It’s 1967, and Eve Babitz, then a sometimes-collagist, is at a Paul Butterfield show in Huntington Beach. The only other person in the audience is Stephen Stills. At the end of the set, he asks her for a ride home. Babitz, who saw collaging as a pit stop on the way to becoming the brash, unapologetic writer and muse we now remember her as, jumps at the chance to strike a deal: “I’ll give you a ride if you let me do the art for your new record.” Stills shrugs, “Okay.”
The cover enchanted me long before I knew it was a Babitz creation. It’s surreal and psychedelic and perfectly late-’60s; I spent years searching for an early pressing. For all the half-century-old records in my collection, holding this specific one feels the most like clutching a relic from a lost time. Listening to it transported me to the 1967 Laurel Canyon of my dreams. Babitz perches the band members in their own personal Mount Rushmore, overlooking a glistening body of water. There are oversized butterflies, angels peeking through twisting trees, flowers tracing the borders, and pink birds floating in the sky. The chaotic, layered, stitched-together nature of the cover speaks to the fragments bouncing off each other inside.
Flip the record over, and you’ll find a chaotic, stream-of-consciousness list of dedications: “To our friends, enemies, and people we don’t know from Adam for their influences and inspiration.” The band names Otis Redding, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Judy Collins, Coltrane, Zappa, Hendrix, “the five Byrds,” and dozens more. It’s a roadmap to Springfield’s splintered musical DNA up to that point—folk, jazz, soul, psychedelia, country.
Buffalo Springfield—Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, Dewey Martin, and Bruce Palmer—were five wildly different players barely holding it together long enough to make something historic. Buffalo Springfield Again was released just 11 months after their 1966 self-titled debut. It also followed the rerelease of their first LP in March 1967, which included the group-defining single “For What It’s Worth,” their highest-charting hit at #7. That first record leaned towards pop, with tight runtimes, a muffled sound, and clear Troubadour influences.
Stills and Young were 22 and 21, respectively, when Buffalo Springfield ascended the charts. Anxious to capitalize on mainstream success, the pair entered a longstanding pattern of one-upping the other, each musician trying to push their group further sonically. It drove a wedge between them: Young quit and rejoined the group multiple times in those 11 months between albums. That summer, David Crosby (a future bandmate) filled in for him at the Monterey Pop Festival. (Crosby is later credited as inspiration on Buffalo Springfield Again deep cut “Rock & Roll Woman,” a ripping song born out of a Stills/Croz jam, with a melody that has Crosby’s fingerprints all over it.) Young was already buckling to the pressure of sudden fame, retreating into solitary recording sessions (spending 100 hours on “Broken Arrow,” alone). Stills saw it as a chance to showcase his wider range of influences—jazz, Latin music, and beyond. Furay, meanwhile, notched three writing credits on Again, often using his songs to air quiet frustrations with the band’s dysfunction. These were men in emotional freefall, dragging the Wrecking Crew into their mess and emerging with 10 tracks that somehow still resemble brilliance.
And yet, Buffalo Springfield Again starts with Young. “Mr. Soul” bursts through the speakers like a panic attack in a leather fringe jacket. It’s thudding, cynical, snide, and blaring, entering with a jolt and refusing to let go. The liner notes “respectfully dedicate” the track to “the ladies of the Whisky a Go Go and the women of Hollywood,” a knowing wink to Babitz’s cover, herself an original Whisky girl. Underneath the wailing guitar and relentless percussion is Young at his most vulnerable. He wrote the song at UCLA Medical Center after having a seizure on stage with the band in San Francisco. His then newly developed epilepsy gets a nod in the third verse: “Stick around while the clown who is sick / Does the trick of disaster.”
The country tonk, Furay-penned “A Child’s Claim to Fame” stands in almost petty opposition to Young’s unraveling. Where “Mr. Soul” spirals inward, Furay’s song is clean-cut, upright, and sharply directed—likely aimed at Young himself. It’s country in structure but pop in spirit, and it reads as a public eye-roll toward Young’s ego-driven flakiness. You could easily draw a line from this track to Young’s “I Am A Child” on Last Time Around; a quiet rebuttal, matching Furay’s condescension with a kind of wounded defiance. Furay’s tendency to go it alone shows up elsewhere, too: on “Sad Memory,” he reportedly recorded his vocals solo after no one else showed up to the session.
