. For that matter, in a genealogy of the Byrds, probably the main point of interest here is the brawn, unfurled early on some crashing, crunchy chords that roll down over “Mental Revenge.” Here’s where the musculature of the late-period Byrds albums was developed, one set of handwashing-in-the-dirty-river workouts at a time.

Love that cover art, too.