byrdsongs, xv

Through love and trust it’s gonna work out fine.  Hmm.  Well, that kind of casual stoner commonsense didn’t work out so well in the end.  But I can relate to the desirability of the vision even though it sounds so very quaint 45 years later, and even though it’s an expression of defeat.  I’m not even sure McGuinn plays on either one of Chris Hillman’s rustic flavored gems on Younger Than Yesterday.   I don’t hear the jangle of his 12-string, but maybe it’s just that he’s completely overshadowed by the nimble Kentucky twang of Clarence White’s playing. The harmonies on Time Between  are positively Beach Boys-esque, but the vibe is farther north up the PCH, Topanga Canyon to be exact, and the song will transport you, in an orange Karmen Gia, up one of the canyon’s twisting dusty roads.   That distinct woodsy essence permeates the air, the special scent that’s so specific to the mountain ranges of Southern California.  The Byrds are playing on the radio. The big fat number you rolled for the trip burns in the ash tray.  Take it slow because you never know when a goat or chicken or dog or feral cat might cross the road. You’re so far from the hubbub. It’s so peaceful, so lush and green, so different from the life you’ve known up to now.  And that’s the whole point, to try and make things groovy again…

jingle jangle mornings, two

My research on the origins and development of jangle continue.  I’ve come to the conclusion that Django Reinhardt was the first jangler, which means that something as Anglo Saxon sounding as jangle actually has French/Latin roots.  The path connecting Jango-o to George Harrison and Jim McGuinn goes through Chet Atkins, Les Paul, Wes Montgomery, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly, among others, and so the question becomes how to turn this into a coherent story, and whether it’s even possible to do so.  I’m still wrestling with a lot of stuff about which I’m not knowledgeable. The amount of material is vast and a bit overwhelming. But there’s no rush.  In the meantime, enjoy tonight’s jangle pop classic from the Hollies.  I could hear its 12-string intro all day and still want to hear it some more.  The footage reminds me of how much better Graham Nash was when his hair was relatively short and he wasn’t all in your face with his holier-than-thou hippy shit.  Teach your children how to take a bath is what I say…

byrdsongs, xiv

Gene Clark’s music has always hit me on a very personal level.  He’s not a great lyricist, but he doesn’t have to be because his voice does so much in conveying his inner anguish.  After a brief stint with the New Christy Minstrels, he had a fleeting taste of stardom and the good life with the Byrds before things seem to have taken a permanent turn for the worse.  He continued making good music, some of it great, but it was more or less ignored. His story suggests that he was beaten down by life itself. Perhaps only in hindsight can we say that it was all probably inevitable.  So much of Clark’s music with the Byrds had a tragic vibe about it, a sense of the ominous.  Something was bound to go wrong.  Maybe there was a part of him that needed things to go bad because that’s what he responded to as an artist.  I’m just pop psyching here. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want...

Without knowing for sure, the narrative I impose on Clark’s trajectory is that he was never quite the same after his break up with Michelle Phillips in 1966 or ’67.  I can understand why.  In her heyday, Phillips could easily cast a spell over even the most emotionally steeled-over man.  Never underestimate the power of physical beauty, or simply of a pretty face.  To have Michelle Phillips and then lose her…you’re better off to have never had her.  But Clark possessed the ability to turn romantic torment into two-minute bursts of simple pop perfection.  His first post-Byrds album, Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, is patchy but well worth spending time with. The record is definitely an early country rock template, but Clark’s pop instincts are always in the foreground, helped along by a cast of session players – including Glenn Campbell, Clarence White and Leon Russell – that reads like the quintessential Hollywood-style hoedown. Tried So Hard to Please Her has been covered at least twice that I know of (Yo La Tengo, Fairport Convention), but nobody can match Gene Clark when it comes to the sweet pain of a happy/sad love song…

