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The Byrds “5th Dimension” (1966)
5D (5th Dimension)/Wild Mountain Thyme/Mr Spaceman/I See You/What’s Happening?!?!?/I Come And Stand At Every Door/Eight Miles High/Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go?)Captain Soul//John Riley/2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)
The Byrds weren’t exactly flying at high altitude by
the time 1966 rolled around. Never the most stable of bands, as early as this
third LP and second year they’d lost their lead singer-songwriter Gene Clark
and like many pre-psychedelic bands in 1966 were split between embracing all
the new exciting possibilities that laid over the horizon or to make music that
their grannies would really enjoy. This sort of confusion occurs many times on
Byrds LPs – they even name their 7th album ‘Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde’ in
reference to this split personality – but this third record is the first time a
Byrds LP is so eccentric that you truly don’t have a clue what’s coming next
the first time you play it. Without Gene Clark there to take the lion’s share
of the writing credits, the Byrds truly don’t know what direction to fly off in
next – so what we get are a few traditional folk songs that if anything sound
slowed down rather than jazzed up, a blues instrumental, some deeply serious
protest songs, some wild and wacky protest songs, a truly adventurous
psychedelic single in ‘8 Miles High’ and its often-overlooked successor ‘I See
You’ and, umm, Roger McGuinn’s hoover doubling as a Lear Jet. Even given that
it was 1966, this album is weird.
But as ever on this website, being ‘weird’ doesn’t
being ‘bad’. As a general rule it’s the bland and empty albums (and artists)
that tend to get short shrift from us (anybody mention The Spice Girls?!) –
albums this weird and eccentric are well worth a place in our discography, even
if this album’s just a little too lop-sided to make it into the 'AAA top
albums' list proper. So here’s the story of The Byrds’ nest-egg, the album that
more than any other sets the template for the group in the years to come and
each character’s later solo records to boot – McGuinn’s quick-switching between
heavy world philosophy and light as a cloud comedy; David Crosby’s first
stirrings of outrage at the corruption in the world around him and the
miserable use humans have made of all the things they’ve been granted in life;
Chris Hillman adds a touch of soul alongside his more usual touches of country
and bluegrass; and drummer Michael Clarke just plays the drums.
But no, that’s being unfair – its as a band playing
together that The Byrds really grow on this record and Michael Clarke’s
contribution to that is the greatest of all. Let’s not forget, The Byrds had
never actually played as a five-piece in the studio until the session after ‘Mr
Tambourine Man (which in terms of instruments just features McGuinn alongside a
set of session musicians) in 1965 and the band were understandably a little rusty
on the first two albums. But by the time of 5D The Byrds are suddenly a
powerhouse of noise, easily the equal of their more rocky counterparts in 1966,
but still with enough subtlety to handle the ballads and switches of tempo
convincingly. Michael Clarke, the Byrd who was famously chosen for his perfect
blonde haircut rather than his musicianship skills and learnt to play the drums
on cardboard boxes, is no longer an embarrassment to the band’s sound but one
of the best drummers around. His switches of style are amazing on this album – he
so should have been a 'jazz' not a rock or pop or even folk-rock drummer - equally
at home with the improvisational licks of ‘8 Miles High’, the all-out rock of
‘I See You’ the truly tricky slowed-down beat of ‘I Come And Stand At Every
Door’ and the pop of ‘Mr Spaceman’. It's when he's being made to play the same
licks several times in a row his playing suffers. So huge is this leap that I
assumed for years the Byrds had brought in a session drummer for this and the next
two albums but no: every drum note and cymbal wash is indeed played by Michael
Clarke. And even if the other Byrds did allegedly spend hours telling him what
to play I don’t care – he still had to play it. Possibly the biggest leap in
any AAA musician’s abilities come in this record, which remains Michael
Clarke’s greatest (half) hour.
