The Byrds are Okay! Is That Okay?

Hello from 2025, (sung to the tune of "Turn! Turn! Turn!") a time after garage punk and punk, after the innovations of James Brown have penetrated down to every funktional cell in our bodies, a time when Chic vies with the Beatles as the greatest English-singing band of the 20th century, a time after disco, house, and techno, and time when not only The Byrds' Greatest Hits exists but the capacity to create our own Byrds' Greatest Hits exists as well. Hello from a time when it's difficult to recreate the rush that the Byrds provided folks (a word I use advisedly) when almost out of the gate in 1965 the band space traveled to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with "Mr. Tambourine Man." The Byrds were innovators, that we can still hear. But when critics claim that the band welded Dylan to the Beatles for a brand-new musical fricassee, they neglect to mention that the Byrds exude little of the raucous thrill of the early Beatles, the ones who fused a rump-shaking R&B bottom with crystal-blue harmonizing up top. For instance, Whit Strub is correct when he claims that "the bridge on “You Won’t Have to Cry” threatens to climb a step into straight-up wanna-hold-your-hand-ness." But threaten is all it does - never does one get the sense that a Hollywood Bowlful of girls and boys would start screaming (and, more importantly, dancing) as the band limps back into the verse. 

This means that from their onset, the Byrds were keeping pace with the Beatles, concurrently in their Ordinary Phase during which they were Dylanizing their own music and recording the two worst albums in their discography - Beatles for Sale and Help!, albums which Rolling Stone types have overrated if not flat-out lied about for decades. They're just okay like most Byrds albums ever. Will the Boomer gerontocracy ever allow them to just be okay? In short, why is the Wiki for the inconsequential Byrds reunion album longer than the one for an album better than anything the Byrds ever recorded (Greatest Hits included), Love: Forever Changes?

Digesting the first few albums is not a painful experience, especially since they traffic in a concision that often gives the Ramones competition. But the drastic lack of bottom gets deadening for anyone even remotely boogie-besotted. Feel free to lay this shortcoming at drummer Michael Clarke's feet; the Byrds themselves had no problem dunking on his talent (and before you get too snarky about Clarke's abilities to ground the band, check that link for a grueling letter written by him as he was dying of alcoholism at 47). But it's not as if they kicked out any jams after Clarke left and/or was fired in 1967; it's clear that the Byrds never cared about our butt cheeks. Add harmonies that start to sound samey after a song or three, like ghosts who visit nightly but fail to haunt you, and you have a sound too thin to support their overinflated legend. 

1967's Greatest Hits has rendered the first three albums superfluous, especially Mr. Tambourine Man, the debut, which lends five songs (out of twelve) to Greatest Hits. Keepers include faster fare like "It's No Use," "It Won't Be Wrong," "I See You," and the bonus track "Why," maybe the friendlier take on Dylan's "Spanish Harlem Incident" or "If You're Gone" with its undergirding drone voices. But really - you can make do with Greatest Hits or, if you fancy more concise jangle, the two early-1980s volumes of The Original Singles. 

A measure of how much I don't get this band lies in my appreciation for Younger Than Yesterday, downgraded by both Robert Christgau and Rob Sheffield in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide. But David Crosby's "Renaissance Fair" was the best non-Greatest Hits song to date. For once, the harmonies haunt and Chris Hillman's bass leads like they never needed a funky drummer in the first place. Crosby's "Everybody's Been Burned" comes in a scosh less haunting and even Hillman works up some spookiness in the verses of "Thoughts and Words." And while even fans like to rip on Crosby's psychedelic indulgence "Mind Gardens" (in two version on the 1996 CD reissue!), it's no drearier than "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" from the previous year's Fifth Dimension. 

