byrdsongs, ix

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was a kid my dad had a pretty big record collection, and it was really his records that gave me my first sustained exposure to rock ‘n roll.  He’s not a big pop guy, but he was a mad man, and I suspect that most mad men, like my dad, bought their fair share of groovy LPs and singles, just as a way of staying current with the culture, keeping informed about where the zeitgeist was headed, all in the interest of becoming more potent and effective as marketers.  Adrift amidst a sea of grown up music – Sondheim, Sinatra, Blosom Dearie, and a ton of other stuff that was played on WNEW 1130 AM in New York – I found scattered records from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, Marvin Gaye, Chicago, Three Dog Night, Harry Nilsson, Procol Harum, Neil Young, CSN, Carole Klein, Cat Stevens, and so on and so forth.  The anxiety that, in my imagining of things, drove these purchases, the fear of losing touch with young consumers, seems to have begun no earlier than late 1966 or 1967.  For example, my dad owned every Beatles album from Revolver onwards, but he did not own Rubber Soul or anything before that.  He had the Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet, but not Her Majesty’s Satantic Request, Between the Buttons, or Aftermath. He had the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile and Friends, but not Pet Sounds.  All his Donovan records – and for whatever reason he had tons of them, more than any other pop artist – were from the period after Donovan went psychedelic.  My assumption here is that he bought all these records more or less as they were released, which may or may not have been the case.  There’s a chance that some of these albums were bought well after they came out.  The archaeology here is necessarily somewhat speculative…

 

…I don’t wanna make it sound like my dad’s interest in this music was only about market research.  I think the marketing thing was probably the most significant factor, but he’s pretty darn sophisticated when it comes to music.  He loves jazz.  It has the same effect on him that pop has on me. It makes him so happy. And even though I don’t particularly care for jazz, except in small doses when it’s refracted through rock, like with Steely Dan or Ricky Lee Jones, it fills me with joy when I get to observe him listening to jazz and to hear him talk about his youth, playing hooky from school and sneaking into the Paramount Theater for Glen Miller and Benny Goodman Matinees. I’m not his biological spawn, but he’s been there with me from the beginning of my life, was there in the waiting room at the hospital (the good old days!) while my bio dad was probably out getting drunk.  We always had music playing in the house when I was a kid. Always.  Granted, a lot of the time it was A Little Night Music or some nails-on-a-chalkboard thing like that, but I know that my appreciation for music comes largely from him.  And even if he wasn’t naturally a lover of pop or rock, he was always curious about what turned me on musically, even when it was Kiss or Deep Purple or the Vanilla Fudge, all of which were probably equally chalkboardish for him.

 …He divorced his first wife, I believe, in 1967 or so, and married my mom in 1970. There was a brief period of a few years when he was a swingin’ bachelor, living in a groovy apartment with a view (and with a sunken living room, one hopes) on Central Park South.  I’d like to think that this was the period when he started to buy rock ‘n roll records, a cool ad exec in his late 40s, with groovy records, drinking martinis, flying all over the world, and (who knows?) maybe even smoking a reefer or two periodically in the company of comely airline stewardesses and models from the ads he was shooting…

One of the records I found in his collection was The Byrds Greatest Hits, which was a package Columbia put together in an effort to cash in on past success after the band stopped making chart topping songs.  And, naturally, the song that affected me most profoundly was Eight Miles High, with its freight train base line and Charlie Parker inspired guitar freak out in the intro, and, most of all, those intense four- or even five-part harmonies. I’d never heard anything like it before and I still don’t think I have.  Even though it’s undeniably a strong move in the direction of rock, I still think it’s one of the most remarkable songs ever recorded.  McGuinn denied it was a drug song, which I think is disingenuous, and so does David Crosby, who quipped in response, ‘of course it’s a drug song, we were stoned when we wrote it!’  Sometimes that guy can be quite charming.

Eight Miles High first appeared on Fifth Dimension, which for the Byrds represents the start of a transition away from the relatively simple pleasures of their first two records.  Gene Clark departed during the recording of the album, leaving something of a romantic void.  But while the proximate cause of Clark’s departure seems to have been personality conflicts within the band, I think his leaving is symptomatic of something much deeper, the same forces that marginalized Marty Balin in the Jefferson Airplane.  The age of fun little love songs like I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better and It’s No Secret had now passed, giving way to much more weighty concerns.  The title Track on Fifth Dimension crystallizes the transition on multiple levels.  It’s a song about the theory of relativity and, more generally, about exploration, inquiry, discovery, and (in all likelihood, despite flimsy denials to the contrary) about LSD as the doorway to all these things.  It also happens to be a spectacular song. The harmonies are as lush and ethereal as ever, and McGuinn makes his guitar sound like bagpipes…