Vintage Guitar: There's a legend about the formation of the Buffalo Springfield that supposedly involved you chasing down a hearse driven by Neil Young.
Stephen Stills: That's a true story. I'd met Neil in Thunder Bay, Ontario; I'd been up there working with a Cambridge, Massachusetts folk group. He came through with his band; he had a bass player and a drummer, and was playing folk music on a Gretsch guitar. I heard what he was doing, and said: \"That is it,\" because the other big influence on my guitar playing had been Chet Atkins. I'd gone to see Chet Atkins doing a demonstration at a guitar store in the late '50s, and of course, I fell in love with his playing, and I began Travis-picking all over the South.
I arranged for Neil to get into the States on a working visa, but he decided to be \"...the Bob Dylan of Toronto,\" broke up his band, and started playing acoustic music in small clubs.
After about a year or so, I was in Los Angeles; I'd decided to try to get a band together out there. Richie Furay had been in that Cambridge folk group with me, and I'd hustled him into coming out to L.A. too, but up to that point all there was to our \"band\" was just him and me, and Richie was about to get disgusted and go home. We'd been searching for musicians all over town. I was on Sunset Boulevard, and I pulled up behind a hearse that had Ontario plates on it; I knew exactly who it was before I even saw who was driving. Neil had another hearse that had died in Thunder Bay, but this one was a Pontiac he'd driven all the way to California, and when I pulled behind him, he was actually looking for 77 Sunset Strip (laughs)! Bruce Palmer was with him; Bruce became the Buffalo Springfield's bass player.
VG: I always thought the band had some great guitar tones on certain songs. What did the Buffalo Springfield use, instrument-wise?
SS: Neil had a fondness for Gretsch guitars, which rubbed off on me, so the original Buffalo Springfield sound was comprised primarily of Gretsches. Richie got an Epiphone to saw on; Bruce played a Fender bass.
VG: Another interesting facet was what might have been called an \"aggressive\" acoustic sound; those guitars were way up front in the mix on songs like \"Bluebird\" and \"Mr. Soul.\"
SS: When we got into our first recording session, the producer said: \"This is not what I want; play it faster,\" so Neil and I more or less learned how to make records ourselves. When you're that young, you find yourself saying things like: \"Let's see what this particular machine does; let's turn all of the knobs up and down, and see what it sounds like when it's really 'scrunchy';\" it was sort of an Elmore James tradition! We did that to some old Fairchild and UA limiters, which would make the guitars sustain in a unique way. So a lot of that was due to what I'd call \"perverse, unnatural, and immoral use of a limiter\" (chuckles).
VG: There were also some lower-end, almost Duane Eddy-ish twangs on tunes such as \"Rock and Roll Woman\" and again, \"Mr. Soul.\"
SS: I actually had a Guild Duane Eddy guitar, and I had a black Gibson that was one of the first models with humbuckings; it was my first old guitar. Then I ran across a Gibson Super 400, so there were a lot of good guitars used on those recordings.
VG: The introduction to \"Rock and Roll Woman\" has always been fascinating; it almost sounds like a 12-string guitar with a harmony tuning.
SS: That was a Gretsch acoustic put through the board, using a limiter; we overdubbed it with its own self.
VG: How valid is it to pronounce the Buffalo Springfield progenitors of country rock? The band came along before the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and there were instruments like a banjo on \"Bluebird,\" and a gospel piano on \"Kind Woman.\"
SS: Well, call it a potpourri of a lot of things. We thought one of the crimes of music back then was pigeonholing – making songs so someone could put them in the right \"box.\" We certainly weren't a country band; we would take all kinds of influences from all over and blend them together. I spent my last year of high school in Latin America, and there's a edge of salsa under all of my rhythms.