Not that the other Byrds are far behind him. Freed,
temporarily, of playing along to both Gene Clark’s and Bob Dylan's lyrical songs
(the band are really making the most of this opportunity to create a 'new'
sound well away from what they were known for - it's a temporary solution,
though, with Dylan very much back in place for the nect LP), the other three
Byrds are given much more scope to put their instrumental skills to use. And,
barring McGuinn’s even briefer attempt at trying to write lyrical passages like
his colleague Gene, the other songs on this album are all rhythmically driven
rather than lyrically driven (if the Byrds really were formed to be the halfway
point between Dylan and the Beatles then this is the point where the fab four
influence really takes over and folk becomes just another wash of colour
rather than a driving force). McGuinn’s guitar playing really leaps forward on
this album, especially the first recording (!) ‘8 Miles High’, adding
psychedelic fringes to what had previously been a very clear and folky sound.
David Crosby, whose roots lay more in jazz and Indian music than pop and rock
in this period, finally manages to weld his four loves together during this
period, with both lead Byrds turned on by the freedom this offers (McGuinn
sounds like nothing less than Ravi Shankar playing the guitar in this period,
although its Crosby’s rhythm playing on ‘8 Miles High’ that’s probably as close
to jazz as we’re going to get in a rock and pop format). Chris Hillman doesn’t
get much to do yet – surprisingly, given that his more country style and
song-writing is all over follow-up LP ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ – but his bass
playing, too, is showing a definite Beatles influence in this period, playing
the less obvious bass chords throughout each song. For one of only two albums
this the classic line-up of The Byrds actually playing as a band, each bringing
their own styles to the table and creating something new out of their combined
efforts. 5D is nothing like as cohesive and easy to listen to as ‘Younger Than
Yesterday’, but it is the point at which the Byrds truly do add another
dimension to their playing and writing, breaking through with a pioneering sound
that still sounds unique to this short span of albums.
It's a real shame, though, that Gene isn't here. The
most sensitive Byrd, the one who strove for new experiences and turned
suffering into art would have been a real asset on an album that's all about
exploring both yourself and the world around you. Gene had simply burnt himself
out, taken too much criticism to heart (his colleagues, jealous of the extra
money he roped in from songwriting royalties didn't help), lost his identity in
a sea of screaming girls and clashing wgos and couldn't cope with the stressful routines of being a rock star
(being famous is usually fairly glamorous nowadays, with albums every few years
in a relatively stable market where your fans remember you and come back again
for more after a mutual rest - in the 1960s fame was a stepladder that had to
be continually climbed with the goalposts forever moving further away). Things
came to a head when Gene, like Brian Wilson before him, found himself locked on
yet another aeroplane pointing in a direction that led anywhere but home, the
four small claustrophobic walls a symbolic metaphor of the fame he felt was
trapping him from all sides. Crosby will go on to smirk at the irony of a Byrds
being scared of 'flying' in the unreleased song 'Psychodrama City' taped at
these sessions ('I don't know why he got on at all if he really didn't want to
fly!' he cackles, about both the physical flight and Clark's pursuit of fame
with the band). But like Brian the year before, poor Gene didn't break down
because of that flight but because of the years of constant touring, competing,
writing, recording, promoting, worrying, arguing and nagging doubts of the past
few years; at least Brian had his brothers to turn to - in The Byrds it was
every man for himself and as the band's biggest star in the early days (in a
songwriting sense at least) Gene felt the loneliness at the top more than most.
From here-on in his is a sad tale of wanting and needing fame and recognition,
the demons of guilt and fear that such fame and recognition awakened and
unhappy slumps back into obscurity, punctuated by increasing drug and alcohol
addictions. Gene was a born rock star, but with the constitution of a poet that
was going to see him eaten up in any band - unlucky for him he became a Byrd, a
band who by rights should have been named 'The Piranhas'.
