1966 at 50: The Byrds' 5d Fifth Dimension

It was so hard to get to hear the Byrds in the mid-70s that it was through luck and nothing else that the only way I got to hear the Turn Turn Turn album was a cassette dubbed by a school friend from his sister's copy. The copy was an original mono LP from 1965. Even the compilations were hard to come by. At a time when even The Beatles were only available in their late period. If you wanted Rubber Soul you had to know someone who had it.

I read about Eight Miles High before I heard a bar of it. It was shrouded in contraversy because of the word high in the title. Even back in the 70s that seemed weird to me. I had to imagine what it sounded like. I did finally hear it once on the radio during a special called Twang about the role that electric guitars played in rock music. For three or so minutes my world stopped. I didn't think to set it up to tape it. When it was over it was gone forever. I tried reconstructing it from that memory but knew I only had the first few chords and opening line.

The 80s were much kinder to the legacy of 60s bands and after a few reissued compilations the original albums began appearing in record shops. Apart from anything else, a great many post punk musicians were turning to the best of the 60s rather than the immediate past for a kindred style. Among the reissues was the Byrds back catalogue but such was the record-buying decision tree of the cashless uni student, I figured I already had the singles compilation and there seemed so many covers on the original albums that I couldn't justify anything instead of a new Teardrop Explodes or Siouxsie spinner.

Then, later, after a year working at a local theatre I left to pursue writing a novel (nyerk nyerk) and received a kind of thank you payment which allowed a few records and more. I got the first three Byrds albums. So I finally heard this one. I'd heard already heard six of the tracks on compilations. Nevertheless, context is everything and this was their entry into the all important 1966 albums ranks. So, what's it like and does it still work?

The cover art is all 60s zeitgeist. The band variously kneel, sit or stand on a Persian rug against a background so black that it looks like the outer reaches of the Zorgon Galaxy. Each band member is holding a white disposable plastic cup with red liquid that could be cherry cordial or something more suitable for creating the impression that they are flying on a rug in the outer reaches of the Zorgon Galaxy. Above them the CBS logo, stereo logo and set list form a kind of arch around the album title in a blocky white font which floats above Byrds in huge paisley pattern letters. If you'd been in any danger of mistaking this for one of the series of Sing Along With Mitch Miller and the Gang from the 50s that danger was erased. So how does it sound?

5D starts without a riff or a snare hit, just a sudden fall into the big floating jangle and warm vocal singing of the expanse of the universe. Falling through the quantum dark somewhere between a folk rock workout and a country waltz, this hymn to the wonders of science catches us from the start as Roger McGuinn's folk club vocal is soon joined by the cut glass harmony of David Crosby's tenor. At one point McGuinn sings a vowel as high as he can go and as the chord changes Crosby comes in even higher with a a falsetto note as the highly compressed Rickenbacker 12 string snakes around with tentacles of pure chiming light. If anything was going to gently but firmly tell Byrds fans that they had moved on from Dylan covers this is it.

Wild Mountain Thyme hearkens back to the folk of the first two albums with a mix of chiming guitar and solemn choir from the valley earth. This time there's a string section that blows in like a cool breeze. It's a beautiful piece and you'll never skip it and, while it reminds us of the joys of the peaks of the previous albums, we've already heard the future and want more of that.

Mr Spaceman like the previous two tracks opens without a 12 string riff which makes a hat trick of departures from the first two LPs. Bam and you're into it. McGuinn sings a country-flavoured jig about a close encounter of the third kind. The bouncy 2/4 time and bright stacked harmonies suggest a jokey throwaway but the song's science fiction elements would return repeatedly in the band's output.

I See You jumps up in 5/4 with the 12 string centre stage like bebop in a Beatle wig. The harmonies come straight in without a solo introduction and they, too, are jazz rather than folk or rock. The melody and vocals are sombre bringing light to lines of word association like notes from a therapy session: "I know you, met before, seventh floor, first world war..." A couple of time stopping droning middle eights in 3/4 pile on the abstraction and a frenetic 12 string solo that prefigures Eight Miles High. It might well be a kind of chocolate box of stream of consciousness but there's always been an eerie undercurrent in this song for me, as though it's a list of the last psychotic thoughts of a killer before his breakthrough action. There's something obsessive about all that detail that's being noted. Maybe it's the razor-crisp harmonies, their impersonal sound and the odd time signature but this one can still give me the creeps.

If that weren't strange enough What's Happening launches into a series of strange statements by the narrator (a solo vocal from writer David Crosby) who is bewildered by the person he is talking to and their surrounds. Could be a straight recollection of a trip. There is hesitation in the voice and a stammered laugh begins another line. Between each couplet McGuinn's 12 string takes a bending walk in a minor key, getting ever higher until it is soaring by the end. We end as we begin on a ground of pedestrian rock to the fade, walking inside a mind as its unschooled occupant. Crosby would take this mood to a far more focused and tingling extent in the big spooky Everybody's Been Burned on the following album and it points to his later work with Stills and Nash but here in the context of a rock group it feels more like a word to the knowing.