jingle jangle mornings

All this talk about the Byrds got me to thinking about the origins of jangle.  Where did it come from?  The Byrds got it from the Beatles, but then again the Beatles refined and further developed their jingle jangle after hearing the Byrds.  You could go back and forth with this all day. Let’s put the question this way:  Who was jangling before the Beatles?  Buddy Holly was pretty jangly and it’s well-known that Lennon and McCartney were big fans. But Buddy Holly’s music was an outgrowth of country and western, refracted through Elvis Presley.  Now that I think of it, the Nashville Sound that Chet Atkins pioneered has a definite jangle to it. But I don’t think you can you talk about Atkins’ innovations without reference to traditional folk music and bluegrass, to say nothing of Django Reinhardt… You can get caught in an infinite regression with these things.  One of the difficulties involved in telling a historical story is that you have to pick a non-arbitrary starting point to the narrative, one that says this is my an admittedly artificial but well reasoned first instance of this thing that I’m interested in (in this case jangle). Right now I have some hunches, but I don’t really know where jangle comes from in a deep historical sense.  I think it’ll be fun to do a little research and try to find out, and also to trace the development of jangle from its immediate precursors all the way up to REM, the Feelies, the Bangles, and so on.  The deep historical stuff may take some time, especially since a lot of the music from before the advent of rock ‘n roll is much less familiar to me.  But while I’m snooping around looking for beginnings, I’ll post some of my favorite jangly songs, along with my ongoing thoughts on the Byrds.  I hope it will be as enjoyable for readers as I know it will be for me… So here’s the inaugural song for this series, an absolute jangly classic to take you into this hot summer weekend…

byrdsongs, xiii

Younger than Yesterday, recorded in late ’66 and released in early ’67, was the Byrds’ most eclectic record to date and, perhaps for this reason, it marks the point at which the band’s commercial success began to ebb. The overall effort is at once euphoric and reflective, combining pop gems like So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n Roll Star and Have You Seen Her Face with the ethereal beauty of Renaissance Fair and Everybody’s Been Burned.  The album also offers what up to that time was the Byrds’ most definitive move in the direction of country flavored pop with Time Between and The Girl Who Had No Name, both of which feature Clarence White playing with the band for the first time, though still only as a session player.  The distinctive bendy twang of his Tellie makes both those songs radiate with folksy charm…

PS - Friends - Girl With No Name has been pulled from YT.  It will reappear eventually, and I will re-post it when it does.  Sorry.

Younger than Yesterday is, in other words, a perfect encapsulation of its time and place.  The album is scattered and even a bit schizophrenic, yet it coheres and is lucid at the same time.  More than any other band with the exception of the Beatles, the Byrds were a cultural mirror.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were a crystal ball and a leading edge.  If you wanted to know what things would be like six months hence – and remember that six months in the 60s was an eternity, or at least it seems that way in hindsight – you could listen to the most recent Byrds album and you’d know…

byrdsongs, xii

If music is an important part of your life, and if you have young children and want them to love music as much as you do, I highly recommend you expose them to Mr. Spaceman.  It’s a great song for kids with its fun, kooky words and sing-along melody.  I was probably seven or eight years old the first time I heard it.  The memories are all blurry now, but I remember playing the song all the time.  And it still fills me with the same tingly, blissed-out feeling almost 40 years later.  …And yet, underneath all the good vibes there’s something more serious going on. Gene Clark has a few oblique nods to Country and Western music on Turn Turn Turn (Set You Free This Time, If You’re Gone), but with the two-step twang of Mr. Spaceman, McGuinn establishes the trend more clearly, though the song is not as explicit in this vein as Chris Hillman’s subsequent country-inflected offerings on Younger than Yesterday (Time Between, The Girl With No Name).  This gradual embrace of these more rustic motifs planted the seeds of country rock quite a bit earlier than is often depicted in writing on the subject. Although Sweetheart of the Rodeo was, at the time, the Byrds’ most decisive attempt at making a traditional sounding Country and Western record, the album did not represent a sudden change but rather the culmination of something that had been brewing for several years…

