Cahn Media: BYRDS BOX SET

THE BYRDS – “There Is a Season” 4-CD + DVD box set (Columbia/Legacy)

Arrives in stores September 26, 2006

OVERVIEW:

Modern American rock starts here. When the Byrds initially took flight in Los Angeles in 1964 the British Invasion, launched earlier that year on these shores by the Beatles, followed closely by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals and numerous others, held the rock world in its sway.

But the Byrds -- former folk, country and bluegrass musicians with a keen ear for the new, electrified sounds (as well as the the words and music of Bob Dylan) -- changed all that. The jangly timbres of Jim (later Roger) McGuinn's 12-string guitar, and the ethereal three-part harmonies of McGuinn, David Crosby and Gene Clark gave the U.S. its own strong contender for pop musical primacy.

Like many rock bands who came to prominence during the 1960s, the Byrds didn't last nearly long enough. And like many innovators, they were never satisfied merely to repeat themselves. Consequently, THE BYRDS: THERE IS A SEASON presents not one musical approach, but at least four: the groundbreaking, chart-topping folk-rockers of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" fame; the psychedelic, raga-rocking space cadets who gave us "Eight Miles High" and "5D"; the country-rock outfit who made the pioneering album SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO; and the inveterate folkies/traditionalists who so beautifully adapted "Wild Mountain Thyme" and "I Am a Pilgrim."

As the Byrds experienced artistic changes they underwent changes in personnel, as well, The first 50 selections of this 99-track, four-CD set (there's also a bonus DVD featuring 10 vintage clips) spotlights the original five, comprising lead guitarist-vocalist McGuinn, rhythm guitarist-vocalist Crosby, vocalist Clark, bassist Chris Hillman, and drummer Michael Clarke. Upon take off, we hear the Jet Set, the first of two pre-Byrds bands on Disc One, the other being the Beefeaters. (Compare the Beefeaters' version of “Don't Be Long", from 1964, and "It Won't Be Wrong," a far more polished take of the very same song, recorded by the Byrds the following year.)

Over the course of the four CDs, spanning the years 1964 to 1990, one encounters every hit and many key album cuts, as rendered by the various incarnations under the Byrds' legendary name. There are previously unreleased tracks, live radio shots, in-concert performances and, of course, the studio classics that made the Byrds one of the most important rock bands of the past four decades.

HIGHLIGHTS

· For the first time - the COMPLETE Byrds story

· 99 tracks on 4 CDs

· Includes 5 Unissued Tracks

· Contains all of the key singles and album tracks, as well as pre-Byrds recordings and material unearthed while reissuing The Byrds catalog

· BONUS DVD contains 10 Previously Unreleased TV appearances 1965-1967

· Extensive new liner notes by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, as well as intros by Tom Petty, Gary Louris (of the Jayhawks), and other admirers

· Personally overseen by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman

TRACK LISTING:

DISC ONE

1. The Only Girl I Adore [by The Jet Set] +

2. Please Let Me Love You [by The Beefeaters] +

3. Don't Be Long [by The Beefeaters] +

4. The Airport Song

5. You Movin’

6. You Showed Me

7. Mr. Tambourine Man

8. I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better

9. You Won’t Have To Cry

10. Here Without You

11. The Bells Of Rhymney

12. All I Really Want To Do (single version) +

13. I Knew I’d Want You

14. Chimes Of Freedom

15. She Has A Way

16. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

17. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) +

18. It Won’t Be Wrong

19. Set You Free This Time

20. The World Turns All Around Her

21. The Day Walk

22. If You’re Gone

23. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (withdrawn version) +

24. She Don’t Care About Time (single version) +

25. Stranger In A Strange Land (instrumental)

DISC TWO

1. Eight Miles High

2. Why (single version) +

3. 5D (Fifth Dimension)

4. Wild Mountain Thyme

5. Mr. Spaceman

6. I See You

7. What’s Happening?!?!

8. I Know My Rider

9. So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star

10. Have You Seen Her Face

11. Renaissance Fair

12. Time Between

13. Everybody’s Been Burned

14. My Back Pages

15. It Happens Each Day

16. He Was A Friend Of Mine [LIVE] *+

17. Lady Friend +

18. Old John Robertson (single version) +

19. Goin’ Back

20. Draft Morning

21. Wasn’t Born To Follow

22. Tribal Gathering

23. Dolphin’s Smile

24. Triad

25. Universal Mind Decoder (instrumental)

DISC THREE

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

2. I Am A Pilgrim

3. The Christian Life (Gram Parsons vocal version)

4. You Don’t Miss Your Water (Gram Parsons vocal version)

5. Hickory Wind

6. One Hundred Years From Now (Gram Parsons vocal version)

7. Lazy Days (alternate version)

8. Pretty Polly (alternate version)

9. This Wheel’s On Fire (alternate version)

10. Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man

11. Candy

12. Child Of The Universe (Candy soundtrack version)

13. Pretty Boy Floyd [LIVE]

14. Buckaroo (instrumental) [LIVE]

15. King Apathy III [LIVE]

16. Sing Me Back Home [LIVE]

17. Lay Lady Lay (alternate version)

18. Oil In My Lamp (alternate version)

19. Tulsa County

20. Jesus Is Just Alright

21. Chestnut Mare

22. Just A Season

23. Kathleen’s Song (alternate version)

24. All The Things (alternate version)

DISC FOUR

1. Lover Of The Bayou [LIVE]

2. Positively 4th Street [LIVE]

3. Old Blue [LIVE]

4. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) [LIVE]

5. Ballad Of Easy Rider [LIVE]

6. You All Look Alike [LIVE] *

7. Nashville West (instrumental) [LIVE] *

8. Willin’ [LIVE]

9. Black Mountain Rag (instrumental) [LIVE]

10. Baby What You Want Me To Do [LIVE] *

11. I Trust [LIVE] *

12. Take A Whiff (On Me) [LIVE]

13. Glory, Glory

14. Byrdgrass (instrumental)

15. Pale Blue

16. I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician

17. Nothin’ To It (instrumental)

18. Tiffany Queen

19. Farther Along

20. Bugler

21. Mr. Tambourine Man (Banjoman soundtrack version) [LIVE]

22. Roll Over Beethoven (Banjoman soundtrack version) [LIVE]

23. Full Circle

24. Changing Heart

25. Paths Of Victory

* Previously Unreleased

+ Mono

Original Recordings Produced by Jim Dickson, Terry Melcher, Allen Stanton, Gary Usher, the Byrds, Bob Johnston, Terry Melcher and Chris Hinshaw, Neil Wilburn, Richard G. Abramson and Michael C. Varhol, David Crosby, Don DeVito

Compilation Produced by Bob Irwin

Mastered by Vic Anesini at Sony Music Studios, New York

BONUS DVD

1. Mr. Tambourine Man

2. I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better

3. All I Really Want To Do

4. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)

5. It Won’t Be Wrong

6. Set You Free This Time

7. So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star

8. Mr. Tambourine Man

9. Eight Miles High

10. Mr. Spaceman

www.legacyrecordings.com

All tracks are stereo, except where indicated.

DISC ONE

1. The Only Girl I Adore 2:23 [by The Jet Set]

(R. McGuinn-G. Clark)

produced by Jim Dickson

recorded: 1964

release: Together ST-1014 - Early L.A.

mono

2. Please Let Me Love You 2:21 [by The Beefeaters]

(G. Clark-R. McGuinn-H. Gerst)

produced by Jim Dickson

recorded: 1964

release: Elektra single 45013

mono

3. Don't Be Long 1:54 [by The Beefeaters]

(R. McGuinn-H. Gerst)

produced by Jim Dickson

recorded: 1964

release: Elektra single 45013

mono

4. The Airport Song 2:01

(R. McGuinn-D. Crosby)

produced by Jim Dickson

recorded: 1964

release: Together ST-1-1001 - Preflyte

5. You Movin’2:06

(G. Clark)

produced by Jim Dickson

recorded: 1964

release: Together ST-1-1001 - Preflyte

6. You Showed Me 2:02

(R. McGuinn-G. Clark)

produced by Jim Dickson

recorded: 1964

release: Sundazed SC 11116 - The Preflyte Sessions

7. Mr. Tambourine Man 2:29

(B. Dylan)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72245

recorded: January 20, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man

8. I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better 2:32

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72495

recorded: April 14, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man and Columbia single 4-43332

9. You Won’t Have To Cry 2:08

(G. Clark-R. McGuinn)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72497

recorded: April 14, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man

10. Here Without You 2:38

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72503

recorded: April 22, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man

11. The Bells Of Rhymney 3:30

(I. Davies-P. Seeger)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72494

recorded: April 14, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man

12. All I Really Want To Do 2:02

(B. Dylan)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72425

recorded: March 8, 1965

release: Columbia single 4-43332

single version - mono

13. I Knew I’d Want You 2:14

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72246

recorded: April 20, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man and Columbia single 4-43271

14. Chimes Of Freedom 3:51

(B. Dylan)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72501

recorded: April 22, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9172 - Mr. Tambourine Man

15. She Has A Way 2:25

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72429

recorded: March 8, 1965

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

16. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue 3:03

(B. Dylan)

produced by Terry Melcher and Jim Dickson

master number: HCO 72649

recorded: June 28, 1965

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 64846 - Turn! Turn! Turn! - Expanded Edition

17. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) 3:49

(Words from the Book Of Ecclesiastes - Adapt. and music by Pete Seeger)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72734

recorded: September 10, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9254 - Turn! Turn! Turn! and Columbia single 4-43424

mono

18. It Won’t Be Wrong 1:58

(R. McGuinn-H. Gerst)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72736

recorded: September 18, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9254 - Turn! Turn! Turn! and Columbia single 4-43501

19. Set You Free This Time 2:49

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72738

recorded: September 16, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9254 - Turn! Turn! Turn! and Columbia single 4-43501

20. The World Turns All Around Her 2:13

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72730

recorded: August 23, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9254 - Turn! Turn! Turn!

21. The Day Walk 3:00

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: none assigned

recorded: September 14, 1965

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

22. If You’re Gone 2:45

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 87518

recorded: October 20, 1965

release: Columbia CS 9254 - Turn! Turn! Turn!