It took me forever (i.e., last week) to figure out The Notorious Byrd Brothers and I still think Love's Forever Changes smothers it in a field of poppies. Psychedelia consists of constantly morphing figures and thus requires time to allow for the permutations. Much as I celebrate albums lasting 28:28, The Notorious Byrd Brothers' concision seemed thin and unyielding all over again. But eventually, I realized that Roger McGuinn & Co. were just getting through the permutations more quickly (albeit less heartbreakingly and ominously) than Arthur Lee & Co. did. "Natural Harmony" and, especially, "Draft Morning" document a scary false idol washing up on the Beach Boys' shore.

By contrast, I got Sweetheart of the Rodeo immediately. Due to the vagaries of a pre-Napster/Spotify world, I heard it many years before the other titles and it was quite possibly the first album where I could grasp irony, the band (with Gram Parsons for a hot minute) loving and lovingly joking about country music. In this mode, the best track, even better than the ace Dylan and Parsons songs, is the faithful-but-not take on the Louvin Brothers' "The Christian Life."

And then, after their victory year of 1968, the decline sets in as so often happens with congregations of more than one person. Hyde is a lesser Sweetheart although "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man" would have fit nicely on the latter. It gets the edge over Ballad which is almost entirely covers with originals by such esteemed songwriters as John York and Pamela Polland; all you need is the 2:10 they expend on "Jesus is Just Alright." Preflyte is 25:38 of demos from a band guilty of thinness even at their best, i.e., for scholars only. The live half of the (Untitled) double album is good for doing dishes; the studio half is good for McGuinn/Jacques Levy's "Chestnut Mare."

To gauge how low the Byrds subsequently sunk, one need only listen to the Kim Fowley (let into the den by Skip Battin) co-writes on Byrdmaniax and Farther Along. If you can stomach Fowley, check out the baffling Hollywood Babylon-style report "Citizen Kane" on the former or the equally baffling Coke commercial "America's Great National Pastime" on the latter. Extra points to Byrdmaniax for the cool cover if it tricked at least one metalhead into biting. The 1973 reunion is the nadir, an admission that the congregation no longer meant anything to the principals, most of whom had solo irons in the fire by this point. Two Neil Youngs, one Joni Mitchell, yet another McGuinn/Levy, a couple of desultory Crosbys - they'd be embarrassing if they weren't so dull. 

The one song that kept rolling through my head while listening to this discography was "Outside Chance" by the Turtles of all people. I submit that the Byrds bequeathed far more to popular music than Flo & Eddie & Co. ever did. But "Outside Chance" (co-written by Warren Zevon) bashes harder (thanks to new drummer John Barbata) than almost anything on those first three wildly revered Byrds albums. If that means that the Byrds got to the sound first, then so what? Much as I appreciate an open atrium, eventually I'm going to require a floor to go along with my dwelling.

However demented you find the above, do check out Whit Strub's Byrdstupor blog wherein he endeavors to listen to all Byrds-related recordings ever. Perversely, he hasn't gotten to the 1968 goodies and may never will. Even more perversely, he's not properly worshipful of The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin (A&M, 1969), another album better than anything the Byrds ever recorded. He thinks part of the problem is that Gram Parsons subjugated Chris Hillman (!). He has kind words for the second-worst song, “My Uncle” (!!). And he may prefer subsequent Burrito albums to Gilded (!!!). But cut the man some slack - he's listened to this right-wing Hillman horror. 

Oh and p.s. Hüsker Dü's "Eight Miles High" >>>> the Byrds'.

Grades (all releases on Columbia except where noted):

Mr. Tambourine Man (1965): B-minus (docked a notch for decades of overrating and inutility due to Greatest Hits)

Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965): B

Fifth Dimension (1966): B

Younger Than Yesterday (1967): B+

The Byrds' Greatest Hits (1967): A

The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968): A-minus

Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968): A

Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde (1969): B

Preflyte (Together, 1969): C+

The Ballad of Easy Rider (1969): B-minus

Untitled (1970): C+

Byrdmaniax (1971): C

Farther Along (1971): C

Byrds (Asylum, 1973): C-minus

January Top Ten

1. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024). A film maudit was expected and a film maudit was what we got - a loony mess but an endearing one. So for me, someone who hasn't seen a Coppola film since 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula because I've been busy and also, some of the titles didn't strike me, to quote Jiminy Glick, my only question is why does this feel like the work of a high school student? Coppola began conceiving of this in 1977, well past his adolescence. But the allegorical bedrock, the self-importance, the reckless spending all bespeak the habits of the Clearasil set. What happened (or didn't)?

