byrdsongs, xvii

Lady Friend is not only the best thing David Crosby did with the Byrds but is the finest song of his career.  It’s certainly one of my three or four favorite byrdsongs, though it can really be viewed as a David Crosby solo performance, Crosby having re-recorded his own harmony ovberdubs in place of McGuinn and Hillman’s initial backing vocals.  McGuinn and Hillman are more or less reduced to being session players…  As hard as it is to like Crosby the man, there’s no denying his massive talent as a vocalist, and he had some pretty good pop instincts as well, which are easily overlooked due to his much higher profile in Crosby Stills and Nash, where the whole point was to (d)evolve from the lightness of pop to the overwrought self-righteousness of corporate hippy rock.  I don’t dislike CSN. They made a lot of good music and occupied a big place in my childhood.  On a personal level, they make me think of the hours and hours I spent alone in my room as a kid.  It’s not always a set of memories I want to return to, but they definitely made me feel less alone back then.  It still blows my mind when I think of CSN as essentially the Byrds + Buffalo Springfield + the Hollies.  The thing is, though, I’ll take any one of those three bands over CSN any day of the week. Even with CSN’s unmatched harmonies, they just sound too serious about themselves for my taste. I didn’t recognize this about them when I was little, or if I did I interpreted it as cool hippy earnestness, something to emulate.  We get more jaded and cynical as we age and nowadays CSN strike me as a symbol of everything that went wrong in the late 60s.  Even their vaunted harmonies sound shrill to me now, exquisitely executed and oh so heavy handed... Lady Friend was Crosby’s last stab at the pop life. He went about it using the Gene Clark Happy/Sad song formula and added a lovely orchestral sheen.  I’m not sure who arranged the horns.  I tend to be suspicious of horns and really anything that makes guitars harder to hear, but the horns in Lady Friend really elevate the song into the realm of great pop art.  Crosby’s two other masterpieces from this period, Draft Morning and Triad, are really pop/rock hybrids.  They’re terrific songs, but they lack Lady Friend’s pop purity.  …Crosby was apparently unhappy with the way Gary Usher mixed Lady Friend.  It’s admittedly a bit muddy sounding, particularly in mono, but I think there’s something charming and quaint about the song’s cluttered vibe.  Even when you listen to it now, it makes you feel like you’re hearing it on AM radio. It sounds like what a mid-60s pop song is supposed to sound like. I cherish that about it…