Whistling Down the Wire by Crosby & Nash (Vinyl record album review)

Record basics

• Album name: Whistling Down the Wire
• Group name: Crosby & Nash
• Year: 1976
• Number of discs: one
• Label: ABC Records
• Collection: Selman
• Distinguishing characteristics:
  • Scratched into side one of LP: ABCD-956-A 1
  • Scratched into side two of LP: ABCD-956-B 6
• Buy it on Amazon: $49.99

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’ve never listened to this record before, but it will be my second Crosby & Nash record, and my eleventh from the Crosby/Stills/Nash/Young music collective. The previous ten were:

• Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969): 5/5
• Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970): 5/5
• Stephen Stills 2 (1971): 2/5
• 4 Way Street by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1971): 5/5
• Songs for Beginners by Graham Nash (1971): 4/5
• Harvest by Neil Young (1972): 5/5
• So Far by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1974): 4/5
• Wind on the Water by Crosby & Nash (1975): 2/5
• CSN by Crosby, Stills & Nash (1977): 2/5
• Daylight Again by Crosby, Stills & Nash (1982): 1/5

What I expected

I did not like Wind on the Water very much, and Whistling Down the Wire is from just a year later, so I’m not entirely optimistic, but Nash looks far healthier on this album cover than the other one, so maybe that had an effect on his music.

What it was actually like

I guess I should have expected two things from a 1976 record: disco and reggae. Unfortunately, I got both^[1].

The disco song was Spotlight, which was really not the worst of its genre – it was more rock than many disco songs – but was still bad, with a bizarrely misplaced harmonica. The reggae song was J.B.’s Blues, one of the worst reggae songs ever.

The two songs with the most “CSN” style folk rock sound were Taken at All and Out of the Darkness.

Foolish Man was a blues song, but extremely slow, and another extremely slow song was Mutiny, which was rock and had multiple electric guitar solos.

Broken Bird, Time After Time and Marguerita were pretty boring soft rock.

Dancer was a rock instrumental, except for some moaning sounds that were pretty jarring, and it mostly sounded as if they were just messing around on their guitars and practicing how to harmonize their voices.

Grade

2/5: weak, but I was able to listen to the whole thing