I have mixed feelings about country rock.  I’m fond of telling people that I really only like country music when it’s played by stoned hippies.  The more traditional and pure sounding it is, the more I tune it out.  This is why I like but don’t love Sweetheart of the Rodeo.  The songs on the record where you can hear McGuinn’s Rickenbacker jangling away, and where there’s a poppy time signature, those are the ones I can get behind. In other words, I like the songs where the Byrds sound like the Byrds, you can keep the ones where they try to sound like Hank Williams.  I much prefer the next few albums (Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde, Ballad of Easy Rider, Untitled) because, as country rock records, they’re more rock than country. But the meaning of the country in country rock is something that fascinates me.  I view it as an expression of the desire to flee the urban chaos of the mid to late 60s, to get away from the tumult and lead a more peaceful, pastoral, organic, authentic life.  There’s also the cowboy angle, the fetish hippies made of the mythic rugged individual, the nomadic wanderer rooted to nothing and nobody, roaming the wild frontier, living self-sufficiently, free of the grinding and collective problems of city life.  It’s actually a pretty conservative concept, this notion that the most effective way to deal with social strife is to flee from it altogether.  And it’s also built on a Robinson Crusoe-type fantasy of total self-reliance. You can really see why so many hippies became right-wing libertarians. And this is another reason I can’t completely give myself over to country rock. It’s an expression of something I find very problematic…

On the other hand, there’s the sound of Clarence White’s Telecaster, which has magical powers, able to make all my overly-intellectualized reservations vanish.  But well before Clarence White joined the Byrds, and well before Sweetheart of the Rodeo, back when most listeners still thought of the Byrds as a folk rock group and America’s answer to the British Invasion, just as the 60s were becoming a kaleidoscopic fusion of ecstasy and upheaval, there was this initial salvo…

byrdsongs, xi

I spoke of maturation yesterday, the way it’s a double-edged sword, wisdom and perspective on one side, a loss of innocence on the other.  String arrangements were one of a number of manifestations of creeping maturation in pop music.  One rarely if ever heard strings in any pop music before 1965. Rock ‘n roll was the soundtrack to a newly assertive post-war adolescence, and strings were anathema to its rebellious spirit.  But the young grew up fast back then.  It’s not like today where so many adults are technically adults but have really never stopped being children…  When I hear the strings in the Byrds’ interpretation of Wild Mountain Thyme, I think of pop music becoming increasingly self-aware of itself as an important vehicle of communication, which itself is an expression of young people having to come to grips with the turbulent 60s.  The strings – which I actually think diminish the power of the song considerably – are sad, but not for the reasons that were likely intended.  What’s sad about them is that they mark a passage out of the fleeting moment of carefree exuberance.  It’s the end of hotrods and burger stands and girls doin’ the watusi in the cage at Pandora’s Box.  It’s reefers and goofballs and the first few experiments with LSD morphing into bad acid trips and heroin overdoses.  Yesterday you were catchin’ a wave and sittin’ on top of the world, today you’re crouching in a rice paddy. The endless summer, seemingly so blissful and free, turns out to be based on racial domination, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. …I like this version of Wild Mountain Thyme even though its strings inspire in me nothing so much as romantic nostalgia.  They turn the song into a conservative lament...

byrdsongs, x

The songs recorded for and around the time of Fifth Dimension are what change sounds like.  Change and maturation.  Mind you that maturation is by no means necessarily a good thing. It usually involves the loss of innocence. But  maturation also means slowing down and recognizing that, alas, you don’t have all the answers, that it’s not simply a question of what but also of why.  Why, the song, manifests change and maturation in both form and content.  It sounds to me quite literally like the song, especially the version recorded at RCA studios at the tail end of ’65, is varispeeded (?) down a tone or two, which gives it a weirdly languid feel even as the guitars crackle with electricity. Also note the song’s oedipal/electra overtones with its invocation of the generation gap as an encounter with the reality principle.  Keep saying no to her, since she was a baby.  But the most striking feature of the song is the raga drone of the two guitar breaks.  There’s so much going on here, it’s almost too much. One can easily become overwhelmed and tune it all out as just so much noise.  It is admittedly a very noisy song, more a wall of noise than a wall of sound. But the noise works for me.  When I feel myself getting too heavily loaded down with its ideas and concepts - the song is busy as well as being noisy - I take a step back and reduce it to the basic perfection of its three-chord riff.  Still, the varispeeding of the harmonies militates against the  attempt to keep the listening experience simple.  They’re pleasing, those harmonies are, but they’re also scary, the yin and yang of LSD, akin to when you’re six and your parents take you to a haunted house, or when a beautiful girl shows up naked in your nightmare.  You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so you do both at once and let the music sort things out for you…  