'5D' is generally seen as the album where the other
Byrds step out from under Gene's shadow. By and large that's true, but for now his shadow is just too big to match. Gene
still had time to leave the mother of all leaving presents: the lyrics for
'Eight Miles High' and an excellent harmony vocal on flip-side 'Why?' (a Crosby
song senselessly left off this album and re-recorded to lesser effect for
'Younger Than Yesterday'). Both songs rather set the tone for the biggest album
theme of unlimited horizons and a new sense of understanding of the world. Both
Crosby and McGuinn - the two chief writers on this album though all four
remianing Byrds receive a credit for instrumental 'Captain Soul' - found
themselves at an unusually harmonious point of view, albeit from two very
different resources. Crosby has just discovered drugs, his mistress muse and
ultimately biggest monster that will gain gradually more and more control over
his life until the point in the mid-1980s when a judge locks him away in a
state prison as one last desperate attempt to save his life. For now, though,
drugs have done wonders for Crosby's pscyhe: they've expanded his point of view
to such a point that he truly discovers his 'voice'. The political 'What's
Happening?!?!?' is far from the best song he'll ever write, but it's a crucial
breakthrough for him as a composer, daring to ask why a mad world is quite as
mad as it is. His lyrics for the 'Eight Miles High' soundalike 'I See You' also
point to new realisations, with a whole host of seemingly unlinked metaphors
spinning into his mind each time he sees a 'girl'.
McGuinn, meanwhile, is spending his last album as
plain 'Jim' McGuinn - he's become increasingly fascinated with the Subud
religion (someone influential in the cult told McGuinn he was unlucky because he
had the 'wrong' number of syllables in
his name - asked to pick a name with two syllables he chose 'Roger'; this led
to a joke/hype/conspiracy theory on the lines of the 'Paul is Dead' theory that
he'd been 'replaced'. When asked once by a hapless reporter what had happened
to his 'twin brother Jim' McGuinn joked that he'd 'gone to Rio' - the story
behind the rather peculiar title for his 1990 'comeback' album!) Many people
assumed drugs was the cause behind Roger's change of both name and personality,
but no - McGuinn kept as far away as any rock star in the 1960s could (natural
cautious, perhaps he'd already seen how the head-first Crosby had been affected
by them). Religion and books (especially science ones) and the need to 'fill
the gap' left behind by Gene Clark all conspired to create a McGuinn who was
far more on the ball and sure of himself than on the band's first two albums
(he jokingly calls the Byrds' music 'philoso-rock' during the period interview
hidden away on the CD re-issue). The title track, a debate about the many
different dimensions of length, height, space, width and time that can be
experienced by people was perfect for the times and deserved to be one of the
band's bigger hits. 'Mr Spaceman', meanwhile, is a trippy comedy song about
extra-terrestrials - the first appearance of a favourite topic that's going to
run his songs for years, through 'CTA-102' and into 'Space Odyssey' on the
next two Byrds albums. His choice of cover song, the world war two protest song
'I Come and Stand At Every Door' is also a significant choice - though Crosby's
later rants against the Vietnam war and contemporary politics embarrassed him
(Roger thought 'rock' stars should be separate to such things), McGuinn had a
passion for using songs from the past as warnings to us in the present about our
future - a theme that runs through all his 'Folk Den' revival projects in the
21st century and right back to 'We'll Meet Again' and to some extent 'Oh Susannah'
from the first two albums. This is his best choice yet, the seven-year-old
ghost of a victim of Hiroshima doomed never to know what it's like to grow old
and looking down heartbroken at a world that should have been hers to grow up
in (McGuinn is at his best on this song, the emotion of the song breaking even
his famously ice-cold persona).
Unfortunately, letting each style take over one at a
time means that this is a truly uneven record at times. The rest of the album
songs are at best filler, at worst desperation: while not every track on 'Mr
Tambourine Man' or 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' was a knockout, you could at least hear
that the band were trying something that could have worked or nearly worked
(yep, even 'Oh Susannah!') '5D' is much more of a rollercoaster ride though:
alongside 'Eight Miles High' 'I See You' '5D' 'I Come and Stand' and 'What's
Happening' are two fairly dreary traditional folk songs (seemingly recorded
because the band feel they havcen't done much folk on this album), even
drearier Stax soul pastiche 'Captain Soul' and the sound of McGuinn's hoover
doubling as a lear jet while the band use some random sound effects and sing
'go round the lear jet, baby' over and over. Credited to McGuinn, this song
makes you feel that if he wasn't taking drugs then perhaps he should have been
- even by Byrds standards (who always try and end their albums on an unusual or
at least eccentric song) '2-4-2 Foxtrot' is a novelty unbecoming of their great
name. Personally I quite like 'Hey Joe', the cover that everyone wqho owns this
record seems to despise, but even though Hendrix re-wrote the rule box on
revisiting folk tunes with this very song, Crosby's earlier versions is fun,
funky and got there first (Hendrix learnt the song from the San Franciscan band
The Leaves - they learnt it from Crosby, who was their early champion!)
