Following the release of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Déjà Vu, the folk-rock supergroup divided and conquered, releasing a quartet of seminal albums as individuals. This fall, David Crosby's follow-up - debut solo release If I Could Only Remember My Name - will be reissued for its 50th anniversary with a host of bonus material.
READ MORE: Back to the Garden: Must-Hear Outtakes from CSNY's 'Déjà Vu' Box
If I Could Only Remember My Name, released in 1971, featured members of an informal collective known as the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. This loose union of music legends in the making included Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and core members of Jefferson Airplane (Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, David Freiberg), Santana (keyboardist Gregg Rolie, drummer Michael Shrieve) and the Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann). Their commitment to harmonic singing and fantastic improvisation led to a psychedelic subgenre later known as "freak folk" - and also helped Crosby work through the personal pain of losing his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in a car accident the year before.
Though the album was initially panned in comparison to CSNY's then-recent group and solo material - Lester Bangs infamously deemed it "a perfect aural aid to digestion when you're having guests over for dinner" - If I Could Only Remember My Name is today rightly seen as a classic. That classic gets a whole new look with a 2CD expanded edition that features 14 bonus tracks - 12 of them previously unreleased, including session outtakes and early demos recorded as early as 1968. The first, a demo called "Riff 1," can be heard below.
If I Could Only Remember My Name will also be reissued on 180-gram vinyl. Both formats will be available Oct. 15.
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