Ellos Cantaron Juntos...Un Poco...O Mucho

Old time (ha!) One Buck records readers will know that I consider Crazy Eyes, reworked in December here to include the album's outtakes, their strongest album. But when I have to pick second favorites, I'll end up with an album, that probably no other Poconut would vote in that position. Yep, you guessed it, it's Cantamos (usually in a close match/almost tie with direct follow-up Head Over Heels, also an excellent, consistently strong album). 

Cantamos is a weird album in the Poco discography. It is, in many ways, their lost album, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. For decades, Cantamos wasn't available on CD, and when it finally became available in 2003 in the U.S. and 2006 in the U.K., the discs were soon very expensive, then sold out in short time anyway, putting the album out of print once more. And out of print (so to speak) it stayed. On their official You Tube channel they feature every single Poco album, across numerous labels, except Cantamos, which is nowhere to be found. Truly odd. And a little sad, as Cantamos is one of their very best and deserved a much better fate and wider audience. 

So, what makes the album great? First off, it has the first really good Rusty Young compositions. Young had the occasional instrumental (or semi-instrumental on predecessor Seven) on earlier albums, but here he really comes into his own as a writer on the excellent "Sagebrush Serenade" and "High and Dry", the latter staying a concert favorite for years (plus the more wussy "All The Ways" that presages his later penchant for soft rock). Paul Cotton, often responsible for some of the worst or more boring songs, brings out one of his best, "Western Waterloo", the lovely "Susannah" and the very good rocker "One Horse Blue". "Another Time Around" runs maybe a little long, as some of his songs from the era do, but has a memorble chorus. Timothy Schmit, never the most prolific of writers, has two songs, both winners. This is all top notch stuff. Poco thankfully also abandoned their experiments with harder edged rock they tried out on Seven, to mixed results and success.   

Seriously, how the hell do you have the above commissioned artwork and end up with this shit?

Cantamos is a mighty fine album, but it could still use some help. For one thing: better cover art. The original cover sleeve is just terrible. A small painting of Poco in the middle (actually, slightly left of center for some reason) of an especially and spectacularly ugly-looking pattern, that is probably supposed to represent some Southwestern U.S. Native American art, but could just as well be your parents' ugly-ass 'exotic' wallpaper from the 1970s. I sort of get what they were going for, hinting at the album's return to a true country sound, but man is the end result eye-searing. Looking for related Poco art I found the original cover illustration by Phil Hartmann, which seemingly was made for the innersleeve, though my dad's LP, from which I sourced a slightly crackly version of the album for years, definitely didn't have that. The original image is definitely a big improvement, if you can groove to the handpainted covers of the era (...and why wouldn't you?). It's also a fine - even metatextual - representation of the album's contents: Four pickers singing and playing together in the back room of an empty saloon. Sounds about right, considering Poco still not having a mass audience in 1974, sadly. Why this illustration was covered up with all that ugly stuff on the released version in the first place? Another mystery.  

I also thought that the sequencing of Cantamos could be improved, mainly because it always was odd to start with "Sagebrush Serenade". Good as the number is, it clearly shows how author Young is coming from writing instrumentals, having these long instrumental interludes. Good stuff, but maybe not ideal as an opening number. So to kick things off in style I opted for a one-two punch: Cotton's tough Old West epic "Western Waterloo", followed by one of Timothy B. Schmit's best (and criminally underrated) pop songs, "Whatever Happened To Your Smile", originally hidden away as the penultimate number "Sagebrush Serenade" gets to be the side closer it works much better as. The first two songs on side two are identical to the released version, and then I switched the rest around to balance Schmit and Cotton vocals. Speaking of: This is another reason for why Cantamos is so good: Young might write songs now, but the lead vocals still go to Schmit who is four or five times the vocalist Young is, even if they both work in the same vocal register. And Cotton sings in a nice, relaxed form. It always bothered me when on his first albums with Poco he would do this oddly pressed, nasal whine; basically going for a weird Neil Young impression. None of that stuff here, thank you very much. 

Yeah, so Cantamos is one of Poco's best, albeit little known work. This post will hopefully help a little to change that. And now that this blog post has grown longer than I thought it would, tiempo de escucharlos. Ellos cantaron...