One Hit No More, No. 25: Buffalo Springfield & Some Poor Bastard Named Dewey Martin

#Inspiration

The Hit
Not many songs express their era – even a generic version of it – but Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” still stands as a singular example. If you’ve watch five movies or documentaries about the 1960s, or the Vietnam War, you’ve heard it; hell, if you’ve seen a commercial that references the 60s, you’ve heard it. It had nothing to do with Vietnam, as it happens: Stephen Stills wrote the song after seeing the protest of a curfew on Sunset Boulevard turn into a riot outside a club called Pandora’s Box.

It’s one hell of a song, still and anxious; it puts you in the calm before the storm and holds you there for as long as it plays. The instrumentation is minimal, but brilliantly used to create that tension. Burdened as it is with standing in for an era and old daydreams about making the world beautiful, it takes listening to it with fresh ears to drown out the clichés and just hear it as a piece of music…

…with that in mind, the angst the main players in Buffalo Springfield feel about their music cracks me up a bit. Especially in context.

The Rest of the Story
“But getting back to Buffalo Springfield, I’m glad the music is getting out. Flawed as it is, it’s really genuine. There’s no posing.”
- Stephen Stills

It is impossible, maybe even ridiculous, to talk about Buffalo Springfield as a one-hit wonder – and that goes well beyond legends like Stills and Neil Young fronting the band. That said, they did not last long as a project – just two years and two albums, with a third Last Time Around coming out after the band broke up. After a short honeymoon period, permanent chaos reigned, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it, “After various drug-related arrests and line-up changes, the group broke up in 1968.”

The honeymoon was something, though. Young and Stills knew one another from Canada – they’d once played a place called Fourth Dimension in Thunder Bay, Ontario – they kept in very loose touch, especially after Stills relocated to Los Angeles (where he auditioned to be a Monkee, among other things). Young, meanwhile, got an invite from another acquaintance, a bass player named Bruce Palmer, who had something going with a band called The Mynah Birds, who had one James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., aka, Rick James, on the mic. (Palmer’s invite: “Come and join our band—there’s a Negro lead singer, we do rock ’n’ roll and hey, who cares that you play a 12-string and sing like a fag?”) When that band imploded when Johnson/James got arrested for being AWOL from the Navy, Young and Palmer hawked their gear to buy a hearse (Young’s second, which he called “Mort II”) and drove off to see what Stills was up to.

After struggling to find him at venues and coffee houses, Young and Palmer decided to take off for San Francisco…when they passed Stills and a friend of his, Richie Furay, driving the opposite direction on Sunset. They eventually circled back to one another and, within days, they’d played their first show as Buffalo Springfield (named for a steamroller, btw), and they’d have a seven-week residency at the Whiskey A Go Go and people fighting and scraping to manage and/or record them. The original line-up included Stills (keyboard, guitar, vocals), Young (harmonica, guitar, piano, vocas), Furay (guitar, vocals), Palmer (bass), and a drummer named Dewey Martin (who briefly played with another band in this series, The Standells). The feeding frenzy brought in the sharks, something Stills had several thoughts on in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone. This is the tidiest:

“In show business all these guys are on the make. It’s like TV. In the beginnings when people realize how much money could be made, the strip was crawling with posers. ‘Oh, I’m a manager!’”

One pair in particular rubbed him the wrong way: Charles Green and Brian Stone. Though they already had Sonny & Cher to manage, Green and Stone squeezed out Buffalo Springfield’s then-management, took control of recording – which all concerned agree they sucked at – and generally became one of the band’s several problems. The other two came from within, and mostly from Young and Palmer. Palmer’s issues were pretty straightforward: an unsettled immigration status and a very persistent drug habit that saw him get arrested then shipped back to the home country (Canada) twice in rapid succession. Young, meanwhile, kept disappearing, often leaving Stills to handle his parts for live shows, or even The Byrds’ David Crosby, who became a regular stand-in when Young vanished (Found this wonderful quote: “But it’s still not clear who, or what killed The Buffalo Springfield. The easiest answer is Young, who famously abandons projects with little notice when they cease to remain interesting to him.”)

