Stephen Stills (1970). When Stephen Stills gets into full gospel mode, he can achieve greater sincerity than many of his sixties contemporaries. This album, plus Manassas (a more collaborative effort) mark Stills' attempts to carve out a solo identity apart from Crosby, Nash and Young. That identity is laced with country-western feel, complicated rhythms, and his characteristic elegant guitar work. This album opens with "Love the One You're With," which Mary's Garage Band covered in an aggressive, distorted guitar style that surely violates everything Stills intended for the song. That, of course, was our intention.

“Love the One You’re With” is a very good pop song. Its lyrics recall a Smokey Robinson-style play on words, with a sly encouragement to play around a little while the cat’s away. On stage, I always introduce this song as the anthem of college freshmen everywhere, who often have left high school sweethearts behind and are now trying to figure out whether and how to be faithful. Stills’ advice is clear: don’t be.

This recording also features “We Are Not Helpless,” which ends in a rousing “Amen” refrain that the church guitar group I used to play in would use from time to time. There’s a general feel of late sixties/early seventies “spirituality” in this record, and echoes of it in the later Manassas album too. Stills pulls this off without either the cloying, orchestrated quality that later pop tunes such as “You Light Up My Life” provided or the cynicism and/or insincerity that some rock stars inject into any discussion of religion (Jethro Tull, for example). Stills is as clear as he can be while remaining ecumenical, and while this would certainly bother dogmatists (since he rarely names whatever deity he’s invoking), his message is certainly recognizably Christian enough for use, say, in a Catholic mass in the mid-1970s . . .