byrdsongs, ii

I went to a party at a friend’s house when I was in 11^th grade and worked up the nerve to ask a pretty girl to dance with me.  The experience has stayed with me ever since. I recently looked her up on Facebook. I'm not sure why I did this.  We were never really friends.  She was just a good looking girl who I admired from afar and never saw again after I went away to college. I guess my social world these days has shrunk considerably, and I find myself thinking about people from my past a lot more. I had no problem finding her on Facebook but didn’t ‘friend’ her because doing so would have been pathetic on so many levels.  She’s married with kids and looks older, as we all do, but Father Time tends to ravage women much more cruelly than it does men.  I don't think it's horrible or sexist to point this out, is it?  She’s not unattractive (I’m basing this entirely on photos, mind you), but she’s not the little girl I once knew, that's for sure.  I'm sure she'd say the equivalent about me if she saw me today, and if she even remembers me.  Anyway, along with my heightened curiosity about people who were in my orbit long ago, my thoughts turned to this girl/woman because I’m back into a Byrds groove these days.  In the early Gene Clark period, the Byrds had so many romantically evocative songs.  Gene Clark is a hero of mine, among other reasons, because he was so sentimental, and so tragic. Tragic sentimentality gets me every time, especially if it's offered with nice doses of harmony and tambourine. It's that pop life thing I've talked about so often.  Clark has a great line in the song, You Movin’ where he sings, ‘now the way you toss your hair, when you swing, swing to the right…'  That’s more or less exactly how I remember dancing with the girl on that night in 11^th grade.  I was a total loser with girls, but I remember her tossing her hair and swinging.  It was an overwhelmingly erotic set of gestures, one I was completely unequipped to handle.  And every time I’ve heard You Movin’ over the years, I remember that sexy tossing and swinging.  I often try to imagine a different version of myself in that situation, a completely different person, really, someone who could have taken the tossing and swinging as an invitation to explore further and get closer. My inability to do this at the time still haunts me today, believe it or not. It’s weird because, although You Movin’ did not appear on any Byrds record, and to my knowledge was not until very recently made available to fans on anything other than hard-to-find bootleg collections, it's a nifty little tossed off song from the treasure trove of demos they cut for Columbia in ‘64 and early ’65.  Check out McGuinn's frenetic guitar solo and Crosby’s lovely high harmony in the bridge and chorus.  The whole thing captures the sparkling energy of Los Angeles at the dawn of the Mondo Mod era.  It’s total bliss, in other words.  And yet, for me the pleasure is tinged with all kinds of complex, somewhat masochistic feelings, pain and sweetness become one and the same, almost as if I love the song precisely because it puts me in touch with a lingering emptiness I have inside me and turns it into something as alluring as that girl flicking her hair and gyrating her bouncing body from side to side…