When You're Gone

In 1989 a Byrds tribute album called Time Between was released. There were a flurry of these tribute albums, indie and leftfield rock 'n' roll bands recording covers of Neil Young, The Byrds, the Velvet Underground and Jimi Hendrix songs, with mixed results. The Neil Young tribute album, The Bridge, is uniformly superb- the others less so, but still, each one has its moments. On Time Between Dinosaur Jr stepped up and covered The Byrds I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better.

I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better

J Mascis' drawl and guitar playing were tailor made for some Byrds action, taking the song at double speed and the backing vox/ lead vox interplay sounds wonderfully half arsed, like the trio just stumbled out of bed, switched on their amps and played. 

The 1965 original, a Gene Clark song, is out of this world, the Rickenbacker jangle, harmonies and element of doubt in the chorus line, 'probably', putting it right near the pinnacle of Byrds songs and any songs from 1965. Incredibly, I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better was a B-side (to All I Really Want To Do). And equally incredibly, it is sixty years old next June. 

I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better

Half An Hour Of David Crosby

David Crosby died on Thursday aged eighty one. Given the sometimes chaotic nature of his life it could be seen as a miracle he made it to eighty one. That he did so still railing against the world, former bandmates, Donald Trump, slights and injustices, seems all the more admirable- he never gave into old age or mellowed, he carried on being the same wilful and difficult man he was when The Byrds fired him back in 1967 for being wilful and difficult. His talent as a songwriter, singer, player and arranger of harmonies meant that he was usually worth listening to although I'll happily admit there are sections of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young back catalogue I've avoided and will probably continue to. But when he was good, he was so very good. 

I started listening to The Byrds as a late teenager, aged eighteen in 1988. The Byrds were in the air (lol) back then, their Rickenbacker jangle, fringes, beads and sunglasses and acid/ folk rock chiming with the guitar bands of the day, the Creation bands and The Stone Roses. I started with a cassette, a compilation with all their songs in a random order and then picked up Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday on vinyl second hand. Crosby's songs were rarely the most obvious, rarely the ones with the shimmering twelve string chords and the perfect 60s verse/ chorus structure. His songs were sometimes in odd tunings or had strange time signatures, dreamlike songs, trippy and hallucinatory. 

In photos he often looked like The Byrd out of step, the round face contrasting with the other four's chiselled cheekbones and perfect hair, the only wearing a cape when the others were all in Levi's jackets or three button suit jackets.  His parents had tried to get some discipline into him as a young teenager when he was developing a strong anti- authoritarian streak and this seems to have followed him his whole life, a man who followed his own course, often to the detriment of his health and friendships. His 1971 solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name, was made with an all star backing cast (Neil Young, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, some of Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Grateful Dead) and by rights should be a  disaster but is one of those albums that exists on its own terms and in its own world a nine- song, beautifully weird, psychedelic folk masterpiece. 

David Crosby, one of a kind. R.I.P.

Half An Hour Of David Crosby

• Everybody's Been Burned
• I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better
• Long Time Gone
• Music Is Love
• Wild Mountain Thyme
• Ohio
• Orleans
• Guinnevere
• Wooden Ships
• Tamalpais High (At About 3)

Everybody's Been Burned is from The Byrds 1967 album Younger Than Yesterday, a slow burning, mysterious, jazz influenced written a couple of years before he joined the band. The opening lines were borrowed by Tim Burgess for The Charlatan's 1990 single The Only One I Know, The Byrds very much in the ether at the time. I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better is from1965, the B-side to their second single All I Really Want To Do (a Dylan cover) and was written by Gene Clark. It's the best 60s Rickenbacker, guitar jangle pop song bar none. Wild Mountain Thyme was on 1966's Fifth Dimension, one of the folk standards they played. 

Long Time Gone, Wooden Ships and Guinnevere are all from the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album in 1969, all Crosby songs. Guinnevere was about three women in Crosby's life, one unnamed, one Joni Mitchell and the third his girlfriend Christine Hinton who was killed in a car crash in 1969. Crosby identified her body, after which according to Nash, Crosby was never the same. Wooden Ships imagines the survivors of a nuclear apocalypse meeting and asking 'who won?'

