The packaging of a person's pain is a sticky subject for criticism. It feels uncouth to suggest the suffering should be more graceful.

The predominant emotion on this album is something uncomfortably akin to self-pity. "The biggest fool of all is me," sings the artist's persona (as a male chorus parrots each awkward line, socking home a clumsiness of meter and thought that must be heard to be cringed at properly). "I play the music for the music you see/For money I do publicity/So I can buy guitars, put a studio in the backyard/You know what it costs me to find another key...."

Defensiveness, the handmaiden of self-pity, is also present. The title tune chronicles one pilgrim's rigorous, debilitating progress through the pharmacopoeia only to conclude with classic delusion: "Some people into Jesus/Other people into Zen/I'm just into everyday/I don't hide from where I been."

Someone with a bit more introspection might have tackled these matters more profitably, someone like, say (as hateful as Stills might find the comparison), Neil Young. Harvest was concerned with similar questions of loss and disillusionment but always showed enough self-knowledge to be entertaining.

Sloppiness of presentation makes the package complete. The words have a hasty quality, as if made up five minutes before. The few concrete images used—giving someone The Key, going on down The Road—serve double duty from song to song. Two tracks placed consecutively even begin with the same six words; worse luck, the words are "When I was a young man." This apathy in the lyrics might not have been so apparent had the music itself been more involving, but it as well is perfunctory. A range of styles is used humorlessly but the predominant attack is Stills' familiar driving hunka hunka, with only its excesses present. What does not sound vaguely autistic is frankly embarrassing, especially sung with such deadly earnestness. "And the world can get so twisted from Mary Jane/Lookin' back it seems so ridiculously insane."

It would be sad to think the people involved put this record out not because of business pressures but because they were proud of it. In any case perhaps it is time for them to do some reevaluating. (RS 137)

TOM NOLAN