(Welcome to the) Hotel California

I've been reading "Hotel California" by Barney Hoskyns over the past few weeks. I purchased the book because I had been led to believe that it contained a fair amount of information about Randy Newman (and because British Amazon had it on sale for a ridiculously low price) and some about Jackson Browne. It turned out that there was plenty of information about Jackson Browne but little about Randy Newman, who didn't really belong to the Los Angeles singer-songwriter circle of the late 60s/early 70s.

This book talks about a period of music which isn't well represented in my collection. Apart from the Newman albums, I have all the early Jackson Browne albums along with "Crosby, Stills and Nash", but my Joni collection starts with "Blue" and concentrates on the following years. Once I bought a 'greatest hits' collection by The Byrds, which I listened to on Saturday. Almost every track sounds the same and almost none of it sounds interesting.

This is a concise description which I could apply to most of the music described in Hoskyns' book: most of the faux cowboy material fell on deaf ears and I never could stand The Eagles. As someone rightly pointed out, almost all of the musicians which one considers to be part of this scene are not Californians (the exceptions are Newman, Browne and Crosby).

The book is a bit muddled, unsure of whether to tell a strictly chronological tale or whether to concentrate on people and/or groups. As a result, there's a bit of both which makes for haphazard, if informative, reading.

I knew nothing about the early life of David Crosby (all I did know was his sailing, his drug problems, his liver transplant and his jail sentences), so this book clued me in. To me, the standout track of "Crosby, Stills and Nash" is C's "Guinevere" and I have always wondered why there were no other tracks of a similar standard created by him. Now I know.

I have the "remixed from the original master tapes" cd version of CS&N which I bought about ten years ago. The production on this is strange to my way of thinking: whilst the guitars (especially in "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes") have careful spacial placing, the vocals (with one notable exception) are mixed together, dead in the middle, thus making it difficult to separate each singer's contribution. Strange for a harmony group - unless they wanted to provide a blend of three voices as one. The notable exception is "Helplessly hoping", which has clean separation on the vocals (and showing again that Crosby has a lovely voice); this track only has a single acoustic guitar, which may have something to do with the vocal separation.

I've never been one who looks for the perfect vocal (I have been given to understand from other sources that both CS&N and The Eagles would record multiple vocal tracks and then edit on a word by word basis!), as one can imagine from listening to years of Randy Newman, so most Californian perfect vocal songs leave me cold. Where is all the expression and emotion? Rank The Eagles against Van der Graaf Generator, and whilst it's easy to understand why one act has sold millions of records whereas the other has not, it's also clear on which side the true emotion and passion lies. And the musical ability.