The Byrds were an early obsession of mine when Dylan and folk rock came into being, and this song, cowritten by band leader Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn and Harvey Gerst, is jangle guitar in its greatest expression. The twelve-string intro pours down like a hard rain and the harmonies are a kind of perfection, not choir boy ethereal, more like a chorus of sensitive people, male or female, who yearn for a partner, someone to complete their sense of self. The guitars and harmonies tend toward the strident, edging on atonality, and makes you imagine someone under mental duress trying to walk the straight line, to remain in the center of an eroding calm. And it's under two minutes. So much angst, yearning, melodrama in such a compact space of time. These were the days when short tunes had real heft.
Barry Afonso chimes in: One interesting thing about the Byrds is that Roger McGuinn dominated and directed the band but did not project a distinctive personality as a front man. He wasn't quite colorless, but his personality and persona were elusive and protean. McGuinn lacked the swagger or flash of a rock band leader. But he was the indisputably the Master-Byrd -- others came and went, but he was the indispensable member. How how would you describe the character McGuinn projected when he fronted the Byrds? Who WAS he, anyway?
Burke (clearning his throat pretentiously):I can only guess that his experience in the folk scene with the Limelighters, the Chad Mitchell Trio and his stint with Bobby Darin formed the personality he brought to the Byrds, just play the music, serve the song, don't be egocentric or showy. McGuinn was not publicly political and kept his views close the vest and objected to David Crosby's political and conspiratorial rantings from the stage. He might have been something of a control freak. It's been said that while he radiated a sense of calm from the stage, he was aggressive in dealings behind the scenes in matters of music and how the band was perceived. I thoroughly enjoyed the work he did with the Byrds with the early albums (up to Notorious Byrds Brothers), but he was a cipher.
I'm Only Sleeping --The Beatles The best song about getting up at the crack of noon, only to go right back to sleep. Much is made of the backwards guitar break from Harrison, an accomplishment and innovation indeed, but it's the least interesting aspect of the tune, which as a suitably steady and toned down pulse of a rhythm, simulating, maybe, the measured breathing of someone in deep sleep. McCartney's basswork is superb here, and and at the half point , before the short Harrsion extravaganza, he takes while can be called a bass solo, his only one (unless I miss my guess). Lennon's singing of his lyrics is understated , again suitable in a song that praises laziness; he gets it right, I think, of the universal (?) experience of being awakened in the middle of a dream right before the dreamer gets to the anticipated payoff in the slumbering world. At that moment , in that instance, the world is raw, intrusive, an insane nest of busy body magpies. This is easily one of my favorite songs on a perfect studio release (Revolver),
Ramblin Gamblin Man / Tales of Lucy Blue --Bob Seger System
This is disc got constant play when I lived in Detroit and got even more play after I moved the comparatively edenic San Diego. This 1969 is an earnest and brilliant example of garage band genius, the kind of thrashing primitivism of musicians who definitely not virtuosos who all the same howled, jammed and slammed in minimalist fury all the pent up teen rage of his Michigan fan base. Black Eyed Girl is a gloriously lumbering blues with prime Seger shouting/screaming/bellow, his rasp achieving an appealingly frayed high note, "Ramblin Gamblin Man" is a hard charging rocker with a simple and killer drum beat, all sorts of weird psychedelia , feedback, wah wah pedal orgies, lots of Seger rasping his lungs out. Down Home is a great companion to the home life portraits by the Stones ala Live with Me. Seger refined his approach over the years to mostly good occasionally great effect, but this album gave he idea that hard rock at ground level should sock you in the jaw and kick you in the head.
Eight Miles High--The Byrds
"Eight Miles High" by the Byrds, released in 1966, a brief and cogent combination of Imagist lyrics, unusual time signatures that alternate between 5/4 and 4/4, jazz and raga overtones and guitarist Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn's transcendent , Coltrane inspired solos. There was a lot of early experiments in mixing rock with other genres, specifically raga and jazz, and not a little hunt and peck improvisation happening during this period, the most succesful efforts being the extended Bloomfield excursions on East West, Larry Coryell's invention of fusion method in the Free Spirits band, and some others, but Eight Miles High was a radio hit of a sort, ranking at 14 in the Billboard 100. It was banned from some stations because of the (too) obvious association with drugs, but where I was in Detroit the tune was played an awful lot on our local AM and FM outlets. It was an unexpected surprise at the time, a song completely unique and ahead of its time that stands as one of the artistically succesful attempts at what would come to be termed fusion.
