1969@50: BALLAD OF EASY RIDER - THE BYRDS

A bright and easy arpeggio on an acoustic guitar with a swell of a string section rising. McGuinn's vocal enters with the lines about the river flowing and things going where they will. This retake of the Byrds newer contribution to Dennis Hopper's groundbreaking film Easy Rider is a lift from the sombre one in the film and on the soundtrack album. The band went with the decision to strengthen their link with the runaway success of the movie, leading with this track and giving the whole album its title. But this did not sustain. No further tracks have any direct relevance to the film apart from having a distinctly American flavour with revisits to the country rock of the album before the previous one.

It's not just the identity of the record to the movie. Unlike Dr Byrds where McGuinn insisted on flying the Byrds flag by taking every lead vocal, the singing is shared and the sole original founding member is even absent from three of the tracks altogether. How thinly can you stretch a well known musical entity before it warps beyond recognition or snaps entirely?

Fido contributed by and sung by soon to depart bassist John York is pleasant enough with some fine guitaring from Clarence White and a drum solo that doesn't get too boring. A swaying rhythm swings between the first and fourth chords until it ends.

Oil In My Lamp provides something like a progression in that its harmony put it pleasantly between the old Byrds and Baptist church sangin'. The song is a hymn associated with the early years of school but here actually compels with a commitment to the the brightness of the plagal motion of the tune and the strength of the vocals. It is entirely harmonised but the clearest voice is drummer Gene Parsons.

Tulsa County is a tasteful country cover with some fine bending guitar slinging, a strong McGuinn vocal, sweet harmonies that work for being a lot less formal and blocky than the trademark Byrds harmonies, fiddle and gentle Nashville lilt.

Jack Tar The Sailor begins with some lovely atmospherics on the guitar, settles into a kind of mid Atlantic folk with McGuinn supposedly trying a British accent to go with the origin of the song. McGuinn knew what he was going for and would have felt emboldened by the emerging of the brash folk fusion of UK acts like Steeleye Span, Pentangle and Fairport Convention. The trouble is that he just sound like he's pretending to be about ninety-seven years old. The the bands efforts create a genuinely beautiful setting but the vocal just makes every good thing drag like a corpse across a pub floor.

Jesus is Just Alright begins with very tasty minor key country rock guitars. The harmony vocals are blocky and eerily reminiscent of the style of close-to-home success of Crosby Stills Nash and Young. And then it ends.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue rises as a country flavoured dirge that takes forever to finish the title line at the end of the chorus. They had done a more folk-rock take during the Turn Turn Turn sessions which might have struck them at the time as more of the same but plays far better than this interminable outing.

There Must be Someone I can Turn To sounds sincere, authentic and like the cover version it is. It's good but should it be here? McGuinn absent.

Gunga Din begins with a superbly bright and difficult acoustic arpeggio. A gentle country rock motion tells a tale of sad disappointment and societal rejection. Lovely nimble fingered Telecaster work in the outro. Nothing to complain about, really.

The Woody Guthrie cover Deportee is full country or as close as they close on Sweetheart. Is it bitchy to suggest that McGuinn's vocal sounds like a mix of Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons? Great song, though.

The final track is Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins and reinstates the earlier tradition on Byrds albums of a goofy closing track. After a reconstruction of the Houston countdown Roger comes in with an acoustic guitar and gentle harmonium with a few lines that are over before they've begun.

You can put this album on and leave it on. It's what a Byrds album sounds like when the band is a version that more resembles the ship of Theseus and the repaired beams and masts, for all their faithfulness to the original design, stick out. The half-arsed cover art which McGuinn infamously hated for its corny warped typeface and bizarrely contrary image of a biker who looked more like the rednecks at the end of the movie than the freedom-seeking hippy of the movie. And the shortfalling insistence on the link with the movie that runs out after the first track doesn't help. Not even the barely coherent liner notes by Easy Rider star Peter Fonda can help.