23. The Times They Are A-Changin’ 1:54

(B. Dylan)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72647

recorded: June 28, 1965

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 64846 - Turn! Turn! Turn! - Expanded Edition

withdrawn version - mono

24. She Don’t Care About Time 2:29

(G. Clark)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72729

recorded: August 23, 1965

release: Columbia single 4-43424

single version - mono

25. Stranger In A Strange Land 3:04

(D. Crosby)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 72740

recorded: September 18, 1965

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 64846 - Turn! Turn! Turn! - Expanded Edition

instrumental

DISC TWO

1. Eight Miles High 3:34

(G. Clark-R. McGuinn-D. Crosby)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87690

recorded: January 25, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9349 - Fifth Dimension and Columbia single 4-43578

2. Why 2:58

(R. McGuinn-D. Crosby)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87687

recorded: January 24, 1966

release: Columbia single 4-43578

single version - mono

3. 5D (Fifth Dimension) 2:33

(R. McGuinn)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87883

recorded: May 25, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9349 - Fifth Dimension and Columbia single 4-43702

4. Wild Mountain Thyme 2:30

(Arr: R. McGuinn-C. Hillman-M. Clarke-D. Crosby)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87804

recorded: May 25, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9349 - Fifth Dimension

5. Mr. Spaceman 2:09

(R. McGuinn)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87800

recorded: April 29, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9349 - Fifth Dimension and Columbia single 4-43766

6. I See You 2:38

(R. McGuinn-D. Crosby)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87876

recorded: May 19, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9349 - Fifth Dimension

7. What’s Happening?!?! 2:35

(D. Crosby)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87801

recorded: April 29, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9349 - Fifth Dimension and Columbia single 4-43766

8. I Know My Rider 2:43

(Traditional; Arr.: R. McGuinn-G. Clark-D. Crosby)

produced by Allen Stanton

master number: HCO 87993

recorded: July 28, 1966

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

9. So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star 2:05

(R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88324

recorded: November 28, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9442 - Younger Than Yesterday and Columbia single 4-43987

10. Have You Seen Her Face 2:40

(C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88329

recorded: November 29, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9442 - Younger Than Yesterday and Columbia single 4-44157

11. Renaissance Fair 1:50

(D. Crosby-R. McGuinn)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88397

recorded: December 6, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9442 - Younger Than Yesterday and Columbia single 4-44054

12. Time Between 1:53

(C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88388

recorded: November 30, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9442 - Younger Than Yesterday

13. Everybody’s Been Burned 3:05

(D. Crosby)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88398

recorded: December 7, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9442 - Younger Than Yesterday and Columbia single 4-43987

14. My Back Pages 3:08

(B. Dylan)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88395

recorded: December 5, 1966

release: Columbia CS 9442 - Younger Than Yesterday and Columbia single 4-44054 (edited)

15. It Happens Each Day 2:44

(D. Crosby)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 88399

recorded: December 8, 1966

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

16. He Was A Friend Of Mine [LIVE] 2:36

(Traditional; Additional Lyrics: R. McGuinn)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none

recorded: April, 1967 - Swedish Radio Broadcast - Radiohuset (Studio 4) - Stockholm

previously unissued

mono

17. Lady Friend 2:30

(D. Crosby)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94794-4

recorded: June 14, 1967

release: Columbia single 4-44230

mono

18. Old John Robertson 1:50

(R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94897-1

recorded: June 21, 1967

release: Columbia single 4-44230

single version - mono

19. Goin’ Back 3:26

(G. Goffin-C. King)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 95118

recorded: October 9, 1967

release: Columbia CS 9575 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Columbia single 4-44362

20. Draft Morning 2:43

(D. Crosby-C. Hillman-R. McGuinn)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94923

recorded: August 2, 1967

release: Columbia CS 9575 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers

21. Wasn’t Born To Follow 2:04

(G. Goffin-C. King)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 95388

recorded: November 30, 1967

release: Columbia CS 9575 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Columbia single 4-44990

22. Tribal Gathering 2:04

(D. Crosby-C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94927

recorded: August 16, 1967

release: Columbia CS 9575 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers

23. Dolphin’s Smile 1:59

(D. Crosby-C. Hillman-R. McGuinn)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94926

recorded: August 16, 1967

release: Columbia CS 9575 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers

24. Triad 3:29

(D. Crosby)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94926

recorded: August 17, 1967

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

25. Universal Mind Decoder 3:27

(R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 94922

recorded: July 31, 1967

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65151 - The Notorious Byrd Brothers - Expanded Edition

instrumental

DISC THREE

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere 2:33

(B. Dylan)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: NCO 98261

recorded: March 9, 1968

release: Columbia CS 9670 - Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and Columbia single 4-44499

2. I Am A Pilgrim 3:39

(Traditional; Arr.: R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: NCO 98265

recorded: March 13, 1968

release: Columbia CS 9670 - Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and Columbia single 4-44643

3. The Christian Life 2:28

(I. Louvin-C. Louvin)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 97260

recorded: April 24, 1968

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

Gram Parsons vocal version

4. You Don’t Miss Your Water 3:48

(W. Bell)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 97220

recorded: April 15, 1968

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

Gram Parsons vocal version

5. Hickory Wind 3:31

(G. Parsons-B. Buchanan)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: NCO 98262

recorded: March 9, 1968

release: Columbia CS 9670 - Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

6. One Hundred Years From Now 2:52

(G. Parsons)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: HCO 97335

recorded: May 27, 1968

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

Gram Parsons vocal version

7. Lazy Days 3:16

(G. Parsons)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: NCO 98263

recorded: March 9, 1968

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 87189 - Sweetheart Of The Rodeo - Legacy Edition

alternate version

8. Pretty Polly 3:35

(Traditional; Arr.: R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

produced by Gary Usher

master number: NCO 98266

recorded: March 9, 1968

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 87189 - Sweetheart Of The Rodeo - Legacy Edition

alternate version

9. This Wheel’s On Fire 3:53

(B. Dylan-R. Danko)

produced by Bob Johnston

master number: HCO 97737

recorded: October 8, 1968

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65113 - Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde - Expanded Edition

alternate version

10. Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man 3:53

(R. McGuinn-G. Parsons)

produced by Bob Johnston

master number: HCO 97736

recorded: October 8, 1968

release: Columbia CS 9755 - Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde and Columbia single 4-44746

11. Candy 3:37

(R. McGuinn-J. York)

produced by Bob Johnston

master number: HCO 100506

recorded: December 4, 1968

release: Columbia CS 9755 - Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde

12. Child Of The Universe 3:08

(D. Grusin-R. McGuinn)

From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Candy

produced by Bob Johnston

master number: HCO 97951

recorded: December 4, 1968

release: ABC S-OC-9 - Candy soundtrack version

13. Pretty Boy Floyd [LIVE] 2:48

(W. Guthrie)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 8, 1969 - The Fillmore West

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65910 - Live At The Fillmore - February 1969

14. Buckaroo [LIVE] 2:09

(B. Morris)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 8, 1969 - The Fillmore West

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65910 - Live At The Fillmore - February 1969

instrumental

15. King Apathy III [LIVE] 3:14

(R. McGuinn)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 8, 1969 - The Fillmore West

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65910 - Live At The Fillmore - February 1969

16. Sing Me Back Home [LIVE] 3:00

(M. Haggard)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 8, 1969 - The Fillmore West

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65910 - Live At The Fillmore - February 1969

17. Lay Lady Lay 3:18

(B. Dylan)

produced by Bob Johnston

master number: HCO 105809

recorded: April 18, 1969

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

alternate version

18. Oil In My Lamp 2:02

(Traditional; Arr.: R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 106039

recorded: June 19, 1969

release: Columbia C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

alternate version

19. Tulsa County 2:49

(P. Polland)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 104002

recorded: July 23, 1969

release: Columbia CS 9942 - The Ballad Of Easy Rider

20. Jesus Is Just Alright 2:10

(A. Reynolds)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 106034

recorded: June 17, 1969

release: Columbia CS 9942 - The Ballad Of Easy Rider and Columbia single 4-45071

21. Chestnut Mare 5:08

(R. McGuinn-J. Levy)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 107631

recorded: June 3, 1970

release: Columbia C 30181 - Untitled and Columbia single 4-45259

22. Just A Season 3:52

(R. McGuinn-J. Levy)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 107630

recorded: June 2, 1970

release: Columbia C 30181 - Untitled and Columbia single 4-45259

23. Kathleen’s Song 2:39

(R. McGuinn-J. Levy)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 107633

recorded: June 9, 1970

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 65847 - Untitled/Unissued - Expanded Edition

alternate version

24. All The Things 4:56

(R. McGuinn-J. Levy)

produced by Terry Melcher

master number: HCO 106946

recorded: May 26, 1970

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 65847 - Untitled/Unissued - Expanded Edition

alternate version

DISC FOUR

1. Lover Of The Bayou [LIVE] 3:39

(R. McGuinn-J. Levy)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: HCO 107027

recorded: March 1, 1970 - The Felt Forum

release: Columbia C 30181 - Untitled

2. Positively 4th Street [LIVE] 3:07

(B. Dylan)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: HCO 107673

recorded: March 1, 1970 - The Felt Forum

release: Columbia C 30181 - Untitled

3. Old Blue [LIVE] 3:30

(Arr. & Adapt. by R. McGuinn)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: HCO 107673

recorded: March 1, 1970 - The Felt Forum

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 65847 - Untitled/Unissued - Expanded Edition

4. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) [LIVE] 2:53

(B. Dylan)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: HCO 107670

recorded: March 1, 1970 - The Felt Forum

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 65847 - Untitled/Unissued - Expanded Edition

5. Ballad Of Easy Rider [LIVE] 2:11

(R. McGuinn)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: HCO 107671

recorded: March 1, 1970 - The Felt Forum

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 65847 - Untitled/Unissued - Expanded Edition

6. You All Look Alike [LIVE] 3:08

(S. Battin-K. Fowley)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 28, 1970 - Colden Hall, Queens College

previously unissued

7. Nashville West [LIVE] 2:12

(G. Parsons-C. White)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 28, 1970 - Colden Hall, Queens College

instrumental

previously unissued

8. Willin’ [LIVE] 3:13

(L. George)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 28, 1970 - Colden Hall, Queens College