Young spreads his reach further on “Expecting to Fly,” the orchestral, disorienting, and unmistakably experimental composition that layers harpsichord, vibraphone, and timpani over a sweeping symphony. It feels massive, emotionally and sonically, like something off Days of Future Passed. The vocal octaves expand the space even more, giving the impression that the orchestra is playing on a soundstage. (The song later appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because of course it did.) It’s unsettling and evocative. When Young hits the falsetto on “If I ever lived without you / Now you know I died,” it carries the kind of devastating weight that makes you believe him.
Now, as far as the Young/Stills debate goes, I’m more often than not on Young’s side. But there are times when Stills’s exacting, genre-hopping craftsmanship scratches a part of my brain that is neglected in Neil’s discography. If we’re going song-for-song, Stills takes it for me on Buffalo Springfield Again. His blend of jazz, country, and grittier rock influences feels more immediate, even in all the chaos. Because of it. The first time we get a Stills-written track is “Everydays”—a sleepy, sauntering jazz-rock tune that almost misses its own beat, swaying so loosely it feels like it could collapse in on itself. The recording is messy, like it was done on a second take and left that way intentionally. The keys drag just behind the rhythm, like a Sunday driver zoned out on an oceanside road. But it’s hypnotic. The lyrics drift into existentialism, the monotony of the day-to-day: “Drive in the hills / Forget your fear / Getting it out of / Second gear.”
“Bluebird” hits for the exact opposite reasons. The entire record itself feels like it builds up to and falls from this moment. The jangly, psych-adjacent guitars are consuming, matched in rhythm to the crashing drums. The guitars devolve into acoustics and electrics that chase each other in circles, and a sneaky banjo reprise closes the song. There’s bravado, but there’s a sadness underneath it. The falsetto in the bridge—“Do you thiiiiiiiiiink she looooooves youuuuu? / Do you thiiiiiiiink, at allllllll?”—is one of my favorite musical moments of all time. I love “Bluebird” for the way it sounds, but I love “Bluebird” even more for the things it says. It’s part hallucinatory dreamscape, part breakup song, centered around a girl completely engrossed in her own sadness. “Soon she’s going to fly away / Sadness is her own” is one of those lines that feels too personal not to have been written about me (or a past-life version of me). She knows only crying, just crying. I know only “Bluebird,” just “Bluebird.”
Stills is admittedly less daring than Young and Furay, opting for rock-adjacent genres rather than full-blown orchestration or layered studio trickery. “Hung Upside Down” is him working within a scope that makes total sense for him. It’s an oft-overlooked track, but the fuzzy, rambling guitar tones are so thick that you can almost see the sound waves. Furay’s vocals are strong here, too, leaning into a ‘60s sweetness that bridges their earlier Byrdsian harmonies with a thicker, more rock-forward sound. Nothing flashy, but it packs a punch.
“Broken Arrow” is the album’s true unraveling point, the moment where Young fully leans into the identity crisis he later admitted fueled the song. He dumps all of his splintering identities into one magnum opus, opening with a reprise of “Mr. Soul” (this time featuring what sounds like Martin on vocals), then spirals into a stitched-together maze of time changes, jazz breakdowns, eerie ballgame organ, and sudden waltz interludes. There’s a Beatles ethos to the whole thing, an unsettling haze that feels like Sgt. Pepper’s-meets-“Revolution 9.” (The flashes of applause that cut in and out of the track were even taken from a Beatles show.) It’s a multi-movement epic that jumps genres as much as it does tempos, eventually landing in a loose, clarinet-centered jazz shuffle to close out the song and the record.
Buffalo Springfield Again is itself a collage. Babitz captured that in the artwork, pasting together butterflies, goddesses, and glamorized sadness. The songs do the same thing: stitched from separate sessions, moods, and egos. The friction from everyone pulling in different directions creates its own kind of harmony, unifying the tracklist through contrast. Each crack in the album reveals a different truth. It lingers because it never settles, constantly shifting under your feet.
