The ironic “guarantee” David Crosby made after the first Byrds album
On April 12th, 1965, just three days after London’s Yardbirds released their first top ten single, ‘For Your Love’, another ornithologically inspired new outfit from Los Angeles, The Byrds, put out a jangly tune called ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. This was a Bob Dylan cover, of course, but plenty of radio listeners at the time didn’t even realise it, as Dylan’s own version of the song – released as an album track on Bringing It All Back Home – had only been out for a few weeks itself.
By the summer of ‘65, however, as The Byrds’ take on ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ became the first Dylan-penned song to top the US pop charts, the cultural impact was clear. When you combined the folk roots and high-minded lyrics of Dylan with the harmonies and chiming Rickenbackers of The Beatles, you got a new thing called “folk rock”, and The Byrds were that new genre’s poster children.
Flash forward 60 years, and The Byrds – much like the Yardbirds, for that matter – are remembered more as a reflection of their times, and as a launching pad for young musicians, rather than a culture-changing band on the shortlist of 1960s greats. In some ways, that’s only because the members of The Byrds, when effectively offered the “crown” of folk-rock, immediately rejected it.
“Most groups accomplish one thing,” founding member David Crosby told the Associated Press in 1966. “They achieve a static form and maintain it for security. In so doing, they promptly go straight backwards.
“Every record we make,” the 24-year-old Crosby added for emphasis, “Will differ from every other record, I guarantee.”
Crosby was armed with evidence of his point in the form of The Byrds’ newly released single ‘Eight Miles High’, which also appeared on their 1966 album Fifth Dimension. Less than a year had passed since the huge success of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, which had been followed by two full-length albums flush with other Dylan covers. Now, the older, wiser Byrds (all still in their early 20s) were pulling from a much wider pool of influence, including the likes of John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar.
“[Our music] is neither jazz nor Indian music,” Crosby clarified. “But we listen to their music and like it, and it influences our minds and our playing. What we play is an abstraction from what we’ve heard. We don’t take their form or their instruments. Our music is done on an electronic 12-string, a much newer and stranger instrument. Music now is a blesh—a blending and meshing. It’s a good word: it works.”
As Dylan and the Beatles had learned already, embracing the new sounds of the changing ‘60s will cost you some of your original fan base. Those who stuck with The Byrds, though, found that Crosby was true to his word. Every album was different from the next; just maybe not for the reasons Crosby might have imagined.
Before recording their fourth album, 1967’s Younger Than Yesterday, The Byrds lost their primary songwriter, Gene Clark, who decided to pursue his own project, as well as their producer, Allen Stanton, who switched to a different label.
During the later months of ‘67, as the remaining band members worked on the psychedelic folk-rock album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, well-documented creative tensions led to the dismissal of drummer Michael Clarke and Crosby himself, who went on to start similar feuds with his new bandmates in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
The only remaining original Byrds by 1968, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, did manage to stick to David Crosby’s old guarantee, even if it was out of spite. Adding Gram Parsons to the band, they released the seminal country-rock classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo that year, an album that bore no resemblance to the jangle-pop Byrds of just a few years earlier. Unfortunately, the record also inspired the immediate departure of Hillman and Parsons to form the Flying Burrito Brothers, leaving Roger McGuinn as the last man standing by the time 1969’s Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde came out.
Crosby had been quite prescient. No two Byrds records would ever be the same, because no two Byrds records, save for the first two, would include the same line-up.