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

9. Black Mountain Rag [LIVE] 1:17

(Traditional; Arr.: C. White-R. McGuinn)

produced by Jim Dickson

master number: none assigned

recorded: February 28, 1970 - Colden Hall, Queens College

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

instrumental

10. Baby What You Want Me To Do [LIVE] 3:48

(J. Reed)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: September 23, 1970 -The Fillmore East

previously unissued

11. I Trust [LIVE] 4:04

(R. McGuinn)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: September 23, 1970 -The Fillmore East

previously unissued

12. Take A Whiff (On Me) [LIVE] 2:54

(A. Lomax-J. Lomax-H. Ledbetter; Arr.: C. White-R. McGuinn)

produced by the Byrds

master number: none assigned

recorded: September 23, 1970 -The Fillmore East

release: Columbia/Legacy C2K 65847 - Untitled/Unissued - Expanded Edition

13. Glory, Glory 4:02

(A. Reynolds)

produced by Terry Melcher and Chris Hinshaw

master number: HCO 110641

recorded: January 17, 1971

release: Columbia KC 30640 - Byrdmaniax and Columbia single 4-45440

14. Byrdgrass 1:42

(G. Parsons-C. White)

produced by: the Byrds

recorded: January 24, 1971

master number: HCO 110649

release: Columbia/Legacy CK 65848 - Byrdmaniax - Expanded Edition

with Eric White on harmonica

instrumental

15. Pale Blue 2:22

(R. McGuinn)

produced by Terry Melcher and Chris Hinshaw

master number: HCO 110658

recorded: January 22, 1971

release: Columbia KC 30640 - Byrdmaniax

16. I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician 2:03

(R. McGuinn-J. Levy)

produced by Terry Melcher and Chris Hinshaw

master number: HCO 110638

recorded: January 17, 1971

release: Columbia KC 30640 - Byrdmaniax

17. Nothin’ To It 1:38

(Arr.: D. Watson)

produced by Neil Wilburn

master number: NCO 108783

recorded: April 28, 1971

release: Columbia C 30584 - Earl Scruggs: His Family & Friends

with Earl Scruggs on banjo

instrumental

18. Tiffany Queen 2:40

(R. McGuinn)

produced by the Byrds

master number: HCO 115594

recorded: July 25, 1971

release: Columbia KC 31050 - Farther Along

19. Farther Along 3:00

(Traditional; Arr.: C. White)

produced by the Byrds

master number: HCO 115543

recorded: July 25, 1971

release: Columbia KC 31050 - Farther Along and Columbia single 4-45514

20. Bugler 3:06

(L. Murray)

produced by: the Byrds

recorded: July 22, 1971

master number: HCO 115589

release: Columbia KC 31050 - Farther Along

21. Mr. Tambourine Man [LIVE] 2:56

(B. Dylan)

From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Banjoman

producer: Richard G. Abramson and Michael C. Varhol

recorded: January 1973

release: Sire 7527 - Banjoman

22. Roll Over Beethoven [LIVE] 2:59

(C. Berry)

From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Banjoman

producer: Richard G. Abramson and Michael C. Varhol

recorded: January 1973

release: Sire 7527 - Banjoman

23. Full Circle 2:41

(G. Clark)

producer: David Crosby

record date: 1973

release: Asylum 5058 - Byrds

(P) 1998 Elektra Entertainment Group

Produced Under License From Elektra Entertainment Group

24. Changing Heart 2:41

(G. Clark)

producer: David Crosby

record date: 1973

release: Asylum 5058 - Byrds

(P) 1998 Elektra Entertainment Group

Produced Under License From Elektra Entertainment Group

25. Paths Of Victory 3:10

(B. Dylan)

produced by Don DeVito

recorded August 6-8, 1990

release: Columbia/Legacy C4K 46773 - The Byrds Boxset

DISC ONE

Tracks 1, 4-6 Produced under license from James T. Dickson

Tracks 2, 3 Produced under license from Elektra Entertainment Group

DISC TWO

DISC THREE

Track 12 Courtesy of Geffen Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises

DISC FOUR

Tracks 21-22 (P) 1977 Michael Varhol

Courtesy of Michael Varhol

Tracks 23, 24 (P) 1998 Elektra Entertainment Group

Produced Under License From Elektra Entertainment Group

Track 25 (P) 1990 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

BONUS DVD

1. Mr. Tambourine Man

(B. Dylan)

Footage courtesy of Research Video

2. I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better

(G. Clark)

Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

3. All I Really Want To Do

(B. Dylan)

Footage courtesy of BBC Motion Gallery, BBC Worldwide Americas Inc.

4. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)

(Words from the Book Of Ecclesiastes - Adapt. and music by Pete Seeger)

Footage courtesy of Research Video

5. It Won’t Be Wrong

(R. McGuinn-H. Gerst)

Footage courtesy of Research Video

6. Set You Free This Time

(G. Clark)

Footage courtesy of Research Video

7. So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star

(R. McGuinn-C. Hillman)

Licensed exclusively by Reelin' In The Years Productions LLC on behalf of SVT.

8. Mr. Tambourine Man

(B. Dylan)

Licensed exclusively by Reelin' In The Years Productions LLC on behalf of SVT.

9. Eight Miles High

(G. Clark-R. McGuinn-D. Crosby)

Licensed exclusively by Reelin' In The Years Productions LLC on behalf of SVT.

10. Mr. Spaceman

(R. McGuinn)

Performance of the Byrds courtesy of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

LINER NOTES

Introduction by Roger McGuinn

The Byrds were huge Beatle fans and after seeing their movie "A Hard Day's Night" we attempted to copy their instruments and clothing. We wanted to get suits like the ones they wore, with velvet collars but were having a hard time finding them. We finally found a clothing store in East Los Angeles called "Mr. Parker's Closet" that had some black suits with rounded velvet collars, something like the ones the Beatles had worn. They were our stage outfits at Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood. After our five sets, we left them hanging in the dressing room at the end of each evening. Usually they were still there when we came back to work the next day, but one day they were gone! We couldn't afford to buy new suits so we just performed in jeans and t-shirts from that point on.

After the success of "Mr. Tambourine Man" we got to meet and hang out with the Beatles. I remember telling John Lennon the story of our missing suits and he said, "I wish somebody had stolen our suits!"

Later that year the Rolling Stones invited us to be their opening act on a stadium tour. They would arrive in an armored car and were usually right on time. But one show in San Diego was an exception. Our repertoire was limited, but long enough for the short set required of us. After our last song I noticed the frantic concert promoter in the wings making a stretching gesture. He wanted us to keep playing, but we were out of our own material. I started playing the Stones' hit "Not Fade Away" out of desperation. Just then Mick walked in with a big smile.

We did a lot of TV shows in the days following our No. 1 hit with "Mr. Tambourine Man," and the taping of them was usually pretty boring. After going to makeup we would wait for hours while they worked out technical details. Then there would be a camera rehearsal and more waiting before shooting the actual show. To entertain ourselves on the road we had bought some fireworks while on tour in the States. We had them with us in the UK during the taping of a TV show in London. Crosby and I thought we'd have a little fun. We took some fireworks out of our pockets and stomped on them on the floor in the middle of the TV studio. These Chinese incendiary devices were designed to ignite under pressure. When they went off, they sent smoke and sparks in every direction with loud crackling noises. The studio staff freaked out and ordered everybody off the set while they nervously inspected all the cables and equipment for short circuits. Finally after about half an hour, not finding anything, they decided to resume the taping. They never did find out what had happened.

Psychologists tell us that the human frontal lobes are not fully developed until the mid 20s. The Byrds were in their late teens and early 20s when we rose to top of the charts. Perhaps that accounts for our childlike behavior. So called adults turn into little boys on the road. I really can't tell you all the things we did but It sure was fun!

Roger McGuinn

July, 2006

Thoughts On the Byrds by Tom Petty

Let’s think about the Byrds for a moment. The first signal beamed to me was “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It came trance-like from my AM radio as I was waking up on a Saturday morning in 1965. These were times when virtually every day was one of discovery in rock & roll. The Beatles had come like a hurricane, and a tidal wave of British groups followed in their wake. And many of them were very good. The Kinks, the Zombies, and the Rolling Stones, to name a few, were making England look like the only direction to look for great music. Then I heard that incredible twelve-string intro and those voices that followed. They seemed ethereal, from somewhere I’d never been. The real stunner on that innocent morning was to hear the DJ say, “that was the Byrds, a new American group.” For some time they would be all the U.S. could be proud of in rock music—and it didn’t stop there. There would be more great singles and awe-inspiring LPs for years to come.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Byrds was how well they fit into the ’60s, as well as how they helped shape it. This was no one-and-a-half-hit pop group. These guys were Artists. They were going to push the envelope. The Beatles knew it and so did their fans. Without a single member with a rock background, they came from folk trios, bluegrass, Christy Minstrels and beatnik coffee houses. It was almost like a lab experiment, mixing the elements and seeing what came out. They brought Dylan into the pop mainstream and there were elements of Coltrane and R&B, raga and oh, country. Much has been made of Gram Parsons’ brief time as a Byrd. He did create incredible music during the Sweetheart Of The Rodeo period. So did McGuinn and Hillman. And as for who created “Country Rock,” even if we look past the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” “Act Naturally,” or “What Goes On,” the Byrds’ “Mr. Spaceman” from Fifth Dimension or “Time Between” from the Younger Than Yesterday LP showed up years before Parsons. But let’s take nothing away from Gram. He was great, and great is great. The Byrds bubbled over with great. These guys were going forward no matter what. They were never imitators. I don’t think they could have been if they wanted to. They were just too unique. McGuinn (Jim or Roger) was always the center of the storm. His Rickenbacker electric twelve-string was essential to the Byrds and absolutely changed the way rock & roll sounded for years. But enough of the technical stuff. To us young fans they were much more than cool sunglasses, suede capes and leather boots. These guys were not pinup boys. They were musicians. And for that alone we are all in their debt.

Peace and Love,

Tom Petty - 2004

Imagine the sound of a supersonic jet soaring over an old chiming belltower. That's how I hear the Byrds. At the same time incredibly modern and yet extremely traditional, at the same time breaking new ground and mining the old. It strikes me that they were the first to do what they did. They did not have themselves as a reference as every band that followed in their footsteps did. Like all great bands they are impossible to copy. Take it from someone who has tried. I cannot imagine the musical landscape without the Byrds. They are a touchstone, an adjective . . . something sounds "Byrdsy" which immediately conjures up jangle and harmony. I think of three things when I think of the early Byrds . . . twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar, tambourine, and that unmistakable harmony. They made it sound so easy, but believe me, it was anything but easy. Later they would pioneer psychedelic and country rock, but for me I think of them as the creators of folk rock . . . one part Beatles, one part Dylan and the rest truly their own. Internal strife most often ignites the most creative music, and they had enough strife and friction for a hundred bands. They created a genre, and there are very few bands that can say that. They were always one step ahead of their audience, or should I say eight miles above them.

Gary Louris (The Jayhawks)

Minneapolis, MN

7/12/04

There was nothing like it on a rock & roll record at the time. There has been nothing like it since. Revolution and sunshine; barricades and discotheques; long dusty roads and top-down convertibles; holy song and teenage hallelujah: They were all there, all at once, in the explosive parade of chime at the beginning of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Byrds’ 1965 Columbia Records debut and one of the greatest, immediately historic singles ever made.

