Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield, Poco and other groups. Souther, Hillman, Furay with "Fallin' In Love":
! No longer available
Trivia: Neil Young wasn't all that confident in his singing when Buffalo Springfield cut their first album; he wrote five songs for the album, but he handed the lead vocal chores on three to Richie Furay:
Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"
! No longer availableBuffalo Springfield, "Flying on the Ground is Wrong"
! No longer availableBuffalo Springfield, "Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It"
! No longer available(This song, by the way, was the B-side of their first single, "For What It's Worth.")
Richie Furay went on to write one of Buffalo Springfield's most affecting songs . . .
Buffalo Springfield, "Kind Woman"
! No longer available. . . and often featured it in Poco's live performances while he was the leader of the group. Furay also wrote the title track of Poco's first album, a song that spoke of Buffalo Springfield's collapse and became Poco's signature song for a long enough time . . .
Poco, "Pickin' up the Pieces"
! No longer availablePoco began as what was left of Buffalo Springfield after Young and Stephen Stills took a hike before their third album,
Last Time Around, was finished. Furay and Springfield bassist Jim Messina (he'd replaced Bruce Palmer after their second and best album,
Again) finished the album with a guest, Rusty Young, one of the few pedal steel guitarists willing to work on the rock and roll side of the street. The three felt comfortable enough working together that Young decided to stick with the two soon-to-be-ex-Springfielders for their next project, and he even convinced them to hire drummer/singer George Grantham. They brought in future Eagles bassist/vocalist Randy Meisner to complete the new lineup. They thought of calling it Pogo until cartoonist Walt Kelly decided not so fast, boys, prompting them to change the name to Poco before a Kelly lawsuit could go past the filing stage.
Getting Poco a recording contract took something similar to a baseball trade to make happen: On the Poco side, Randy Meisner, Rusty Young, and George Grantham hadn't had any kind of recording deals previously, but Richie Furay and Jim Messina were tied to Atlantic's Atco label as Springfield members. Enter David Geffen, then a talent agent and manager, who was trying to resolve a similar issue involving the newly formed Crosby, Stills & Nash---Atlantic wanted the new trio and they already had Stills by way of the Springfield, but both David Crosby and Graham Nash were tied to Columbia and its subsidiary Epic thanks to their previous memberships in, respectively, the Byrds and the Hollies. Geffen hunkered down with then-Columbia president Clive Davis and they agreed on a deal---Furay's and Messina's contracts would be traded to Columbia/Epic in exchange for Columbia sending those of Crosby and Nash to Atlantic.
(The player to be named later, of course, was Neil Young, who had a solo deal of his own with Reprise, but Young joining CS&N was no issue since Young, too, had the Springfield tie to Atlantic.)
So Poco signed to Epic. And right away they ran into the issue that would dog them their entire career---lineup changes. Randy Meisner left the group either during or after completion of their debut album,
Pickin' up the Pieces---he didn't like that Jim Messina, who had produced the final Buffalo Springfield album and was producing Poco, refused to let other band members be part of the final mixing of the album. Meisner joined Rick Nelson's band before falling in with the players who eventually called themselves the Eagles. His replacement was another future Eagle, Timothy B. Schmit, who arrived in time for their second, eponymous album. Both albums drew powerful reviews but sold little; in 1969-70 their more explicit country-rock hybrid was still ahead of its time. (The Flying Burrito Brothers, the band Gram Parsons formed after leaving the Byrds, had something of the same issue, though both bands were strong concert draws.)
Messina convinced Poco to make their third album a live album, considering the band's strength as a concert attraction . . . and they daringly made it mostly new material. The ploy worked; the album pulled up just short of the top 25, but Messina decided to leave when he realised Furay was asserting himself too strongly as the group's leader and chief songwriter. His replacement was former Illinois Speed Press guitarist Paul Cotton. In a rarity in Poco's career, this lineup hung in for three more studio albums before Furay himself decided he'd had enough of a band who was getting rave reviews and had built a consistent audience for live performances but couldn't sell records. By the time Poco eventually had their big hit single, "Crazy Love," Rusty Young was the only original member left. Just before that single and its album
Legend, Schmit left Poco---when the Eagles invited him to step in and succeed, ironically enough, Randy Meisner. Unlike the earlier departures of Meisner, Messina, and Furay, Schmit not only left Poco on good terms, the band actually stopped just short of threatening to kill him if he
didn't accept the Eagles' offer.
They never duplicated their "Crazy Love" success, though Schmit returned to the group after the Eagles collapsed in the early 1980s. The band soldiered on with the usual lineup shifts until the original quintet---Furay, Messina, Young, Meisner, and Grantham---reunited in 1989 for the first time since early 1969. And hit the jackpot: "Call It Love" went top twenty. The lineup didn't stay together, but Rusty Young, Paul Cotton, and George Grantham kept the band going until Grantham's stroke in 2004. In the last decade, Poco has been Young, Cotton, bassist/singer Jack Sundrud, and drummer George Lawrence, at least until Cotton left at last to be replaced by keyboardsman Mike Webb (in 2010) and Young decided to retire from full-time touring in 2014.