This is an album that begs the faint praise it often draws. Not all bands produce at their best album after album. The Byrds had more than their share of upsets and reversals of fortune that, when seen with clear hindsight, would puzzle the staunchest fan as to why they bothered with the strongest debate held by just when they should have split and found new careers. I'm not a fan of Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I think it's bland and pandering rather than bold. The return to exploratory rock afterward with Dr Byrds was better but then it was followed by this. And there was both good and dire to follow but no further sheer brilliance. McGuinn's relative aloofness from the project had a lot to do with the ongoing saga of the mooted musical Gene Tryp which he envisaged would spring him off to a new and bigger career. This album's lack of force beyond the level of elevated muzak bears witness to its central figure's distance from the centre. Ah well ...

1968 at 50: SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO - THE BYRDS

Only months after the release of their most sustained progressive rock album The Byrds shocked their fans and critics alike by producing this slab of country. Originally envisaged as a history of American 20th century pop music by Roger McGuinn the album was steered with increasing persuasion towards country by new recruit and visionary Gram Parsons. Parson's contributions were pared back due to legal entanglements and the band lost their initial fanbase. So, was it worth it?

A steel guitar pickup kicks us in as You Ain't Going Nowhere begins. McGuinn's familiar voice takes us through the Dylan song with an effortless twang and the harmonies come in like cleansing showers. If the country stutters on guitars here and there let us know what we're in for they don't sound wrong or forced. The song was unreleased until this version (the original would come out later on the Basement Tapes album: same as the final track).

I am a Pilgrim begins with a shuckshuck from a fiddle and Chris Hillman's easy vocal is supported by banjo and fiddle. Longer than expected breaks of the strings between verses seem to request we take it easy and not get upset about our favourite progressive band sounding like it was born in Nashville. No harmonies but Hillman's voice proves an easy listen.

The Louvin Brothers' The Christian Life is next and it's a tad troubling as McGuinn's vocal verges on hick caricature. The glorious chorus lifts this but every verse just comes back to sounding like parody which is not what you want if you are trying to do what this album has already stated as its intention. Also, the Louvin Brothers were iconic, their harmonies the stuff of legend and, while they were partly pushed into doing a number of gospel heavy albums like Satan is Real they were well capable of folky greatness without a speck of religious affiliation. If the Byrds are trying to eat and have their cake by slyly winking at their rock fanbase with this one it must fail with them as offputting and alienate the Opry audience they'd got their hair cut to please. Well, it's a lovely chorus.

You Don't Miss Your Water, by contrast, sounds like a Byrds song with an added steel guitar and honkytonk piano. McGuinn is in fine and unaffected voice and the harmonies are up to par and more. This convinces where the last one worries.

Enter the chief architect of the album's country lean. Gram Parsons sings You're Still on My Mind without irony as the session musicians plink and plonk their way through a drunken heart number. It works but at this stage it couldn't sound less like a Byrds track. Yes, by all means progress, but here is the sound of one person's agenda vs the rest of the band. It doesn't sound like progress. It sounds like an invasion.

Pretty Boy Floyd is McGuinn returning to his childhood folk influence as he dusts off the banjo and in fine Byrds voice courses through the Wood Guthrie number with a fiddle, double bass. The pace and voice retain the Byrds stamp and link this one to Wild Mountain Thyme, Old John Robinson and any number of folk songs the band had rocked up on previous albums.

The indisputable jewel of the album opens the second vinyl side as Hickory Wind spreads like honey over our ears and Parsons sings his own co-write with sincere plaintive voice. At last every country element comes to the aid of the song which could easily be a rock track or a Vegas ballad. With hindsight we are hearing the future of Parsons and the Byrds (i.e. a split). But this is a sublime piece.

One Hundred Years from Now is another Parsons composition but sounds like it could come from Turn Turn Turn, being harmony vocals only: minus the 12 string (with the riff on a steel). Lovely but very, very light.

Chris Hillman cover The Blue Canadian Rockies and as with his country flavoured contributions on Younger than Yesterday it falls back into the tracklist without creating a lot of texture. Hillman's voice doesn't detract but adds little.

Parsons takes the vocals on Merle Haggard's Life in Prison with his customary confidence. Like so many of the tracks here the arrangements feels played by session musicians rather than the band. Haggard's own recordings were often done this way but then you get him and his burned in style at the mic. Parsons does well but even he can't lift this cover above being a cover.