Four decades later, everything about “Mr. Tambourine Man” seems perfect yet impossible, two-and-a-half minutes of startling opposites and natural beauty. The song was Bob Dylan’s: a hobo’s prayer for adventure and revelation, originally set in sea-chantey time and not yet officially recorded by Dylan when the Byrds – Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke – first heard it in demo form in late 1964. The guitar overture was adapted by McGuinn from the carol Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire, composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1723. McGuinn dressed the riff in the church-bell twang of an electric, twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar, an instrument he fell in love with as soon as he saw George Harrison play one in the Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night.

And there were the voices: McGuinn, Clark and Crosby, all ex-folk singers blinded by Beatlemania and bringing Dylan’s “jingle-jangle morning” to life with choral precision and Southern California vigor. Before the Byrds, there were three basic forms of harmony singing in rock & roll: black street-corner doo-wop; the country-duo tradition modernized by the Everly Brothers; and the white, glee-club shine of the Four Freshmen and the Hi-Lo’s, taken surfside by the Beach Boys. The Byrds’ three-part maneuvers were something else, practically Gregorian in blend and tone yet aggressively jet-age in attack and sensuality.

That sound was also “an illusion,” McGuinn reveals, “the same as if you look at a TV set and you see a solid picture, when it’s actually a lot of lines.” In “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he explains, “Gene and I are singing in unison, with David doing the solo harmony part. My voice was a little thin; Gene’s was deep. I gave him flexibility and speed; he gave me fullness. Together, the two of us made a good lead singer, while David skipped around between third, fourth and fifth harmonies, giving the sense of all these things going on.”

Another illusion: McGuinn was the only Byrd in the studio band that recorded the instrumental track for “Mr. Tambourine Man” on January 20^th, 1965, at Columbia’s West Coast studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. (Vocals were done the next day.) Columbia staff producer Terry Melcher, mindful of studio time and expense, replaced rhythm guitarist Crosby, Hillman – a teenage wizard on mandolin but a beginner on bass – and fledgling drummer Michael Clarke with session pros: bass guitarist Larry Knechtel, drummer Hal Blaine and pianist Russell Bridges a/k/a Leon Russell.

“You can only speculate that we weren’t good enough as a band,” says McGuinn, “which was about right. I had five years of playing in studios with people like Judy Collins. But even I was nervous. I remember Hal Blaine took me aside. He said, ‘Don’t be nervous. You know what I do? Go out and have a couple of beers.’ Which I didn’t.”

Melcher put McGuinn and the hired guns through at least twenty-two takes of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” devoting the rest of the three-hour session to the B-side, Gene Clark’s Beatles-style ballad “I Knew I’d Want You.” “But as slick as that single is, how would it have sounded if we had worked hard and done it as a band?” Chris Hillman wonders today. Before signing with Columbia, the Byrds spent much of 1964 rehearsing at another local facility, World Pacific Studios, learning to sing and play as a group under the guidance of their co-manager, record producer Jim Dickson. “I bet ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ would have been a more interesting record,” Hillman contends. “Listen to that, then listen to ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!,’ which we did nine months later. The band is a band – there is a different movement to the music. You can feel it.”

You hear that feel and surge throughout this collection, the definitive successor to the first groundbreaking Byrds boxed set, issued in 1990. “Mr. Tambourine Man” was immaculate in everything, including timing. Recorded virtually at the midpoint of rock’s greatest decade and Number One across America by June 26^th, 1965, the Byrds’ first single abruptly ended rock & roll’s malt-shop adolescence. With the union of Dylan’s songwriting and the Byrds’ radiant bravado – quickly tagged “folk-rock” – a new age of exploration began, accelerating into psychedelia, country rock, the singer-songwriter movement and the first stirrings of electronic pop, all with the Byrds at the forefront.

“Mr. Tambourine Man” was also the start of the Byrds’ own stardom: seven Top Forty singles in two years; eleven classic studio albums for Columbia; a parallel career as the premier rock & roll interpreters of the Dylan songbook. No band – with the exception of the Byrds’ biggest fans and transatlantic rivals, the Beatles – achieved so much in so short a time, even in the runaway Sixties. And no other band risked so much, and came so close to losing it all, for the sake of going forward. The hits brought riches and acclaim – but also disappointment, argument, desertion and, with amazing regularity, rebirth.

The first fifty tracks here rightly celebrate the original lineup in all of its class and crisis: the gleaming reveille of the Dylan covers; the heartbreaking elegance of Clark’s love songs; the technicolor galactica of “Eight Miles High” and “Draft Morning.” The second half of this set is just as vital and moving. It is a salute to those Byrds who followed – Clarence White, Kevin Kelley, Gram Parsons, Gene Parsons (no relation), John York and Skip Battin – and to their cinematic vision of American music in the stone country of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, the space-rock jolt of Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, the poignant wanderlust of Ballad Of Easy Rider and the open-plains and purple-mountain majesty of (Untitled).

“But I have to go back to the thing that was central to the songs and the band – folk music,” says McGuinn. “Folk is at once contemporary and timeless, and it was at the heart of almost everything we did. We all came from that – especially Gene, David and myself – and the Byrds never strayed from those roots. We made pop music from folk music, and you can hear it in everything we wrote and played and sang. I always had the feeling that you could take any song and, with the right approach, make it modern.”

The Byrds were the sound of history in the making. This is how they made it.

* * * * * *

In the early 1960s, teenage America was still Milkshake Nation, sleepwalking through the leftover yes-sir-no-ma’am daze of the Eisenhower administration. The heroes of Fifties rock & roll were dead (Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran) or in exile: jail (Chuck Berry), the church (Little Richard) and Hollywood (Elvis Presley). Hair was short, skirts were long, father knew best. Bob Dylan, folk’s upstart prince, was a star in New York’s Greenwich Village, on college campuses and nowhere else. In his famous two-part Rolling Stone interview, published in 1971, John Lennon recalled with acidic relish the Beatles’ seismic arrival in the U.S. in February, 1964: “When we got here, you were all walking around in fucking Bermuda shorts with Boston crewcuts and stuff on your teeth.”

The Beatles truly begat the Byrds. Born in Chicago in 1942, James Joseph McGuinn III was twenty-one and working in New York’s hit factory, the Brill Building, writing songs for Bobby Darin’s publishing company, when he first heard the Beatles. McGuinn had solid pop and folk credentials; he had been a sideman for Darin, the Limelighters and the Chad Mitchell Trio. But the Beatles, McGuinn told me in 1990, “changed the whole game for me. Folk music was on the decline, and this Beatle music was on the upsurge. I saw a definite niche, a place where the two of them blended together. If you took Lennon and Dylan and mixed them together – that was something that hadn’t been done.”

By the spring of 1964, McGuinn (who changed his first name to Roger the next year while involved with Subud, a spiritual movement founded on the Indonesian island of Java) was singing Beatles songs with an acoustic twelve-string guitar at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Folk purists were outraged; a few of the club’s regulars, including Clark and Hillman, were intrigued. “I have a vivid memory of Roger at the Troubadour, singing ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’” says Hillman. “I went, ‘Wow, he makes that work.’ Roger always had that edge.”

Clark had the same reaction. Born Harold Eugene Clark in 1944 in Tipton, Missouri, the second of thirteen children in a family of Irish-Native American descent, he joined the New Christy Minstrels in 1963, recording two albums with the pop-folk group before quitting and moving to Los Angeles, where he all but lived in the Troubadour’s hangout room, the Folk Den. Clark heard McGuinn singing Beatles tunes there, and they made plans to become a duo – until Crosby caught the two of them harmonizing at the Folk Den one day and chimed in, uninvited.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into that,” McGuinn confessed in 1990. Born in Los Angeles in 1941, the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer, David Van Cortland Crosby had a reputation in folk circles for his outspoken king-sized ways, which McGuinn saw firsthand when they met in 1960, in Santa Barbara while McGuinn was on the road with the Limelighters. But Crosby, who had toured with Les Baxter’s Balladeers and covered much of the nation’s coffeehouse circuit as a solo act, owned a breathtaking high-tenor voice and impeccable harmonic instincts. He also had access to a studio. Crosby had recently cut some demos at World Pacific, produced by Jim Dickson. McGuinn set his reservations aside: “David said, ‘I know this guy who has a studio we can use for free.’ That was all I needed to hear.”

The first six songs on Disc One come from those 1964 World Pacific sessions, during which Hillman and Clarke joined the trio. Born in Spokane, Washington in 1944, Clarke (real name Michael Dick) was a near-double for the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, spotted playing congas in the San Francisco area, on separate occasions, by both McGuinn and Crosby. An L.A. native raised on his family’s ranch in San Diego County, Hillman – also born in 1944 – was new to the bass guitar but a country music prodigy. At fifteen, he was taking mandolin lessons from Scott Hambly of the Kentucky Colonels, who included future Byrd Clarence White. By seventeen, Hillman had recorded his first album, Bluegrass Favorites, with the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. (Guitarist Bernie Leadon would also play with Hillman in the Flying Burrito Brothers, then move on to the Eagles.)

In 1963, Hillman’s mandolin prowess landed him in the Golden State Boys, with country-rock pioneers Vern and Rex Gosdin. The Boys changed their name to the Hillmen, in Hillman’s honor, but only lasted long enough to make one album – produced by Jim Dickson, who soon invited Hillman to the Byrds’ rehearsals even though the latter had never touched a bass before. “Chris had a way,” Dickson explained, “of playing mandolin that was deferential to vocals.”

At World Pacific, those voices became a Band. The blatant unplugged-Beatles sound of “The Only Girl I Adore,” recorded by McGuinn, Clark and Crosby as the Jet Set, soon bloomed in the go-go gallop of “You Movin’,” the luscious whisper of “You Showed Me,” and the jazzy sigh of “The Airport Song,” inspired by McGuinn’s and Crosby’s hobby of watching planes take off and land at LAX. As a test flight, Dickson arranged in mid-’64 to release the Jet Set numbers “Please Let Me Love You” and “Don’t Be Long,” cut with a studio rhythm section, as a single on Elektra Records. Elektra founder Jac Holzman tried to capitalize on raging Anglomania by crediting the disc to the Beefeaters, to no avail. But the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson could hear the glory right around the corner. “You’re not quite there yet,” Wilson said when the well-connected Crosby played the record for him. “Go back and work on it some more. You’ve almost got your sound.”

That sound arrived with McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker and Dylan’s demo of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” McGuinn recalls going with Crosby and Clark to see A Hard Day’s Night shortly after its American release in August, 1964 and immediately writing “a laundry list of the instruments we needed, copying all of the instruments the Beatles had,” including George Harrison’s twelve-string Rickenbacker. McGuinn credits Columbia staff engineer Ray Gerhardt with the signature resonance of the Rickenbacker on the Byrds’ first official recordings: “He put compression on it to create the sustain. I have a feeling he might have been using compression more to save his equipment. Remember, these were union guys. I’m playing, and they’re going, ‘The VU meter’s pegged to the right, we gotta do something.’ But Gerhardt put my guitar through two compressors, which created this amazing ring” – Dylan’s “jingle-jangle morning” incarnate.