byrdsongs, ix

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was a kid my dad had a pretty big record collection, and it was really his records that gave me my first sustained exposure to rock ‘n roll.  He’s not a big pop guy, but he was a mad man, and I suspect that most mad men, like my dad, bought their fair share of groovy LPs and singles, just as a way of staying current with the culture, keeping informed about where the zeitgeist was headed, all in the interest of becoming more potent and effective as marketers.  Adrift amidst a sea of grown up music – Sondheim, Sinatra, Blosom Dearie, and a ton of other stuff that was played on WNEW 1130 AM in New York – I found scattered records from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, Marvin Gaye, Chicago, Three Dog Night, Harry Nilsson, Procol Harum, Neil Young, CSN, Carole Klein, Cat Stevens, and so on and so forth.  The anxiety that, in my imagining of things, drove these purchases, the fear of losing touch with young consumers, seems to have begun no earlier than late 1966 or 1967.  For example, my dad owned every Beatles album from Revolver onwards, but he did not own Rubber Soul or anything before that.  He had the Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet, but not Her Majesty’s Satantic Request, Between the Buttons, or Aftermath. He had the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile and Friends, but not Pet Sounds.  All his Donovan records – and for whatever reason he had tons of them, more than any other pop artist – were from the period after Donovan went psychedelic.  My assumption here is that he bought all these records more or less as they were released, which may or may not have been the case.  There’s a chance that some of these albums were bought well after they came out.  The archaeology here is necessarily somewhat speculative…

 

…I don’t wanna make it sound like my dad’s interest in this music was only about market research.  I think the marketing thing was probably the most significant factor, but he’s pretty darn sophisticated when it comes to music.  He loves jazz.  It has the same effect on him that pop has on me. It makes him so happy. And even though I don’t particularly care for jazz, except in small doses when it’s refracted through rock, like with Steely Dan or Ricky Lee Jones, it fills me with joy when I get to observe him listening to jazz and to hear him talk about his youth, playing hooky from school and sneaking into the Paramount Theater for Glen Miller and Benny Goodman Matinees. I’m not his biological spawn, but he’s been there with me from the beginning of my life, was there in the waiting room at the hospital (the good old days!) while my bio dad was probably out getting drunk.  We always had music playing in the house when I was a kid. Always.  Granted, a lot of the time it was A Little Night Music or some nails-on-a-chalkboard thing like that, but I know that my appreciation for music comes largely from him.  And even if he wasn’t naturally a lover of pop or rock, he was always curious about what turned me on musically, even when it was Kiss or Deep Purple or the Vanilla Fudge, all of which were probably equally chalkboardish for him.

 …He divorced his first wife, I believe, in 1967 or so, and married my mom in 1970. There was a brief period of a few years when he was a swingin’ bachelor, living in a groovy apartment with a view (and with a sunken living room, one hopes) on Central Park South.  I’d like to think that this was the period when he started to buy rock ‘n roll records, a cool ad exec in his late 40s, with groovy records, drinking martinis, flying all over the world, and (who knows?) maybe even smoking a reefer or two periodically in the company of comely airline stewardesses and models from the ads he was shooting…

One of the records I found in his collection was The Byrds Greatest Hits, which was a package Columbia put together in an effort to cash in on past success after the band stopped making chart topping songs.  And, naturally, the song that affected me most profoundly was Eight Miles High, with its freight train base line and Charlie Parker inspired guitar freak out in the intro, and, most of all, those intense four- or even five-part harmonies. I’d never heard anything like it before and I still don’t think I have.  Even though it’s undeniably a strong move in the direction of rock, I still think it’s one of the most remarkable songs ever recorded.  McGuinn denied it was a drug song, which I think is disingenuous, and so does David Crosby, who quipped in response, ‘of course it’s a drug song, we were stoned when we wrote it!’  Sometimes that guy can be quite charming.