Topanga Canyon serves as a setting of broad demise. One of Palmer’s busts happened at a party there, when, with Eric Clapton in attendance, various members played loud enough to “make the hills ring.” After the second bust, Jim Messina (yes, that Jim Messina) took over the bass duties and, when the band finally completely broke up and went their separate ways (e.g., Young and Furay to Atlantic, Young to Warner Bros.), Messina worked with Furay to mix and release the band’s posthumous third album. Palmer, as it turns out, became one of those famous “casualties of the 60s,” someone who never checked out of the lifestyle. As noted in a 2016 article in Observer, a guy named Jimmy McDonough reached out to Palmer for an interview for his biography of Neil Young. Here’s how that went:

“When McDonough went out there, ‘in the wilds of Topanga Canyon outside some woebegone hippie house, past its prime and oozing that Manson vibe’ to interview Palmer for his book in the late ’90s, and Palmer tried to hit him up for money first.”

At this point, half of anyone who found this post must be wondering about Martin. There’s a little piss-taking in putting his name in the title, because, more than any other member, Martin strove mightily, to keep Buffalo Springfield going. He started with New Buffalo Springfield, which featured Davy Jones’ stand-in on The Monkees, Dave Price, plus two guys who would later play with Arthur Lee’s Love, Gary Rowles and Don Poncher. That version didn’t last long before Young and Stills sued it into oblivion (though there was a short-lived deal that let Martin keep playing in exchange for surrendering royalty rights). That was 1968, but Martin tried again with a new New Buffalo Springfield (which had a less interesting line-up), only to get fired(?) out of that one (they later became Blue Mountain Eagle), after which Martin tried to start another band called Medicine Ball, but that flamed out on its own. Martin would try one more time in 1991 with Buffalo Springfield Again, but Furay came in with the cease-and-desist that time around.

Neil Young and Stephen Stills went on to become…well, icons in American music. They’d even collaborate again when Crosby, Stills & Nash expanded to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but Stills knows how Young works (“I can’t be unkind about it,” [Stills] said. “Working with Neil is a privilege, not a right”). Palmer probably had the least happy end; he died of a heart attack in 2004, still navigating Topanga Canyon. Martin would pass a couple years later, in 2009, cause unknown, but generally acknowledged to be natural causes. He did get one more moment, however: an official U.S. patent for a three-part drum rim that gives you two more rimshot sounds than the standard model…

…oh, and Young sabotaged the Buffalo Springfield's 2012 reunion after seven shows. And he broke up the band the first time when they were about to play Carson. As implied above, this band squeezed in enough crazy shit for three bands. It sounds like Young took one last attempt at getting their original recordings up to his high standard. He was about to release that material in 2018, when Rolling Stone talked to Stills…who didn’t know that Young was doing anything with their material until Rolling Stone called.

About the Sampler
I started listening to Young’s remastered originals, but without realizing it (dammit!), which means a misguided attempt to “really connect” means I listened to the stuff that both Young and Stills think sounds like crap (especially their eponymous debut, i.e., what Green and Stone wrought). That said, there wasn’t any more thought or method to what I selected beyond liking…most of the songs (I just recalled adding “Uno Mundo,” which I included as an example of cheese). “Mr. Soul” is the only other song I recalled hearing, and I’ve always loved that one. The rest are a grab-bag I pulled off Buffalo Springfield (“Go and Say Goodbye,” “Sit Down I Think I Love You” (which made an early impression), “Hot Dusty Roads” (a late favorite), “Burned,” the band's first single (which has a great back-story) "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing," and, of course, “For What It’s Worth”), their heavier follow-up Buffalo Springfield Again (“Hung Upside Down," “Mr. Soul” and “Broken Arrow”), and, finally, the stragglers Furay and Messina rescued after the breakup on Last Time Around (“Pretty Girl Why,” “Special Care,” “Questions,” the breezy oddball “Carefree Country Day” and, a personal favorite from this past week, Young’s achingly beautiful ballad, “It’s So Hard to Wait.” All that files under “folk-rock” with differing emphasis on folk and rock. It’s good stuff, or at least I like it and don’t have the ear to get pissed off about the recording. I won’t lie: I saw Buffalo Springfield’s name coming for a month or so, and I was pretty excited about hearing more from them. And it was good.

Source(s)
Wikipedia – Buffalo Springfield
Wikipedia – Dewey Martin
LA Times obituary for Dewey Martin (2009; people say nice things; it's good)
Rolling Stone interview with Stills (2018)
Observer article (2016, best source, probably, and it asks, did Neil Young break them up?)