If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971)

If I Could Only Remember My Name is the debut solo album by the American singer-songwriter David Crosby, released on February 22, 1971, by Atlantic Records. It was one of four high-profile albums released by each member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the wake of their chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu. Guests on the album include Jerry Garcia, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and other prominent West Coast musicians of the era.

The album peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Top LPs chart and earned a RIAA gold record certification in the United States. It initially received negative reviews from critics, but has gone on to achieve cult fandom and praise from modern critics.

Background

The album was released following the success of the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young album Déjà Vu. Its popularity contributed to the success of the four albums released by each of the members in its wake – Neil Young's After the Gold Rush (1970), Stephen Stills's self-titled solo debut (1970), this 1971 Crosby debut, and Graham Nash's Songs for Beginners (1971). The period was also one of mourning for Crosby following the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton in a 1969 car accident. Grief stricken, Crosby coped by doing hard drugs and spending large amounts of time in the studio, where he "felt safe."

Recording sessions took place at the recently opened Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco. While there, Crosby invited many of his musician friends to take part. Among them were Nash, Young, Joni Mitchell, and members of the Grateful Dead (most frequently Jerry Garcia), Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Santana. According to Crosby,

These were all good friends and good people and they knew that I was lonely and they knew also that I was slightly nuts at the time, and they would come and we would play music ... I would sit down with whoever did show up – most often Jerry [Garcia] – and start playing a song ... If you started playing music, he wanted to play. And we had two-track tape running constantly the entire night. And the minute that something started to happen, the 24-track would start to roll – or maybe it was 12 track back then ... And then I would start layering harmonies onto it, and that was a lot of fun."

The loose ensemble of musicians was given the informal moniker of The Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra by Jefferson Airplane bandleader, longtime Crosby associate and fellow science fiction fan Paul Kantner, although Crosby noted that the P.E.R.R.O. was only a willful invention of Kantner's rather than a collective project. Many from this agglomeration, including recording engineer Stephen Barncard, also worked on Kantner's Blows Against the Empire, Songs for Beginners by Nash, and the Grateful Dead's American Beauty, all recorded in part concurrently with the Crosby album at Wally Heider Studios.

Music

Even with the star-studded guest line-up, the final two songs feature Crosby alone. Only five songs have actual lyrics, "Orleans" being a 15th Century round listing various French cathedrals. Crosby's song "Laughing" had been written earlier in his time with CSNY, while a demo version of "Song with No Words" had been tried out during the sessions for Déjà Vu and would appear on the 1991 CSN retrospective package. "Cowboy Movie" recounted the tale of a group of Old West outlaws torn apart by a femme fatale; in actuality a recounting in thinly veiled form of the encounter by the quartet with Rita Coolidge and her effect on the romantic aspirations of at least two of them, as identified immediately by Nash.

The album is rooted in the folk-rock tradition, but like much of Crosby's work it also borrows tunings, time signatures, and vocal phrasings from jazz. Some writers have labeled it an early example of psychedelic folk, with Billboard describing the music as "psychedelic folk dirges." Pitchfork stated that "he music feels the way a dream sounds when you try to retell it in the morning: foggy, only loosely coherent, dissolving in real time."

Release

If I Could Only Remember My Name was released in February 1971 on Atlantic Records. Two singles were taken from the album, including the minor hit "Music Is Love", a collaboration with Nash and Young that was released in April 1971 and peaked at No. 95 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album has remained continuously in print.

In October 1990, a compact disc version was released, having been digitally remastered from the original master tapes, using the equipment and techniques of the day, by Barncard. A double-compact disc version appeared in November 2006, with an audio disc remastered in HDCD, including a bonus track (the hitherto unreleased "Kids and Dogs", previously earmarked for an unreleased Crosby solo album slated to appear on Capitol Records in the early 1980s) and a second DVD Audio disc of the original album remixed for 5.1 digital Surround Sound.