Eight Miles High first appeared on Fifth Dimension, which for the Byrds represents the start of a transition away from the relatively simple pleasures of their first two records.  Gene Clark departed during the recording of the album, leaving something of a romantic void.  But while the proximate cause of Clark’s departure seems to have been personality conflicts within the band, I think his leaving is symptomatic of something much deeper, the same forces that marginalized Marty Balin in the Jefferson Airplane.  The age of fun little love songs like I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better and It’s No Secret had now passed, giving way to much more weighty concerns.  The title Track on Fifth Dimension crystallizes the transition on multiple levels.  It’s a song about the theory of relativity and, more generally, about exploration, inquiry, discovery, and (in all likelihood, despite flimsy denials to the contrary) about LSD as the doorway to all these things.  It also happens to be a spectacular song. The harmonies are as lush and ethereal as ever, and McGuinn makes his guitar sound like bagpipes…

byrdsongs, viii

A few observations I neglected to mention about yesterday’s song… As a solo artist, Gene Clark re-recorded it as a sad, countrified ballad. Some Clark devotees prefer it to the original, but I’m not among them.  There’s something about Clark’s signature songwriting approach in the early days of the Byrds, placing words about painful romantic loss within a snappy tune, that really works for me.  I hope it doesn’t mean that I’m happy when I’m miserable.  Maybe it just takes the edge off in some way.  But She Don’t Care About Time actually twists the Gene Clark happy/sad songwriting thing even further.  The words themselves aren’t sad per se, they’re more a statement of total love and devotion, but the music is oddly upbeat and melancholy at the same time.  Listening to it, you get the sense that he’s so in love that it can’t possibly end well.  There’s such a thing as being overly fixated romantically (take it from a guy who knows).  And with her arms around me tight, I see her all in my mind.  Which brings me to tonight’s song, another gem off Turn Turn Turn.  This one puts the listener in touch with the consequences of complete and total devotion.  Actually that’s not quite right.  It’s more about a guy who neglects someone who loves him and only realizes what he had after he’s lost her.  So the two songs, last night’s and tonight’s, both performed in the happy/sad style, present  us with two ends of a spectrum.  One end is the guy who’s overly attached and sets himself up for heartbreak, and the other is the guy who only comes to appreciate the love he took for granted after it’s gone. I call it a spectrum, but I’m not so sure.  Is there a happy medium between these two ways of loving?

byrdsongs, vii

Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn Turn Turn after it, both appearing in 1965, are great albums because as a listener you can hear the 60s becoming the 60s.  I know that this maybe doesn’t make a lot of sense on the face of it, and it’s hard for me to explain what I mean because it’s largely an intuitive ‘feel’ thing that comes across in the vibe of the music.  The songs have an electricity about them and give off a sense that youth culture is coming into its own.   Just check out the opening 12-string riff in the song I’ve posted today and the way the second guitar arrives with such ostentatious confidence.  And then the way the harmonies join in with those guitars.  There’s so much promise in the music, so much optimism, and it’s all so very Californian, California as ground zero of this potent fusion of youth, sex, and jet-aged exploration.  It’s fascinating to look back at it now and realize how fleeting it all was.  The equivalent album for the Beatles was Help!, but by the time Rubber Soul was released several months later, you can already pick up on the 60s veering into something different. Rubber Soul has a conceptual unity to it, as opposed to being a collection of discrete songs, which suggests a new level of self-consciousness where the music comes to recognize itself as art and as something socially important, a 'statement.'  It’s gradual and doesn’t happen all at once, but it’s really interesting to think that the 60s were simultaneously becoming the 60s and becoming something else at the same time. The late Ian McDonald, author of Revolution in the Head, which is in my opinion the best book yet about the Beatles, laments the transition from pop to rock, and I would tend to agree.  It’s not that there’s no longer any good pop music after 1965, of course, but more that the unassuming innocence is increasingly replaced with self-importance. Compare the wide eyed earnestness of the Beach Boys’ Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) with the aesthetic pretension of Pet Sounds, out just six months later.  I say this as someone who loves Pet Sounds and thinks it’s about as close as you can get to being a perfect pop record.  But it’s only almost perfect as opposed to flawless precisely because there’s a dark cloud on the horizon.  For the Byrds, the transition takes place gradually over the next three albums after Turn Turn Turn.  I give Jim/Roger McGuinn credit for holding out for as long as he could.  Those three albums – 5D, Younger than Yesterday, and The Notorious Byrd Brothers – are remarkable because the music seems to be struggling with itself.  There’s a sense of not wanting let go, but also of knowing that one can’t hold back the sands of time.  This is why we hear the influences of Bach, John Coltrane, and raga seeping into the songs on those records. It’s funny that when I listen to the pre-country rock Byrds, I feel like I’m joining in the struggle.  I don’t want the age of pop to pass, and yet I also adore the transitional music they made in their slow passage into rock. I’m torn.  But tonight’s song is pre-transition, the apotheosis of pop, representing that brief moment when everything is just perfect.  It’s a warm summer night. The Byrds are the house band at Ciro’s on the Strip.  The cops haven’t cracked down on the kids yet. McGuinn plugs in his Rickenbacker, and Crosby does the same with his Gretsch.  They tune up to pitch with Hillman.  Clark picks up his tambourine, he of the handsome, chiseled features. The room sparkles with energy as the Byrds begin to play.  The kids in the audience dance dances that are freaky but also relaxed and groovy.  If only they could make time stand still…

