byrdsongs, xxi

The second Goffin and King track on Notorious Byrd Brothers, Wasn’t Born to Follow, is what I wish country rock had become.  The song’s little two-step giddyup gives it an obvious c&w vibe, but the flanged guitars make the song  feel trippy in a way that’s almost entirely absent from what would soon come from the  Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, and even most of what the Byrds did in the post-Notorious era.  There’s a reason Wasn’t Born to Follow works so beautifully in Easy Rider.  This is music for a motorcycle, an iron horse as opposed to flesh and blood.  Mechanization, modern and complex, still remains on par here with the simpler pleasures of the mythic agrarian past, but only for the time being, and only tenuously.  An impulse to flee into the arms of Mother Nature is built into the song and is something it shares with more typically rustic sounding country rock. Where the trees have leaves of prisms, and break the light in colors, that no one knows the names of. But the Byrds aren’t quite ready to leave the city behind.  I mentioned how Notorious is a record that feels like it’s trying to avoid complete capitulation. Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which, staggeringly, comes a mere seven months later, is music of resignation.  Notorious is still straddling things, and the pull between the past/present and the present/future is the source of the record’s eclectic brilliance. Wasn’t Born to follow is the perfect crystallization of this creative tension, transforming it into a two-minute sound collage that’s as coherent as it is sublime…