The tune David Crosby called his “first decent song”
David Crosby got started young. Raised alongside a musician brother, it seemed like Crosby was bound to only ever be a musician, flunking out of school to fall into the inevitable.
At first, he couldn’t find a place to land, though. After dropping out of college, Crosby bounced from band to band, group to group, lending his voice to a whole bunch of different folk and early rock groups, but none of them ever managed to make it stick. There were some minor successes, but almost all of them came through covers, not originals.
Even when he finally got The Byrds together, it wasn’t their own words that made them big. Instead, it was Bob Dylan’s, as their cover of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ sent the group to number one, giving Dylan his only ever chart topper, despite not actually singing on the recording himself.
On their debut, there were some self-written tracks, but they were admittedly nothing special – Crosby himself admitted that. But for a bunch of albums, three to be exact, Crosby felt like they were doing the job of songwriters. but not actually proving their worth as one at all.
There are some legs to that opinion. In those early years, their Dylan cover kept them fed at first. Then it was their cover of Peter Seeger’s ‘Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)’ that kept momentum going. The singles were leading the way while their full LPs were really only performing off the back of them, not because people were amazed at Crosby and co as the new legends of the folk songwriting game.
They were trying though. Crosby especially felt like they were trying by their first album, Fifth Dimension, hoping that people might have acknowledged that. “‘Eight Miles High’ had showed we were already trying, with the John Coltrane guitar solo and writing about drugs, which nobody else dared to do,” he said.
However, that album, and the first song they were truly proud of, was caught in a shadow. “But I think ‘Eight Miles High’ was still miles behind Revolver,” he said. As The Beatles shared their record a month after their own, The Byrds were forgotten quickly for the Fab Four as they were forever dogged with comparisons to the Liverpool lot, but inevitably comparisons that put them in second place.
The mission was to escape that, and so the band locked in. “Our next album was The Byrds trying to be us, not The Beatles,” Crosby said as Younger Than Yesterday stood as their mission to finally stand on their own feet and be freed from simply feeling like a tribute act, or a second best opinion.
Sometimes, resolve is all it takes. Suddenly, it felt like something clicked as Crosby said, “We started to write much better.” With the pressure on to improve, the singer and songwriter actually felt like he did, crafting what felt to him like his first real song, or at least the first he was proud of, stating, “‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ was my first decent recorded song.”