I Can't Make Love--Wall of Voodoo
I witnessed Wall of Voodoo for the first time at the Urgh concerts in Santa Monica in 1980, sharing the bill with Pere Ubu, Dead Boys, Magazine,a wholly transformational encounter. The band applied the ticktock reductionist rhythms with a sense of apprehension. It was almost Hitchcockian, as in any scene when a nervous protagonist under duress hears an overly loud clock ticking away . "Ring of Fire" was masterfully drawn out, and Stan Ridgeway seemed to me the best talk-singer since Lou Reed , a flat, hardened monotone , leering and braced by a slight ironic tone, reflecting LA Noir no less than Marlowe. "I Can't Make Love" was my takeaway from the entire night, an underrated lament of A loser, battered on both sides by the lure and dispatch of the affection he craves. This is a lament of someone so saddled with self loathing that he can't complete a sentence. The pleading refrain of "I'm a nice guy" as the song fades is stark and stripped of illusion, it is Lear without the poetry. The abject despair and self-pity that's revealed is equal parts moving and repulsive, which is a remarkable accomplishment.
David Crosby, RIP. He was a wonderful singer who revolutionized folk harmonies, fusing them with the electric strum of loud rock. As a member of the Byrds he played a large part in creating a new genre that influenced thousands of musicians and hundreds of bands, an impact that is still hard today in younger artists. He wrote or cowrote a fair number of genius songs --"Why", "Eight Miles High", "Triad", "Everyone's Been Burned", "Dolphin Smile", "Draft Morning", "What's Happening", "Deja Vu", among others. When the key vocalist and principal songwriter Gene Clark left the Byrds after the second album, he and the other members of the band stepped up their songwriting chops and kept the Byrds a fresh, vital, and energetic sound. Sometimes, he was inconsistent in quality as a songwriter, and wallowing in sheer hippie muddleheadness. "Almost Cut My Hair"? --but his best songs are among the best of the period. You can go so far that the songs achieve the elusive quality of being timeless in steeply musical terms. The hooks still seduce you; the melodies continue to set a seamless mood; the words evoke atmospheres and situations that refuse the taint of age. Crosby's best words, melodies, and vocals returned you precise moments of wonder. I can't think of any ballads that set a higher mark than "Everyone's Been Burned" or "Triad". His genuinely splendid work is thin, however, being his studio work with the Byrds and the first two CSN (and Y) releases. I only lent half an ear to his work after those discs and found them inconsistent--some good, some dreadful, some simply unmemorable. Crosby's legacy is secure, though, as he always will be THAT GUY in the Byrds and THAT GUY in CSN (and Y) who help create music that hasn't, on its terms, been equaled.
An issue I've always had with the original edition of the Byrds' last release in the original formation, The Notorious Byrds Brothers (1968), was the omission of two A plus Crosby compositions, "Triad" and "Lady Friend". The latter was their previous single, released due to Crosby's conviction that it would be a hit, but it charted poorly on the Billboard charts. The singer's stock within the band fell dramatically according to various accounts, and members Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman chose to release a Gerry Goffman-Carol King tune "Going Back", a saccharine imitation of a Byrds-like song that did, however, do far better on the charts than did "Lady Friend" Tensions within the band were already at a breaking point, much of due to Crosby's habit of giving extended political raps between songs during live performances. After some arguments over Crosby's songs, McGuinn and Hill fired the aggrieved singer and released Notorious Byrd Brothers. Notorious could have been their best album had they passed up on the Goffin-King songs "Goin' Back" and Wasn't Born to Follow" and instead used Crosby's "Triad" and "Lady Friend".
I'm a decades long admirer of the Goffin and King songwriter team, but their contributions to this album never sat well with me; they sound false, and a bit contrived to construct folk-rock message songs tailored to the band's image. Something like "lets write a Dylan like song that would a sure fire hit for the Byrds." The irony has always been that the Byrds were on the leading edge of a musical movement where lyrics were authored by band members and attempted more depth of feeling and imagery. I suppose by the time NBB came along the originality they introduced to rock had already become clichés and tropes, firmly embedded in the archive of go-to style moves and were ready for weak imitation and outright parody. "Goin' Back" and "Wasn't Born to Follow" sound like parodies, intended or not, and they spoil an otherwise fine album. Crosby seemed to have become a species of professional celebrity, famous for being famous, and I wish he had more brilliant collaborating years than there were. But so many artists become and remain celebrities with inflated reputations on dramatically less quality work than Crosby produced, which is to say that the late singer-songwriter's contributions were tremendous and, most importantly, they were advancements in craft and harmony that still matter over half a century later. God bless him for that much.
