From the Control Room to the Stage: Jim Messina’s Five Decades in Sound

On Friday afternoons in the late 1960s, Jim Messina would climb into his car after the final school bell and drive 65 miles north up the California freeway toward Hollywood. He’d work through the weekend — Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday, Sunday night — then turn around and drive home Monday morning in time for an 8 a.m. class.

He was 16 years old. And he was producing records.

More than half a century later, the arc that began in those weekend sessions has bent through some of American rock’s most consequential moments: engineer and bassist for Buffalo Springfield, co-founder of the pioneering country-rock band Poco, and one half of the wildly successful duo Loggins and Messina, which sold more than 20 million albums over five years together. On March 14th, Messina brings his band, The Roadrunners, to Bethel Woods Center for the Arts — the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival.

A Radio DJ’s Hunch

The whole thing started with a phone call from a stranger. A DJ named Glenn Edwards, working at a radio station out of the Disneyland Hotel, had somehow tracked down the teenage Messina and offered him a job at his record label.

“I said, ‘I’m not sure what you want me to do,'” Messina recalls, “and he said, ‘Well, I want you to produce some records for me.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what that means.'”

Edwards explained: show up at the studio, listen to the musicians, go through the arrangements, and make sure everything sounded right. An engineer would handle the technical board. Messina just needed to make sure the music got done the way it needed to be done.

“I went, ‘Wow, that’s like dying and going to heaven,'” he says.

The Circuit Board Philosophy

Ask Messina how the different roles he’s played in music — performer, songwriter, producer, engineer — relate to each other, and he doesn’t reach for the language of chapters or phases.

He reaches for electronics.

“They’re like an electronic circuit,” he says. “You got to have a resistor, you got to have a capacitor, you got to have a transistor sometimes or a transformer. They all work together for me in a circuit.”

It’s a telling analogy from someone who came of age not just playing music but building the infrastructure around it. Before joining Buffalo Springfield, Messina had been working at a Hollywood studio called Universal Audio — a place he’d helped build — engineering sessions for early rockabilly musicians: James Burton, Joe Osborne, Jerry Allison of the Crickets.

That background means that even today, when Messina thinks about walking into a recording session, his mind immediately runs through a technical checklist. What’s the room like? What kind of preamps do they have on the drums and the guitar? What’s going on the bus?

“It’s just because I’ve done it for so many years,” he says. “It’s just part of my awareness.”

A Taxi Cab, a Question, and Country Rock

The story of how Poco came to exist — and with it, an entire genre — begins not on a stage or in a studio, but in the back seat of a New York taxi cab.

Messina and fellow Buffalo Springfield member Richie Furay were headed to a music store when Messina asked what Furey planned to do once the band broke up.

“He said, ‘I don’t know,'” Messina recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind being in a band together with you.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what will we do?'”

Folk rock felt like it was winding down, Messina thought. But Furay had written some songs — “Kind Woman,” “C’mon,” among them — that had a country feel. And Messina, from his days at Universal Audio, had a deep appreciation for the twang and cry of early rockabilly.

“I suggested to him, ‘Well, why don’t we do something that’s a little more country,'” Messina says. “Just set folk rock to country rock. It was just a phrase in passing that I threw out at him.”

That offhand phrase would name a music genre.

The final piece clicked into place during a studio session in Buffalo Springfield’s final days. The band was finishing an album, and a roadie mentioned a young steel guitar player living in Colorado — a guy named Rusty Young.

They brought him in.

“I said, ‘You know, I think this guy could make that happen,'” Messina recalls. “And I think from that session in Buffalo Springfield was really the birth of Poco.”

Sitting In on Something Bigger

In the early 1970s, Columbia Records asked Messina to produce a young, largely unknown songwriter named Kenny Loggins. Loggins had raw talent but nothing else — no band, no manager, no agent, no road experience. The resulting album was titled Kenny Loggins with Jim Messina Sitting In, a title carefully chosen to feel impermanent.

“I thought the best way of doing it — after a while of us working together and me finding his musicians — was that maybe I sit in for the first tour, get him some sea legs,” Messina says. “Introduce him to my audiences of Poco and Buffalo Springfield, which I had earned already.”

The plan was to step away after one tour, one album. The title was designed to leave a door open.

“I figured I would just step out once we did a tour,” he says. “I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

What happened instead was five or six years, eight albums, and more than 20 million records sold. Messina credits the chemistry — Loggins’ openness, a willingness to try things, a shared joy in singing together.

“There was just a magic there that really was inspiring,” he says. “And it was a lot more work than I ever really wanted to put into it. But it was time well spent for both of us.”

Here, There, and Everywhere

These days, Messina lives outside Nashville — another city, he notes, where music history is part of the air you breathe. He says performing at Bethel Woods, with its deep roots in Woodstock and the era that shaped him, feels right.

“It feels comfortable and it feels natural,” he says. “To have been a part of life in a way where music is celebrated — especially at a place where it’s being honored as a musical site.”

His new album with The Roadrunners is called Here, There, and Everywhere, and the upcoming Bethel Woods show is designed as a kind of retrospective in motion — moving from Buffalo Springfield through Poco into the Loggins and Messina years, and back out again into new material. Songs like “Carefree Country Day” and “Kind Woman” anchor the first set. “Your Mama Don’t Dance” closes it out.

He describes the setlist the way an engineer might describe a well-wired board: every component placed deliberately, every transition serving the whole.

“It’s kind of like creating dovetails in a box,” he says. “Every corner has to be right — cut properly — otherwise it doesn’t make a box.”

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a financial supporter of Radio Catskill.

Image: Jim Messina with The Roadrunners performs March 14th at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. (jimmessina.com)