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Byrds

Certain Songs #165: The Byrds – “One Hundred Years From Now”

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Album: Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Year: 1968.

As someone who was getting into The Byrds at the same time he was getting into punk rock, I’ll admit that it took me decades to fully understand the charms of Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was probably wasn’t until the early 90s when the erased Gram Parsons vocals showed up on the first box set, followed by the alt-country movement and my subsequent discovery of Parsons’ solo albums and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

And while I’ll never revere it the same way I love those psychedelic albums, it’s impossible for me not to love their take on Gram Parson’s “100 Years From Now,” even if I’m a heathen and prefer the take with McGuinn & Hillman singing harmony to the one where Gram sings all by his lonesome. Either way, they’re asking a great question:

One hundred years from this day
Will the people still feel this way?
Still say the things that they’re saying right now

Featuring a dynamic pedal steel  hook from Lloyd Green and some subtle leads from Clarence White, “One Hundred Years From Now” feels like the missing link between The Everly Brothers and Rank & File and a song that could – in any era – fit snugly in either the Rock or Country camps, while reminding you that those camps reside on the same lake.

Also: believe it or not, we’re nearly halfway to finding out the answer to the question that Gram poses in the lyrics. It’s possible (not probable, but possible) that somebody could be reading this in 2068 who knows the answer.

Video for “One Hundred Years From Now” (McGuinn/Hillman vocals)

Video for “One Hundred Years From Now” (Gram Parsons vocal)

Certain Songs #164: The Byrds – “Change is Now”

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Album: The Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Year: 1968.

With its infamous cover photo of a horse standing in for the recently-departed David Crosby, The Notorious Byrd Brothers was the work of a band that was firing on all cylinders while completely falling apart. This was represented in several multi-part songs that never quite ended up where they started. Like every member of the band needed to contribute something completely unique to each song

That it held together at all was due to the fact that no matter where the songs went, The Byrds never abandoned their core strengths – their harmonies and McGuinn’s ever-surprising guitar.

For example, the appropriately-named “Change is Now,” which starts out as a slow, meditative piece with the usual hippie lyrics:

Change is now, change is now
Things that seemed to be solid are not
All is now, all is now
The time that we have to live

Then, with no warning whatsoever, it transitions into a country song – with future Byrd Clarence White (probably) playing pedal steel guitar as they sing the chorus:

Gather all that we can
Keep in harmony with love’s sweet plan

And then, just as abruptly, with session ace Hal Blaine playing the drums instead of Michael Clarke, they transition in to a very long psychedelic guitar solo unlike anything else that McGuinn had done – using sustain to let the notes of the solo blend into each other instead of articulating each one seperately, sounding more like Jeff Beck’s work in the Yardbirds than anything he’d previously done.

And then, back into the verses, as if nothing had happened at all, instead of everything happening at once, and while the long guitar solo section never returns, they do go back into the country chorus once more. Strange, and yet beautifully compelling, and – of course – held together by the McGuinn-Crosby-Hillman harmonies that never once waver during all of the weirdness.

Video for “Change is Now”

Certain Songs #163: The Byrds – “Lady Friend”

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Single, 1967.

Arguably the greatest song that David Crosby has ever written on his own, the majestic “Lady Friend” is kind of the “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” of The Byrds catalog: a fantanstic non-album A-side that was sabotaged by questionable production.  Because it was considered a failure, it wasn’t released on either of their Greatest Hits albums.

I first heard it on a 1987 odds-and-sods compilation album called Never Before (an album that also featured a beautiful banner-shaped Byrds poster that hung on my wall in various apartments for years) where “Lady Friend” stuck out, but had these terrible overdubbed drums. 

