For What It's Worth

Just one note - but a note so distinctive, so memorable, so unique that the song is instantly recognizable. How often does that happen?

The note is a harmonic, played by Neil Young on the twelfth fret of the high E string. The player merely touches the string rather than pressing it down to the fretboard, and at certain places on the instrument's neck a tone is generated. A harmonic has tonal qualities and overtones other notes do not have.  And it doesn't decay the way other notes decay - it keeps ringing, sustained and renewed by its own vibration.

That harmonic is the signature of "For What It's Worth," Buffalo Springfield's most famous song. It's a pretty good song - it's a really great record. Stephen Stills wrote it in response to the Sunset Strip curfew riots ("the hippie riots") of November 1966. It's hardly worthy of being remembered as a riot - this same city had seen the Watts riots just a year earlier - but it was certainly a large demonstration in response to measures by the city administration clearly aimed at closing down the emerging rock clubs like the Whiskey a Go Go and Pandora's Box. Stills actually sounds pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing, almost neutral ("nobody's right if everybody's wrong"), but it's that same noncommittal  detachment of his vocal that gets the song across.

Stills and Young are what we first notice and they're what we most remember, but it's the other three who really make this the great record it is. Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin find a deep, deep groove in these two chords - Palmer, in some sad ways the Syd Barrett of the bass guitar, is phenomenal. And it's Richie Furay's performance as the lead harmony singer that brings the real urgency to the record, along with the winding guitar lines spinning out of Young over the second half of the song. 

The San Francisco scene may have been more celebrated and more notorious, and it has always loomed larger in 60s mythology. But Los Angeles certainly had as many great bands - the Byrds, the Doors, Mothers of Invention, Love - and they definitely made more great records. And Buffalo Springfield should have been the best of them all. The very idea of the band was almost too good to be true.  Stephen Stills and Neil Young were already accomplished, distinctive songwriters and guitarists. Richie Furay was a wonderful singer with tremendous stage presence, and Stills was pretty good himself. And Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin made up what was by far the finest rhythm section of any American band - no one else came close. 

It didn't happen, of course, and it was probably never going to happen. Neither Stills nor Young are cut out to collaborate with anyone - Stills is so insecure that he has a desperate need to be in charge, to take control of every situation he finds himself in. Young, far more passive-aggressive, simply does whatever he likes and chances are it's going to be something very different six months down the road. It held together for less than a year. They had enough time to build a reputation as a sensational live act, find professional management, and get a recording contract. 

It all went south from there. Their management-production team botched the recording of their first album. Bruce Palmer kept getting arrested and deported. He would sneak back into the country, get busted and deported again, and sneak back in again. Neil Young had trouble coping with his first brush of public notoriety. The stress of it all provoked his first epileptic fits, which put him in hospital and would plague (and terrify) him for the next several years. He soon embarked on his own course of erratic behaviour - quitting the band, coming back, quitting again.  They managed to make a second record, which is rightly regarded as their masterpiece, and it is indeed one of the great albums of 1967 - but the band is only fully present on one song, Young's "Mr Soul," with the rest of the album was made by various partial configurations of the band.

The legend - Ahmet Ertegun, no less, said they were "the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none" - of their live shows lives almost entirely in legend. There are a few bootlegs. Inevitably for audience recordings from 1967, these are of pretty poor sound quality. Moreover, they are all from the band's final weeks, after Palmer had drifted into the ozone and Young had come and gone and come back multiple times. Nothing appears to have survived from what everyone remembers as their peak, when they were blowing everyone away at the Whiskey in the summer of 1966.

It was probably always too good to be true.