Dylan's Nothing was Delivered begins with a beautiful steel guitar figure and proceeds to a country shuffle. McGuinn takes it to a comfortable Byrds place, with the chorus changing from the 2/4 of the verse to a harder 4/4 grind for the chorus. Get rid of the steel and add a 12 string and this could be on any of the earlier albums.

I wonder what fans heard when they listened to this for the first time. There had been many indications from the first album on that the band was committed to the American-ness of their music and had a good grounding among them in the folk music of America. More than a handful of tracks on any of these LPs attest to their willingness to try country. When I first heard Hey Mr Spaceman in the early '80s it sounded like a hoedown to me. So, why, with all this ready made scholarship, does this album sound like pandering and sometimes ridicule?

Two years earlier the song High and Dry on the Rolling Stones album Aftermath was clearly a kind of Nashville/Leadbelly hybrid and Jagger, uncertain of what the fans might think, throws a "yep!" in every other line to let the universe know he's not so square as to do this for real. (He was still at it in Beggars Banquet but with a lot more maturity.) Why does a band who knows their country and shows how strongly they can express it through their own rock base end up treating it so lightly?

But none of this sounds as authentic as Gene Clark's Set You Free This Time from the Turn Turn Turn album, one of the touted origin-points of folk rock. Set You Free is clearly a country song, and a good one, and done without a nudge or a wink. Even Chris Hillman's dull 2/4 numbers on Younger Than Yesterday have more going for them as far as country rock claims might go. Too much of Sweetheart sounds like the kind of parody that happens at the end of band practices but played with top shelf sessioners.

It really has to be Parsons. Pushing himself further out front, alienating the band from its music and trying to hoist a flag with his name on it as well as the Byrds. To me, it's just a poor fit. The music is ok, if on the light side and you can leave it on but it's just nothing compared to hearing a Mr Spaceman rub shoulders with the frenetic jazz rock of I See You. See, The Byrds were already deeply invested in blending and emerging as themselves. It's not just the lack of Rickenbacker jangle here or the absence of Crosby's sublime descant, it's a wrong turn and it was one from which the band would never find their way back.

1968 at 50: THE BYRDS - THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS

Towards the end of 1967 The Byrds were a different band from the one that recorded the final original line up album 5D. And different again from the one that had recorded the more consistent Younger Than Yesterday. By the end of recording this one the quartet would be a duo looking at a very uncertain future. Gene Clark was long gone but David Crosby was getting restless and unpredictable. Clark was briefly asked back but left soon after. Crosby was fired, never to return outside of much later revivals. The drummer Mike Clarke was sacked, asked back and sacked again. A bonus track on the 1997 remaster CD bears witness to the cranky state that band had got to as Mike Clark runs the gauntlet of McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman and their tripartite wit as he consistently fails to please. All that, more, and the band still managed to created their slickest and most convincing development yet. I prefer the early ones, however flawed and bitsy, but I can't go past Brothers for the pleasurable wholeness and sheer joy it offers.

Artificial Energy starts with a stutter on the snare and a full brass section before the band comes in with guitars and vocal harmonies. But something's wrong. The brass is clear as a bell but sounds like it's playing down the street, not a part of the whole arrangement even though it's constant force is keeping an otherwise fairly standard rock tune bouyant. The song is about being so sped up on amphetamines that you only find out you've committed murder during your come down. Bum. Mer.
The story takes us from the elation of the come on to the worst of the plunge down. So, what at first might seem a bizarre mixing decision gains some weight as a canny trope to suggest the out of body fog that a big speedy time can give. The end features the kind of druggy frown of a bad time with a little feedback that seems to drag itself under a rock.

Goin' Back is The Byrds we knew were still in there under the crazy trumpets and words of the opener. But again it's a strangely muted version. The vocals are low in the mix, however full bodied and like on the previous two albums there is no big pop riff on the Rickenbacker to announce it. It's a cool and laid back ode to returning to the energy of childhood imagination by the great Carole King and Gerry Goffin and the Byrds glide through it as though in pennance for the decadence of Artificial Energy. A first listen might have it sounding bland and over light, a regression even (Crosby thought it was) but, really, it's pitched at a perfect level and it's mix of characteristic 12 string chime, block harmonies and Brian Wilson like glockenspiel lead us warmly into the rest of the album. Whether you think it's really going back or a gentle way forward no Byrds fan can keep the door shut as the final gorgeous three part la-la-la chorus glitters into the light.

