The Byrds

important work in color

1965: Mr. Tambourine Man. 1966: Turn! Turn! Turn! * Fifth Dimension. 1967: Younger Than Yesterday * Byrds’ Greatest Hits. 1968: The Notorious Byrd Brothers * Sweetheart of the Rodeo. 1969: Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde * Preflyte. 1970: The Ballad of Easy Rider * Untitled. 1971: Byrdmaniax * Farther Along. 1973: The Best of the Byrds (Greatest Hits, Vol. 2) * The Byds. 1980: The Byrds Play Dylan. 1981: The Original Singles. 1986: The Very Best of the Byrds. 1988: Never Before. 1990: The Byrds (Boxed Set).

David Fricke has written, "There are very few sounds in rock & roll as immediately recognizable, physically exhilarating and historically pivotal as the opening guitar riff on the Byrds’ 1965 debut single, "Mr. Tambourine Man." The historical pivot signaled by McGuinn’s twelve-string arpeggio definitely has little competition or historical pivoting would have long ago made us dizzy and faint. The Byrds’ first album, Mr. Tambourine Man, by fusing various popular elements, sounded like a brand new something. Bob Dylan witnessed the Byrds’ recording sessions in January of 1965 and in June released Bringing It All Back Home which offered up several electrified folk-tinged rock and roll songs. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, released a few months after the Byrds’ record, shows an influence. The Byrds’ formula – dubbed folk rock – touched on many bases: Gene Clark (with help from Roger (Jim) McGuinn) handled the Beatles’ own brand of pop (though songs like "I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better," "You Won’t Have to Cry," "I Knew I’d Want You" are more laid back, less exuberant that the original model); these were wedded naturally to the shimmeringly produced and harmonized (usually folk) tunes by other writers; the vocal harmonies, influenced by the ornate harmonies of classic folk groups and the Beach Boys, were unusually and uniquely moody (here the Byrds eclipsed the Beatles); and the twelve-string guitar, which should have been little more than a melodic gimmick, imbued their songs with glistening hooks and a heightened sense of importance. Roger McGuinn’s passion for folk music didn’t dampen his willingness to slightly recast it and the updated style was quickly accepted by an audience that was sensing quaintness in the usual folk forms. As a synthesis of many different formats, Mr. Tambourine Man was a hybrid fertilization that stimulated an abundant harvest.

Though many talents passed through the band on its bumpy ride to posterity – Gene Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gram Parsons, Gene Parsons, Clarence White – Roger McGuinn’s personality envelopes the Byrds’ music forcefully in an almost auteurishly disconnected sense. By a careful choice of other writer’s material (Dylan, Pete Seegar, Woody Guthrie, Goffin-King, Don Gibson, The Louvin Brothers) and a variety of traditional songs, as well as his own songs that reveal a liberalized and, at times, psychedelisized Christianity propped up by a steadfast and stern moral code, McGuinn tinted the Byrds’ oeuvre with grave (yet wry) colors. McGuinn has often been a cowriter: "It Won’t Be Wrong," "He Was a Friend of Mine," "Mr. Spaceman," "I See You," "Eight Miles High," "Why?" "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star," "Renaissance Fair," "Change is Now," "Old John Robertson," "Dolphin’s Smile," "Drug Store Truck Driving Man," "Bad Night at the Whiskey," and onward through his early seventies partnership with Jacques Levy and up to his most recent solo album – Back From Rio. Despite the many collaborators, McGuinn’s unwavering moral framework gives the songs a certain personal spin. Many of the songs evoke the mysteriousness of existence, or depict a certain moral despair; they pick up some emotional gravity from the sense of the veil that McGuinn suggest lies between this life and another. The dreamlike innocence of the boy chasing the horse in "Chestnut Mare," the heedless adultery and greed of "King of the Hill," the drug-tinged immersion in both the present and the past in "Renaissance Fair," the get-me-out-of-here urgency of the live version of "Mr. Spaceman," the character assassination of "Drug Store Truck Driving Man," the cosmic/tawdry message of "Car Phone," the beauty of the landscape in "The Ballad of Easy Rider" and the beauty of the mindscape on "Eight Miles High" all seem to be hinting at the eternal, the all-being, and it makes for an enchanting musical experience that never leaves the real world too far behind. Gene Clark’s knack for pop catchiness enlivened the Byrds’ early sound, but it was McGuinn’s love of harmonies, and mid-tempo folk arrangements, that helped give Clark’s ballads that extra edge of sonority and passion. (Clark would make use of the style in his solo career.) Another mark of McGuinn’s steadfastness may be suggested by the fact that he was able to collaborate with David Crosby as long as Crosby’s quasi-mystical excursions could be interpreted dualistically, as gifts from drugs or gifts from God or Nature depending upon how one wanted to look at it; but as soon as Crosby started pushing boundaries a bit too far with songs like the sexually ideological "Triad," and the legitimately experimental "Mind Games" (brutally denigrated by McGuinn) Crosby was in danger of contradicting the spirit of the Byrds and was discarded.

