Manassas: Edmonton Sundown, London

I DON'T THINK I've ever heard so much good music and so much bad from the same group at the same time as when I heard Stephen Stills' Manassas at the Edmonton Sundown. Mr. Stills, it should be said, has one hell of a fine band, but some inexplicable quirk of taste forces him to blow it time after time. He can swing from the brilliant to the unutterably bad within seconds, and neither he nor his audiences seem to be able to tell the difference.