byrdsongs, xx

You may have gathered from my musings over time that I’m obsessed with Tin Pan Alley, and really songwriters more generally.  I think it’s part of that unseen / under- appreciated hero fetish of mine.  Songwriters whose words and music propel pop idols to superstardom…the session players who play the music but remain largely hidden in the shadows…the producers who barely get a mention in small typeface on the back of the LP…all the indispensable people who make it happen while flying under the radar.  Nowadays there’s so much more readily-accessible information available to even those with only a passing interest in knowing who did what on which record.  It’s easy to forget, for example, that at the height of the Brill Building’s productivity, most of the writers and musicians manufacturing the hits labored in relative obscurity...

Which brings me back to the Byrds, and to The Notorious Byrd Brothers.  The record features two great songs by the Tin Pan Alley songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who were best known at the time for having penned Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, arguably the high-water mark of the Golden Age of Rock ‘n Roll.  But by the late 60s, the Brill Building was decidedly unhip.  Hippies preferred 20-minute drum solos over two-minute teenage symphonies to god.  But the two Goffin and King songs on Notorious are stunning.  Much of their greatness is simply that the lyrics are poignant and the melodies are lovely.  But you also have to give a lot of credit to McGuinn and Hillman for the performances, and to producer Gary Usher, who pulls all the elements together and makes each song into a mini-masterpiece… 

Notorious opens with McGuinn and Hillman’s Artificial Energy, a song about uppers with a narrative that ends with the protagonist either killing the actual queen (but of what we don’t know) or killing “a queen,” as in a homosexual, under drug-fueled circumstances that are left to the imagination.  The song’s bad-trip vibe is made even more raw and striking by the raucous R&B-flavored arrangement, replete with horns-a-go-go, and a fade out that forces you to experience the come down.  Then comes the first of the two Goffin and King songs, Goin’ Back, a wistful ode to the innocence of childhood that couldn’t be more stark in its juxtaposition with the speedy freak out of Artificial Energy.  Within its time and place, Goin’ Back also represents a recognition that the teen paradise of the mid 60s is turning into something much darker.  With its interplay of glockenspiel, pedal steel, and McGuinn’s butterfly guitar flourishes, the song makes you feel like you’re walking in a pleasant dream.  There’s nothing to clutter your mind. Everything's beautiful, nothing hurts.  And as the song fades and those angelic voices caress your face like warm mist, you might even have a moment or two feeling as if you were back in the womb…