The Dylan cover was Dickson’s idea. “The Beatles were what Roger and Gene wanted to copy,” Dickson explained to me in 2001. “I wanted more of a song-oriented band that took songs from the community.” And Dylan, Dickson said, “was writing the best new songs in our world.” Dickson knew Dylan personally and had already produced versions of “Farewell” and “When The Ship Comes In” for the Hillmen.

“Our intention, always, was to do original material,” McGuinn claimed in an interview that same year. “But Dickson had the attitude that somebody else’s great song was better than your mediocre song.” From the beginning, the Byrds recorded the finest contemporary American hymns around, such as Dylan’s “Chimes Of Freedom” and the coal-mine-disaster ballad “The Bells Of Rhymney,” co-written and first recorded by folk icon Pete Seeger. The Byrds then responded to the challenge implicit in those songs by maturing rapidly as composers.

“Gene was the best writer in the Byrds,” Hillman says. Dylan agreed with him. “I remember Dylan saying, ‘Gene is really interesting to me.’” Most of the original songs on the Byrds’ 1965 singles and their first two albums – Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn! – were written or co-written by Clark, whose rich tenor voice and mod-knight aura made him a natural center of attention. “He’d come out on stage with his tambourine,” Hillman says, “and it was like Prince Valiant coming to save the maiden. He brought that electricity. He also wrote with amazing grace and style. He was writing five or six songs a week, with these divinely inspired lyrics and melodies: ‘Here Without You,’ ‘She Has A Way.’”

“Gene had a good sense of the abstract,” McGuinn once said of Clark’s writing. “He was able to blend that with very melodic things, which was unusual. He captured the feeling of rock & roll with that kind of writing.”

Hillman quotes the opening lines of “She Don’t Care About Time,” for years only available as the B-side of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”: “Hallways and staircases/Every day to climb/To go up to my white-walled room/Out on the end of time.” “What a beginning,” Hillman marvels. “Gene was a romantic. But he had confidence in his songs. He was persistent: ‘I have a new one, listen to this.’” Clark’s regal bearing was, in fact, a fragile thing. “But as troubled as Gene would get,” Hillman says, “he always had his songs. They were his bridge to sanity.”

“The Byrds were never like the Beatles, who had a camaraderie and prior history, who would stick up for each other like a gang,” McGuinn admits. “The Byrds had a cutthroat pirate-ship mentality – every man for himself.” They never had time to become friends. On November 10^th 1964, McGuinn, Clark and Crosby signed to Columbia Records, thanks in part to a phone call from the label’s jazz star Miles Davis, a friend of Dickson’s. (Hillman and Clarke were added to the contract later.) The full five picked their new name over Thanksgiving. Three months later, on March 8^th, 1965, they recorded their first Columbia session as the Byrds – as a band, playing their own instruments, on what would be their second single and Dylan cover, “All I Really Want To Do.”

Then on March 26^th, the Byrds opened a legendary residency at the Hollywood night club Ciro’s – the start of a high-velocity whirl through the rest of ’65 that included a disastrous summer tour of Britain (rough performances, scathing reviews); U.S. shows with the Rolling Stones; and a nationwide ride in a Clark Cortez motor home as part of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars with Bo Diddley and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Six of the ten vintage clips on the DVD in this collection come from the Byrds’ busy schedule of 1965 TV appearances on dance-party programs such as Shivaree and Hullabaloo.

In between, there were regular visits to the Columbia studios in L.A. where the Byrds continued to make records with dazzling cohesion and meticulous invention: the raindrop guitars and liberation harmonies of “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”; the stately melancholy and upward spikes of vocal light in Clark’s “Set You Free This Time”; McGuinn’s shower of Rickenbacker overtones in “Chimes Of Freedom.” There were gems that went unreleased at the time: a bracing stab at Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” which got as far as the acetate stage and a sneak preview on L.A.’s KRLA-AM; the tantalizing instrumental track for Crosby’s “Stranger In A Strange Land,” later recorded, with lyrics, by the San Francisco duo Blackburn and Snow.

And there would be one more Number One single: McGuinn’s electrification of another Seeger ballad, the anti-war prayer “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” adapted by Seeger from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes (Chapter 3, Verses 1-8) and previously arranged by McGuinn for Judy Collins’ 1964 album, #3. “Roger played it for me on our first U.S. tour, when we were in the Midwest,” Hillman says. “He was singing it in the back of the bus, with an acoustic guitar, saying ‘What do you think of this?’ I thought it was a good song to do. Dickson did not. He said, ‘That will be your last Number One single,’ which was an odd thing to say.”

Dickson was right. But at that September 10^th, 1965 session, the Byrds were a different band from the accidental tangle of genius and ego that Dickson coaxed and guided to the top. The ambitions that brought McGuinn, Clark and Crosby together at the Folk Den had taken on a unique, combined life of their own. The Byrds were peers, not imitators, of the Beatles. They did not just sing Dylan’s songs; they sang with him at Ciro’s. And it all happened so fast that today McGuinn finds it hard to see the Byrds’ first two years as anything other than a thrilling blur.

“I was never aware of progression or improvement,” he claims. “It seemed so gradual. When we were in it, it seemed like a very long time – even though it wasn’t.”

* * * * * *

The story of the Byrds’ 1966 single, “Eight Miles High,” begins appropriately in the song’s “rain gray town”: London, England. McGuinn was shopping in that city one day during the Byrds’ 1965 British tour, when he noticed something in the display window of a small appliance store: “a little gray box,” he recalls, “nestled between the toasters and vacuum cleaners, that looked like a miniature tape recorder.” It was a cassette player and recorder, one of the first on the market, manufactured by the Dutch company Phillips. McGuinn, an electronics enthusiast, walked right into the store and bought one, as well as some blank cassettes. At a Byrds show in the British seaside town of Bournemouth, McGuinn asked the group’s publicist Derek Taylor (who previously worked for the Beatles) to record the screaming girls in the audience with “my new prized piece of equipment, thinking that I could use the screams later, on an album.” (They are the very screams you hear nearly drowning the wall of six-string chime in “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star.”)

McGuinn took his cassette machine along when the Byrds went on the Dick Clark tour that fall. “Dick wanted us to travel in the same bus as the rest of the troupe,” McGuinn says, “but Crosby wanted a separate motor home, so we could have a little more privacy.” At one point, McGuinn goes on, “a friend of Crosby’s played us a record, John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass.” Coltrane’s 1961 experiment in big-band orchestration and Afro-Indian improvisation, “seared through the center of my chest like a white-hot poker.” McGuinn made a cassette copy of the album on his Phillips deck, filling the other side of the tape with Indian ragas by Ravi Shankar.

The Byrds were already devotees of the sitar master, particularly Crosby. “Jim Dickson turned me on to Shankar,” Crosby said in his 1988 autobiography, Long Time Gone, “and blew my head out completely.” There was a World Pacific connection: Richard Bock, who owned the studio and ran the Pacific Jazz and World Pacific labels, first recorded Shankar in 1958. By 1964, when Dickson brought Crosby, then the Byrds, to practice and record at World Pacific, Shankar was one of Bock’s most prolific artists and had made some of his most important, early U.S. releases at the studio.

On the long drives between shows on the Dick Clark tour, the band listened to nothing but Coltrane and Shankar at maximum volume, with the cassette machine hooked up to a Fender Twin Reverb amp, powered by the motor home’s generator. The result, in “Eight Miles High,” was the original quintet’s peak as a band, an act of airborne unity. McGuinn’s and Crosby’s blazing enthusiasms for Coltrane and Shankar; Clark’s mantra-like reflections on the group’s trip to London (“Rain gray town/Known for its sound”); the exotic zigzag of McGuinn’s guitar improvisations; the garage-jazz urgency of Hillman and Clarke underneath: “Eight Miles High” was the Byrds as one, shattering the verse-chorus-verse formalism of Top Forty songwriting (it opens with McGuinn spinning out of orbit on his Rickenbacker) at a time when the Beatles were still in the folk-rock gear of Rubber Soul and the Rolling Stones were growing out of R&B covers. The Byrds’ second golden age of songwriting, on the Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday albums – the modal suspense and raga-guitar excitement of “Why” and “I See You”; Crosby’s bittersweet jewel “Everybody’s Been Burned” – begins with this rare air.

A December ’65 take, done at RCA Studios in Los Angeles, caught the Byrds with a live fire that, at Columbia on January 25^th, 1966, they refined to blinding car-radio effect. McGuinn’s soloing, in both cases, “wasn’t mapped out,” he says. “I had a basic skeleton” – a four-note Coltrane quote from Africa/Brass – “and improvised on it.” Hillman says his opening bass hook “just came to me” but was surely inspired by “hours of absorbing” Coltrane’s 1965 album A Love Supreme. And Hillman emphasizes the pivotal thunder in Clarke’s drumming: “Michael often suffered from no discipline, no focus. But there were times when he played incredibly. Listen to the tom-tom fills in ‘Eight Miles High.’ He’s really swinging.”

Then suddenly, Gene Clark was gone. Shortly after the Columbia session for “Eight Miles High,” the Byrds were boarding a plane to New York (where, according to Hillman, they were to join a concert revue hosted by DJ Murray the K) when Clark turned around and walked off. The singer suffered from a fear of flying that made touring a routine terror for him. But McGuinn swears he “had no idea Gene wanted to leave until he got off the airplane.”

It was not hard to see the toll that life in the Byrds took on a brooding, poetic spirit like Clark. Hillman cites one low point: a fistfight that broke out at the beach as the Byrds mimed a performance of “Set You Free This Time” for a promotional film shot by their house photographer Barry Feinstein. “Gene’s singing, David’s getting antsy – he wants to get out of there,” Hillman recalls sourly. “Then Jim Dickson goes crazy: ‘You can’t leave!’ All of a sudden, Dickson punches Crosby, and Gene, this strong Midwest-farm guy, grabs Dickson in a headlock and pulls him off Crosby. Meanwhile, McGuinn and I are watching this, going to Feinstein, ‘Keep shooting.’” Hillman takes a deep breath. “It’s hilarious now. But at the time, it was just another stupid move on our part. That was Gene’s song – his single, in a way – and it never happened for him.”