A gentle ground of clean chiming guitars, low bass note and insistent high hat begins Natural Harmony and for a moment you relax into the thought of a gentle hippy ballad. Indeed the first droning vocal lines "falling through, me and you" seem to support that. Suddenly the voices take flight and there's something wrong. The voices sound a little phased, a kind of underwater distortion. The next iteration reveals a distant whining under the vocals and then when the next section starts with a droning tambura under the voices you stop and realise that it's actually a very early synthesiser. Multi-tracked as all synths in 1968 were monophonic, the effect is intended, overflowing, treacly yet firm and Eastern. Listening now, you might be forgiven a shrug but this is among the first uses of synthesis on a rock record. As such we are hearing a prototype of electronic arrangement and must listen closer. The song is a hippy ballad but instead of the backwards guitars or tapeloops, the wahwah pedals or fuzzboxes of other bands (or even this one in earlier incarnations) the miracle machine of Bob Moog has entered the studio to stay. The usage adds colour and texture but no gimmick. The following decade would render this cliche but here it is innovation and present in our ears at a lot of time and effort. An early Moog filled a room and took an expert to get any sound out of it. Listen to the track. It sounds effortless and natural. Hillman's songwriting has also come many leaps from the bland country rock of his samey numbers on Younger Than Yesterday. And yet this collective forward lurch is kept tightly packed in a song that really only feels (on first hearing) like a conduit between those that sandwich it. Further listens reveal riches.

A segue with a strident ride cymbal flows into Draft Morning. One of David Crosby's long melodic phrase songs without choruses, the voices come in over a gentle rolling guitar /bass figure, only slightly above the backing. Smooth lines and creamy harmonies belie the grievous lyric about being called up for service in the heavily unpopular Vietnam War. The break in the middle is not a solo but an emulated battle with the horn section from the opening track playing military stabs, explosions and gunfire. This fades as the rolling figure returns and the final verse ends in a question which suggests the narrator's resistance. The fade is led by the 12 string playing bugle arpeggios and a gentle la la harmony given the same kind of phasing treatment as the previous song. The lyric really only runs to three sentences yet the song feels full. McGuinn and Hillman worked on this number after Crosby's departure, giving themselves co-writing credits and further alienating them from the already distant Crosby. For all that the song flows easily from those before it and adds a dignified solemnity to the sequence.

Wasn't Born to Follow sounds like it could have come from any of the first three albums with its cantering pace, chiming Rickenbacker and unison vocals. But again something seems a little strange. There is a very slow phase cycle affecting the bass and guitars (a lap steel and a Telecaster join in). The solo section plunges into heavy phasing with a squealing series of 12 string bends and the band sounding like they are playing through a jet engine. A smooth transition takes us up out of this for the final verse which sounds like the old Byrds again but then the playout is distinctly country with a twangy Telecaster kicking up the chord progression (is it James Burton? he's one of the session men listed) before it all ends with the clump of a snare drum. This is the second Goffin/King track on the album and the fact that it sounds like one of the band's originals from an early album testifies to what they always brought to their cover versions. This is so appealing it always feels a verse too short. It feels perfect placed in the soundtrack of Easy Rider with its forward motion and easy vocals.

Get to You begins with a lap steel pouring cream over a 5/4 rhythm. The string section takes on a drunken loping quality. The vocals are one to one harmony and the lyric tells the story of a flight to London to get to the you of the title. The chorus of "that's a little better" squeezes the vocals into the distance and filters them through a phaser as the percussion intensifies. In the third verse the narrator reveals that it's taken twenty years to get there which throws in a little intrigue. Is it sci fi or a projection into the future? One of the briefly returning Gene Clark contributions with McGuinn though the original credit went to Chris Hillman and McGuinn.

Change is Now begins with a bass droning under a bright guitar arpeggio. The hushed harmonies  come in with a cathedral like solemnity before a brief country chorus and an electronic solo section which sounds like a heavily treated 12 string and a backwards one over the same drone. The chant like verse returns and lifts to the same Nashville chorus with brighter vocals and a tweedling lap steel. We end with the hushed chant telling us that the fear is gone. A deceptively plain message of peace.

