byrdsongs, xviii

A break with David Crosby was only a matter of time after the Summer of Love.  There’s the matter of his JFK rant at Monterey Pop.  He wasn’t wrong in what he said, but one gets the sense that he was almost a parody, the kind of arm chair rebel whose idea of being radical is letting his freak flag fly.

And then there’s the slow simmer of tension within the Byrds. My impression of Jim McGuinn, who changed his name to Roger around this time after getting into Subud, is that he was a bit conservative and quite possibly prudish as well.  This is only a guess based on things I’ve inferred from interviews, articles, and books.  By ‘conservative’ I don’t mean right wing but rather that he was/is, at heart, a serious folk musician. And you know what those serious folk guys are like.  They’re almost as bad as jazzholes. They don’t like any shenanigans served with their music.  McGuinn says he was not a folk purist and I believe him because, after all, he plugged in, which for the purists was sacrilege. But this doesn’t mean he wasn’t serious, and this kind of seriousness was anathema to Crosby’s act at the time. I can see why McGuinn would come to resent Crosby, someone who made such an effort to draw attention to himself as opposed to drawing it to the music. It’s not hard to imagine how McGuinn reacted when Crosby came to the guys with Triad, which is so much more than just a ménage a trois song.  It calls monogamy into question, makes a mockery of it, in fact.  It’s thrilling to hear the Byrds’ version of the song, but it’s a cheap thrill. Where Lady Friend is a high point for pop as a vital force in the culture, Triad indicates that the patient has become irretrievably sick.  The song is a fever dream. 

McGuinn (and presumably Hillman as well) vetoed Triad for inclusion on The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and after they fired Crosby from the Byrds, Crosby offered the song to the Jefferson Airplane, who gave it a bombastic Slouching Towards Bethlehem-ish interpretation, their stock in trade after Marty Balin’s position in the band was marginalized.  The Byrds original version of Triad is groovier, and it's more subtle, no mean feat given Crosby’s outsized self-concept.  Listening to the song fills me with a strange combination of admiration and contempt…