MOST NATIONAL ROCK GROUPS THAT APPEAR IN WASHINGTON FLY IN THE day of their concert and fly out the next morning. Not Poco.
The West Coast–based group spent over a week in Washington promoting their second album. The original purpose of their visit was to appear at the now defunct Ark in Alexandria. While they were in town, they visited various radio stations and gave a free concert at American University’s amphitheater.
Poco, whose forte is blending country and rock, consists of Richie Furay, rhythm guitar and vocals; Jim Messina, lead guitar and vocals; George Grantham, drums and vocals; Tim Schmit, bass; and Rusty Young, steel guitar.
Richie and Jim played together in Buffalo Springfield before forming Poco. During a recent interview on the Steve Walker Show on WHFS, Richie talked about Buffalo Springfield’s final days.
“Steve and Neil (Steve Stills and Neil Young) didn’t really get along,” Richie said. “They felt like they wanted to make the artistic and business decisions. There never was much trust for a manager.
“The major conflicts were between Steve and Neil. I see the guys in Poco a lot more than I saw the guys in Buffalo Springfield. I don’t know why, we just never got together.
“Jim went on the road with the Springfield for their last tour,” Richie said. “We already knew that Neil was going to leave after the tour.”
Poco, like the Springfield, has no manager. Instead they have what they refer to as a tour coordinator. The tour coordinator for the group is Larry Heller, a 1963 graduate of Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD.
After Larry left high school, he went to the West Coast where he eventually became agent for the Chambers Brothers. Poco makes all its own business decisions, but Larry gives his opinion on everything. As tour coordinator, he does exactly what his title implies—arranges all aspects of their tours and enables them to concentrate on their music.
All of the songs on Poco’s first LP for Epic Records were average length (around three minutes each). “The first time we went to San Francisco we were hassled a lot about doing three-minute songs,” Richie said. “They were uptight that we didn’t play long songs.
“We decided to do a long instrumental and put it on our second album at the end of ‘Nobody’s Fool.’” That instrumental is the highlight of the album, with Rusty doing an incredible pedal steel guitar solo—with the use of a rotoverb making the steel guitar sound more like an organ.
Poco’s songs are of a non-political nature. “The thing we’re contributing is a very up trip,” Richie said. “It’s happy. It’s the way we feel.
“It’s us or it wouldn’t be our music. We express ‘us’ through our music.”