The Byrds: Classic Or Dud

Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark by John Einarson is also terrific if horribly depressing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/it-was-the-byrds-album-everyone-hated-in-1968-now-sweetheart-of-the-rodeo-is-a-classic/2018/08/16/a2534a88-9a8f-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d74b28a5b8d1

Writer talks to folks about the album, plus M & Hillman current you plans

Tour

Great article, thanks for posting

I liked this bit from the Washington Post article:

while standing in line at a bank in Beverly Hills, Hillman ran into a sandy-haired kid from Georgia who said he could play piano. Hillman brought him to McGuinn. Parsons was just 21.

“I asked Gram if he could play some McCoy Tyner type of piano,” McGuinn says. “Because I was into John Coltrane and the “Eight Miles High” kind of place. And he played some Floyd Cramer-style piano. Floyd played on Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” That was a song that got me interested in music. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s got talent.’ But I didn’t know he would turn into George Jones in a sequin suit.”

Parsons didn’t hide his true love. At the end of their first rehearsal, Hillman remembers Parsons kicking into a Buck Owens song. The Byrds were trying to figure out their next step, with McGuinn talking up a sprawling, conceptual album with a futuristic suite. Parsons had his own idea.

There is some great stuff about Gram in Stanley Booth’s book about The Rolling Stones, which I may have mentioned once or twice before on this board.

Here’s an interview with Stanley that I haven’t read yet: http://www.furious.com/perfect/gramparsons/booth.html

this (or a vid v related) posted on the old school guitar shredding thread, good stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VwmyItsU-4

What's the musical term called, right before the tele starts it's lead, it's like a short little intro build up?

I guess it basically starts the song as well.

that's most commonly called a pickup. anacrusis would be the more technical term.

nice

thx!

Thanks for the interviews, and that pic of McGuinn & Marty reminds me of a discussion on Rolling Country last month:

roger mcguinn, chris hillman and marty stuart & his fabulous superlatives, sweetheart of the rodeo full album show, los angeles, tuesday night. opening night of a short-ish tour. it was ragged, loose, occasionally awkward and more than occasionally great. they did one set of truncated versions of hits and deep cuts, and then the sweetheart of the rodeo set, played in full but out of order. i got the sense that stuart and the superlatives rehearsed thoroughly on their own and mcguinn and hillman maybe not so much. they missed cues left and right, were looking down frequently for chords and lyrics, and while hillman's voice was in good form, mcguinn was having a little trouble cutting through. but their instincts for harmony are still dead-on, and stuart fit right into that. i felt like i was watching a band still working out its sound, and as a result, when something gelled, when they hit a sweet spot, it was magical. like watching a band discover itself in real time. and that second set was way better than the first. it felt like having a piece of my own dna read back to me. maybe they felt the same.

encore: two byrds classics and three tom petty classics. i was wondering if maybe they would be able to coax david crosby (who i assume still lives here though i have no idea) onto the stage for a song or two. instead we got mike campbell, who joined for "american girl" -- after which they kicked him off and, strangely, played more petty songs without him. marty stuart did a bluegrassy take on "runnin' down a dream" (thumbs up) and hillman did a fairly faithful "wildflowers," which apparently petty produced for him for an album he put out last year.

they also told some stories. they're not particularly good storytellers. damn those harmonies though.

― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, July 25, 2018 9:08 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was already hoping for an album from that tour, even more while reading your dispatch. Marty and His FS have the drive and expertise to keep those geezers functioning onstage for as long as possible.
Yeah, Hillman's always seemed better in bands, all the way back to the Hillmen, but the Petty=produced set has keepers; my comments from the most recent Nashville Scene ballot:
"Have not yet made it through Chris Hillman's The Asylum Years---some hideous harmonies get wasted on the way---but will give it another shot. Some nice tracks on the new Bidin’ My Time, especially "Walk Right Back," one of the many under-covered Everly Bros worthies, seeds of West Coast country rock at its best (he credits inclusion of this song to producer Tom Petty, who did what he could all over--Hillman's not the strongest solo artist among his peers, but has his moments, when the setting's just right, or just about). McGuinn and The Croz show up; some Heartbreakers, still radio-ready, also appear."

― dow, Wednesday, July 25, 2018 9:43 PM

I’d love to see this show next month in Boston but it’s hella expensive.

yeah that was a great report by fcc

I find it difficult to separate "Turn Turn Turn" from its almost overwhelming Boomer-ness -- to the point where I've gone years without listening to it on purpose -- but goddamn it is a gorgeous song from top to bottom, isn't it.

At this point have that experience with a lot of songs from that era so yeah

Heck yeah

Wow! @thedavidcrosby blocked me! pic.twitter.com/nDDQwS1dWv

— Roger McGuinn (@RogerMcGuinn) December 4, 2019

saw the croz doc yesterday... he seems repentant but unable to change his assholish ways

lol @ leaving out why Croz blocked him (which was totally justified imo)

I generally have no use for his musical output (everything great about the Byrds mostly came from others imo), but found the doc pretty engaging and his overall contrition/attitude p refreshing.

why did croz block him?

I mean...............fair enough, David Crosby pic.twitter.com/iu3Lcx5OcT

— Allison Hussey (@allisonhussey) December 4, 2019

Jesus is just not alright with the Croz.

I won't lose a follow
by heeding God's call
for what is a retweet
that wants you to fall?