In his superb 2005 biography of Clark, Mr. Tambourine Man, author John Einarson quotes Clark, reflecting years later on why he quit the Byrds: “I just had a nervous breakdown. It really wasn’t a fear of flying . . . I had just done it every day for so long, and I was starting to get crazy. Finally I just had had it.” Clark also noted the perilous day-to-day state of the band itself: “You had such an incredible mix of personalities that when you put them together, there was magic.” On the flipside, “it was the one group that could probably never get along . . . Basically, the group had a nervous breakdown.”

Clark was the victim – this time. His immediate future would include collaborations with the Gosdin Brothers, then with banjoman Doug Dillard in the Dillard and Clark Expedition. Clark would make two of the finest singer-songwriter albums of the Seventies, 1970’s Gene Clark (a/k/a White Light) and 1974’s sumptuous No Other. But Clark never quite left the Byrds for good. The band backed him on some of his early solo work, and the DVD in this set features a peculiar clip of a four-piece Byrds miming “Mr. Spaceman” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour with a subdued Clark fake-strumming rhythm guitar in place of the recently fired Crosby.

Clark never fully conquered his insecurities and, crippled by cycles of substance abuse, would never fly as high on his own as he did with the Byrds. On May 24^th, 1991, the Byrds’ Prince Valiant and most accomplished songwriter was found dead in his home in Sherman Oaks, California. He was forty-six years old.

The four-man Byrds realigned their energies in 1966 with remarkable speed. McGuinn and Crosby became the primary writers, as a team and competitors. Both found ready material in their mutual love of travel, McGuinn literally at high altitude in “Mr. Spaceman” and “5D (Fifth Dimension),” the latter based on “a philosophical pamphlet about perception and reality that someone gave me”: 1,2,3,4, More, More, More, More by Don Landis. Crosby’s “What’s Happening?!?!” and his hippie dream “Renaissance Fair” – a fanciful report on a local Renaissance pageant promoted by an L.A. radio station – reflected his interest in interior motion: the Aquarian spirituality then blooming in San Francisco and his own transformative experiments with drugs, particularly LSD.

“It wasn’t hard,” McGuinn says of their partnership. “We wrote well together, and for a time, I got along with David – very well. We had a lot in common. We were both into folk music. We both loved the troubadour life. At the same time, Chris was coming out of his shell.”

Hillman, too, was writing, amplifying the country drawl in the Byrds’ folk roots. “Time Between” on Younger Than Yesterday, the first song he ever composed, was made even more down-home by the electric barn-dance lead guitar played by session man Clarence White. Hillman also replaced Clark in the harmony army. “It was the same formula,” Hillman says. “On ‘5D,’ I’m singing double-lead with Roger. It almost sounds like Gene never left. Listen to the motion of the voices in ‘5D,’ to Roger’s singing and the end where Crosby hits that harmony. That is one of the Byrds’ great songs.”

In the studio, McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman recorded their harmonies with fireside authenticity: live, shoulder to shoulder, at two microphones. “It was hard to do punch-ins then,” McGuinn says. “We had tracks filled with instruments – lead guitars and other things.” When the Byrds turned to public-domain material such as Fifth Dimension’s “Wild Mountain Thyme” and the outtake “I Know My Rider” (a/k/a “I Know You Rider”), that song-circle effect – monophonic force with stereo spread – heightened the antique love in the band’s spangled futurism.

There is a wry symmetry to the Byrds’ final shotgun fling in the Top Thirty, in early 1967: the Afro-brass jump of “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” with South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela blowing gloriously over the guitar maelstrom, and the Byrds’ stunning return to the Dylan catalog, “My Back Pages.” The first, written by Hillman and McGuinn, mocked the game of pop, the industry’s incessant chase for the next big thing. The second – suggested to McGuinn by Jim Dickson, then in his waning days as the Byrds’ co-manager and mentor – acutely captured, in Dylan’s words, how it felt to be yesterday’s news, wounded but wiser and no longer bound by expectation.

“Rock ‘N’ Roll Star” was one of three songs Hillman wrote after playing with Crosby on a 1966 demo session for Masekela. “Hugh was producing a South African singer, Letta Mbulu,” Hillman explains. “Hugh and the Byrds had the same manager by then, Larry Spector. Hugh called us in to play with all of these other great South African musicians. It was unbelievable – mind-changing for me. I came home from that, and something clicked in me. All of a sudden, in a four-day period, I wrote ‘Time Between’ – a country song – and ‘Have You Seen Her Face.’ The changes in that one were inspired by the Masekela date. I also started writing ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star.’ Roger added the bridge – he said it reminded him of a Miriam Makeba song – and we wrote the lyrics together.”

“Chris and I were working on ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’ one afternoon at his house,” McGuinn recalls. “We were looking through a teen magazine, maybe Hullabaloo. I don’t remember who was on the cover. It was more about the turnover: ‘Look who’s here this week, and who’s not.’ And there was a sense of our own ability to maintain the level of success that we’d had.”

Hillman is more specific: “It was my little jab at the Monkees – not the Monkees per se, as individuals. Mike Nesmith was a great singer and songwriter. It was the process, the producers who had taken A Hard Day’s Night and turned it into a sitcom. It cheapened what we did. We were looking at this process, at an industry that had once embraced us. And now we weren’t heroes anymore, even in our own home town. It was like we had become jaded old men in a year and a half.”

McGuinn points out that the Byrds, too, were in a sense constructed, “in that Jim Dickson brought in Chris and Michael. We were more organic than the Monkees, who were completely made up for TV. But we were not as organic as the Beatles, who played on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg for years and got really good doing it.” Asked what the Byrds might have accomplished if the classic five had been better friends, bonded by struggle instead of consumed by it, McGuinn says, “That was nothing I could do anything about.”

There was almost nothing left of the Byrds at the end of 1967, except the iridescent glow and exploratory drama of The Notorious Byrd Brothers, the best record ever made by a band in the middle of breaking up. Hillman remembers starting Notorious in utopia: a beach house on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he, McGuinn and Crosby rested and wrote together. “We came up with ‘Draft Morning’ there,” he says, “and a couple of other songs for that album. There were tensions. But we were going forward. It was interesting music.”

In fact, with psychedelia breaking out all over the world, the Byrds moved on to a more dynamic, original music, previewed in August, 1967 by the 45 RPM pairing of Crosby’s “Lady Friend,” a fully orchestrated blast of rapture, and “Old John Robertson,” Hillman’s bluegrass-flavored memoir (with a striking chamber-strings interlude) of an aging silent-film director who lived in Hillman’s home town – “a real sweetheart with a handlebar mustache and a Stetson hat.” The single barely cracked Billboard’s Top 100, a severe disappointment to Crosby, compounded by McGuinn’s refusal to include “Lady Friend” on Notorious.

Yet the Byrds persevered, brilliantly – encouraged on good days and refereed on the hard ones by producer Gary Usher. There were also vibrant guitar contributions from Clarence White. “That album was the peak of the band,” McGuinn claims. “It has that feeling of proximity: the shared experiences of Hawaii, watching the dolphins.” The porpoise cries on the eco-reverie “Dolphin’s Smile” were created by McGuinn on guitar. Members of a new Columbia act, the avant-comedy quartet Firesign Theater, were responsible for the campus-riot sound effects in “Draft Morning.” McGuinn’s love of traditional sea-faring songs and Crosby’s passion for sailing can be heard in the rolling-ocean rhythms of several songs, including “Tribal Gathering,” a Crosby-Hillman ode in 5/4 time to the historic freak summit, the Human Be In, held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14^th, 1967.

The Byrds were in the thick of making Notorious when they became a duo. In October, 1967, McGuinn and Hillman told Crosby he was fired. Michael Clarke quit the following month. Gifted in vocal harmony but not, by nature, given to compromise, Crosby was always forthright in his dissent, rightly so when his ménage a trois love song “Triad” was rejected for Notorious, despite the Byrds’ gorgeous treatment. (“Triad” made its official debut on the 1968 album, Crown Of Creation, by Crosby’s friends Jefferson Airplane.) McGuinn, in turn, was tired of going to war every time the Byrds went into the studio. And Crosby made no secret of his growing friendship with Stephen Stills of the equally fractious Buffalo Springfield. In June, 1967, at the Monterey Pop Festival, Crosby performed with both the Byrds and the Springfield. To McGuinn, there was no room in the Byrds for divided loyalties.

McGuinn clearly recalls the day he and Hillman told Crosby he was out: “One sunny afternoon, we drove our Porsches up to David’s house. We climbed the stairs to his hillside retreat and saw him standing in the open doorway. He seemed delighted to see us. ‘I heard you guys drive up here in your Porsches. It sounded so cool.’ I felt terrible having to do this, but we walked in and told him to sit down. I said, ‘Chris and I have some bad news, David. We don’t want to work with you anymore.’

“He appeared shattered, but we felt that he’d been pushing for this for a long time. It was what he secretly wanted. He said that we could make some good music together, and I said that Chris and I could make some good music without him. We told him that we would work out a settlement and left.

“We didn’t know at the time,” McGuinn admits, “how much we would come to miss his contributions.”

In a 1998 interview, thirty years into his subsequent trials and triumphs with Stills and the Hollies’ Graham Nash in Crosby Stills and Nash, Crosby confessed to me his share of guilt: “I won big and early with the Byrds. We were arguably one of the best American groups. But it was a two-edged sword. It gave me a lot of confidence, but it also didn’t make me grow up. You grow up a lot sooner if you pay a lot more dues. If I’d had to fight harder to get what I got, a lot longer, I might have been a more mature person – a lot sooner.”

“I didn’t fight it,” Hillman says frankly of Crosby’s dismissal. “When Gene left, we moved on. Even without David and Michael, at that point Roger and I had been doing it so long we didn’t think continuing was a problem.” He laughs – a little.

“But it was.”

* * * * * *

On the first day of the Notorious sessions, July 31^st, 1967, the Byrds recorded a glistening instrumental stomp provisionally titled “Universal Mind Decoder” – a backing track that would become the Hillman-McGuinn song “Change Is Now.” “Chris and I were thinking about relativity, sub-molecular life – what is now called ‘string theory,’” McGuinn explains. “It was the idea that all matter is made up of tiny singing loops of energy that are harmonious, vibrating at different frequencies.

“It was basically the idea that the entire universe is made up of music,” he says, chuckling.

Less than a year later, in March, 1968, an entirely new Byrds were at a very different end of that universe, a million miles away in mind and body: recording a country album in the anti-rock capital of America, Nashville, Tennessee. “Nobody of that caliber, except Dylan, had ever come to Nashville to record before, and none of the other rock groups would have entertained the notion of making such an album,” Lloyd Green, one of the busiest and best pedal-steel players in town, then and now, told me in a 2003 interview. “But the Byrds did it,” said Green, whose sweet skidding lick at the start of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” the first track on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, formally announced the birth of a brand new sound. “They brought country and rock together.”

