More of the Music of Stephen Stills

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Stephen Stills

• Manassas is back on the site for the first time in years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on all FOUR sides of these vintage Atlantic pressings – fairly (and unusually) quiet vinyl too
• The sound is big and rich and Tubey Magical, the vocals breathy and immediate
• And you will not believe all the space and ambience – which of course are all qualities that Heavy Vinyl records have far too little of, and the main reason we have lost all respect for most of them
• 4 1/2 stars: “A sprawling masterpiece, akin to the Beatles’ White Album, the Stones’ Exile on Main St., or Wilco’s Being There in its makeup, if not its sound.”

Most copies we played were a disaster: grungy, veiled, with no real top end, grainy, stuck in the speakers, with tubby bass — these and other problems were all too common. When a double album sounds like this it makes for a very long day.

What were we listening for exactly? An absence of all the bad qualities mentioned above would be the easiest answer. Once you find a copy without the nasty grit and the grain so many of them have, you quickly key into the lovely ambience that the better copies have, and then you start to notice the Tubey Magic, the richness and sweetness, the extension up top, the kind of transparency that lets you hear into the soundfield and pick out all the players — pretty much the same kinds of things you’re always looking for in a Hot Stamper pressing, except in this case you just had to be willing to look a lot harder.

What The Best Sides Of Manassas Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1972
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing these records are the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find pressings that sound as good as these two do.

What We’re Listening For On Manassas

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

The Awful Classic

The Classic pressing was a disaster. Can you imagine adding the kind of grungy gritty sound that Bernie is famous for to a recording with those problems already? It was a match made in hell. Back in the day when I was selling lots of Classic Heavy Vinyl, that was one of the titles I refused to have anything to do with. That and Stephen Stills’ first album — both were awful.

Lots of rave reviews for them in the audiophile press at the time though. I guess nothing ever really changes, does it? Played a Sundazed record lately? Well, there you go.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

Song of Love
Rock & Roll Crazies/Cuban Bluegrass
Jet Set (Sigh)
Anyway
Both of Us (Bound to Lose)

Side Two

Fallen Eagle
Jesus Gave Love Away for Free
Colorado
So Begins the Task
Hide It So Deep
Don’t Look at My Shadow

Side Three

It Doesn’t Matter
Johnny’s Garden
Bound to Fall
How Far
Move Around
The Love Gangster

Side Four

What to Do
Right Now
Treasure [Take One]
Blues Man

AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review

A sprawling masterpiece, akin to the Beatles’ White Album, the Stones’ Exile on Main St., or Wilco’s Being There in its makeup, if not its sound. Rock, folk, blues, country, Latin, and bluegrass have all been styles touched on in Stephen Stills’ career, and the skilled, energetic musicians he had gathered in Manassas played them all on this album. What could have been a disorganized mess in other hands, though, here all gelled together and formed a cohesive musical statement.