The oddest thing about '5D' is that while the
material is (by and large) in place (give or take the sound of a vacuum cleaner
and a folk song or two), this just doesn't 'sound' like an album from 1966.
Released a mere month before The Beatles' 'Revolver', the two records couldn't
be more different: there's no unusual sounds on display here (except that dang
hoover!), no sitars (odd given that Crosby and McGuinn had been partly responsible
for encouraging George Harrison's interest in it, famously teaching him how to
play on a beaten up old instriment in a bath-tub on a rare get together in a
hotel room - the only place quiet enough away from reporters!), no tape-loops,
no sound effects and with the exception of the deeply traditional sounding
'Wild Mountain Thyme' and 'John Riley' no strings or brass. Everything on the
album could be replicated in concert, even though the Byrds weren't doing much
touring at all that year (they won't do thatmuch touring again until McGuinn
reforms the band in late 1968). In fact take 'Eight Miles High' and copycat 'I
See You' plus the title track and 'Every Door' away and '5D' isn't even a
complex album - Gene Clark's lyrics alone made those two albums seem deeper
than '5D', which at times seems overtly childish ('Mr Spaceman' is a comedy
song; 'What's Happening?!?' shares a simplistic world view, '2-4-2 Foxtrot' is
a novelty and 'Captain Soul' the kind of things children learn as scales when
practising an instrument).
Ultimately '5D' is a strange experience. The
'difficult third record' for The Byrds, it's not as satisfying as either of the
folk-rock first two or as pioneering and consistent as albums four and five.
If the Byrds’ first two albums were the TV equivalent of ‘newsnight’ or
‘panorama’ (meaning well but a bit fusty and old-fashioned and a bit too
earnest in getting messages across), this album is a TV sketch-show, switching
gears so suddenly it makes us gasp (although like even the worst sketch shows,
if you don’t like one particular style another will be along in a minute). However
when this album is good it's exceptional, showing off every one of the band's
strengths post-Clark: Indian-influences, classy harmonies, quirky lyrics and
unsettling ideas and at times reaches unbelievable peaks. Like the ‘magic
carpet’ the band appear to be sitting on, the journey is a curious mix of the
old-fashioned (this is a rug that looks like an antique after all), the
then-modern (the band are eating fast-food – or at least they are on the back
cover) and the mystical (just check out David Crosby’s new fringe jacket –
he’ll be wearing those non-stop for the next 10 years!) Crossing many borders,
melting several boundaries, 5D is one hell of a ‘trip’ but there's a few crash
landings during take-off too. That's what happens when you take your rides from
a band as wild and exciting as The Byrds who can show you some of the most
amazing sights you'll ever see.
