The Vinyl Dialogues Blog

Stories behind memorable albums of the 1970s as told by the artists

Tag: Stephen Stills

With Judy Collins and Stephen Stills, ‘There were sparks right away’

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On April 21, 2018

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

Judy Collins and Stephen Stills were driving around one day in Malibu, California, when Stills had an idea.

“He said, ‘You know, we need another song on this album,’” Collins says.

It was mid-1968 and Collins was coming off the success of her sixth studio album “Wildflowers,” which reached No. 5 on the Billboard Pop Albums charts after its release in October 1967. The album featured Collins’ Top 10 hit cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”

Stills’ band Buffalo Springfield had just broken up in May, 1968. When Collins and producer David Anderle were planning the next album, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” they decided to record it in Los Angeles.

“This was an opportunity to go to California and I was thrilled to be able to do that,” Collins says. “My producer said, ‘I want to bring you to California to make sort of a live album.’”… Read more

Channeling the ‘Friday Night at Joni Mitchell’s House’ vibe at the local level

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On September 10, 2017

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

It was like sitting around the Algonquin Round Table in New York City in the 1920s with the likes of great writers of the time – people like Dorothy Parker and George Kaufman.

Only the writers this time were musicians – like David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman – and it was the early 1970s.

And the venue wasn’t the historic Algonquin Hotel, in which the greatest writers, critics and actors of that earlier era gathered to exchange wordplay and witticisms. It was the living room of Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon home in California.

There, on any given Friday night, some of the greatest singer-songwriters of their generation would pass around a guitar and play some of the songs they had been working on, songs that hadn’t yet been recorded. Songs that would someday be big hits.

“It was the early … Read more

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