It’s not as bad as I had remembered, but Farther Along nevertheless has the unmistakable sound and feel of a band that’s hung on for too long, well beyond the sell-by date. This was my impression as I listened to the record last night for the first time in probably 15 or 20 years. It’s a shame that the Byrds went out so tepidly with back-to-back dud albums, each a rather dispiriting attempt to shoehorn their music into the domain of ccr*. Their concerts were great up to the end, so maybe the albums were just a pretext for going out on the road, I don’t know… Tiffany Queen is one of the bright spots on Farther Along, but even here you can detect the problems. It’s one of the most muscular songs in the band’s catalogue, but it’s not muscular in the same way as Eight Miles High or 5D or Draft Morning. The muscularity here is weighted down with a certain processed heaviness that reflects the corporate albatross chained to the band in the form of the struggle for presence on the FM radio dial. The canned sound is there in spite of the fact that the record was self-produced by the band and basically recorded live in a London studio over five whirlwind days. The era of the artist with a modicum of independence from the ruthless dictates of the market(aka the age of Aquarius)was giving way to multinational holding companies and their insatiable appetite for profits. Don’t let the shaggy hippies on the record sleeve fool you. The Chuck Berry-ish guitars in tonight’s song sound great, for instance, but no amount of rootsy revivalism can mask the way this stuff conforms to marketing formula...*corporate country rock.
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