byrdsongs, x

The songs recorded for and around the time of Fifth Dimension are what change sounds like.  Change and maturation.  Mind you that maturation is by no means necessarily a good thing. It usually involves the loss of innocence. But  maturation also means slowing down and recognizing that, alas, you don’t have all the answers, that it’s not simply a question of what but also of why.  Why, the song, manifests change and maturation in both form and content.  It sounds to me quite literally like the song, especially the version recorded at RCA studios at the tail end of ’65, is varispeeded (?) down a tone or two, which gives it a weirdly languid feel even as the guitars crackle with electricity. Also note the song’s oedipal/electra overtones with its invocation of the generation gap as an encounter with the reality principle.  Keep saying no to her, since she was a baby.  But the most striking feature of the song is the raga drone of the two guitar breaks.  There’s so much going on here, it’s almost too much. One can easily become overwhelmed and tune it all out as just so much noise.  It is admittedly a very noisy song, more a wall of noise than a wall of sound. But the noise works for me.  When I feel myself getting too heavily loaded down with its ideas and concepts - the song is busy as well as being noisy - I take a step back and reduce it to the basic perfection of its three-chord riff.  Still, the varispeeding of the harmonies militates against the  attempt to keep the listening experience simple.  They’re pleasing, those harmonies are, but they’re also scary, the yin and yang of LSD, akin to when you’re six and your parents take you to a haunted house, or when a beautiful girl shows up naked in your nightmare.  You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so you do both at once and let the music sort things out for you…