David Crosby on the best song The Byrds ever made: “I like that a lot”
David Crosby always had higher aspirations than just being a member of The Byrds. It probably didn’t hurt being in one of the few bands that The Beatles managed to have a dialogue within the 1960s, but Crosby knew that playing songs like ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star’ for the rest of his life wasn’t really in the cards for him. Despite leaving for Crosby, Stills, and Nash later, the frontman could at least admit that ‘Eight Miles High’ was one of the true highlights of their career.
But if you wanted to be coy, this would have been just another example of The Beatles playing a hand in what all rock musicians did afterwards. After all, The Byrds formed as a rock group after seeing the Fab Four on television and hearing the chime of George Harrison’s 12-string guitar, so it wasn’t out of the question for them to go down the psychedelic rabbit hole as their British mates were making Revolver.
That’s really where the comparisons begin and end, though. The psychedelic scene still had room to grow, and being from California, The Byrds had a good view of what the Haight Ashbury scene was going to become once acts like the Grateful Dead started to make their own brand of fantastic music.
While ‘Eight Miles High’ is still one of the cornerstone tracks of that era of California rock, it’s easy to still hear The Byrds inside everything. As opposed to people who just wear a style like a mask, it’s easy to pick out Roger McGuinn’s voice in the mix, which sounds suspiciously coated in reverb, just like his guitar.
The metaphor of the title is so open that you could fly a plane through it, but that doesn’t mean it’s that bad. The whole track was about capturing the feeling of soaring above the clouds, so having a guitar that seems like it’s rising to the heavens was precisely what people wanted to hear.
Crosby made his best music when falling back down to Earth, but ‘Eight Miles High’ was still a peak for him with The Byrds, telling Vulture, “I think the best thing we did was ‘Eight Miles High’. I like that song a lot. Byrds was a pretty clever group in terms of taking singer-songwriter stuff and turning it into pop records. Roger McGuinn was very, very good at that.”
As much as that kind of sound worked in the late 1960s, Crosby started writing songs that didn’t exactly fit The Byrds’ mould. It was certainly leaning towards folksy music, but it probably worked out for the best that he left for his supergroup around the same time that Gram Parsons came into the group, bringing with him an encyclopedic knowledge of country music for Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
Even though ‘Eight Miles High’ is far from the most omnipresent song of the psychedelic rock movement, it certainly had the biggest sound of any of its contemporaries. After one Bob Dylan-esque hit after another, this was when they started to understand what it meant to make music that could go beyond standard rock and roll.