It wasn’t until the 1990 box set where I heard “Lady Friend” the proper way, and I immediately realized that i’s one of those songs that should be more widely known: featuring gorgeous interlocking guitars, a rollicking drum beat (that didn’t need an overdub) and an utterly anthemic chorus declaring:

And I will have to live without her and survive

After the second chorus, the whole song breaks down, and lead by the guitars a well-placed brass section, and an even better placed set of “ba ba ba ba bas,” it slowly picks itself back off of the floor for one more verse and chorus until those interlocking guitars and brass section lead the way out.

It’s one of the more sophisticated arrangements they’d done, clearly influenced by what The Beatles and The Beach Boys were doing, but the sound that Gary Usher got in the studio just wasn’t up to par with what George Martin or Brian Wilson had done. And so it was a huge flop that has

only over time revealed itself to be a secret success on the Rabin scale.

Video for “Lady Friend”

Certain Songs #160: The Byrds – “So You Want to Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”

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Album: Younger Than Yesterday.

Year: 1967.

With its driving circular riff, Hugh Masekela trumpet and sound effects of screaming girls, “So You Want To Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” pretty much says its piece and gets the hell out of the way. With no chorus and deeply cynical lyrics – could be aimed at The Monkees, or it could be aimed at The Byrds themselves –i t was probably also the first Byrds song I noticed on the radio, and therefore, a key reason I decided to check them out.

So you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
And take some time and learn how to play
And when your hair’s combed right and your pants fit tight
It’s gonna be all right

The beauty of this song to me is that it reads more cynically than it plays. While the new, more experimental period signified by “Eight Miles High” in retrospect clearly also signified the commercial death knell (relatively speaking, of course) of The Byrds, the reality is that they were only a commercial powerhouse in 1965, when folk-rock felt new.  

Then it’s time to go downtown
Where the agent man won’t let you down
Sell your soul to the company
Who are waiting there to sell plastic ware
And in a week or two if you make the charts
The girls will tear you apart

So even as the four albums they released from 1966-1968 were among the greatest in the 60s, all for totally different reasons, fewer and fewer people heard them.  And by the time they wrote “So You Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” a seemingly surefire single if there ever was one, it barely dented the top 30. Of course maybe that’s because it wasn’t so surefire after all, as McGuinn & Hillman neglected to come up with a chorus outside of the “La-la-las” at the end.

What you pay for your riches and fame
Was it all a strange game
You’re a little insane
The money that came and the public acclaim
Don’t forget what you are
You’re a rock’n’roll star 

Many many years later – in 1984, I believe – MTV did a show called “Rock Influences,” which purported to take a contemporary band and show how they were influenced by a particular musical genre. The inaugural episode featured R.E.M. and the genre was Folk-Rock.

So along with some boss vintage clips – including the first time I ever saw a clip of Bob Dylan just killing it with “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival – “Rock Influences” showed excerpts from a R.E.M. show where various folk-rock luminaries like John Sebastian and Roger McGuinn shared the stage with them.

John Sebastian, of course, seemed fine with the whole thing, sporting his auto-harp and enthusastically singing “Do You Believe in Magic” while Michael Stipe and Mike Mills sang “ahhhhhhhhhhs” in the background. It wasn’t great, but it was kinda fun.

But the “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” with Roger McGuinn was kind of a trainwreck. He clearly didn’t want to be there, and there is a moment in the first verse where Michael Stipe sings the wrong words on the harmonies and you could almost see McGuinn do the mental calculation on whether or not he’s going to hit Stipe over the head with his guitar.

Fan-Made Video for “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”

R.E.M. & Roger McGuinn perform “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” live in 1984

Certain Songs #159: The Byrds – “Eight Miles High”

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Album: Fifth Dimension.

Year: 1966.

Ladies and Gentlemens, welcome to my favorite song from the 1960s.

That’s right: I love “Eight Miles High” even more than “What Goes On” or “I Can See For Miles and Miles” or “Visions of Johanna” or “She Said She Said,” “Jumping Jack Flash.”  There isn’t anything I don’t love about “Eight Miles High”

I love that it’s the last Byrds song that Gene Clark had a hand in (talk about passing the torch!), and that for whatever punchline David Crosby later became, he at the very least co-wrote this.

