Here are some excerpts from a 2005 Mix Magazine piece they ran about the making of the song…
"At the dawn of the 1970s, David Crosby was on top of the rock world. Originally part of the Los Angeles folk scene in the early '60s, he first rose to prominence as an integral member of The Byrds in their first couple of years, then hit the serious Big Time in 1969 as part of the harmony-heavy folk-rock supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash..By the time Woodstock rolled around in August of '69, Neil Young had joined forces with CSN and they spent several months recording the classic album Déjà Vu at the newly built Wally Heider Recording in San Francisco…Download:
Almost from the moment it was built, Heider's San Francisco facility became the place for Bay Area rock bands to record: Besides the CSNY sessions (which reportedly sprawled more than some 800 hours), Jefferson Airplane cut Volunteers there in 1969, the Grateful Dead made American Beauty in 1970, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Brewer & Shipley and Seals & Crofts all tracked there…a loose amalgamation of stoney Northern California rockers…came to be dubbed the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, who fantasized they would make albums together whenever enough of them were in town and not on tour with their main bands…
… one album in particular — Crosby's 1971 solo debut, If I Could Only Remember My Name — shows the full flowering of those collaborations. Helping Crosby out were some of the best artists from the local music scene, including Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann from the Dead; Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady from Jefferson Airplane; Gregg Rolie and Michael Shrieve from Santana; Frieberg from Quicksilver; Nash and Young; and, up from L.A., former paramour Joni Mitchell…“Laughing” is the album's shining jewel: a brilliant and beautifully recorded song featuring Crosby with Garcia, Lesh and Kreutzmann, and in a brief cameo, Mitchell.
At the time, Crosby was living on a boat docked across the bay in Sausalito and still nursing a heart broken by the death of his beloved girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in an automobile accident in Marin County in 1969 — she was his Guinnevere, and later he would dedicate If I Could Only Remember My Name to her. “I was in a pretty emotional state,” Crosby told writer Steve Silberman in 1995, “trying to stay so deeply in the music that the other thing — Christine — wouldn't drive me under. I needed to work all the time, so I would write constantly, and when I wasn't writing, I was recording, and when I wasn't recording, I would try to get some place to play. It was all I had to hang on to, so I was pretty prolific.”
The songs on If I Could Only Remember My Name were a combination of personal tunes Crosby had written during the years and numbers that developed during jams in the studio. “Laughing” dates back at least to early 1968: Crosby cut an acoustic guitar and voice demo version at Hollywood Sound Recorders in March of that year for Elektra producer Paul Rothchild. In September 1969, when he was still shopping for a solo deal, Crosby cut a second solo version at Heider's studio in Hollywood. Later, he tried unsuccessfully to entice his CSNY partners to record the song on Déjà Vu. Perhaps the song was waiting for the right musicians and the perfect setting to come along…"
Laughing (1968 Crosby demo)
...According to (session engineer Stephen) Barncard, when Crosby was really “on,” he liked to work quickly, so he suspects that the gorgeous waterfall of harmony vocals created by Crosby for “Laughing” were done at the same session. “He has such a great ear and he would just go in and sing a part, double it, maybe triple it, then do the next part and the next one,” Barncard says admiringly. “I think you can put the vocals on that song next to the best stuff he did with Stills and Nash. It was amazing.”…
…Garcia's ethereal pedal steel track, which truly sounds like it was beamed down from another galaxy — it's so strange and different…”It was from outer space and it was probably the first take,” Barncard says with a laugh. “It was absolutely beautiful.”
A number of years later, Garcia himself noted that during that era when he was playing steel on a lot of albums, “The nicest thing I did during that period was on Crosby's solo album. I like what I did on that, generally speaking. I particularly like the pedal steel on ‘Laughing.’ That was some of the prettiest and most successful of what I was trying to get at at that time.”
“There was such a great vibe around that song..,” Barncard adds…“I always felt ‘Laughing’ was the centerpiece of the album — one of the most important tunes and one of the most hi-fi tunes…Everything about it is right: The vocals are right, the overdubs are right, the lyrics are right. It stirs the soul. Everything just fits together like a beautiful mosaic. It's so satisfying from the first note. That song is sacred."
Download:
Laughing from the live CSNY record Four Way Street - June or July 1970 recording
Laughing from If I Could Only Remember My Name - Fall 1970 recording (David Crosby - Guitar / Vocals, Graham Nash - Vocals, Joni Mitchell - Vocals, Jerry Garcia - Pedal Steel Guitar, Phil Lesh - Bass, Bill Kreutzmann - Drums / Tambourine)
Laughing from the David and Dorks rehearsal at the Matrix in San Francisco, CA - December 15, 1970 recording (David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart)
Laughing from the live Crosby & Nash record Another Stoney Evening - October 10, 1971 recording
If you have other versions and are willing to share, please let me know.
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