Old John Robertson starts with a bugle arpeggio on the 12 string but then blasts off into a brisk two beat country. Old style Byrds harmonies  but with a constant chiming steel. When the title character's wife dies there is a sudden incursion by a string section with a beautiful brisk but still sorrowful figure. Back into the song the phasing is back and stays as the song tells the tale of how this now lonely man was ridiculed without anyone asking for the truth of his life as fear kept them out. A kind of Simon and Garfunkel pathos number but with a cowboy band on acid. All this under two minutes.

Tribal Gathering settles into another 5/4 jazz groove. A busy vocal melody delivers images of angels and butterflies and crowds of happy people. Instrumental breaks scream with electronics and drones. Another verse and another psychedelic break. End. This is what happens when a young David Crosby and a young Chris Hillman write a song together. It's just over two minutes and it's gone from gentle jazz to freakout twice.

Weird synthesised warbling gives way to a gentle harmony vocal about the carefree life under the ocean wave in Dolphin Smile. Another wailing droning break with a thudding funereal drum. Another gorgeous verse and it fades into tinkling and glistening.

Full Sci Fi synthesis for the backing of Space Odyssey. A loping waltz time with sea shanty style melody in the vocals and a solemn fuzz guitar. The seagoing balladry is in fact about space voyages and takes more than a leaf out of Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel. Stanley Kubrick would release his epic 2001: A Space Odyssey later the same year. McGuinn would continue to approach science fiction for his inspiration but this sombre piece about a mysterious pyramid on the moon and it appearing to have waited for an evolved species to find it probably finds its highest expression, there at the apex of the strange object in the song. With a pace and gravity that recalls the dark plea of 5D's I Come and Stand at Every Door we can hear how seriously he took the notions he sang of.

While it can often feel so light that it passed by without leaving a trace Notorious Byrd Borthers yet makes a strong and cohesive statement of its times, of the fear of war and the rewards of peace and hope, always hope. But while those sentiments might remind us of the scriptural references of the earlier Turn Turn Turn the theme here is progression. Twin forces of traditional country voices and the electronica that was turning the most basic of songs into wailing otherworldly things weave together to give us an album both recognisable as The Byrds and suggestive of a very different group. Even the sameness of the instrumental breaks with their drones, feedback and wailing set in gentle vocal harmonies and the rolling chimes of the electric 12 string, and the often unbroken sequencing  suggest that the instrumentals are windows on to a swiftly passing landscape of uncharted worlds.

And then there were two. Soon enough there would be only one but McGuinn soldiered on, taking the name into country, hard rock, gospel and finally a kind of grinding early seventies rock that felt like the ship had run aground. Until then there was this lift from the blandness of the previous set that showed how very much could be done when the lineup grew chaotic and tempestuous. It sounds like an album, not a fight.

1967 at 50: YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY - THE BYRDS

For a fourth album this sounds a lot like a difficult second. In a sense it is, though. It is their second after the departure of previous chief originals writer Gene Clarke and his voice. It's a second album also in the sense that it differs far more from its immediate precursor (5D Fifth Dimension) than the first two did. It's a set that features both the familiar and the experimental, enriching some of the best ideas of the previous albums and catering to the formula for the fans. From the crazy Crosby cauldron of Mind Gardens to the as old as yesterday Dylan cover with a rich 12 string intro, this disc sounds like musicians who want to go ahead but eat the mass appeal, too.

So, start with a track that mixes cynicism with idealism like So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star.
An arpeggiated two chord figure on the 12 string let's you know who this is. Add some amp breakup (so console clipping) to that instrument of purity and you get the old band with a new attitude. When the harmonies come in (no lead vocals with this one) they are more distant than we're used to, thin and compressed they sit in a pocket of the mix rather than ride on its surface like they did in Turn Turn Turn. This is a song about the same kind of self awareness that made those things an issue to fans and the rock press alike. The title is taken from the kind of do it yourself manual that middle America was buying to help build its garden sheds or improve its job prospects.  "So you want to be a rock and roll star .. Just get an electric guitar and learn how to play..." But the joke of it sours quickly with, "sell your soul to the company who are waiting there to sell plastic ware." Bypass the passion for music and go straight to the fame, the sex and the money. This is from a band who had raked in more than their share of all of that and then witnessed what a fickle public could do, especially when guided by a still very conservative media. The song is rough and as processed as smooth peanut butter but they want you to know that they are on top of this and put in some delicious Latin lead playing on the Rickenbacker and an livelier trumpet (Hugh Masekela!) to sharpen things up. The real sound of a stadium of girls screaming stands in for half a verse and if you have the 5D album in mind it might remind you of the song about the Lear jet it ended on. A tiny epic of attitude and incorrigible musicality from players who know you understand. That's a good start.

