The writing on The Youngbloods' Elephant Mountain is confident and assured; songs like Ride The Wind, Beautiful, Smug and Darkness Darkness captured the sensibilities of the late sixties, many of these expressions of love, friendship, betrayal and one's role in society, were prevalent in much of the rock music from this period except here it lacks the pretension that graced many records in the late sixties. The primary reason for this? Jesse Colin Young's angelic voice for one along with the eccentric approach to making music.
The Youngbloods, much like the UK band Traffic, frequently made keyboard-based material and this lack of a guitar driven sound ultimately made the band stand out somewhat. At the time, I thought Elephant Mountain to be one of the best albums of 1969 and it stands the test of time, still sounding fresh after all these years. The record features an oddball mix of ragtime, bluesy jazz, ersatz classical and simple balladry that slowly insinuates itself into your overall music-head.
Jesse Colin Young interview on bestclassicband.com:
“Charlie Daniels produced that album. What was he like?"
Jesse Colin Young: “You should have seen Charlie in a rayon suit with short hair and milk bottle-bottom glasses. He was a perfect producer. He explained it to me. He said, 'Sometimes artists need you to get behind them and push them, and then other times you get in front of them and hold them back, but I think you guys just needed me to be there.'”
The band became a trio at that time. What happened to Jerry Corbitt?
Jesse Colin Young: "Three tunes into the Elephant Mountain album, Corbitt left the band. He said, 'I can’t fly anymore.' Here we are at the beginning an album; we were recording in L.A. at RCA Studios. So we just carried on and Charlie was the transition. He was always in a good mood, always ready, always appreciative and supportive. He got us through it.”
With the departure of member and co-founder Jerry Corbitt, Jesse Colin Young became the primary songwriter of the band, penning seven of the 13 tracks on the album, and co-writing four more with Lowell Banana Levinger and Joe Bauer. Young's songwriting ranges from jazzy acoustic ballads (Sunlight and Ride the Wind), to country/folk pop (Smug and Beautiful) and bluesy hard rock (Sham). Darkness, Darkness and Quicksand are songs dealing with depression and suicide, quite at odds with the optimistic to happy-go-lucky image of the band created by songs like Get Together and Grizzly Bear). The four tracks credited to Young, Banana, and Bauer are all instrumentals.
Levinger's On Sir Francis Drake is another inventive instrumental named after Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Marin County, an area in California where the band had recently moved. At 6:44 it is the longest track on the album, consisting of two sections, the first an electric piano-based waltz, the second a blues jam with some bass soloing by Young. The remaining song on the album, Rain Song (Don't Let the Rain Bring You Down), was co-written by Jerry Corbitt, Felix Pappalardi (of Mountain) and Gail Collins, his wife.
Lester Bangs was enthusiastic in Rolling Stone, saying “this is one of the most encouraging albums I have heard in months…This album exudes that supremely rare commodity in these dark, bored, destructive times – joy.”
Years later, Rolling Stone said the album bridges the gap between the last days of psychedelia and the outbreak of country-rock that had afflicted artists like the Byrds and Neil Young. From: https://msmokemusic.com/blogs/mind-smoke-blog/posts/5867393/hot-platters-elephant-mountain-the-youngbloods-rca-records-1969
