Loggins and Messina - The Best of Friends (1976)

After the end of the sixties, with one of the most innovative periods in popular music having come to a close, some rock writers wondered how the sixties could have led to . . . the seventies.  What happened to the promise of the future? they asked in unison.  Why are we listening to Loggins and Messina?  

It's true that Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina weren't edgy or challenging.  Loggins was a sentimental singer-songwriter with a penchant for the melodramatic, and Messina had already established himself as a laid-back country rocker in Buffalo Springfield and Poco.  Together, they embodied the smooth, mellow West Coast AM pop sound that has been blamed and damned for turning rock and roll into easy listening.  But with the Beatles gone, Hendrix dead, and Americans exhausted by war in Vietnam and lawlessness at home, Loggins and Messina were a balm the country may have needed.

The Best of Friends, a greatest-hits compilation released after Loggins and Messina broke up, captures the duo's most memorable moments.  Jim Messina's taste and production savvy complemented Loggins' carefree and childlike attitude, producing some warm, almost touching folk-pop songs and some silly but still enjoyable light rockers.  It was a formula that gave them so much crossover appeal they were actually covered by Anne Murray ("Danny's Song") and by Poison ("Your Mama Don't Dance").  

Among the songs here, the softer numbers are typified by low-key arrangements where the music is at best a subtle backdrop for Loggins' and Messina's (but mostly Loggins')  lyrical musings about nature, home, and family.  "Watching the River Run" and "Peace of Mind" have a nice, pastoral vibe to them, the former song using a waltz-like melody and gentle flute that brings to mind a river flowing silently through a forest.  "House at Pooh Corner" is a guilty pleasure, a charming ode to A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books that have more heart than the Disney re-contextualizations of them - perhaps because Loggins, who wrote the song, has a much more personal connection to the original Milne book of the same name.  (It was originally recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.)   And in the early seventies, when the country was still being torn apart by so much strife, "Danny's Song," written for Loggins' brother about the family he'd started, offered some comforting hope for the next generation. 

Kenny and Jim don't rock out as well as they mellow out - "Angry Eyes" sounds tougher and more menacing that it actually is - but they have fun with the funky toe tappers "My Music," which you can't help but clap along to, and "Your Mama Don't Dance," an irresistible parody of parental mores that climaxes (no pun intended here) with a teenage sexual encounter ruined by a nosy cop who sounds like Yosemite Sam ("Out of the car, long hair!").  The real joke here, for anyone who missed it, is that Loggins and Messina's music wasn't exactly danceable or rockin' and a-rollin' either, so why should the old folks get so upset because these guys are just having a laugh? And why should the young hip crowd care if the squares dig them?   It's all good clean fun, and Messina provided enough sparkle to turn Loggins' simple ideas into something special.  Too bad Loggins didn't realize this when they split up; his solo career turned out to be one long run of vapidity.  You know the joke about his own greatest-hits record: "The Essential Kenny Loggins? What could possibly be on it?"  But if you're a fan of seventies light rock, and if you do need Kenny Loggins, you need this record.  Because The Best of Friends, with its ten wistful, whimsical tunes, shows how much Kenny Loggins really needed Jim Messina.