I love how got banned for being about drugs when it’s so clearly about flying to London and how it inspired Husker Du to not just create the greatest cover version in rock history, but write a sequel (”Dead Set on Destruction”) where they’re stuck in London forever.

I love Chris Hillman’s ominous bassline, and how Jim McGuinn’s guitar comes in playing the main theme, and then almost instantly devolves (but really heightens) into an insane mess of Coltraney Shankarisms for a few seconds until setting up that opening phrase:

Eight miles high

And then, for an instant, the entire universe stops, until Michael Clarke’s drum roll snaps it back into existence.

And when you touch down
You’ll find that it’s stranger than known

And there’s that drum roll again, which will spend the rest of the song as a spirit guide, only appearing when it is absolutely necessary to make sure the entire song stays together after McGuinn’s guitar continually threatens to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe. (I originally wrote “rip a whole in the fabric of the universe” and now I’m convinced that McGuinn was trying to do that as well!)

At the end of the day, it’s kinda ironic that it took jazz-influenced guitar solos to create a full-fledged psychedelic rock classic, but there it is, and what’s so beautiful about the guitar solo is that McGuinn clearly didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. I mean he did conceptually: he knew how to leave holes (and wholes!) at first to set up tension, he knew how bring the main theme back in before just randomly splattering notes everywhere, but the fact that he was in no way a virtuoso was what made all three solos so powerful.

And so what does it all add up to? A single that must have been incredibly weird to hear over the radio, one of the first psychedelic songs – predating even “Rain” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” – and one of the most gorgeous and influential songs ever recorded.

Fan-Made Video for “Eight Miles High”

“Eight Miles High” Live at the Fillmore East, 1970

Certain Songs #158: The Byrds – “Wild Mountain Thyme”

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Album: Fifth Dimension.

Year: 1966.

A serious contender for The Prettiest Song Ever Recorded (Folk Division), “Wild Mountain Thyme” has of course been recorded dozens and dozens of times. I’ve heard only a fraction of those, but I can’t imagine any of them being more achingly gorgeous that the block vocals / 12-string guitar / soaring strings arrangement that The Byrds pull off here.

That said, I have to give a shout-out to a version of this song that Peter Case performed solo live in the KFSR studios in either 1986 or 1987. I treasured my cassette copy of that show for years. You know, until I lost it. Because I lost nearly all of the cassettes that I treasured in the 1980s, which almost killed me.

On Fifth Dimension, “Wild Mountain Thyme” is filler, for sure. Gene Clark had left the band, and neither McGuinn or Crosby had more than a couple of songs ready to go, and instead of doing Dylan songs (only two of their eight 1960s album didn’t have at least one Dylan song), they decided to do traditional songs that may influenced Dylan, whom in 1966 was taking tradition out into a back alley and beating it to within an inch of its life.

But it’s great filler. And sticking a gorgeous old folk ballad in between a waltz about the Theory of Relativity (or taking acid) (or both!) and a country song about wanting to be abducted by aliens pretty much sets the listener up for the psychedelic madness still to come.

Video for “Wild Mountain Thyme”

Certain Songs #157: The Byrds – “5D (Fifth Dimension)”

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Album: Fifth Dimension.

Year: 1966.

Here is one of my most indefensible of all of the indefensible positions I will take while doing the Certain Songs project: Fifth Dimension is my favorite Byrds album. And it’s not even close. Well, kinda close, cos I also love Younger Than Yesterday.

On the face of it, I realize that’s ludicrous. Fifth Dimension is a mess: they’d lost their primary songwriter in Gene Clark, so it features two instrumentals (if you count that song about flying in a lear jet); an alien abduction song; the mandated-by-1960s-law cover of “Hey Joe;” two songs written by “Traditional,” and – worst of all – four songs co-written by “David Crosby.” 

