A recording studio can be a confessional, a laboratory, or a place where a band quietly comes apart. For Buffalo Springfield, it was all three at once. On October 30, 1967, the Los Angeles group released Buffalo Springfield Again, their second studio album on Atco Records. The record arrived after nine months of sessions that stretched from January to mid-September—and after a year in which the five members had begun pulling in different directions.
Deportation, departures and Monterey
The debut album had been rushed, but Buffalo Springfield Again took its time, and time was exactly what the band did not have. Bassist Bruce Palmer was deported in January and slipped back into the United States illegally to keep working. Neil Young quit and returned several times. He missed the group's Monterey Pop Festival appearance; David Crosby filled in at Stephen Stills' request. On the surface, Buffalo Springfield was a band. In the studio, it was often five solo projects sharing a name.
On the surface, Buffalo Springfield was a band. In the studio, it was often five solo projects sharing a name.
Nowhere is that clearer than on 'Expecting to Fly.' During one of his departures, Young booked a studio without telling the others. The session musicians assumed they were recording a Neil Young solo project, not a Buffalo Springfield track. Jack Nitzsche arranged the strings, and not one other member of Buffalo Springfield played on the song. It ended up on the album anyway—a Buffalo Springfield record with no Buffalo Springfield in it.
Young pushed the studio itself into the foreground. 'Broken Arrow' opens with applause taken not from a Buffalo Springfield concert but from a Beatles performance, then drops in a live-in-studio fragment of the band's own 'Mr. Soul.' The result was a collage that treated production as part of the composition. Mark Prendergast noted that on Buffalo Springfield Again, Young showed that studio craft mattered to him as much as songwriting.
Furay, Stills and the back cover
The fractures also opened a door for guitarist Richie Furay, who had contributed nothing to the debut. On Buffalo Springfield Again he finally got songs onto a band record, including 'A Child's Claim to Fame,' an early country-rock tune. Meanwhile, Stills built 'Rock & Roll Woman' from a jam with David Crosby, whose voice may also be on the recording. The back cover even thanked a long list of influences and inspirations—some of whom actually played on the record but were not credited.
The album peaked at number 44 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, a modest showing for a record this ambitious. Years later, the critical verdict caught up with the music: Rolling Stone placed Buffalo Springfield Again at number 188 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time in 2003, and the record held the same spot when the list was revised in 2012. The album also found a place in Robert Christgau's Basic Record Library for the 1950s and 1960s, and it appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 1997 it was reissued on CD in HDCD format.
Buffalo Springfield Again is what happens when a band stops pretending to be a unit and records the truth of its own disassembly. The result was not a farewell, exactly, but a document of five musicians already living in separate futures—and somehow making those separate futures sound like one band.