The
Songs:
First up is the title track [46] '5D (Fifth Dimension). I
must confess I never used to be that keen on this song, the first track on the
first Byrds album I ever owned, but over time its as good an introduction as I
could hope to have, poised between the band’s folkie past and their psychedelic
future. It’s completely unlike anything Roger McGuinn will ever write again:
its poetic imagery and carefully constructed lengthy phrases sound more like a
Bob Dylan or Gene Clark song (or the best fit of all, the book of the
Ecclesiastes set to music that was ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’) and has the kind of
tune that sounds as if its been around for generations. But lyrically it all
gets a bit more confusing: the talk of discovering a ‘new dimension’ to life is
common speak amongst 60s drug takers but its part of a large parcel of mid-1966
songs that don’t actually come out and say it quite yet (The Beatles’ ‘Dr
Robert’ and ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ are two more examples). Traditionally
when bands do this kind of thing they couch the music with the most
exhilarating, breathtaking and groundbreaking music possible – but not here;
The Byrds are instead treating this new discovery as one on a par with their
gospel/traditional music, going back to their roots in order to express what a
change this stepping stone in their lives represents. The best juxtaposition on
this track, though, must surely be the line about ‘I saw the great blunders my
teacher had made, sicnetific delirium madness’ which occurs at the most
traditional part of the whole track, just as the barbershop vocals kick in –
borrowing from bygone generations at the same time Mcguinn’s narrator promises
the same won’t happen to him and his kind! McGuinn’s vocal is the best thing
about this track, with just the right sense of awe and curiosity (indeed, it
might be his best vocal of all on a Byrds record) and his lyrics are
particularly strong on this song, making it a shame that he never wrote more of
these songs, swapping its style for all-out country or rock and roll on later
tracks. Yet, even though it’s a song I admire, it’s a song that’s hard to love
and is ultimately uninvolving somehow – it’s very hard to ‘connect’ with this
song despite its tales of new adventures, perhaps because of its
backwards-looking melody and style. Never mind, the band will get it spot-on for
‘8 Miles High’. In yet another Byrds-Beach Boys crossover, that's future Smile
lyricist Van Dyke Parks guesting on organ (McGuinn apparently told him to
'think of Bach'!)
[47] ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ is a lesser attempt at the folk trick that
works so well later on in the record during 'John Riley', a slightly boring
song that, like many of The Byrds’ worst arrangements, is slowed to a crawl.
One of the more boring songs in The Byrds’ canon, this features another jaded
string arrangement sitting in counterpart to McGuinn’s rather lumpy guitar work
and is only truly saved by the harmonies, with Crosby’s falsetto shining out
loud and clear as ever. Lyrically this traditional folk song is a rather odd
piece, telling us that as long as the mountains exist there will always be a
love to replace the one you’ve just lost (mountains usually signify permanence
when used as metaphors for songs), although this might make sense of yet
another battle going between the band’s usual instrumentation and the more
folkie harmonies/strings. A curious misfire this one, seeing as its built on
many of the things that traditionally work well in Byrds songs.
[48] ‘Mr Spaceman’ is a much more crafted song and travels along at a
fair lick, but like many of McGuinn’s lesser songs its repetitiveness is
extremely irritating and it takes five or so verses to basically tell us the
same thing over and over (this song must have the biggest chorus repeats of
pretty much any song that clocks in at just over 2 minutes!) At least the
lyrics are funny, though (well sort of, once) with an alien beaming up
McGuinn’s narrator into his spaceship and showing him around before taking off
again ( Something that’s hard to grasp for modern newcomers to this song – yes
the ‘spaceman’ in the title is an alien not a man in a spacesuit because most
people didn’t really think of humans as being in space before 1969 and the
alleged moon landing; we knew that aliens might have the potential to visit us
back then, but not that we had the potential to visit them) and contain a
lovely line in Mcguinn’s mournful ‘I hope they get home alright’, as if he’s
just waved goodbye to his folks on a long drive home instead of a species
taking over his planet from the other side of the world. Really, though, this
song is too chirpy for its own good and like many of the band’s comedy songs
falls flat, because the humour’s too dry for us to be sure that it really is
humour we’re listening to (a similar thing happens with 1967’s ‘So You Want To
Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’, which is the story of X Factor 30 years early – the
world should have heeded the warning!)
[49] ‘I See You’ is the next
strongpoint on this album, a rare McGuinn-Crosby collaboration that shares so
much DNA with ‘8 Miles High’ that its surely a long-lost twin. We get the same
frenetic drumming, the same Coltrane-inspired rhythm guitar, the same
completely off-the-wall Rickenbacker solo and the same fragmented and cryptic
lyrics. The biggest difference is the subject matter – if 8 Miles High is about
experiencing the world afresh (see below), then song is about discovering
people fresh and truly seeing what they’re up to for the first time. This song
is pure chaos from first note to last, all tied together with glittering Crosby
harmonies, with some classic lyrics that take in honesty and lies, love and
infatuation, past lives (the first appearance of this well-loved and by 1970
well-worn Crosby theme) and earth and space, all dealt with in fragmentary,
image-filled lines. A terrific launching pad for a song about new experiences
and finding out more about life The Byrds really go to town with this record,
making it more raucous and energy-filled than anything in their back catalogue
(barring, of course, the recently-recorded ‘8 Miles High’). Long dismissed as a
poor man’s 8 miles of altitude, this is actually a pretty good second take on a
similar subject and well worth digging out by all the many people out there who
consider ‘8 Miles High’ one of the best records of the mid-60s.
