Is The Byrds song ‘Eight Miles High’ about drugs?
A classic slice of early psychedelia, The Byrds’ 1966 single ‘Eight Miles High’ sounds like it’s by the trippers, for the trippers, of the trippers. Its 12 cryptic lines about things “stranger than known” and “shapeless forms” almost feel like a parody of songs later written on LSD because they’re that overtly drug-tinged.
And Roger McGuinn’s double-octave arpeggios up and down his 12-string guitar sound like a mock military signal, a clarion call for hippies of the world to unite in acid-fuelled fantasy. The droning harmonised vocals that follow hardly bring us back down to earth.
The Byrds themselves made no secret of their drug habits. Guitarist David Crosby once famously suggested, “All wars would end immediately if the various chiefs of state dropped a little LSD.” And it’s a matter of historical record that they dropped acid together with The Beatles in early 1966, around the time that ‘Eight Miles High’ was recorded.
But the story behind the song’s meaning and inspiration is not nearly as trippy as we might assume when listening to it. Although it certainly bears the hallmarks of early psychedelia with influences from Indian raga music, post-bop jazz and The Beatles’ drug-inspired compositions, the basis for the lyrics to ‘Eight Miles High’ is actually rather less rock and roll.
The eight-mile-high club?
The song started to take shape while The Byrds were several miles up in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, flying over to the UK for their first international tour. The idea came about because of a conversation between vocalist Gene Clark and main songwriter McGuinn about exactly how high their aircraft was flying.
Clark began to write lyrics about his view of English cities, their streets and their weather as the tour progressed. Crosby added in the line, “Rain grey town, known for its sound”, in reference to London’s music scene. The piece was most likely a collaborative effort between the two of them and McGuinn, who developed its melodic structure on the basis of Clark’s lyrics.
In another nod to British music, the original lyric “Six miles high” was altered to “Eight miles high” as a tribute to The Beatles’ US number one single ‘Eight Days a Week’. Ironically, that’s another song written about touring.
Even more ironically, Clark, The Byrds member responsible for most of the lyrics for ‘Eight Miles High’, left the band the same month it was released as a single. His main reason? A chronic fear of flying that put him off touring. Clearly, the lyrics meant more to him than throwaway verses about a foreign tour. In the first place, their subject matter had been inspired by Clark’s phobia.
Another reason for Clark’s cold feet about touring again with the band was their overall bad experience on that first UK tour. Their performances received negative reviews, while pre-existing English band The Birds took legal action against their name.
One couplet of the song’s lyrics alludes to these misfortunes, going beyond mere weather descriptions and reverence for the British invasion. Although it might sound like just another complaint about Britain’s drab climate, “Nowhere is there warmth to be found” is actually a complaint about the cold reception the band received from the UK press. And “those afraid of losing their ground” are clearly supposed to be members of The Birds, who felt threatened enough by the arrival of their US counterparts to sue them.
And so, while not quite scientifically correct, ‘Eight Miles High’ was written as a transparent and unambiguous reference to the terrifying height at which a commercial aircraft flies. No allusion to drugs if you ask The Byrds. “It wasn’t really about that,” McGuinn has explained. It really is just about flying, then. Plane and simple.
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