Roger McGuinn had a 12-string guitar. It was like nothing I'd ever heard. - David Alan Coe, ''Willie, Waylon and Me'' he root of desire is staked in our hearts and immune to logic.
It is impossible to say what might come of a glimpse of John Lennon cradling a short scale electric guitar on the Ed Sullivan Show, or the bright trebly compressed sustain of the 12-string intro to ''Mr. Tambourine Man'' - the version The Byrds wrested away from Mr. Dylan.
I wanted a Rickenbacker guitar since before I ever thought about playing a guitar. Yet while I've owned a lot of guitars in my life, I've never owned a Ricky. The reasons for this are not complicated: They were too expensive, and now that I can afford one, I'm sufficiently mature enough to understand that I've no real need of an expensive musical instrument.
Besides, there's a waiting list - it could be five years before my guitar would be delivered. You can’t always get what you want. But I think about the dream guitar every time I hear The Byrds - or Tom Petty, whose debt to Roger (formerly Jim ) McGuinn is as acknowledged as it is profound.
McGuinn was as much imitator as innovator - he bought his Rickenbacker 360-12 after watching George Harrison play one in A Hard Day's Night.
The sound, chill and chiming, is at once electric and sublimely organic, the crackle of neurons firing in some deep sweet seat of the brain. You feel the guitar, its yaw and warble — the ringing arpeggios based on banjo fingerpicking — and your response is emotional rather than intellectual.
It’s all there on the four-CD / one-DVD retrospective of the band’s career called There Is a Season, being released into the marketplace today by Sony / Legacy.
Maybe The Byrds have not been treated well by history. In their day, they were considered the first American band to rival The Beatles, and their initial objective, to marry the blissful Mersey pop of The Beatles with the serious intent of the folkie Bob Dylan, was inspired and inspiring to the point that Dylan was compelled to go electric himself.
That’s not to suggest that The Byrds forced his hand, though there was likely some of that — why should Dylan cede the hit records to his cover band ? But there’s no denying they got to folk rock ahead of everybody else.
And they probably got to psychedelic drug music before everybody except possibly The Yardbirds (who arrived there honestly, cutting the blues with smack and acid ).
And while they probably didn’t make the first country-rock record, they were, thanks to Gram Parsons, undeniably the first rock band to make a straight-ahead cosmic American, i. e. “country,” music album.
But they busted up, and David Crosby became famous for singing with Graham Nash (and sometimes Stephen Stills and Neil Young ). Connoisseurs of roots music might argue the Flying Burrito Brothers were a more coherent idea. By 1972 The Byrds were done, though the name lived on in dubious arrangements through the 1990 s.
Unless you are one of those obsessives, The Byrds might seem less iconic than their ’ 60 s contemporaries — The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and The Who. They haven’t the cultish cachet of The Kinks or the Grateful Dead or the rousing, persistent accessibility of Creedence Clearwater Revival. If you didn’t buy in at the beginning — if you weren’t alive or alert — The Byrds might seem like nothing more than a familiar sound encountered now and then on classic rock radio.
Their reading of Pete Seeger’s “Turn ! Turn ! Turn !
” — a folkie hymn cribbed from Ecclesiastes — made No. 1 before you paid much attention to any rock ’n ’ roll that didn’t emanate from a Saturday morning cartoon.
Nothing ever completely fades away anymore.
In the digital age, we’ve all got warehouses as big as Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu in which to stash away the totems of our age (and any previous ages with which we’ve developed a graverobber’s fascination ). Maybe we will never get the Rickenbacker, but we’ve got the songs it made. Boxed sets stack up like little coffins, containing the bodies of work of all those bands that made the 1960 s and 1970 s seem so special, whether or not you were there.
The cultural hegemony of the baby boom — m-m-m-my — generation assures that we’re all familiar with the canonical works. You can’t go a week without hearing The Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” somewhere.
The set (suggested retail price $ 54. 98 ), compiled with the help of band members McGuinn and Chris Hillman, includes 99 chronologically arranged tracks, the first half or so of which feature The Byrds’ original lineup — McGuinn, Hillman, Gene Clark, David Crosby and Michael Clarke. It also includes both sides of a pre-Byrds single recorded by McGuinn, Crosby and Clark under the rubric “The Jet Set,” and a couple they recorded as “The Beefeaters.
”
The set also collects five previously unreleased live tracks: “He Was a Friend of Mine” (recorded in 1967 for Swedish radio ), “You All Look Alike” and “Nashville West” (both from a 1970 show at New York’s Queens College ), and “I Trust” and a cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do” (both from a 1970 show at New York’s Fillmore East ).
The DVD features 10 tracks of television performances from 1965-1967. In the liner notes by critic David Fricke are contributions from Tom Petty and The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris.
McGuinn provides an introduction. It’s an improvement on the 1990 boxed set — the DVD is especially interesting — and the $ 40 it’s likely to cost in the real world seems a fair price. If you’ve got all The Byrds’ albums you don’t need it, but you’ll probably want it.
If you merely want a representative sample of their work, this will suffice (though you might want to pick up a copy of Sweetheart of the Rodeo as well ). At any rate, it’s a lot cheaper than a vintage Rickenbacker 360-12.
McGuinn and Clark came from the world of folk music.
McGuinn had been part of the Chad Mitchell Trio and worked with Bobby Darin as a backing guitarist when Darin decided to incorporate folk music into his act, and had played the coffeehouse circuit on both coasts. Clark had been a member of the New Christy Minstrels, and he shared McGuinn’s fascination with The Beatles. They formed a duo and played a few gigs before they were approached by David Crosby — who had been performing with the Greenwich Village-based folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers — to form a trio.
