Album: Younger Than Yesterday.
Year: 1967.
With a beat that would sound like classic Motown if only Chris Hillman & Michael Clarke had even the tiniest bit of swing (The Byrds could pull off a lot of things, but R&B was beyond their ken) and featuring two of McGuinn’s greatest guitar solos, “Why” closed the stellar Younger Than Yesterday with perhaps their hardest-rocking song.
Lyrically, it’s a trifle:
You keep sayin’ no to her
Since she was a baby
You keep sayin’ no to her
Not even maybe
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
But this isn’t one of those songs I love for the words, I love it for the guitars – especially the raga-ish guitar solos, far more controlled than “Eight Miles High,” of course, but completely compelling – and (broken record) the way their voices go up when asking “whyyyyyyyyyyyy”?
And because of the straight-forward beat, tough(ish) guitars, and simple verse-chorus-verse structure, out of all of the Byrds songs, this feels like the one that set the template for all of the power pop to follow – it’s hard for me to imagine songs like “A Million Miles Away” or “Tomorrow Night” existing without it.
“Why”