LINER
NOTES
FOR THE ASSOCIATION'S THE ASSOCIATION
By
Richie Unterberger
When The Association came out in August
1969, things had changed a lot in the year and a half or so since their
last album (1968's Birthday),
within both the group and the entire pop scene. The band's days as Top
Forty mainstays had passed, and rock music was far more geared toward
album sales than it had been just a couple of years before, when the
Association's popularity had peaked with "Windy" and "Never My Love." The Association, the group's fourth
album, reflected a maturing sound, and one which did manage to take the
record up to #32 in the LP charts, even though it failed to yield a hit
single.
Two
significant
changes had taken place when the band convened for the album's
sessions. One was the return of lead guitarist Jules Alexander, who had
left the band in 1967 to go to India after appearing on the first
Association albums under the name Gary Alexander. His replacement,
Larry Ramos, stayed on, and as the Association's Jim Yester explains,
"now we had two lead guitarists. It put another brain in the mix. And
instead of six guys from different places, you got seven guys from
different places. But it also had things vocally, because you can
certainly get a lot further out with seven guys. You can be more
selective about what you double, or you can double two different parts
instead of just one of the parts being doubled. So it gets interesting
in the arranging. Jules is a very strong personality, as is Larry, and
at times, that caused problems. But on the creative end, it is
certainly a plus."
And the band had changed producers, though their
previous one, Bones Howe, had helped guide the Association through some
of their biggest hits with "Windy," "Never My Love," and "Everything
That Touches You." Production credits for The Association would be shared
between the group and John Boylan, who had been part of the late-'60s
band the Appletree Theatre with his brother Terence. Eventually Boylan
would become one of the most successful producers in the business,
working on albums by Linda Ronstadt, Boston, the Little River Band,
Pure Prairie League, and others. In the late 1960s, though, he was just
starting to get his feet wet in production, his association with the
Association beginning when he produced the songs the group placed on
the soundtrack of Goodbye Columbus
earlier in 1969. Boylan ended up writing one of the songs on The Association, "Yes I Will," to
boot.
"John was a friend from the Village, and a lot
of us had known him personally before working with him," remembers
Yester. "One of the things we really liked about John, John had the
same kind of ear for what the backgrounds were doing that we did. I
think it's because he came through that whole folk and folk-rock thing
also. The mix of the tunes on that album is, I think, so much closer to
how we heard it than Bones
[Howe] and [previous Association producer] Curt [Boettcher].
"I think Jerry [Yester, who produced the band's
second album] probably mixed closer to what we heard also, as far as
the voices were concerned. But Boylan really had it down. It was so
nice to be able to hear the whole vocal arrangement. Whereas a lot of
the stuff that Bones mixed, you kind of heard the edges of it; you
couldn't hear the thing itself. All you heard was kind of, like, the
overtones of it. I was very frustrated by that."
Longtime Association listeners might have been
surprised to hear a pronounced country-rock flavor on several of the
cuts, such as "What Were the Words," which Yester wrote for the
Dillards (whose fine 1970 country-rock album Copperfields was also produced by
Boylan, as it happens). "I played it for Rodney [Dillard], and he said,
'Oh well, we can't do that. You have to record that!'" Yester laughs.
"He wouldn't take it." That didn't keep Rodney and fellow Dillard Herb
Pedersen from playing on the album, with Buddy Emmons handling the
steel guitar on "What Were the Words."
Though other tracks like Terry Kirkman's "Look At
Me, Look At You" and Alexander's "Dubuque Blues" were very much in a
country-rock mood, the group were dependably eclectic on the record as
a whole, offering bittersweet romanticism on Alexander's "Love Affair,"
mild psychedelia on "The Nest," stomping R&B on "Are You Ready,"
weird heavy rock on "I Am Up for Europe," and just plain weirdness on
"Broccoli." "When somebody had something crazy like that, that was part
of us," says Yester of Russ Giguere's "Broccoli." "We decided to share
it instead of pushing it off into a closet or something. That was very
genuinely Russell. Russell is a militant vegetarian."
It was indicative of a diversity that, as Yester
acknowledges, could be a double-edged sword. "We all really loved
diversity. A lot of the stuff that we decided not to do, I wish in a
lot of respects we had done, because there was some stuff that was a lot further out. But one of our
bywords was, don't spook the locals.
"A lot of times we used to hear that we were too diverse. There was so much
diversity that it was actually to our detriment. But that was the
nature of the beast. You got six guys that are coming from six
different places, and you try to agree on a direction. It gave us a lot
of variation. But at times it kind of was detrimental because it didn't
give a specific direction. We had been told that was gonna sneak up and
bite us on the butt, and it probably did." Not until, however, the
group got the chance to go into yet more directions on a subsequent
live album and their final studio full-length for Warner Brothers, both
also reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice. -- Richie Unterberger
unless otherwise specified.
HOME WHAT'S
NEW MUSIC BOOKS
MUSIC REVIEWS TRAVEL
BOOKS
LINKS ABOUT
THE AUTHOR SITE MAP
EMAIL RICHIE BUY
BOOKS