byrdsongs, lxviii

A friend and reader asked me why I’ve been bothering to write about so much mediocre music lately. It’s a fair question, especially since I have other exciting projects in mind for the future. Why not make the future now? I could have ended this series with The Notorious Byrd Brothers, in which case the whole thing would’ve had a happy ending, at least musically speaking.  But I didn’t wanna short change the Clarence White era because I have so much admiration for his guitar playing, even though the Byrds studio material over his tenure with the band as an official member is patchy and mixed.  And then I wanted to reassess all the post-Byrds bands and solo material in hopes of finding gems I‘d never paid attention to before. So far, the only gems I’ve found are ones I already knew about. I hope that I’ve at least been able to introduce them to folks who’ve never heard them before. …Most of the stuff from the mid 70s is quite frankly forgettable. I’m fond of saying that time redeems all bad music.  This may be true of music that’s initially not taken seriously or that’s perceived as a joke, like the Monkees or Herman’s Hermits or the Archies.  But time tends not to redeem stuff that’s just tepid and bland, that just is with no real reason for being other than that it may serve as a vehicle through which a record company can extract more value from its roster of talent. No amount of time, in other words, will redeem the second Manassas album or anything by Souther Hillman Furay. Even still, I’m pressing on in order to be thorough. That's just the anal-retentive way I roll. I think I should see this project through to a conclusion that provides some satisfying closure. It’d be a bummer to end things on a bad note. In spite of all this less-than-stellar music we’ve been exposed to over the past few weeks, it’s still the case that the Byrds – McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman, Clark, and even Clarke – are and will always be heroes to me because of what they were able to do over a few heady years in the mid 60s. I'd like to conclude this series in a way that’s worthy of their most enduring legacy. I imagine that this is how Roger McGuinn felt in the mid 70s. He kept making unremarkable records, each time knowing that the music had to be framed inside an FM radio shell, each time trying to make the corporate rock idiom work for him.  It wasn't a natural fit, perhaps because he’s way too good of a musician to be having to bend his talent to some prefabricated commercial mold. I hear the stuff and I think, what a waste of great talent.  And it’s not his fault.  The changing economics of the music industry forced him into a narrowly circumscribed box, leading to material that sounds stunted and lifeless.  Cardiff Rose, released in 1976, lends further credence to this diagnosis.  What's werid is that the record is produced by Mick Ronson. Rono!  On the one hand, with two of my all-time GUITAR GODZ working on the same project, I'd expect the outcome to be so much better than what we end up with here. But on the other hand, let's face it, Rono and McGuinn is a strange mix, the king of trashy power chords and the deft 12-string player with his endlessly intricate passing chords and arpeggios.  It's a mismatch, and perhaps this is what accounts for the music's lack of personality. The record has some nice touches here and there, but it’s pretty boring stuff, a collection of songs that all more or less sound similar to one another. There’s nothing distasteful on the record, it’s just dull as hell. One thing that’s different this time around is that the song structures are slightly more folky sounding, indicating that McGuinn's attempts at making convincing corporate country rock have been abandoned in favor of corporate folk rock - CFR - with heavy emphasis on the C and the R. A cover of Joni Mitchell's Dreamland is the one song on Cardiff Rose that has anything vaguely approaching a hook, like a water mirage in the midst of the hottest and driest of hot and dry deserts…