Music Is Love, Orleans and Tamalpais High (At About 3) are all from If I Could Only Remember My Name. Orleans is a reworking of a traditional French song from the 15th century sung in round. Tamalpais is a mountain in California, mentioned by Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder in their works. 

Ohio was a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young single written by Neil Young following the Kent State University shootings in May 1970 where four students were killed by the US National Guard at an anti- Vietnam War protest. Crosby's backing vocals stand out as he cries out 'Four!' and 'How many more?' as the song fades out. According to Young, Crosby was in tears after recording them. 'Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming/ We're finally on our own', is as good an opening line as any protest song has. 

Keep Saying No To Her

On Sunday night Drew posted Wasn't Born To Follow by The Byrds on Twitter, a gorgeous piece of cosmic country from 1968 (and appearing on the Easy Rider soundtrack a year later). The Byrds and yesterday's postees The Charlatans are always connected for me, partly because of Tim Burgess pinching some of David Crosby's lyrics from Everybody's Been Burned for The Only One I Know and partly because they're linked in my past. I remember getting into The Byrds via a cheap compilation aged 18 or 19 and The Charlatans would come along not much later. I pulled out my vinyl copy of Younger Than Yesterday for a listen, an 80s re- issue of their 1967 album, folk rock songs tinged with acid guitars, psychedelia and jazz. The Byrds seem very time- locked to me rather than timeless- not that that's a bad thing- the harmonies, the 60s phrases in the lyrics, the Rickenbacker, the brisk drumming. On Younger Than Yesterday the road into country they took in '68 is signposted with a pair of Chris Hillman songs, Time Between and The Girl With No Name, two of the album's highlights. The album's closing song, Why, took me right back to being in my late teens and sitting in the sun in the summer.

Why

Why is a David Crosby and Jim McGuinn co- write, led by Crosby's Ravi Shankar inspired raga guitar, and some lovely lead acid guitar lines ringing out courtesy of McGuinn with just enough distortion on the Rickenbacker, a Motown pace backbeat, and on top those distinctive harmonic vocals and very mid- 60s lyrics about an unnamed hippy girl, 'Keep saying no to her/ Since she was a baby/ Keep saying no to her/ Not even maybe/ why?'. The gently stoned finger pointing reaches its peak in the third verse, Crosby asking The Man, 'You say it's a dead old world/ Cold and unforgiving/ I don't know where you live/ But you're not living/ Why?'

One Hundred Years From Now

This week's pictures all come from a visit to Hack Green 'secret' nuclear bunker, a Cold War concrete box and bunker in Cheshire from where regional government would take place in the event of a nuclear war. The Cold War officially ended in 1989 following an agreement and announcement from Bush and Gorbachev. The USSR broke up in 1991, the USA won and everyone was happy. The bunker was already outdated at this point I suspect. The machinery and computer systems, dormitories, radio broadcast equipment and all the rest of the gear designed to administer the north west of England in a post- apocalyptic world look pre-1980s. The idea that much could happen from here to successfully help Britain survive an attack by the Soviet Union seems ridiculous (in the same way that the rockets and modules that took three men to the moon fifty years ago look like tin cans held together by the type of screws and nuts most of us have in our tool boxes- thankfully the moon equipment worked while the nuclear infrastructure never faced the test it was designed for).

The year before than the moon landings The Byrds switched from psychedelic rock to an older, gentler sound. The arrival of Gram Parsons in 1968 had pushed them in a solely country rock direction. Gram's appearance was the subject of some legal disputes and his lead vocals on several songs had to be re-recorded by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman. It's also been suggested that McGuinn was uncomfortable with giving over so many lead vocal slots to Parsons and wanted to re-establish the older Byrds as the key voices. Gram was still irate about this wiping of his voice and McGuinn's re-recordings in 1973 and who knows, if still alive today, he might still be unhappy about it- the Gram vocals have since been re-released on various box sets and extras. There aren't too many albums that can claim to have kick started an entire genre but Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is one- all country rock, alt- country and Americana can be traced back to the eleven songs contained within its grooves.