The best Byrd’s were this original group of McGuinn, Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke. The harmonies were the richest with Crosby and Clark contributing their thick, smooth sonorities. The song writing was balanced evenly between Mcguinn and Clark, with Crosby eventually adding his spooky, moody tunes to the mix. Chris Hillman almost filled the shoes of Gene Clark upon his departure. Pop fiends will find the first few albums pretty hard to resist; the integrity of the slow tempos still has the power to seduce. (Never Before is recommended as a surprisingly solid batch of outtakes and alternate takes from this early era. It’s a mystery why some of these songs weren’t used given the reprehensibly meager running time of the Byrds’ first eight releases.)

The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968) was Crosby’s last Byrd flight. The harmonies had started to flag. The differences between Crosby’s need to push sexual/social/musical limits and Roger McGuinn’s "Goin’ Back" urges were starting to criss-cross in an uncomfortable manner. On Sweetheart of the Rodeo, McGuinn left behind some of the Byrds’ baggage – i.e. the harmonies are to some degree ditched in favor of solo vocals, the psychedelic veneer is removed to reveal a rustic foundation; the pop assimilation devolves to a plaintive folk/country brew and for the first time the Byrds descend to country folk clichés which brought them close to sounding like a very ordinary band (comparing their work to the Band’s originality, for instance, reveals what was lost; the early Byrds’s avoidance of clichés became an embracement; the band was abdicating the fusion elements that made them interesting in the first place). The Byrds adhered so closely to the country/bluegrass format that they are virtually just another country/bluegrass band, albeit one with good taste and heavy drums. Much has been made of Gram Parsons few months with the band, though he contributed only two songs that can be called classics ("Hickory Wind" and "100 Years From Today"), and was mostly a destabilizing influence. There is little point to pushing the Byrds as progenitors of a music that already existed, no matter how well they emulated it (reference points being the Dillards, Merle Haggard, early rockabilly, and the country elements found in many standard 60’s folk albums). Instantly tagged as a new species – country rock – the Byrds’ new direction legitimized an already existing approach, but at slightly louder volume and with an unlimited lyrical concern (not that they made much use of the latter). The Byrds’ albums that follow – Dr. Byrds, Ballad of Easy Rider, Byrdmaniax, Farther Along - are loaded too heavily with proficiently played cover tunes without much of an interpretive slant, even as the band attempted to slip back into a harder approach to folk rock and roll. In some ways these albums hearken back to the old style of folk music which had grown quaint when the Byrds first took hold of it. McGuinn’s intolerance of new, heavier styles of rock became conservatively reactionary. Elsewhere, Gene Clark and Doug Dillard had gotten together to form an innovative drumless update of pop and bluegrass; soon Parsons and Hillman formed the more devil-may-care Flying Burrito Brothers. Crosby, of course, joined the more engaged (aesthetically, musically, socially) Stills, Nash and, later, Young. A year later (1970) even the Northern California band The New Riders of the Purple Sage, when they weren’t servicing John Dawson’s soppy romanticism, were playing with more reckless abandon that the Byrds (the Eagles would take the format to self-aggrandizing, witless heights on the boneheaded Desperado before evolving into a less naïve bunch of cynics).

McGuinn was never a prolific writer and his talent for assimilating and popularizing, which in the beginning was expert, was pretty weak during the Byrds latter era (by now the Dylan covers had become perfunctory and rather joyless). This post-Crosby Byrds may have exposed the essence of Roger McGuinn’s personality ("Jesus is Just All Right With Me," "The Christian Life") by clearing away strong writing personalities, but it deflated, rather than expanded, it’s appeal. Once again a band whose communal effervescence was more than the sum of its parts dissolved into the solo artist’s lonely assault upon the mountain. Telling is the fact that Roger McGuinn abandoned the country rock boondoggle when starting his solo career, in order to reignite the more flexible and passionate playing of the early style and its usefulness to his aims. At his best he succeeds as a one-man Byrds, using the old bands’ style to tap into that vein of expressive gold.

The Byrds’ Box Set is admirably put together, and is full of interesting outtakes; it is essential, but like the Byrds’ career it peters out a bit as it goes along.

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