The Cover Uncovered: Why The Byrds are joined by a horse on ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’
Of all the bands named after animals, The Byrds are still the only ones to bring another species into the mix.
It’s no secret that the Los Angeles outfit’s fragmented timeline was packed with tension. Over a recording career that lasted under ten years, a total of 11 musicians performed as official members of the group across 12 studio albums. Funnily enough, the lineup went back to its original form by the time they put together their final project in 1973. What happened between the first and the last LPs, however, was far more tumultuous than the heartwarming optics of their first run’s conclusion.
By 1967, The Byrds were shoulder to shoulder with the heavyweights of a creative circuit that was overflowing with talent. With four reputable albums to their credit already, they returned to the studio and began concocting a fifth to keep their momentum alive. By then, of course, the band was in a fragile state. The sessions for The Notorious Byrd Brothers commenced with David Crosby, Michael Clarke, Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn all working together. By the end, only Hillman and McGuinn remained.
The first to leave was Clarke, who was growing increasingly upset at how the group treated him. Matters came to a head during a recording of ‘Dolphin Smile’, when Crosby started criticising his drumming and even referred to him as a “poor little baby” for pushing back. What’s more, the argument was published years later as a hidden track following ‘Universal Mind Decoder’ on the album’s 1997 CD reissue. Although he contributed to five of the 11 cuts on the original release, session percussionists Jim Gordon and Hal Blaine took over for the remainder of the songs.
Crosby’s subsequent departure was a whole other story because he was asked to leave. Although The Byrds were made up of three songwriters, the authority he assumed over their output didn’t sit well with the other two. His credibility had already taken a hit due to the commercial failure of his composition, ‘Lady Friend’, which the band had released as a single. This friction was further aggravated by Crosby’s aversion to recording Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s ‘Goin’ Back’ for the album, which ended up taking the place of his own song, ‘Triad’.
Beyond songwriting, the band members were also frustrated about having their names attached to Crosby’s antics. Most notably, he gave a monologue at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival about how the assassination of United States President John F Kennedy was a hoax. With all the Byrds standing beside him on stage, he told the crowd, “The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed, and this is your country”.
The final straw was Crosby’s overall commitment to the group, which was beginning to dwindle. In addition to missing several recording sessions, Hillman and McGuinn saw his decision to perform with Buffalo Springfield at Monterey as a sign of his detachment from their team. Ultimately, they fired Crosby and finished the album with assistance from multiple session musicians as well as original Byrds member Gene Clark.
Taking all this into account, the horse featured on the cover of The Notorious Byrd Brothers doesn’t raise too many questions. Three of the four main contributors to the tracklist, Clarke, Hillman and McGuinn, can be seen standing beside the animal, with Crosby noticeably absent despite his sizable presence on the album.
In a 1980 interview, Crosby addressed the controversial image and said, “An accident? An accident! … Do you believe that? It’s bullshit. You know it is. You know why [McGuinn] did it.” In response, McGuinn cheekily defended the cover art with, “If we had intended to do that, we would have turned the horse around.”
As speculation surrounding the photo persisted for decades, Hillman cleared the air in his 2020 memoir and wrote, “People still ask me today if the horse represented Crosby. Maybe so, but not intentionally. That was the horse Mike was riding, and it just happened to stick his face in the window next to us. It wasn’t a set-up deal — more like a happy accident.”