So why wind things back by three or so years to the next one? Chris Hillman's Have You Seen Her Face with its big opening riff (not on a 12 string, admittedly) and Merseybeat tune and Tambourine Man harmonies is the kind of California cool song about a girl that the last album pretty much erased. Yet here it is. The band rocks with some fine mid-60s grit in the guitar tone to contrast the Gregorian harmonies and it passes by very pleasantly.

CTA 102 was a radio source from a quasar that engendered speculation that it might be evidence of alien civilisations in deep space. Written by McGuinn and Troubadour regular, roadie and guru of the weird and the wonderful Bob Hippard. Together the pair latched on to the notion that their song might reach the citizens of CTA 102, setting it in a radio-friendly Byrds harmony jangle that might be launched via Earth waves to the great Cosmos. A clear next step from 5D's Mr Spaceman the song takes a turn for the strange when the instrumental section is wifully ditressed to sound like a distant radio signal over which we hear some strange sped up vocals which could be backwards (they aren't, it's McGuinn and Crosby speaking gibberish) to invoke the aliens commenting on the Byrds song. The blend of slight major key pop with a big scary idea gets beyond the cuteness of the presentation but only just. Still, it's a step ahead.

Renaissance Fair begins with a lovely gleaming arpeggio on the Rickenbacker which forms the ground for a slightly overdriven chord figure. Translucent harmonies sing of olde worlde costumes and market stalls at one of the Renaissance revival events that became regular events with the hippies and the folkies. The singers think they are in a dream of the days o' old and, to be fair, a Renaissance fair in the '60s prior to the inevitable commercialisation might well have looked, felt and smelled as though everyone was partying like it was 1467. Sonorous word pictures of the stalls and the vibe are told in a deft Crosbian blend of medieval and jazz intervals and some lovely melisma on the vowels. If it was another band from the time I'd be in a swoon. Here, it glides by lightly and goes, pointing to Crosby's near future in CSNY which is to say beyond my interest.

Chris Hillman's next number Time Between plunges into contemporary Nashville with a leaf or two from new folk rock outside of the Byrds' own brand of it. Hillman's is creditable, given that he's not trying to trowel it on as a country number. The real revelation here is his fluid Telecaster playing which twangs and bends with the best of them. A pleasant song about a long distance relationship.

Pleasant is the word for most of the album so far and it's a let down after the opening broadsides of the first two sets and the bold self effacing experimentation of the previous one. Which is why we have to wait almost a whole side to get to the second great song of this LP. David Crosby's Everybody's Been Burned begins with a spooky 12 string arpeggio travelling through chords complicated by 9ths and fourths as it climbs and gently falls through a minor key. It could be the theme song of a mystery and indeed seems to find an intrigue of its own. The title and first line promise a song sung in sympathy to someone damaged from a relationship but it just doesn't go there. Crosby's pure tenor takes us through some cold observations about the futility of loving and even just trying to love. "I know that door that shuts just before you get to the dream..." This eerie line gives way to a gentle 12 string solo that begins lyrical but seems to get stuck halfway as though its stuttered staccato phrase cannot or should not be finished. The second and final verse sings about the impossibility of seeking love by turning, running or hiding and then, quite chillingly ends with: "So I guess instead I'll love you." The rolling 6th and 9th chords press on into the fade. It's like a first draft of Love the One You're With as imagined by Charles Manson.

