Rusty Young says that even though he’s been playing “Crazy Love” for more than 30 years, he won’t stop playing it.
After all, the 1979 song was the biggest hit for Young’s band, Poco. The band has been around for some 40 years, practically invented the country-rock genre, and has included such skilled musicians as Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield), Jim Messina (Loggins and Messina) and Randy Meisner and Timothy B. Schmit (The Eagles).
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Still, Young figures fans want the hits. And he feels so lucky to have had a Top 40 hit, he WANTS to play it. Young feels so strongly about this, he felt compelled to tell a story to illustrate his point.
“We were in Paris and the label had thrown this party at the Ritz. It was about 5 a.m. and people were passed out all around me, Champagne bottles all over — the stuff you’d expect to see at a party like that — and the only two people awake were me and Tom Fogerty (of Creedence Clearwater Revival),” said Young, 65. “Tom says, ‘I’m quitting Creedence.’ I said ‘That’s crazy, why?’ He said he couldn’t bear to play ‘Proud Mary’ one more time.”
“I told him, if I had a hit that big, I’d open with it, play it in the middle of the set, close with it, and use it for two encores.”
That story aside, Young says he’ll probably only play “Crazy Love” once when Poco plays One Longfellow Square in Portland tonight. Young, the only original member of the band and the one constant through its 40-plus-year history, will be performing with an acoustic trio-version rounded out by Jack Sundrud and Michael Webb.
Besides “Crazy Love,” Poco has had only two other Top 40 hits — “Heart of the Night” in 1979 and “Call It Love” in 1989. But the band has a stockpile of critically acclaimed tunes that weren’t necessarily hits, including “Just for Me and You,” “Keep on Tryin’ ” and “Indian Summer.”
Young’s musical success story started in a bar, as many musical success stories do. He was about 6 years old when his parents started bringing him to their favorite country bar in Denver to hear their favorite steel guitar player. They’d sit him right on the bar, dressed in his best Roy Rogers cowboy outfit. He took steel guitar lessons at 6, and was playing in clubs himself at 16.
He was just 21 in 1968 when he was hired to play a studio session with the legendary ’60s rock band Buffalo Springfield, which included Furay and Messina. When Buffalo Springfield split up soon after, Furay, Young and Messina decided to form their own band. They soon enlisted Meisner, who Young had known from playing clubs in Denver.
The band had a different name every week for a while, mostly playing at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, honing its country-rock style. Young said that before shows, the band would throw names in a hat, pick one and use that name that night.
One night, their band manager threw in the name Pogo (he looked like the comic strip character of the same name). That name stuck, and the band used it for a while — before the comic-strip folks sued them. So they changed it to Poco.
With Poco, Young continues to make new music and play old favorites. He says the thing that has helped the band survive all these years is the “musicianship” of the people who have been in it.
“I’ve always been able to surround myself with people who are better than me,” he said.
Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at:
rrouthier@pressherald.com
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