Two Halves Of Seven Equal ? - Or Poco's Weird Math Problem

Uh-oh. That's no doubt what the remaining members of Poco must've thought when band leader and main songwriter Richie Furay handed in his resignation just before the release of Crazy Eyes. Gone was Furay's recognizable voice, his stage presence, and most importantly, the songs. To be fair, the band had come a long way since Furay had utterly dominated the songwriting on the band's first two bands. Paul Cotton brought a strong songwriting presence immediately, and had three songs apiece on From The Inside and A Good Feelin' To Know and two - the same as Furay - (not counting a coer each) on Crazy Eyes. But Schmit had been content to contribute the occasional ballad, and now had to step up his production, while Rusty Young's real coming out as a songwriter would have to wait for another album.

So while the odds for a quality album seemed slim, the now quartet acquits itself pretty nicely. While Young contributes only one song, his "Rocky Mountain Breakdown" is the best of his country reels, and has a cameo of founder Jim Messina on mandolin. The biggest surprise are Tim Schmit's songs, especially "Skatin'"  and "Just Call My Name", which see Poco experimenting - for the first and only time, really - with a harder edged guitar rock sound. While Paul Cotton had been drafted into the band specifically to beef up the rock guitar in Poco's country rock, Schmit had mainly been known for delicate ballads, but does a pretty good job on these, while Cotton's opener "Driving Wheel" is another of his storytelling epics and quite impressive, while expansive closer "You've Got Your Reasons" also does quite nicely. "Faith In The Families" was a stage favorite and maybe thus chosen to represent the album on their Greatest Hits collection. 

So most of the album's songs were fine, and yet there was something off about Seven, something that made me rarely put the album on and often pull it out of the CD player before the album was done. And yet it took me only a cool 20+ years to figure it out. Sure, having it on CD with no side breaks, and having listened to it about three times in that time span didn't help, but still: For a dude who - since this lil' blog adventure started - spends a lot of time thinking about sequencing, it's kind of tough to realize that Poco did the old 'one rock/quick side, one ballad/slow side' and that's caused such a weird, and not entirely satisfactory, listening experience. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing: Did I not listen a lot to the album because it's running so weirdly, or did I not realize why it's running so weirdly because I barely listened to it. It's the latter, of course, but still: consider the One Buck Guy miffed that he missed this little detail. Then again, since the start of this blog adventure I'm much more sensitive to these things than before, so beforehand I jad just shrugged it off, and the album with it. 

To be fair, this two different sides deal is a weird gambit for a band like Poco, whose music lives between these poles, but is never that rocking, nor that slow, comfortably living in a midtempo world that carries hallmarks of both sides. So it was always a weird idea that Poco would try to attach two identities to two album sides. It's just not a good fit. What happened with the original configuration of the album left me baffled, on numerous levels. On one hand, possibly to fulfill the 'rock side' part of the concept, there were Schmit's heavy rock numbers, So it was not only strange to have two heavy rock tunes from Schmit, but it was even weirder that they ,  each other back to back. But the conception also explains why - after the reasonably promising first half - the album sort of drifts away together with the listener's attention when ballads and midtempo numbers are all cluttered together in the second half. 

This can of course be corrected in a rather simple manner: Resequence the album so that the ill-fitting two side concept is dissolved. Alternate the rock and slower songs, as well as the Cotton and Schmit vocals, and you have a version of Seven that is a much better listen. Which is - you might've guessed - exactly what our One Buck Record of the day is. A sronger version of a pretty good, if not quite top-tier, Poco album. there's a lot of worse ways to spend half an hour.