But of course the instrumentals are charming; the alien abduction song was a single; “Hey Joe” is fun and energetic; one of the “Traditional” songs is one of the Prettiest Songs Ever Recorded and one of the David Crosby co-writes …well, we will get to that in a day or two.

Then there is the title track, which is the first Byrds song credited soley to Jim McGuinn, who starts it while falling through infinity all by his lonesome …

Oh how is it that I could come out to here and be still floating
And never hit bottom and keep falling through
Just relaxed and paying attention
All my two dimensional boundaries were gone I had lost to them badly
I saw the world crumble and thought I was dead
But I found my senses still working

As McGuinn continues waltzing through time and space, he picks up David Crosby and Chris Hillman, who chime in about halfway through, their eternal harmonies also lyrically apropos:

And I opened my heart to the whole universe and I found it was loving
And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made
Scientific delirium madness

Yes, it sounds like hippie-dippie bullshit – OK, it is hippie-dippie bullshit – but it’s also some of the best American psychedelic music ever made. Even if McGuinn has always insisted it was about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and not LSD.  Sometimes a trip through the fifth dimension is just a trip through the fifth dimension!

Besides, had Einstein still been alive, he probably would stopped everything else he was doing in order to write the Theory of David Crosby’s Harmony Vocal on the Phrase “Stilllllll Floating” Near The End of “5D.” My understanding is that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is going to dedicate a whole new episode of Cosmos to trying to explain just how significant that harmony is.

And at the end, when Van Dyke Parks chimes in with an ethereal pipe organ underneath McGuinn’s guitar solo, it sounds like the music St. Peter is blasting from the Pearly Gates in order to remind people what’s at stake there. You get in, you get to hear The Byrds for eternity.

Fan-Made Video for “5D (Fifth Dimension)”

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #156: The Byrds – “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”

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Album: Mr. Tambourine Man.

Year: 1965.

In the beginning was The Byrds.  Before Big Star. Before Tom Petty. Before R.E.M. Before The Smiths or The Church or any of the countless bands that picked up a 12-string Rickenbacker (what garage-rock enthusiast Craig Sullivan was fond of calling “the slow guitar”), found a couple of folks who could sing well together and started writing songs, it was The Byrds. 

Because it was in the Byrds who was first created maybe my favorite sound in all of popular music. Like, have you heard last year’s Real Estate album? It’s got that sound.

That sound – McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker; the harmonies of McGuinn, David Crosby and Gene Clark; even Michael Clarke’s precise drums (or in the case of the early records, whichever studio pro actually played) – is a sound that I will chase to the ends of the earth. It’s a sound that defines The Byrds so much to my ears that I never even paid attention to the fact that Gene Clark wrote the lions share of songs on their first two albums.

Which is fine: I love their McGuinn-oriented psychedelia the best anyways, but even still, it’s impossible to resist “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” their best early original song, and the first indication that they were more than just a (great!) Dylan cover band.

Not only does it have a catchy riff grounding the song, the call-and-response vocals of the later verses and the chorus are utterly textbook, and the relatively long galloping guitar solo leaps out from the folk-rock framework and takes the song to a completely different place.

Video for “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”

18 Musical Moments to Die For

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The Hold Steady, Wiltern, Los Angeles, Nov. 25, 2008

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve done one of these, but I’m back!! In black. (Which is a terrible choice, because it’s, like, 150 degrees today.)

This time, on Musical Moments to Die For, we have two of the greatest cover versions of two of the greatest songs ever recorded; druggy people writing songs about their drug problems, and casual rockstar sexism.

We also have the usual 80’s indie obscurity, and run the gamut from catchy artsy sophistication to catchy dumb-ass stomping crapola.

This is the eighth in a series: The first one had 25, the second one had 24, the third one had 23, the fourth one had 22, the fifth one had 21, and the sixth had 20, and the seventh had 19.

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