Album: Younger Than Yesterday
Year: 1967
. . .
To be a fan of The Byrds during their three-album psychedelic phase meant that you had to put up with a certain amount of silliness – lysergic and otherwise. Some of the silliness manifested itself in songs about David Crosby’s already contentious relationship with reality, but the rest manifested as Jim McGuinn songs about outer space. Which, as you might imagine – especially when accompanied by jangly guitars and stellar harmonies – were right up my alley.
Perhaps the silliest – and therefore, my favorite – was McGuinn’s paen to a recently-discovered quasar, “C.T.A.-102.” Initially discovered in the early 60s, C.T.A.-102 was initially held by some scientists to be proof of extraterrestrial life, until they realized that, nope, that’s just quasars. Better luck next time!
In any event, at some point McGuinn was inspired to write a great jangly-guitar song where the usual amazing harmonies sing the following words:
C.T.A. – 102
Year over year receiving you
Signals tell us that you’re there
We can hear them loud and clear
We just want to let you know
That we’re ready for to go
Out into the universe
We don’t care who’s been there first
That all takes up, like, the first 20 seconds of the song. After that, it’s a long instrumental section which is just basically just the jangly guitar and drums, “outer space” noises made by an electronic oscillator, and a “beep-beep” on the 2 & 4 – which I will insist falls under The Handclap Rule. This lasts for a utterly glorious full minute until then they come back in for one final verse.
On a radio telescope
Science tells us that there’s hope
Life on other planets might exist
At which point, the song comes to an abrupt halt, and suddenly we’re in the middle of an extraterrestrial civilization (you can tell because they’re talking in alien voices), who are millions of light-years away, listening to “C.T.A.-102? as it’s being beamed from Earth!!
This is either the silliest thing to appear on a 1960s album, or the greatest. Or both!!!
As I was doing research for this piece, I discovered I had written about it before, back in 2008 when NASA decided to beam a song that wasn’t “C.T.A.-102? into outer space. This probably means that I now lead the internets in writing about this song. I’ll leave it up to you to decide as to whether or not that’s a good thing.
“C.T.A.-102”