The “best” Byrds song, according to David Crosby
As the British invasion dominated the American charts by the mid-1960s, it took Los Angeles-based outfit The Byrds to sense the countercultural winds blowing.
Youth rebellion and anti-establishment sentiment were bubbling away on the Billboard Hot 100. While The Rolling Stones were chipping away at sexual mores on ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and Motown/Stax were scoring the Civil Rights struggle, it was The Byrds’ ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ in October 1965 that drew everyone’s attention to the explosive convergence of social upheaval and creative flourish that was hurtling toward the Western world at a pace.
Before long, rhythm guitarist David Crosby found himself at the epicentre of the countercultural explosion. Helped by The Byrds’ cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ a few months earlier, the quintet, albeit with shifting line-up over the years, spearheaded the American 1960s road to Woodstock across a run of celebrated folk rock records splashed with subtle psychedelic leanings.
Crosby would emerge as a titan of the era, entering the 1970s as one-third of the Crosby, Stills & Nash harmony trio and reaching even greater critical standing with Buffalo Springfield’s Neil Young.
Despite such a celebrated body of work, Crosby always consistently highlighted The Byrds’ album effort that he thought stood as their best. Released in February 1967, the fourth LP Younger Than Yesterday saw the band soak up the lysergic flavours of the day, coating their trademark jangle with studio trickery and electronic flourishes, as well as headier immersion into jazzy arrangements. Despite losing founding member Gene Clark, The Byrds continued charting a creatively innovative course, and their gift for rock-solid harmonies hadn’t dimmed as the Summer of Love was beckoning ever closer.
“Well, we knew what we wanted to do, and by that time we’d gotten pretty good at it,” Crosby told Musicangle in 2004, casting his mind back to Younger Than Yesterday’s importance to The Byrds. “That’s probably the best record. I remember sitting up at [bassist Chris] Hillman’s house looking out over Los Angeles, ‘chemically enhanced’ and listening to the thing and thinking ‘goddamn’ you know? I was really knocked out by that. I thought it was an excellent piece of work”.
One song on Younger Than Yesterday would anticipate Crosby’s knack for stirring and slightly haunting songcraft. While written as early as 1962, ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’s weary blues wandering owes much to its artful chord work, a quality that shines all over Younger Than Yesterday. “That one’s in dropped D, and you could see right away that I was a slightly demented child. Yeah, I haven’t played that in a long time. I remember the chords…that’s for sure”.
Crosby summed up his take on the pensive ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ with high praise: “That one I think is my best set of chords, and that one I still do”.
Contemporary reception of Younger Than Yesterday was mixed, at odds with the retrospective critical appraisal The Byrds’ fourth LP has enjoyed since. But ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ struck the music world instantly with Crosby’s ruminative ache, a spike of lyrical pain that would guide his future work.
