As promised, I’m finally back with more drivel about my record collection. Manassas, the debut by Manassas, is a record and a band I barely knew existed before just a few years ago – and then when I took the plunge, this album hardly left the turntable.
Early on in this project, way back in the C’s, I wrote about how I somehow considered myself a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fan despite having only their greatest hits record. Not sure how I did that math, but for nearly 40 years, a copy of “So Far” and a Crosby-Nash album that I openly didn’t care for amounted to my fandom. So it’s only within the last decade or so that I dug deeper into the CSNY-related catalog and found plenty else there to love. At some point, I got a digital copy of Manassas, and it simply floored me. Not long after, I picked up this beautiful vinyl copy at Deep Groove here in Phoenixville, and started playing it even more. When I got my new turntable in 2019, Manassas was the first album I played, and the new detail that I could hear just floored me.
This album was released in 1972. (I think we’ve already shown I don’t like to rush into my fandom.) You could argue that Manassas is pretty much Stephen Stills, as he wrote nearly everything on this double album. But it’s also a big and very good band, a band that is firing on all cylinders, working their way through a broad range of styles in service of the Stills songs. Crunchy hard rock, folk rock, straight-up country, deep funk – it’s all here, and it all works. For at least two years after I got it, it was simply my go-to album, playing over and over, in the house and in the car. Several long stretches of New Jersey were made more bearable by Manassas. It’s absolutely one of my top discoveries in the past 10 years, even if the album itself is 50 years old.
Listening to this, I simply marvel at the period of intense creativity Stephen Stills was having. 25 or 26 when putting this together, just off the incredible debut of Crosby Stills & Nash, which was mostly Stills songs, and their second album, with Neil Young. Then the “Stephen Stills” solo album came out in 1970, giving him the hit “Love The One You’re With.” Then six months later, his second solo album came out. Then in late 1971, he formed Manassas with Chris Hillman and put out this epic double album. That incredible ability to work on multiple ideas at once, to assimilate and integrate, to just powerfully create – that’s a power of youth. I had a similar energy once, and remember how awesome it was, how much I could get done, and done well, how the ideas just flowed.