McGuinn put it more succinctly: “We were the pioneers – with arrows in our backs.”

The shortest and strangest episode in the Byrds story opened in early ’68, in a bank in Los Angeles where Hillman ran into Gram Parsons, a passing acquaintance who sang and played guitar with East Coast immigrants the International Submarine Band. Who made the first country-rock record will forever be a matter of dispute. Hillman claims it was the Byrds in 1966, with “Time Between”: “We brought Clarence [White] in on guitar and did this bluegrass thing with a rock & roll beat. To me, that is the first country-rock song.”

But Parsons and the ISB could stake a claim to being first in line with Safe At Home. Recorded in 1967 but not released until after Sweetheart, the ISB’s only album was a spirited fusion of Nashville classicism and the rougher, upbeat country coming out of Bakersfield, California, dressed in British Invasion guitars. Born Ingram Cecil Connor III in 1946, in Winter Haven, Florida, Parsons was a trust-fund kid who passed through frat-rock and folk music on his way to country. Raised in the South, where hillbilly music and R&B were more integrated than schools and lunch counters, Parsons came late to country but was a quick study, ready to press his passions for Loretta Lynn, George Jones and Merle Haggard on the Byrds when, at the bank, Hillman invited him to a rehearsal.

“I knew this music,” Hillman told me in 2003. “I was playing in hardcore country bars south of L.A. with a fake I.D., when I was nineteen. But Gram understood this music too, and he knew how to sing it.” More importantly, the Byrds, with new drummer Kevin Kelley (Hillman’s cousin), were still recovering from the hard-won artistic victory of Notorious. “Gram was ambitious,” Hillman said, “full of vinegar and ready to go.”

With Hillman’s support, Parsons persuaded McGuinn to drop his ambitious plan for the next Byrds album: a two-disc history of American music from traditional folk and pre-war country music to contemporary rock and the space-age whoosh of McGuinn’s favorite new instrument, the Moog synthesizer. But the decision to go all country, all the way (to the point where the Byrds even got haircuts) had as much to do with McGuinn’s ideas of leadership as it did Parsons’ silver tongue. “What it amounts to,” McGuinn said in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview, “is that I’ve been willing to go along with the ideas that were different just because they were different, so you couldn’t pin me down and say the Byrds [are] any kind of band. That was what the country thing was all about.”

The full tale of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo – the original eleven-song LP plus a feast of outtakes and alternate versions – can be found in the two-CD Legacy Edition reissue, released in 2003. Yet in the eight tracks here, the Byrds’ verve and nerve in Nashville, then in Los Angeles where they completed the album, come through bright and clear. Although McGuinn came to the sessions with no new originals, he perfectly captured the woodsmoke and anxiety in the cover of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” from Bob Dylan’s 1967 “Basement Tapes” sessions with the Band. Hillman put his own roots on the table, with his lead vocal in the traditional hymn “I Am a Pilgrim.”

Parsons made the most of his momentum, introducing the Byrds to the Louvin Brothers’ pledge of devotion “The Christian Life” and William Bell’s deep-soul diamond and 1961 Stax Records debut, “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” Parsons also contributed two of his greatest songs, “One Hundred Years From Now” and the intimate homesickness of “Hickory Wind.” The latter was to be one of his few lead vocals on the LP. A threat of litigation from LHI Records – producer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood’s label, which had the International Submarine Band under contract – forced the Byrds to wipe most of Parsons’ singing, which was redone by McGuinn. (Three songs appear in their original state here.) Another Parsons song, the breezy “Lazy Days,” was pulled entirely.

Parsons didn’t stay much longer. On July 8^th, 1968, the morning after the Byrds headlined a charity show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Parsons refused to leave his hotel and join the band on a scheduled tour of South Africa. Publicly, he objected to the prospect of playing in a country ruled by apartheid. "I first heard about the South African tour two months ago," he told the British weekly Melody Maker, after the Byrds left without him, promoting roadie Carlos Bernal to guitarist. "I knew right off when I heard about it that I didn't want to go. I stood firmly on my convictions."

Privately, Parsons was steaming over the LHI mess and his escalating friction with McGuinn, who insists that Parsons used the tour as an excuse to leave the Byrds and pursue a new exciting friendship with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. “He wanted to stay in London and hang out with Keith,” McGuinn says. “Mick and Keith had taken us to Stonehenge that week, where Keith and Gram bonded. Keith loved country music and wanted to learn all he could from Gram, who was enamored of the Stones and couldn’t bear to leave them.”

McGuinn also feels that he and Hillman have long been unfairly criticized for going to South Africa. The genesis of that trip, McGuinn explains in detail, goes back to 1961, when he was a touring guitarist for the Chad Mitchell Trio: “We promoted our first live album, Mighty Day On Campus, with a college tour of the South with Miriam Makeba. Miriam and I were in the back of our rented station wagon when we got caught in a traffic jam preceding a Martin Luther King rally. Suddenly, a carload of white teenage boys pulled alongside of us, yelling obscenities.

“I apologized to her for the rudeness of some people in our country. Miriam said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. You should see what they do to us where I come from. In South Africa, my people are treated like animals. It’s a shame because it’s such a beautiful country but so full of hatred. If you ever get the chance, you should go there and see it for yourself.’ I promised her I would.”

In 1968, when the Byrds were offered concert dates there, McGuinn accepted – “not for the money, but to fulfill my promise to her, to see the evils of apartheid firsthand.” He and the Byrds paid dearly for that decision and their outspokenness about apartheid in the South African media. There were death threats. The Byrds were never paid for the shows. And the tour came to an abrupt end – a hasty escape on a chartered DC-3 – when South African authorities tried to arrest the band on trumped-up drug charges. “The accusation that I toured South Africa solely for profit, with a complete indifference toward the racial inequality there, was particularly stinging and unfair,” McGuinn says, “considering my true motive and the hardship we endured.” When the Byrds returned to London, they presented the British Musicians Union with clippings from the South African press, evidence of the anti-apartheid statements the Byrds made there. The Union, which banned the Byrds from performing in the U.K. because of the tour, promptly reversed the order.

The combined strain of Parsons’ exit and the South African disaster nearly killed the Byrds. Kelley soon quit. Then after Sweetheart’s release, Hillman bolted, reconnecting with Parsons to form the flamboyant and influential country-rock band, the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Parsons’ legacy as a hell-bent genius was sealed when, after two Burritos albums and a pair of acclaimed solo records, he fatally overdosed on a mix of morphine and tequila at the Joshua Tree Inn, in the California desert. He was twenty-six.)

To add insult to defection, Sweetheart was condemned from both sides of the great divide. The country establishment called it heresy: radicals mocking working-class music. Most rock critics and Byrds fans felt betrayed: America’s best band pandering to the enemy. The ill will continued for some time. The Byrds’ historic two-song appearance on country radio’s holiest of holies, the Grand Ol Opry – on March 16^th, 1968, during the Nashville sessions – outraged country DJ Ralph Emery, who attacked the band on the air. In reply, McGuinn and Parsons reduced Emery to redneck caricature in “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man,” a stinging waltz-time highlight of the Byrds’ next album, Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde. Emery never forgot or forgave. “Years later, every time I’d be on Ralph’s show with Desert Rose,” Hillman says, “he would pin me on it. I’d tell him, ‘Ralph, I didn’t write the song. I’m not on the record.’”

Today, Hillman likens the troubles that wracked the Sweetheart Byrds with the wider ferment around the band: “The Sixties took a left turn in 1968. We lost that innocence that came with the Beatles. We were on the verge of anarchy – the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations; the Vietnam war; the problems on campus. The Byrds went from playing the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 to Crosby and I both being at Altamont, him in Crosby Stills Nash and Young and me in the Burritos.”

Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is now recognized as one of rock’s most prophetic albums. The rise of outlaw country in the 1970s, the 1980s roots-rock phenomenon and the alternative-country boom can all be traced back to the Byrds’ unprecedented Nashville adventure. “The Byrds, in doing country as country, show just how powerful and relevant unadorned country music is to the music of today,” wrote Jon Landau, in a spirited defense of Sweetheart in the September 28^th, 1968 issue of Rolling Stone. “And they leave just enough rock in the drums to let you know that they can still play rock & roll. That’s what I call bringing it back home.”

* * * * * *

I first interviewed Roger McGuinn in 1990, for Rolling Stone, on a pair of balmy spring days in Los Angeles. We spoke about folk music, Los Angeles in the Sixties, religion, his trademark “granny” glasses (all the rage in ’65) and the Byrds, the last in special detail. When I asked him about the closing chapter – from late 1968, when he rebuilt the group from scratch, until the final surrender in early 1973 – McGuinn was blunt.

“I should have been less reluctant to dump it,” he admitted. “I think I should have bailed out earlier and done something else. It was like I inherited a body shop or a lemonade stand. I wish I’d done it more like [Eric] Clapton – formed a different band, gone solo or whatever, much earlier. I really think I kept it going for too long.”

I come back to that quote whenever I write about this period of the Byrds. Because I didn’t agree with McGuinn. This collection’s survey of those years and albums confirms what I have always believed: The Byrds were one of America’s most exciting and important bands long after they stopped being the biggest. Retrospect is a funny thing, too. The Byrds’ hit-single streak ended in 1967. But from 1969 to 1971, amid the rise of arena rock and the invasion of the supergroups, the Byrds were a top national touring attraction and in regular rotation on FM underground radio. A decade after that 1990 interview, talking about the album Live At The Fillmore, February 1969, McGuinn conceded, “It was a hot band at the time, especially because of Clarence.”

Guitarist Clarence White was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1944, into a French-Canadian family that was also a band, led by his father Eric and featuring Clarence’s older brother Roland on mandolin. In the early Sixties, with the Kentucky Colonels, the White brothers recorded two seminal “newgrass” albums, The New Sounds Of Bluegrass America and Appalachian Swing! Clarence’s fierce, precise attack on electric guitar made him a popular session man in Los Angeles, where he was getting calls from Pat Boone and the Monkees as well as the Byrds. At the same time, White and California-born drummer Gene Parsons wowed the crowds at local country bars with their groundbreaking twang-rock combo Nashville West.

The call that mattered came in the wake of Sweetheart, when Hillman, not yet gone, recommended to McGuinn that he bring White into the Byrds. White took Gene Parsons with him. “He had his own style that was a synthesis of all the things he had heard,” McGuinn said of White in 1999. “And because he had the B bender, he was able to incorporate a lot of steel-guitar licks.” The String Bender was a device invented by White and Parsons that, attached to the B (second-highest) string of an electric guitar, mimicked the distinctive meow of a pedal-steel guitar. “But the greatest thing about Clarence was that he never played anything that sounded vaguely weak, or like a mistake. He was always driving – into the music.”