To fill out the rock band lineup, the three singer-guitarists added drummer Michael Clarke — allegedly more because of his physical resemblance to Brian Jones than for his musical ability — and Hillman to play bass. (Though Hillman had never played the instrument before, he was an accomplished musician who’d played guitar and mandolin in bluegrass bands since he was 15 years old. )
McGuinn has said he stumbled across his trademark jinglejangle style on the Rickenbacker 12-string by accident — at the recording session for the first Byrds’ single “Mr.
Tambourine Man” (the faux anglophilic spelling was the band’s nod to the British invasion ). The engineer, Ray Gerhardt, insisted that Mc-Guinn’s guitar be run through a compressor to protect the studio equipment from loud rock.
The effect not only sounded great, but it allowed McGuinn to sustain notes longer — he could use the guitar to imitate the freejazz atonalities of saxophonists like John Coltrane (the best example is found in the opening riff of the 1966 hit “Eight Miles High” ).
Contributing to the almost kiddy pop brightness of the first two Byrds’ albums is the shiny production of Terry Melcher, who brought the same sensibility to his work with the band as he did to Paul Revere and the Raiders. Gene Clark was the first band member to assert himself as a songwriter. There Is a Season includes his “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “ Set You Free This Time, ” “World Turns All Around Her” and “She Don’t Care About Time” off the first two albums.
By the end of 1965 McGuinn appeared to be the band’s driving force. Clark exited after supplying the lyrics to “Eight Miles High,” a song ostensibly about the band’s airplane trip to England but widely considered — and often banned as — a drug anthem. (Interestingly, one of the reasons Clark gave for leaving the band was fear of flying.
)
While the third album, Fifth Dimension (5 D ), wasn’t as psychedelic as the initial single (and its flip side, the raga-flavored “Why” ) might have led some to expect, it did establish The Byrds as a band capable of generating their own material (though Dylan would remain a touchstone throughout their career ).
Hillman was the star writer of the very strong fourth album, Younger Than Yesterday, delivering four full songwriting credits (“ Have You Seen Her Face, ” “Time Between,” “ Thoughts And Words” and “The Girl With No Name” ) as well as co-writing with McGuinn the anthemic “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n ’ Roll Star ?” (a snarling dig at The Monkees’ made-for-TV success that some ironically took as autobiographical ).
Guitarist Clarence White made his first appearance (as a session player ) on the album.
In late 1967, Crosby was fired from the band on the grounds that he had become “too dictatorial.” Crosby alleges the conflict stemmed from the group’s decision not to release his menagea-trois ballad “Triad” in favor of a Gerry Goffin-Carole King song called “Goin’ Back.
” (There Is a Season collects both The Byrds’ version of “Triad” — which was later recorded by the Jefferson Airplane and by CSN Y — and “Goin’ Back.” )
Gene Clark came back, then quit after three weeks rather than board an airplane. Drummer Mike Clarke quit and was replaced by Kevin Kelley.
White became a permanent member. And Hillman recruited Gram Parsons to play keyboards and rhythm guitar.
For me, The Byrds became something different when Parsons joined — the legend is that McGuinn thought he was a nice kid, an amiable young man who’d do what he was told.
But Parsons, largely by force of personality and undeniable talent, made The Byrds into a honky-tonk country outfit, resulting in the seminal Sweetheart of the Rodeo. And then, before the album was released, Parsons quit the band rather than play to segregated audiences in South Africa. Lee Hazelwood alleged that Parsons was under contract to his record company and McGuinn — perhaps nervous about a new singer dominating the new Byrds album— re-recorded most of Parson’s vocals.
Parsons, who was dead within a couple of years, thought Mc-Guinn made a mess of the songs, and there is evidence he was right. If you compare Parsons ’ version of the Louvin Brothers’ “The Christian Life” during the Sweetheart sessions to McGuinn’s take, the latter comes off as charming novelty, a lookyhere, we-got-some-Americanafor-the-kids rock ’n’ roll gesture. Parsons, on the other hand, isn’t kidding at all.
He pushes his always tenuous voice to the shaky brink in a sincere, utterly un-ironic reading of the lyrics. All his buddies who want him to drink and carouse with them are going to hell and he’s not, and he’s glad of that:
My buddies shun me, since I turned to Jesus..
. Others find pleasure in things I despise / I like the Christian life There would be a clutch of other albums, some chilling moments — like Clarence White’s lead vocal on the title track of 1971 ’s Farther Along. (White would be killed in an accident in July 1973; Parsons would famously die by misadventure in a motel room in Joshua Tree, Calif.
, in September of that year. )
McGuinn tried to reunite the original lineup in 1972, but the results were anticlimactic. The Byrds brand became diluted in the 1970 s and ’ 80 s, to the point that at one time original drummer Clarke was touring with a band called The Byrds that included no other original members.
It wasn’t until 1990 that a legal agreement was reached that prevented any group not including McGuinn, Hillman and Crosby from performing as The Byrds. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the band in 1991; later that year Gene Clark died. In 1997, Michael Clarke died.
Hillman and Crosby have expressed interest in working with McGuinn on future Byrds projects, but McGuinn has so far rebuffed their overtures, preferring to concentrate on his solo folk tours. He still plays that Rickenbacker. pmartin@arkansasonline.
com
Philip Martin
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