Little Black Book: Guinnevere

David Crosby: Guinnevere

[purchase]

Once upon a time, the recording was the recording; the very concept of demo versions would have made little sense in a world in which the point of record-making was that it captured the live performance event. These days, of course, performance is repetitive and constant, and some days it seems like every scrap of material is recorded. The end result is a blessing and a curse, part and parcel of the very newness which confounds labels and pits artists and fans against the very recording industry that is supposed to align and represent those parties and more, and going into why and wherefore would take a good couple of hours we just don't have.

But just because something has been recorded doesn't mean it has value. As I discussed in a post about B-sides and rarities over at Cover Lay Down yesterday, many non-album tracks truly belong in the vaults and dusty hallways where they are ultimately unearthed. Demos, especially, often suffer from poor recording quality, not to mention as-yet-unperfected songwriting; though there are plenty of collectors who drool to hear even the muddiest scrap of Nick Drake or Beach Boys outtake, there's a reason why this, after all, was not the version the artists and engineers chose to press into wax for all eternity.

Which makes David Crosby's predominantly solo version of Guinnevere, originally recorded in-studio a year before the release of the full-bore Crosby, Stills, and Nash version, a tripartite anomaly: a demo recording, released by the artists themselves, which is both crystal clear (thanks to some decades-later remixing and a surprisingly crisp source tape) and hauntingly beautiful. It may not have the full-bore CSN harmonies we know from the "original" version, and it seems to have traded the slow build-to-rock we're used to hearing for an acoustic envelope of singer-songwriter sound. And maybe it's my bias as a folkfan. But in my mind, this is the keeper.