 2.  George Michael: "Father Figure" in Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024). Unlike the Fifty Shades trilogy, there was less time here to lay out the rules of the S/M relationship between Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (or ignore them altogether as in Some Call It Loving). So despite the bravest performance of Kidman's career, much of this comes off as rushed and underbaked. But every so often, a film will transform a song you think you've got down and that happens when "Father Figure" scores a steamy acquiescence scene. "That's all I wanted," the song starts, signaling not only a post-coital smokiness but a maturity rooted in Michael's openness to appear vulnerable. The skeletal track (mostly Michael on a Roland D-50) leaves no hiding spaces for his breathy vocal and the backup singers (Shirley Lewis and an inaudible-to-me Michael) take the chorus. He's as naked as Kidman in the scene and the amplified theatre sound leaves us too with no hiding spaces. It's an embarrassingly adult song, light years away from (though not necessarily better than!) than the teenpop of Wham! which fizzled out barely a year before. "Father Figure" has him growing up so quickly it forces you to reexamine if Kidman's submission is all that rushed to begin with. 

3. Matthew Restall: Elton John's Blue Moves (33 1/3). Riot. Exile. Forever Changes. Big deal. But when the 33 1/3 series editors chose to publish an entire book on Elton John's dreadful 1976 double album, I perked up. Restall posits several theories as to why Blue Moves "was a success that failed, and yet also a failure that succeeded," i.e., it sold as well as its predecessor (1975's Rock of the Westies) but felt like a turkey - punk, John's coming out as bisexual in Rolling Stone two weeks before its release, music so uncompromising it dashed expectations like Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (no), David Bowie's Tonight (closer), and George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (there we go), John's former publisher Dick James Music flooding the marketplace with reconfigurations of older product (in re-released singles, comps, live albums, K-Tel collections, a box set) and muddying the waters of new material, etc. All reasonable explanations except of the music itself where Restall does not convince - the album remains a bloated, marshmallowy tax on the senses.

4. Illeana Douglas: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia (Lyons). I thought this coffee-table book by the fine actor (best remembered by me as the art teacher Roberta in Ghost World) would plumb the psychogeography of Connecticut, especially its status as a de facto suburb of New York City. Alas, it's comprised mostly of synopses of films set in the Constitution State. So if you see it in a bookstore, read the photo captions and find the movie/city pairing that jolts you most. As a frequent resident of Stamford, I'm looking forward to taking in Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947) and, um, The Horror of Party Beach (Del Tenney, 1964). 

5. Padgett Powell: Edisto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). I'd wanted to read this since 1989 when Spin deemed it one of the Top 10 Coolest Books in an issue that changed my life. Alas, this diffuse portrait of a white boy growing up in a largely Black community in the South gave me the mehs, yet another reminder that popular music will always goose my ass harder than literature. Unsurprisingly, the one line that snapped out at me doubles as a fine piece of music criticism. In a description of the Black voices surrounding him, our protagonist compares them to the Godfather of Soul: "Like these James Brown guitar riffs of five notes that run twenty minutes, then one of the five notes goes sharp and a statement is made. A whole evening hums, and then there's a new note — razor out."