Is Crosby ill? This is like the second or third time I’ve seen some sort of reference to him approaching death but with no specificity or suggestion that it’s anything other than him getting old.

Everybody has been blocked before
Everybody knows the pain
Anyone in this place
Can tell you to your face
Why you shouldn't try to @ someone

Listening to THE PREFLYTE SESSIONS for a few days.

'Boston' and 'You Moving' have always been such refreshing pop bursts. It's a downer to look them up in Johnny Rogan's TIMELESS FLIGHT REVISITED and find them dismissed. That's an odd book: hundreds of pages but not much sense, I think, of the excitement of the Byrds. The negative feelings it always leaves me with remind me a little of the negativity of MacDonald's REVOLUTION IN THE HEAD.

Anyway, early Byrds forever.

Since the block on Twitter was mentioned: earlier this week, McG. retweeted a tweet from a tweeter who chided either him or Crosby for the Bible thing, and McG. said no,but that he *had* sent Bibles to the imprisoned Croz, who "shrugged them off. He blocked me for saying that no one wants to work with him any more."

I would paste it, but Twitter can be twitchy.

So at least here you have an example get an idea what a Twitter war would have been in the 60s...

"NEIL OUT! CSN FOREVER!"

Grace Slick would be all into it for a bit and then her feed would just turn into cat pictures.

Sad about the latest feud.

Does anyone else like THE PREFLYTE SESSIONS?

I do!

also like this---Dennis Hopper could be a really good photog, at least as good as actor or director:

Hey kids - that’s the Byrds playing at Jane Fonda’s Fourth of July party 1965 - photo by Dennis Hopper. pic.twitter.com/M5l4E26YTl

— Pat Thomas (@PatThomas1964) July 4, 2022

I'm not buying the photo book - way out of my price range - but those photos really are awesome. For whatever reason, the Byrds hit a nostalgic sweet spot for me more than anyone else, at least for the '60s. For the 50th anniversary tour for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, they did a handful of classics beyond that album, and as soon as McGuinn played the opening notes to "Mr. Tambourine Man" on his 12-string, it was mana.

Yes that's one super photo.

Pat Thomas's tweets are always worth seeing and reading (says the Judee Sills doc, which he worked on, is almost ready, btw):
http://twitter.com/PatThomas1964?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1544105578821140480%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ilxor.com%2FILX%2FThreadSelectedControllerServlet%3Fboardid%3D41threadid%3D1002unread

Hopper’s photographs are great. He had a real eye. I’ve always been surprised this aspect of the man was always so overlooked.

Had no idea Roger McGuinn and Harrison Ford were both born on the same day in the same city. They both turn 80 today.

Hopper’s photographs are great. He had a real eye. I’ve always been surprised this aspect of the man was always so overlooked.

"Eight Miles High" is so incredible I can't even believe it exists

Then you’ll probably enjoy this:

https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-139-eight-miles-high-by-the-byrds/

(xpost) As is this, which for some reason always gets buried as the 20th or so search result on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3eWX0aYXjo

wow that is great, what a snapshot

keep meaning to check out that 500 songs podcast, probably should now

Just wish sound and image were a lot clearer--I think that's something that was commercially released at some point?

I love this band, and "Eight Miles High" is my favorite of their singles. (Hüsker Dü's cover is also a huge favorite, as is Hüsker Dü in general.)

That BBC/WGBH series with Robert Palmer as its chief consultant spotlighted "Eight Miles High" in its episode on psychedelia. (The BBC actually titled that episode "Eight Miles High" whereas WGBH's PBS broadcast called it "Blues in Technicolor.")

The show has been uploaded to YouTube many times over the years - it usually gets flagged and taken down at some point - but at the moment, most of the episode in question can be found here.

"Eight Miles High" is discussed from 1:48 to 5:03. McGuinn talks about the solo at 2:52 - that part really stuck out for me because he plays a small fragment of it. (I had never seen anyone perform it before even though I had heard that record many, many times.)

I feel like more and more critics have knocked the band in recent years - not dismissing them altogether but taking them down a few pegs in terms of their place in history, but I haven't found any of those arguments to be very convincing. The worst I can say about the Byrds is that 1) a handful of their classic albums were marred by filler (a fault that's diminished on the digital reissues - they all have enough top-notch bonus tracks to make up for the LP tracks that should've been left out), 2) their later, less-heralded albums were wildly uneven, but this doesn't change what they had already accomplished before, and 3) they weren't a great live band, but that doesn't feel all that relevant when I've mainly thought of them as recording artists. (I barely heard, much less saw, any live material until I had grown very familiar with their albums, and I think that was limited to the first disc of Untitled and what little was on their first box set.)

yeah the 1990s / early 2000s CD reissues are all worth grabbing just for the bonus tracks ... tons of great stuff there.

I haven't seen any of those recent-ish criticisms, but I can't imagine what the angle could be. They made great records, they were innovative and hugely influential, and their patchier albums never had much of a profile to begin with. Like birdistheword said, the relevance of the quality of their live shows is questionable given how little live material there is -- and the live disc on (untitled) is great.

That Robert Palmer series, though, has some major gaps, errors, omissions, and other things generally associated with such series (beyond the fact that the Who aren't even mentioned in passing). Listening to the 500 Songs podcast, there's been many, many moments where I think, "Yep, they got that wrong on the PBS series."

The Byrds Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1971 smokes, but that's not the classic lineup