There's something about that "in the jingle-jangle morning I'll come following you" line that gets me every time: Roger McGuinn once said of his band, The Byrds, that they were set up to be "Dylan meets The Beatles" and when they impinge on the mainstream it's usually because of their cover versions of the former, but it was really the latter band which defined and sculpted their sound. That sound eventually grew out and away from the sum total of their influences and remains, to this day, some of the most dynamic and harmony-enhanced music committed to vinyl.
Basically a bunch of folkies hanging out in Los Angeles during the early 1960s, McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Michael Clark went together to see A Hard Day's Night at the local cinema. The very next day they borrowed $5,000, bought some 12-string Rickenbackers, and gave themselves a name. Somewhat out of step with what was going down at the time, their exasperated record company handed them a song Bob Dylan had written but wasn't using and told them to do a "jingly-jangly" cover of it. The band hated Mr Tambourine Man, mainly because it was in 2/4 time whereas all The Beatles' stuff was in 4/4 time and it also had four verses - three too many, in their eyes. Under pressure to record it, though, McGuinn came up with the idea of adding a Bach-like intro courtesy of his trusty Rickenbacker, cutting out three of the verses and changing it to 4/4 time. The result was one of the most popular and instantly recognisable pop/rock songs of all time. It was always a bit of a shame that, due to record company pressure, The Byrds were mainly viewed as a Dylan cover band (they also famously did All I Really Want To Do and My Back Pages), for they were a genuinely ground-breaking musical experience in their own right, whether they were creating space-rock (with 5D - Fifth Dimenison), psychedelic-rock (with Eight Miles High) or most notably, country-rock (the still astonishing Sweethearts Of The Rodeo album).
They were also very much a Los Angeles band and their soaring harmonies fitted in nicely alongside other bands of the city at that time such as The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, The Mamas and Papas and The Turtles. Operating as a clearing house for the best talents of the day, members such as David Crosby went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash; Gram Parsons went on to The Flying Burrito Brothers; and Chris Hillman went to Manassas. There was also an oft-ignored idiosyncratic element to their music - as in taking a Welsh poem to form the basis of The Bells Of Rhymney or using passages from The Bible as on Turn! Turn! Turn! (with a little help from Pete Seeger).
The overriding memory, though, is of the Rickenbacker-drenched melodies, a sound that has come to define the 1960s almost as much as Sgt Pepper's and Pet Sounds. The simple studio trick of recording the guitar directly through the board and not through an amplifier (using electronic compressors, if you're really interested) did the trick nicely. It's a sound you can still hear deep down in the work of bands today such as Teenage Fanclub and Montrose Avenue.
Like The Beatles, with whom they shared a press officer (Derek Taylor - who was shot dead in bizarre circumstances in a Los Angeles motel in 1975), they experimented on the pharmacological level and for a while flirted with the same sort of Eastern religions/cults the Fabs did - Roger McGuinn, who used to be known as Jim, changed his name after a guru in Indonesia said the name Roger would vibrate better with the universe, or something like that. There was also the odd flash of humour, as in their classic send-up of "celebrity" life on So You Want To Be A Rock n' Roll Star which provided Joe Walsh with the lyrical template for his later Life's Been Good single.
It's a pity the same guru wasn't able to make them vibrate better with themselves, as after a series of break-ups/reunions/ new personnel, they emerged into the 1970s as a rather sad bunch of hippies whose day had gone and subsequent "Original Line Up" tours were just an embarrassment. No matter - in their day they were up there with The Beatles and The Beach Boys and that is more than good enough for me.
An excellent new, mid-priced 27-track "Best Of" Byrds package has been released on limited edition, digipak format by Columbia/Sony records. Also highly recommended is a new and updated Byrds biography, Timeless Flight by Johnny Rogan (the noted Smiths biographer who had a fatwah imposed on him by Morrissey) which is published by Omnibus Press.
In a move that will have serious repercussions for all on-line music coverage, major media mover Danny Kelly (the bloke who presents Channel 4's sports phone-in programme Under The Moon) will be unveiling his new, daily on-line music magazine on an Internet provider near you soon. Nearer home, Ireland's only weekly on-line music magazine, Muse, is celebrating its first birthday and promising all sort of fab things if you make their way to their site at www.muse.ie.