6. Margaret Drabble: The Millstone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984); A Touch of Love (aka Thank You All Very Much) (Waris Hussein, 1969). Drabble's portrait of an unmarried pregnant woman in London who's made up her mind to keep her baby is equal parts harrowing and warm and all the more welcome for it. But it leaves a sour aftertaste, rendering childbirth/rearing an achievement superior to all other pursuits. One sentence toward the very end threatens to tank the entire enterprise. Rosamund, now the mother of baby Octavia, invites George, the gay man who unknowingly sired the child one night in a fit of heterosexuality, back to her flat to meet the infant. George is polite but, understandably, cannot share Rosamund's resolute love for Octavia, prompting Rosamund to opine, "George, I could see, knew nothing with such certainty." How she's gained access to the whole of George's existence Drabble never makes clear. The film version, starring Sandy Dennis as Rosamund, is better because Rosamund's state of mind is left open to interpretation. And Ian McKellen's turn as George opens up even more tantalizing possibilities for living life for oneself without ever becoming selfish. 

7. James McCourt: Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975); Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance (William Morrow & Co., 1978). Two revered, fabulously gay, gorgeously written New York City novels that proved a slog, akin to listening to someone recall their rather characteristic Saturday night. Dancer from the Dance follows gay men boogieing to disco, ingesting drugs, and lusting after sundry Adonises, activities that meet Holleran's disapproval: "They were bound together by a common love for a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn't throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing." This disco scholar who deems Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You," which makes several appearances within, one of the greatest singles of the 1970s says, "Pah!" McCourt's novel is a tougher read but lets in more air by keeping its eye on the millions of people who couldn't care less about the titular opera diva (pronounced Mardew Gorgeous) protected by a phalanx of worshipers with equally wacky names.

8. Gypsy, Majestic Theatre (January 3, 2025). It's simple. Every post-Merman diva who has taken on what may be Broadway's greatest role acts the part of Rose to the detriment of each number's song shape. Dramaturgy trounces melody as is the norm in a post-Method/Sondheim world. So while Audra McDonald acquits herself more than admirably, I kept hearing Ethel Merman in my head. And the event was definitely not worth the $368 I had to choke up to witness it. 

9. Meridian Brothers: Mi Latinoamérica Sufre (Ansonia/Bongo Joe, 2024). The Meridian Brothers was started in 1998 as a solo project by musical polyglot Eblis Álvarez who eventually formed a band to experiment more deeply with various genres -  the music of his homeland Colombia, for sure, but also "the golden era of ’70s Congolese rumba, Ghanian highlife and Nigerian afrobeat" to which this new album is a homage. As per the liners, it's also a concept album about Junior Maximiliano III, a young man of privilege who wants to study the folklore of Latin America but gets sidelined by taking a drug he calls "soma" and harboring criticism of his motivations by the artists in his ethnographic sightline. Even Spanish listeners will glean little of this from the songs; the liners merely clarify the satiric tone, reminiscent of "Common People," of the lyrics which include such translated-by-Google language as "Hey, how does rotten cumbia continue to advance?" and "Yesterday I cried while shitting." Álvarez's guitar lines sound like a kid brother toggling the radio dial just enough to annoy the crap out of you, needling where the African norm is more soothing or euphoric. If you're leery about swallowing such a jagged little pill, then check out the fervid, pulpy cover art by Mateo Rivan. It's a perfect depiction of Junior's bent journey which ends with him encrusted in self-pity and asking the government to subsidize his suffering.

10. Geordie Greep: The New Sound (Rough Trade, 2024). Former singer/multi-instrumentalist of feted London math rockers Black Midi Geordie Greep has such a goofy, onomatopoeic name, looks so much like a cartoon character, sounds so much like Donald Fagen, sambafies his music as satirically as Steely Dan did, plays up his virtuosity just like Steely Dan did, hires a orchestra of virtuosos just like Steely Dan did, and inhabits a cast of sketchy characters just like Steely Dan did that the man had to be grown in rock critic Petri dish. Greep's solo debut is speedier and shoutier than the Dan and you're right to wonder how much distance he's gained from the incels about whom he harangues over 62 minutes. But that's only because he's fashioned such an outrageous, ear-demanding platform for their toxicity.