[50] ‘What’s Happening?!?’ is Crosby’s big breakthrough. It’s
actually his first full songwriting credit on any album (although the pre-fame
Byrds CD ‘In The Beginning/Preflyte’ has one other) and it really sets the tone
for just about everything Crosby’s written afterwards. A series of rhetorical
questions that at first appear to be dissing some jilted lover but then end up
being a rant about the faceless rich who run society without consultation with
the other people in it, this is Crosby waking up to how the world works and
putting into a place an anger and rage that still simmers through his work
today. While the song sounds unfinished by his later standards (Crosby’s songs
more or less give us comfort, as well as telling us how hard it is to change
the unchangeable), another strong recording makes up for any lapses in the
song, with McGuinn’s heavily echoed guitar seemingly answering Crosby’s cries
after every line. By 1966 standards this song is hugely impressive – when
everybody else was telling love stories of one kind or another, Crosby was
already asking ‘Why?’ (a question that’s taken up with a track on the next LP)
and unlike the small handful of tracks on this theme that had appeared in the
past, this song doesn’t even try to offer answers, it just shrugs its head and
moves on.
The tracklisting that puts that track right before
[51] ‘I Come And Stand At
Every Door’ is a masterstroke. An old 1940s song written in the
aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb, this is another angry song that demands
answers from the people in power and in the context of this most 60s of records
seems to be the hippie generation distancing themselves from the ‘war
generation’ of their parents. In many ways this Nazim Hikmet song (translated
by Pete Seeger and also covered by Stephen Stills’ later girlfriend Judy Collins)
is the first 1960s song, using the ghostly apparition of a murdered
seven-year-old to plead that the atom bomb is never used again. Indeed, its
amazing this very then-topical song hadn’t been covered by a rock and roll
group before – its only 3 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis after all and
the worries over the Cold War with Russia are all over this list, right up
until the fall of communism in 1989. McGuinn’s subdued vocal is another of his
best, undermining all sense of drama and emotion with its vicious one-note
stabs at the unseen attackers. Interestingly, it’s not until the second verse
that we learn the narrator is a ghost from Hiroshima (pronounced with the ‘old’
Western phonetic spelling heeeero-sheema – it was years before I realised those
talking about ‘heroshimah’ were on about the same thing) and they could stand
for any nation under attack till then. It’s also interesting that Hiroshima is
already considered to be ‘long ago’ by 1966 (21 years on) – could it be that
The Byrds were trying to make a statement here to last for centuries? The band
performance is another one that’s top notch: Clarke’s general drum rumble
intercut with sudden bangs on the drum kit sounds like its being played in slow
motion, while the echoey Rickenbacker guitar truly does sound ghostly here.
Perhaps this is the 5th dimension the Byrds are on about in the
title – not the brave new world of exciting psychedelia but the old unseen
phantoms that haunt mankind throughout his history until he learns to change
his ways.
