Fifth Dimension

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

April 11, 2015 by Jim Connelly

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”

April 11, 2015 by Jim Connelly

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)”

April 9, 2015 by Jim Connelly

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)”

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