One Hundred Years From Now

You Were Putting Me On

I found this clip recently and it made me smile, Teenage Fanclub back in 1995 or '96 playing live on The White Room, covering The Byrds 1965 B-side (B-side!) I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better, if push comes to shove my favourite Byrds song.



There's nothing wrong with this clip at all- Teenage Fanclub in 1995, a band in love with music and the sheer joy of playing, Norman and Gerry sharing the vocals, a group who could out jangle anyone, totally Byrdsy. There's some frantic tambourine rattling too from roadie Guitar George.

I'l Feel A Whole Lot Better opens with that wonderful chiming Rickenbacker riff by Jim McGuinn and then lifts off, with all the harmonies, the uncertainty of the lyric- 'Ill probably feel a whole lot better when you're gone'-  and that rocket fuel rhythm section, a perfect slice mid 60s folk rock, all over and done with in two minutes and thirty two seconds. I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better was written and sung by Gene Clark and released as the flipside to Mr Tambourine Man, their first self- written song that sold in its millions.

I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better

In 1989 Dinosaur Jr covered the song, released on a Byrds tribute album called Time Between, an album that also had covers by the likes of the Mock Turtles, Thin White Rope, Miracle Legion, Robyn Hitchcock and The Chills. J Mascis, Lou and Murph go at it fast, ragged and in one take. Gene Clark said this is his favourite cover of the song and I can't disagree with that. I don't have a copy of this anymore- I owned the album once but have no idea where it is now. If anyone has an mp3 of this version I'd be more than happy to take a copy off your hands.

Daytime Just Makes Me Feel Lonely

I had an urge to hear the music of The Byrds this week, the mid 60s, jingle-jangle, folk-psyche Byrds. It was the result of listening to Michael Head's Adios Senor Amigo in the car going to and from work this week. There's a Byrdsian influence on Adios Senor Pussycat, in the playing, the chords and the harmonies.

A long time ago I posted Feel A Whole Lot Better, my favourite Byrds song, with its chiming Rickenbacker guitar riff. But I also found a lot to re-love in this one, a minor key Gene Clark masterpiece, written when The Byrds were still The Jet Set. It's shot through with melancholy and loneliness as he describes being in the big city Los Angeles, without her. The opening guitar riff seems to hint at what would happen in 1966 with Eight Miles High.

Here Without You

Eight Miles Again

Husker Du's version of Eight Miles High is just indescribably good, a 7" single worth its weight in gold. Blistering, white hot, ferocious, 60s rock meeting 80s punk, with Bob Mould lacerating his vocal chords and fingertips.

Eight Miles High

There are several live clips on Youtube. This one is Husker Du live in Camden in 1985. Astonishing, sheets of metal feedback from Bob and manic drum thumping from Grant Hart.



Live in 1987 at a Dutch festival from someone's collection of home recorded VHS tapes, slightly less manic...

And Then We Touch Down

The Byrds and Eight Miles High- when folk rock became acid rock. It's the trippy guitars that get all the attention but the bass playing is way out there and the vocal harmonies are superb. I have loved this since I first heard it sometime in the mid 1980s. It was only twenty years old then but felt ancient.

Eight Miles High

Probably

A slight change of tack now- from 80s electronic dubiness to 60s folk-rock. I'm not sure this song is folk-rock, more template making guitar pop. The Byrds' I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better was a B-side from 1965 and an album track. Written and sung by Gene Clark (far left in photo), the chiming 12 string Rickenbacker guitar, pounding tambourine and three part vocals add up to perfection, and my shoddy writing in no way does it justice. One of your favourite guitar bands is in here somewhere I'll wager. The lyric adds it's own little sardonic twist, Gene Clark weighing up the departure of a girl who's done him wrong and deciding he'll feel a whole lot better when she's gone. Well, probably. While I'm here, check out the hair. Best 60s fringes? Probably.

I\'ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.wma#2#2

Signs In The Street That Say Where You're Going

The punk cover (as opposed to it's second cousin the ironic cover) is one of the pleasures of post '77 punk rock. Husker Du's cover of The Byrds psychedelic masterpiece Eight Miles High may well be the high point of both all punk covers and Husker Du's back catalogue. It's absolutely blistering and well worth a few minutes of your weekend.

01 Eight Miles High.wma