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We're Not Who You Think We Are

Younger Than Yesterday

Certain Songs #162: The Byrds – “Why”

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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”

Certain Songs #161: The Byrds – “C.T.A.-102”

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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”

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.

“So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star”

“So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star” Roger McGuinn & R.E.M.