Next up is [52a] ‘Eight Miles High’. Where do I start with this
track? It’s so well known that everyone assumes it was a #1 (actually it was a
comparative flop, especially in Britain where a radio ban for ‘drug-addled
lyrics’ meant it barely went top 40) but it’s probably more important for the
songs it influenced rather than for itself: I doubt we’d have had other
psychedelic journeys like ‘I Can See For Miles’ and ‘Lucy In the Sky With
Diamonds’ had this track not come first to break the mould. Gene Clarks’
farewell present with the set of lyrics for this song are first class: so
fragmented they sound like a haiku poem but together with the pounding music
they sound like a catalogue of last images seen before the coming of something
either exhilarating or destructive. The band’s playing is as tight as can be,
with Hillman’s bouncy bass rooting the song magnificently, before Crosby’s
scratchy and angry rhythm guitar chips away at the song and McGuinn’s
Rickenbacker soars on top. You can hear a first take of this song on the
current CD release and the difference between the two is like night and day
(the first is even creepier, mainly thanks to a slower tempo and an even more
out of control guitar part), showing just how important this song was to the band
that they re-recorded it again later to get it right. A word about the lyrics:
every fan knows it was really about The Byrds’ ill-fated trip to London (the
one where they were under-rehearsed, billed as ‘America’s answer to The
Beatles’ and got roundly booed at most of the shows), but the lyrics about
‘rain gary town, known for its sounds’ was about London and the line about ‘in
places small faces alone’ may well be about another AAA group just starting in
1966... Marvellously cast between being in control and falling over the edge of
a cliff, this is the last definitive Byrds song for some four years, mixing the
past and the future sound of music like never before. And to think, just a few
decades after this we get The Spice Girls as the default mode...
Most fans hate [53] ‘Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go)’, seeing it as a
poor relation to the Hendrix version. But what few people know is that Hendrix
would never have known the song had Crosby not ‘discovered’ it (his protégé
band ‘The Leaves’ covered it first, although this Byrds recording is after
Hendrix). People seem to hate the fact that the band play it fast rather than
slow, but that’s how the song was written – and to my ears it sounds just as
good, if not better. Unfortunately, good as the arrangement is, this is
obviously a first take or as good as; the band sound tentative and aren’t sure
whether to really go for it or not right up to the curious way the song fizzles
out at the end. Crosby’s vocal – only his second lead in the band’s released history
– is nicely strong I think, even if he treats the whole thing like a game
rather than life or death. The only real problem with this song is that it’s
basically the forthcoming ‘Captain Soul’ all over again with some added lyrics
and taken at a slightly faster trot – and guess what song came next in the
track-listing?!
[54] ‘Captain Soul’ is another of this album’s pot-pourri in styles
that doesn’t quite come off. Too rocky for soul, with too many psychedelic
twinges, this song simply sounds like a studio jam built on a promising Hillman
bass line (that’s the most soulful thing in this song, sounding rather like a
Booker T riff) that features a lot of uninspired dross, really, barring the
rather impressive harmonica part (played by a returning Gene Clark who was
visiting the session, but sadly doesn't get a credit on the sleeve!) According
to the sleeve-notes, this song was Michael Clarke’s idea, something which is
surprising given that his rather clichéd drum pattern here is the most bored he
sounds across the whole album! The song was originally called ’30 minute
break’, by the way, and was recorded in a, umm, 30 minute break between other
recordings (although my sessionography suggests they weren’t actually doing
anything else that day) after the band developed the song from a jam session
playing Lee Dorsey’s hit ‘Get Out Of My Life, Woman’. Not that you’d know that
from the finished product which sounds very, well, cautious. What is it with
bands wasting their time on soul-inspired jam sessions in this period? (The
Beatles were recording their ’12 Bar Blues’ during the Rubber Soul sessions at
virtually the same time this track was recorded).
[55] ‘John Riley’ is, like ‘Wild
Mountain Thyme’, a traditional folk tale of a sort the Byrds never really tackle
again, this time two songs from the end instead of two from the beginning – in
fact, it sounds more like a Pentangle track! But Mr Riley is more successful
than his cousin, thanks to the battle royale going on between the band’s more
traditional guitar-bass-and-drums line-up on the left speaker and McGuinn and
Crosby’s etheral harmonies and a rather stilted string arrangement in the
right. Hillman’s bass is terrific on this track, copying Mcguinn’s guitar in
parts before taking off for his own wander up and down the octave, mimicking
the mournful girlfriend ever-searching for her partner lost to the sea. The
band’s harmonies are well suited to this song (especially the last verse, where
Crosby plays out the drama in counterpoint to McGuinn’s more detached lead) and
it’s another interesting stepping-stone from the Byrds’ folk past to their
out-and-out psychedlic future.