Hey, Joe by the Byrds on their 1966 Fifth Dimension album. This song was recorded by too many bands over the decade, and there is not much difference among the 50 or so versions I'm aware of. The reason I was drawn to the song as a naive teen was because it broke the mode the cycle of love-sick Gene Pitney/Leslie Gore pop melodies and melodramas that dominated my conscious mind at the time and gave me and other unsuspecting youth a taste of a real tragedy concerning the consequences of cheating on one's partner.
In this case, the cuckold wasn't going to sob and bleed all over the carpet as would be the metaphorical case for Pitney or Gore. Instead, this fellow answers questions from an inquiring pal about what his game plan is, and Joe makes it plain, he's going to get a gun and shoot her dead. That's getting proactive in the worst sense of the word. I was aware that it didn't put women in the best light and would hardly suffice as an example in problem resolution. Years later, after bitter experience and summary reeducation by sharp females who tolerated my foibles, I became aware of the idea of misogyny, the outright hatred of women. I've been trying to mend my ways ever since.
But at the time, I was engrossed by the sheer drama of it all, the portrait of a lonely guy so anemic in self-esteem that he would rather kill his cheating girlfriend than calm down, feel the feelings, and seek another less destructive path. The one thing I would say as regards anything resembling a defense of the song's treatment of women was that it was an introduction to the idea that emotions are not only dramatic but infinitely and witlessly complex as it goes. It was part of education. But as we say, quantity changes quality, and the surfeit of versions of the renditions leeched the drama from the lyrics and made the ascending chord progression less a measure of tension building than it was a model of metronomic monotony.
But the Byrds version is unique concerning the tempo, which is jacked to nearly punk-pogo dynamics and David Crosby's vocal, which is breathless and sounds winded and excited on adrenaline as would a criminal who had, as the lyrics let on, shot his wife. Forget the sultry and soulful writer of the ballads Everyone's Been Burned or Guinivere, the tunes of sensitive minstrels rhyming away life's ironies. Hey Joe is a blunt revenge fantasy, and Crosby sounds wicked, a man who wants blood. But the biggest payoff is Roger McGuinn's twelve-string work, which aligns itself with that Coltrane-inspired note clustering he did for Eight Miles High. He riffs throughout the tune, swift, jabbing riffs, odd chord accents, more jabbing and dissonant riffing, a busy counterpoint to the pulsing bass, the earnest cowbell throughout, the bated vocalisms: this has the drama that comes at that moment when watching a two-story house on fire and the structure collapses in unredeemable sparks. This is the best version of the song ever released.
Released in 1967, the Byrds' fourth album YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY saw the band saw the band having to commit itself to release a record after the recent loss of their principle and prolific songwriter and lead singer Gene Clark. To be sure , Clark's departure is said to have been caused by a money dispute ; he received more royalties than other band members because of his songwriting contributions. Admirably, Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn. Chris Hillman and David Crosby took up the loss and contributed high caliber material to fill in the void left by Clark, the result being YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY, which I would argue is their best and most important record and certainly one of the best and most important studio albums by an American rock band in the Sixties. Clark's absence force the other members to draw on their own musical passions and, taking their cue boldly from what the Beatles were doing with their experiments, handily expanded their sound far beyond the jangling-folk rock that initially launched them . The harmonies remain without peer, and we saw the very early integration of jazz, Indian raga, country and western , psychedelia and electronics into their musical weave. Smart, disciplined production by Gary Usher keeps this record form becoming a swamp of overcooked pretensions--he was the man who had the job to say "that's enough". SO YOU WANNA BE A ROCK AND ROLL STAR, EVERYBODY'S BEEN BURNED, WHY, RENAISSANCE FAIR, TIME BETWEEN-- the songs are first rate and the confidence these fellows confront all the alien influence and make part of their sound and legacy is amazing. It sounds fresh, alive, 53 years after its release. The only down side on this disc is the last track on the last side (from the original release) , Mind Garden", an un-navigable mind-blown miasma from David Crosby . It was the day, I suppose, when drugs were exciting, most of us working day jobs after school to have cash to buy records from major corporations believed a Revolution was pending, waiting in the winds , and that many musicians and producers, always marketers, thought they needed a song about altered consciousness to appeal to the gullible teen and the witless rock critic. I assume Crosby was sincere in his attempt to get the experience of having a blown mind in song form, but its a mess. I even thought that in 1967, when I was still in junior high.