byrdsongs, vi

The late Gene Clark is, as I mentioned, a tragic sentimentalist and a pop lifer of the very first degree.  Here Without You is his finest song, in my opinion.  It must be tough when the best work of your career comes at its front end.  It certainly seems to have been difficult for Clark.  Though he continued to make and be involved in excellent music after leaving the Byrds for good in 1967, his subsequent work appeared sporadically and his life was apparently pretty rocky.  On Here Without You, we get a glimpse of Clark in all his promise, the romantic dreamer transforming loss and pain into gorgeous music.  The Streets I walk on depress me / The ones that were happy when I was with you…  So much emotional poignancy gets packed into these simple and direct words.  But it’s not just Clark’s words and singing.  The harmonies are also dreamy and flawless. They wash over you and transport you to the top of Laurel Canyon at the last moments of a blood orange dusk.  I spend a lot of time feeling unsatisfied, worried, regretful, alienated, disappointed, alone…etc., but the Byrds make me feel lucky to be a Born Again Angeleno, lucky to be able to partake at least a little bit in the mysteriousness blowing in the dusty desert wind and through the swaying palms…

bydsongs, v

The Bells of Rhymney is the prettiest song you’ll ever hear about a mining disaster, and it’s also one of my favorite byrdsongs.  The original Pete Seeger version is a typical folky protest dirge, but in Jim McGuinn’s hands it becomes a transcendent piece of folk pop art.  The main guitar riff underlying the song is so simple, so perfect.  If you hear it and think to yourself that it sounds like a Beatles song, you might be surprised to learn that you have your causal arrow moving in the wrong direction.  The story goes that George Harrison heard the Bells of Rhymney and then proceeded to use it in the Rubber Soul period for If I Needed Someone.  The give and take between the Beatles and Byrds between ’65 and ‘67 is endlessly fascinating to me. I like thinking about the Beatles and the Byrds and maybe Derek Taylor hanging out in the Hollywood Hills at Peter Fonda’s house… LSD… She said I know what it’s like to be dead…Along with the loveliness of McGuinn’s guitar in the Bells of Rhmney, the stunning harmonies, and particularly David Crosby’s singing on the high end, are what make the song so special (his rhythm guitar playing is pretty great, too). The last harmonized high note in the outro is, without exaggeration, one of the most jaw droppingly gorgeous moments in the history of pop music… 

byrdsongs, iv

Tonight I bring you an artifact from the very peak of human civilization.  It’s been all downhill since, which is not to say it’s been all bad.  Some of the best artistry emerges out of periods of gloomy decline.  But still… I think you’ll agree when you watch tonight’s clip that the giddy optimism is palpable.  The dance routine by itself makes the clip worth multiple viewings, and how can you not dig the girls doing the watusi in their go-go cages?  It makes me sad when I mentally juxtapose it all with the general vibe in the air these days. It’s almost as if I’m watching something that took place on a different planet, in a different galaxy, a different universe.  Whatever it is, it’s a far superior place.  I can only imagine how lovely it must have been to have lived at a time completely devoid of skanky body ink and chronic obesity. But that’s neither here nor there. The important thing is the beauty of the music. The chiming jangle of McGuinn’s guitar sends a pleasing tingle down my spine.  The multi-part harmonies never cease to put me in a trance.  And then there’s Gene Clark, with his tambourine, and one of his best happy/sad songs. He’s the master of taking downbeat words and fucking with you by putting them in a shiny, upbeat context.  Maybe this is another aspect of mid-60s optimism.  The outlook is looking so bright that even breakups can take on a sunny aspect…