White’s technical brilliance and incisive touch are everywhere on Discs Three and Four: the taut distorted curls in “Jesus Is Just Alright” from 1969’s Ballad Of Easy Rider; his combined stampede of jangle with McGuinn in the wild-stallion fantasy “Chestnut Mare” on 1970’s (Untitled); the backporch authority and brotherly fondness White brings to the traditional farewell song “Farther Along” on the Byrds’ 1971 sayonara of the same name. The album’s worth of concert material here – from the Fillmore release, with bassist John York, and the 1970 shows by the (Untitled)-era lineup with bassist Clyde “Skip” Battin – proves that White’s magic came to him naturally, nightly.

The death’s-head bite of White’s fuzztone in “This Wheel’s On Fire” – the apocalyptic “Basement Tapes” sermon written by Bob Dylan and the Band’s Rick Danko, heard here in a rougher, alternate take cut for Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde – is there again at the Fillmore, less than a week after Dr. Byrds’ 1969 release, in the garage-rock crunch of “King Apathy III.” At the New York-area gigs taped for the first disc of (Untitled), White rolls out pure country sunshine in the instrumentals “Nashville West” and “Black Mountain Rag.” Listening to the vitality and ingenuity of these performances, it is shocking to think that White has been gone for more than three decades. On July 14^th, 1973, a few months after McGuinn broke up the Byrds, White was killed by a drunk driver as he loaded equipment into a car after a show in Palmdale, California. He was twenty-nine.

White’s immense gifts and the fundamental lesson of the Byrds’ Sweetheart experiment – that there was a bigger America, a nation of blues and R&B, of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Otis Redding, embedded in country music – set the course for the Byrds’ best work in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The covers alone are a delight: Leadbelly’s “Take A Whiff (On Me)”; the trucker’s lament “Willin’” by Little Feat’s Lowell George; White’s autumnal vocal in the old pilgrim’s song “Oil In My Lamp”; Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do,” a staple of Byrds sets going back to Ciro’s. It’s all there – the old, new, borrowed and blue.

This was also a more democratic Byrds. White and Gene Parsons wrote material and adapted traditional sources for the group. Born in Gallipolis, Ohio in 1934, Battin was in his mid-thirties when he joined the group in the fall of 1969, with experience as a songwriter, studio hand and hitmaker that predated the Byrds themselves. Battin had already been in the Top Twenty twice, as half of the duo Skip and Flip with Gary Paxton: in 1959 with “It Was I” and a year later with “Cherry Pie.” He was also a longtime friend and writing-recording sidekick of producer-artist and L.A. scene king Kim Fowley. The songs Battin brought to the Byrds – most written with Fowley – were closer to pop and vintage rock & roll than the ’65 Byrds ever dared to go. But “You All Look Alike,” a Battin-Fowley number originally featured on (Untitled), was a cunning generation-gap variation on the Appalachian murder ballad, with a dead longhair in the chorus.

“He started it, he’s the original one,” Gene Parsons said of McGuinn’s primacy in the August 9^th, 1971 issue of the British music paper Disc and Music Echo. “He’s got the seniority. But just about anything we want, we do it together.”

Dylan was still a pillar of the Byrds’ records and set lists – and in one instance, a secret collaborator. When actor Peter Fonda, a longtime friend of the Byrds, asked Dylan to write a theme song for Fonda’s new film, the biker odyssey Easy Rider, Dylan declined but wrote a few lines on a napkin and told Fonda to pass them on to McGuinn. What Dylan wrote was the wonderful first verse of “Ballad Of Easy Rider”: “The river flows/It flows to the sea/Wherever that river goes/That’s where I want to be/Flow, river, flow.” McGuinn did the rest.

McGuinn’s new wind as a songwriter accelerated in 1969 when he met theatrical director and lyricist Jacques Levy, with whom he hatched the idea of a Broadway country-rock musical based on Henrik Ibsen’s 19^th Century drama, Peer Gynt. McGuinn and Levy’s project, Gene Tryp, was never mounted, sabotaged by financing and Levy’s unrealistic plans for the production, which included an actual river flowing across the stage. But McGuinn and Levy wrote twenty-six songs for the show – in three weeks – and McGuinn ensured that the Byrds recorded as many of them as possible: “Chestnut Mare,” the Civil War fable “Lover Of The Bayou,” and the haunting love songs “All The Things” and “Just A Season” on (Untitled); the sardonic “I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician” and the beautiful “Kathleen’s Song” on the overproduced Byrdmaniax. (Levy worked with McGuinn into the Seventies and was Dylan’s lyric-writing partner on the 1976 album, Desire. Levy died in September, 2004.)

Byrdmaniax symbolized the extremes that were finally exhausting the Byrds, especially McGuinn. The group, lacking strong new originals and the time to write them, squeezed in three weeks of recording between tours; producer Terry Melcher then overdubbed excessive strings and brass. “It’ll probably be a monster, but we hate it,” Parsons said bluntly after the album was released in June, 1971. (Sales were merely respectable; Byrdmaniax peaked at Number 46 in Billboard.) McGuinn would look back at the record with a realistic share of the blame: “We were just idling artistically. The album sounds like we really weren’t concentrating on doing good work, good art.”

There would be one more flourish of pride and class: the enchanting Farther Along, recorded in less than a week, in London at the end of July, 1971. In that Disc and Music Echo interview, conducted during the sessions, Parsons said the Byrds had been planning to call the album “Home Made, because there’s not one musician on it except us. And it’s magical the way it’s [going] – straight away, first or second take.

“I believe there must be some sort of thing guiding us along, because there’s a lot of luck involved,” Parsons went on, describing one day’s work. “Roger got up, wrote a song, wrote the words, we arranged it, did it . . . It was like magic, it just fell into place. Then we did another track, a gospel one, and that came out so beautiful, so meaningful, we just sat around and cried a little.”

“It was as live as you can get in the studio,” McGuinn said of Farther Along, years later. “It was almost like a demo. We did everything ourselves – produced it, mixed it.” But sales were poor. Firings followed: Parsons in mid-’72, Battin in early ’73. Meanwhile, a pair of Davids – Crosby and the young record mogul David Geffen – were maneuvering the original Byrds into a reunion.

“Crosby came to my house with [then-CSNY manager] Elliot Roberts,” McGuinn recalls. “They sat me down and said, ‘Some of the stuff you’re doing with Skip and Clarence is good. But some of it isn’t – and we really hate the idea of you’re calling it the Byrds.” McGuinn was ready to agree. In February, 1973, a last limping lineup with Hillman back on bass played the final Byrds show, at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. In March, Geffen’s Asylum label released the heavily anticipated – and disappointing – reunion album, Byrds.

“The idea was ill-conceived,” McGuinn says of that record, made as his Byrds slowly expired. “Nevertheless, it was a good party. Also, I think it was David’s way, after having achieved success with CSNY, of recapturing something with the Byrds – a leading role, a position he’d always wanted.”

“The stagecoach was out of control,” claims Hillman. “We needed a leader, a Jim Dickson, to whip us into shape – to say, ‘You guys are not hungry anymore.’ Instead, we were afraid to step on each other’s toes. And we had all been running our own ships for years. I wasn’t just Chris the bass player anymore.

“There were moments on that album,” Hillman contends, “but not from me or Roger. Gene came up to the plate. He was good. He was hungry.” And he is here, in “Full Circle” and “Changing Heart,” two fine Clark songs and the best evidence of what Byrds, with greater care and ambition, could have been. There was another partial stab at reunion in 1979: the trio McGuinn Clark and Hillman, which recorded and toured. But history could not help repeating itself. Clark soon drifted away, leaving McGuinn and Hillman to carry on as a duo for one album before returning to their own careers, for good.

The founding Byrds are now a trio. In 1993, two years after Gene Clark’s death, drummer Michael Clarke passed away, “We were a unique group of five guys,” Hillman says with sadness and pride. “Crosby’s attention to harmony singing was unlike anything I had ever heard. And Roger, being the best musician among us from the beginning, knew the secrets of coloring the voices. He was a great accompanist and had impeccable time.

“But competition blew us apart,” Hillman admits. “At first, we were all reaching for the golden ring, and it was good. We felt immortal, though, because we had so much success at a young age. We became unfocused, out of control, and it destroyed us” – but not the quality or promise of the music they made.

In August, 1990, during preparations for the first Byrds box, McGuinn, Hillman and Crosby convened in Nashville to sing again as one, one more time. They recorded four songs for the set, including, of course, a Dylan cover: “Paths Of Victory.” It was, like every other Dylan song they had made their own, the perfect choice for the moment and the memories it evoked: of great purpose and accomplishment; of fraction, backlash, despair and, in spite of all that, constant forward motion:

“Trails of trouble/Roads of battles/Paths of victory/We shall walk.”

Dylan wrote the song in 1962, two years before the Byrds made their first music together. But the truth of those words are everywhere here, in the glorious singing and daybreak guitars, in the quest for transcendence in every note. It is the sound of the jingle-jangle morning that never ends.

David Fricke

New York City

January, 2006

CREDITS

Compilation produced by Bob Irwin and Roger McGuinn

Mastered by Vic Anesini at Sony Music Studios, New York

Disc one tracks 15-16, 21 & 25, disc two, tracks 8, 15 & 25, disc three, tracks 3-4, 6-7, 9, & 23 mixed by Vic Anesini at Sony Music Studios, New York

Disc three, tracks 8, 13-15, 25 and disc four, tracks 3-7 and 10-12 mixed by Jen Wyler at Sony Music Studios, New York

Engineering assistance: Joe Lizzi

Project Director: John Jackson

Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz

A&R Coordination: Stacey Boyle and Jeremy Holiday

Art Direction: Michelle Holme and Howard Fritzson

Design: Michelle Holme

Project Manager: Abe Velez

What Are You Going To Listen To Next?

For a complete listing of titles available from Legacy Recordings, please visit us at:

www.legacyrecordings.com

These discs were manufactured to meet critical quality standards. If you believe the discs have a manufacturing defect, please call our Quality Management Department at 1-800-255-7514. New Jersey residents should call 856-722-8224.

(P) Compilation 2006 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT / DVD Program: © Compilation 2006 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT / Artwork and Design: © 2006 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT / Manufactured and Distributed by Columbia Records, A Division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211 / “Columbia,” “CMV,” design, “Legacy,” Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada. / WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws. Audiovisual content on these discs is for non-commercial private exhibition in homes only. Any public performance, other use, or copying is strictly prohibited. All rights under copyright reserved. 69699 86424 2

Cahn Media

October 11, 2006

BYRDS BOX SET

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