Last up comes one of the weirdest tracks ever to
grace an AAA album. In fact, so unintentionally hilarious is [56] 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jest
Song) that I was tempted to put it among my favourites. In keeping with
this album’s theme of travel and ‘space’, the album ends with a pilot running
off a list of things to check on his machine while The Byrds repeat ‘going to
ride a lear jet, baby’ over and over the song’s repetitive riff. The Byrds chant in the middle, some
idiot reading flight instructions in the left speaker. Best of all, the band
discovered late in the day that they would not be able to record any real sound
effects of a ‘lear jet’ but McGuinn decided to save the day by announcing that
his new space-age vacuum cleaner sounded just like an airplane taking off (it
doesn’t, it just sounds like somebody’s just started vacuuming in the house
next door – honestly, guys, you could at least have trimmed the opening section
where somebody turns it on!) How did they think they could get away with this?!
For once, even the excuse ‘well, it was the 60s – it was all new then’ sounds a
bit hollow. The result is one of the funniest recordings of them all – but in
the context of this brave album its a sad low spot to go out on, right up there
with ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’s ‘Oh! Susannah’ as ‘last track on an album you never
ever want to hear again’.
So, not every ‘trip’ this magic carpet of an album
takes us on is successful. Sometimes you have to scratch your head and ask what
on earth was going through the band’s minds that they thought they could get
away with us. But then again, it’s amazing that there are any decent tracks on
this album at all – having lost their lead writer Gene Clark and decided to
forgo Bob Dylan songs for the foreseeable future (well, until the next album at
least!), the bulk of this album is left to McGuinn and Crosby to fill, a pair
of writers who had only managed 5 co-writes between them on Byrds albums total
by then and they do so admirably, setting the templates for much of their music
to come. If 5D is disappointing in many ways for an album that promises so much
about taking us to ‘new dimensions’, in the context of The Byrds’ back
catalogue its quite a revelation, marking the stepping stone where the band
went from being a Gene Clark showcase with some nice Rickenbacker to being a
fully fledged rock outfit who could sit comfortably amongst their
contemporaries. 5D is not the best album from the magical year that was 1966
you will ever hear – but individual tracks are right up there with the best
that music had to offer in that halcyon period.
A Now Complete Link Of Byrd Articles Available To Read At
Alan’s Album Archives:
'Mr Tambourine Man' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-134-byrds-mr.html
'Mr Tambourine Man' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-134-byrds-mr.html
‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ (1965)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-byrds-turn-turn-turn-1965.html
'(5D) Fifth Dimension' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-49-byrds-5d.html
'(5D) Fifth Dimension' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-49-byrds-5d.html
'Younger Than Yesterday' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-108-byrds.html
'The Nototious Byrd Brothers' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-20-byrds-notorious-byrd-brothers.html
'Sweethearts Of The Rodeo' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-byrds-sweetheart-of-rodeo-1968.html
'Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-viedws-and-music-issue-68-byrds-dr.html
‘The Ballad Of Easy Rider’ (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-byrds-ballad-of-easy-rider-1969.html
'Untitled' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-38-byrds-untitled-1970.html
'Byrdmaniax' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-byrds-byrdmaniax-1971-album-review.html
‘Farther Along’ (1972) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-byrds-farther-along-1972.html
'The Byrds' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-byrds-1973.html
Surviving TV Appearances http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-byrds-surviving-tv-appearance-1965.html
Unreleased Songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-unreleased-songs-1965-72.html
Non-Album Songs
(1964-1990) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-non-album-songs-1964-90.html
A Guide To Pre-Fame Byrds
Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-pre-fame-recordings-in.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part One (1964-1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part Two (1973-1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Three (1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_9.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Three (1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_9.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part Four (1992-2013) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_16.html
Essay: Why This Band Were Made For Turn! Turn! Turn!ing https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/byrds-essay-why-this-band-were-made-for.html
Essay: Why This Band Were Made For Turn! Turn! Turn!ing https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/byrds-essay-why-this-band-were-made-for.html
