byrdsongs, xii

If music is an important part of your life, and if you have young children and want them to love music as much as you do, I highly recommend you expose them to Mr. Spaceman.  It’s a great song for kids with its fun, kooky words and sing-along melody.  I was probably seven or eight years old the first time I heard it.  The memories are all blurry now, but I remember playing the song all the time.  And it still fills me with the same tingly, blissed-out feeling almost 40 years later.  …And yet, underneath all the good vibes there’s something more serious going on. Gene Clark has a few oblique nods to Country and Western music on Turn Turn Turn (Set You Free This Time, If You’re Gone), but with the two-step twang of Mr. Spaceman, McGuinn establishes the trend more clearly, though the song is not as explicit in this vein as Chris Hillman’s subsequent country-inflected offerings on Younger than Yesterday (Time Between, The Girl With No Name).  This gradual embrace of these more rustic motifs planted the seeds of country rock quite a bit earlier than is often depicted in writing on the subject. Although Sweetheart of the Rodeo was, at the time, the Byrds’ most decisive attempt at making a traditional sounding Country and Western record, the album did not represent a sudden change but rather the culmination of something that had been brewing for several years…

I have mixed feelings about country rock.  I’m fond of telling people that I really only like country music when it’s played by stoned hippies.  The more traditional and pure sounding it is, the more I tune it out.  This is why I like but don’t love Sweetheart of the Rodeo.  The songs on the record where you can hear McGuinn’s Rickenbacker jangling away, and where there’s a poppy time signature, those are the ones I can get behind. In other words, I like the songs where the Byrds sound like the Byrds, you can keep the ones where they try to sound like Hank Williams.  I much prefer the next few albums (Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde, Ballad of Easy Rider, Untitled) because, as country rock records, they’re more rock than country. But the meaning of the country in country rock is something that fascinates me.  I view it as an expression of the desire to flee the urban chaos of the mid to late 60s, to get away from the tumult and lead a more peaceful, pastoral, organic, authentic life.  There’s also the cowboy angle, the fetish hippies made of the mythic rugged individual, the nomadic wanderer rooted to nothing and nobody, roaming the wild frontier, living self-sufficiently, free of the grinding and collective problems of city life.  It’s actually a pretty conservative concept, this notion that the most effective way to deal with social strife is to flee from it altogether.  And it’s also built on a Robinson Crusoe-type fantasy of total self-reliance. You can really see why so many hippies became right-wing libertarians. And this is another reason I can’t completely give myself over to country rock. It’s an expression of something I find very problematic…

On the other hand, there’s the sound of Clarence White’s Telecaster, which has magical powers, able to make all my overly-intellectualized reservations vanish.  But well before Clarence White joined the Byrds, and well before Sweetheart of the Rodeo, back when most listeners still thought of the Byrds as a folk rock group and America’s answer to the British Invasion, just as the 60s were becoming a kaleidoscopic fusion of ecstasy and upheaval, there was this initial salvo…