The old side two begins with a strong rock song, Hillman's first really good one on the album, Thoughts and Words. An urgent descent through the minor  on the 12 string and a six finishes with an aching drawn-out grind on the E sus 4. Hillman enters with a mournful tone, descending with the chords, and lyrics about his love for a woman taking him over before the tight high harmony of the chorus and  its surprise: "I thought I was on top of it all!" The second verse gives way to a swirl of two backwards acoustic guitars that add a weirdness to the situation. A final verse staves of repetition by including Crosby's descant response to Hillman's lines into the final chorus and closing vortex of backwards playing to the final chord. While the chorus seems a tad worn compared to the rest of the song it does fit and shows us that Hillman could be more than the providore of album filler.

When I first heard Mind Gardens I made a conscious decision to soldier through it so that I would never have to hear it again. So, formless, pointless and hippy the song and its creator, David Crosby seem to vanish into the void of their own arseholes. Lots of backwards guitars and meaningless musings in a meandering mess of a melody. Listening to it for this post had me kicking down each pillar of that dismissal. First, it does have form. Crosby's wandering improvisations on the tune can distract from that but they too carry beauty (particularly the line "but when the sun came" with its beautiful Indian melisma on the last word) and adorn the central modal tune that climbs out of the dark rich Celtic musical soil where Crosby found it. His strong tenor tells a tale of overprotection before wisdom arrives with a lesson about trust from nature. It's a fable and doesn't need assignment to a more mundane story (it could apply to romantic love, parenthood, or even, gosh-darn, gardening). It has become my favourite track on the album.

My Back Pages starts with a compromise, a chord progression repeats without being moulded into a bright 12 string riff or having the song just start. When I first heard the album and knew its place in the sequence I winced a little and wondered why the band went backwards this way. It's an even tamer Dylan cover than any they had already done and, with its rousing chorus and McGuinn's Dylanesque lead vocal and then big, ringy Rickenbacker solo, it has the feel of a management call or even the band themselves voting for a single for the old fans. The experience of the Dylan-free but controversy-plagued 5D and the banning of the masterpiece single Eight Miles High, the Byrds could be forgiven for bashing out a bit of the old tried and true. Coming after the most startlingly original song they'd ever done and dumping the listener into cliche drive feels like surrender to the very forces they castigate in the bold opening track.

Chris Hillman was to expand his songwriting abilities considerably from the next album on but on this breakout set where he provides four new originals to an albums sequence and adds another lead vocal to the range he has only really been able to distinguish himself with one. Thoughts and Words is more in line with where the band were moving but still retained some marks of earlier periods of pop music. The Girl With No Name is a song I confuse in memory with Time Between and Have You Seen Her Face. They are all country flavoured songs constructed according to prescription and played sung with a checklist precision that says to me: well all the notes are right, what more do you want? Plenty, actually but that can wait until Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Strident slightly-overdriven guitars bash out the opening chords of Heatwave until you realise that it's a new recording of the song Why from the previous year. This was apparently included at David Crosby's insistence. I'll echo the title here. The band already had a good swag of new material on hand, some of it more impressive than this but they chose to end their entry in the most game-changing year of the decade with the b-side of an old single that flopped. And then the new version strips the previous outing by removing most of the distinctive bending 12 string soloing that engendered the term raga rock to apply to at least two years of progressive rock music. It's still a decent Byrds song but now it sounds like the begrudging compliance with a tantrum.

You might have guessed that this is not my favourite Byrds album. I won't offer any what-ifs to suggest how it might have been improved. Chris Hillman's songs irritate me but if you don't have those you might not have a host of splendid ones in the years to come. It was good to be pleasantly surprised by Mind Gardens which I'd written off as hippy timewasting. But more than Fifth Dimension's production being plagued by the loss of a major contributor Younger Than Yesterday's  set reveals the effects of that gap and they are not good. If I were old enough to have bought this album on first release I would have played it once all the way through and then only returned to it for individual tracks. Even now, walking around and listening determinedly to the whole sequence, often daily, my impression is of some real tries at finding the new with the old strengths and falling back to routine as though exhausted. Perhaps it would take David Crosby becoming so unbearable that freedom from him became the spur. Whatever it was, the band, already limping, would yet find some greatness as they continued to develop and progress even to the point of sound unrecognisably different from the Byrds of the first album but in a way that disturbs rather than inspires.