A smoky, funny flowering homage to one of the sizes of American music

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Three stars

In 1970, David Crosby, burned through the implosion of Supergroup Crosby Stills Nash & Young this summer and still mourned his 21-year-old friend Christine Hinton in a car accident in 1969, retired to his boat in Sausalito, California. Many drugs drank a lot of alcohol and somehow made a recording.

At night with a squad of Crack West Coast musicians, including Jerry Garcia from Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell and his former bandmates Graham Nash and Neil Young, Crosby took up his debut solo album if I could only remember my name. “I was an immature person who was stoned from my head and hit me with something that I couldn’t do absolutely,” said Crosby years later to Rolling Stone. “It is astonishing that I managed to go to the studio at all.”

Under the circumstances, the somewhat unfocused drift that hovers through the album makes sense. But it didn’t help when it occurred in February 1971.

But in the past 50 years the reputation of the album has grown so that the composer and producer Kate St. My name would deliver the perfect vehicle.

Originally commissioned for the Llais Festival and applied to the Wales Millennium Center in Cardiff last October, we went north to Glasgow for Celtic connections.

The stubborns were applied at the concert

St. John was on stage by an impressive series of musicians and singers, including guitarist Robbie Mcintosh, drummer Evan Jenkins, percussionist Ernesto Marichales, Kris Drever, Liam O’Maonlai (formerly from Hothaus Flowers) and The Staves, such as the guitarist Robbie Mcintosh. (BC Camplight was missing with Covid.)

What followed was an evening with impeccable musicality, glorious harmonies and sufficient evidence of crosby’s songwriting skills to challenge those of us who kept our remaining, Kniemarian post-punk prejudices “Never Trust a Hippy”.

And yet … and yet it felt a bit like a missed opportunity. The problem was more presented as musical. From the moment when everyone met on the stage and started the opening track of the album, Love, led by the rods, is clear that this would be a tonal high-end evening. If at all, there was a flawless precision that was more in focus than the dirty beauty of the original. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact, St. John later said that Crosby had paid all of his musicians with a bag of weeds.

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But when the first half of the show reminded, if I could only remember that my name was going without introduction or context, the evening collected a possibly unplanned ceremony. O’Maonlai brought a loose majesty into the rain, the most beautiful song of the album, and Ed Harcourt played Cowboy film – Crosby’s self -mythologizing retelling in CSNY history – with a fierce intensity. But everything felt a little, well, church.

This became all the more clear in the second half – devoted to the highlights of the Crosby Songbooks – when everyone loosened, to talk and the impression of being thoroughly amused.

Margo Buchanan brought a bluesy boasting into the long time, Harcourt returned to offer a violent takeover of CSNYS almost cut hair, and the staks reminded us of crosby’s pop sensitivity with their harmonies on the classic of the Byrds.

Kris Drever

And when Michelle Willis, now located in Scotland, but who has worked with “Cros” in his last years, came up and spoke about the man they knew suddenly had a look at another possible way to get crosby history Tell telling that his humanity has to say (although it has to be said that nobody spoke in the evening about what a monumental pain in the ass could be the man, how he would often admit himself).

The highlight of the evening was a duet between Willis and Kris Drever about things that we do for love that was a smoky, growling joy.

In the end, the affection that everyone on stage for Crosby’s work was very obvious. It was only that it was a lot more fun than they came out and admitted it.