If the cute 12 string riffs of Turn Turn Turn or the Bells of Rhymney have been absent from this far more serious platter and the lyrics are getting stranger and darker they still form slight preparation for the Side 1 closer I Come and Stand at Every Door. This is the one I had to replay when I got that copy back in the 80s. I heard it through three times straight and it sent a shiver each time. It still does. A modal wash of jangling guitar and crashing cymbals waltzes slowly beneath Gene Clark's unsmiling account by the ghost of a child incinerated in Hiroshima, condemned for eternity to knock on doors and plea for peace. "My hair was scorched by swirling flame, my eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind. Death came and turned by bones to dust and that was scattered by the wind" I'm welling up a little just typing those words. This is a cover of a song that emerged in the US folk scene in the late 50s. The lyrics are an adaptation of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet piece The Girl Child and the song under the new title can be found covered by many including a nerve draining version in the 80s by This Mortal Coil. The Byrds version keeps its rock basis in the background, washing back and forth like the tide as Clarke's funereal drone persists against the force. The full band harmonies at the end offer some relief with the words about peace but it's too little too late as the wash falls quickly into its fade. End of side one.

The CD version observes a second or two of silence before resuming. Side 2 begins with one of the most sublime songs of its decade. A thick electric bass arpeggio thuds around the tonic and fifth of E over swishing ride cymbals. A stuttering six string electric clangs on a low E and then the huge golden notes of the introductory riff of Eight Miles High sing loud as a fanfare. Lift off. The figure playing G major against the relative minor that the rest of the band are grinding through tells us we're in for a strange ride. Immediately we are in for some turbulence as the 12 string lunges into a strange modal scale as influence by John Coltrane's sax as the then fashionable Indian classical music. This is not the sweet and cute jangling riff of Mr Tambourine Man but an engine turbining up and taking off. It scraggles around the scale, moving upward until it hits the ceiling with a rapid alternation of a high E and F. Before you can take any of that in the vocals enter, leaving us somewhere between Ravi Shankar and Cologne Cathedral's greatest hits.

The unworldly harmonies through the minor third slow and strong as a take off, lingering on the tension of ascent until the release with the ringing open D on the 12 string which feels like you're in the open air. Eight miles high and when you touch down you'll find that it's stranger than known ... Signs in the street that say where you're going are somewhere just being their own. What does that mean? To me it means perfectly chosen vowels and consonants sung like a monastic choir rising to the clouds. I don't care what it means because I'm up there with them, suspended. The second verse is the same steady controlled climb and cruise. Then the next instrumental break begins with the gleaming fanfare on the 12 string, courses through some turbulence in the stratosphere and darkly builds until again the choir emerges again for the last verse: Round the squares, huddled in storms.
Some laughing some just shapeless forms. Sidewalk scenes and black limousines. Some living, some standing alone. A brief moment of indecision in the playing, not stumbling or stuttering, more like hanging in the air wondering whether to land or keep coursing through the light. It's a landing, turbulent, jangling and assured rolling to a massive four engine stop that ends in the sigh of a ride cymbal.

I remember the phrase "huddled in storms" and thought, whether or not this was correct, that they had borrowed the word storms as a kind of collective noun, a group of huddles. It gave me pictures of vague fogbound shapes, flashes of  light sparkling around them. I will never get sick of this song.

Almost as a sublime to ridiculous transition next up is David Crosby's take on the year's go to cover, Hey Joe. The Leaves made it a garage epic and Hendrix just made it epic. The Byrds give it a speedy panic with a scraggly lead guitar (6 string) skittling in the background and Crosby's nervous high voice on full psycho setting. I like this version and I think I'm the only one who does. Maybe it's because the others stand by themselves and this needs an album to make it work. It sounds like something Crosby insisted on for coolness' sake.This was the Byrds' first album to contain no Dylan covers. The covers they chose (not counting to two trad numbers), this and Every Door, were decidedly un-Dylan and more a grab at the wider zeitgeist, anti-war and outlaw. Things were on the change.

Captain Soul sound like filler and is but it's filler composed of a kind of taunt. Having built a brief but fast career on folk modernisation and rocking up Dylan. A soul based groove would have seemed a freshener as much as Hey Joe was. The trouble is that, while it's endurable, it goes nowhere and has as much soulfulness as any of the white boy garage acts that Lenny Kaye stuffed the Nuggets album with: intention doesn't equal effectiveness.

John Riley is one for the old fans, a solemn choral jangle reading of an old folk tune about a returning lover. The same paint by numbers string section that appeared in Wild Mountain Thyme turns up again, and again as needlessly. It's pleasant and easily lived through but sounds like yesteryear.

Finally we hear the rising scream of a jet engine which gives way to a far more convincing groove than Captain Soul as between grabs of control tower radio talk we get a fun closer telling us to ride the Lear jet, baby. Before you think of this being an innovative anti-consumption broadside, taking aim at the really big wheels, be informed that the Byrds were young cool Californians with a lot of money who knew the people who designed the aircraft and probably a few people who owned one. This is a celebration of one of the ultimate consumables of the era. They might have turned into hippies but for now they wanted in.

As closers go, this was a step up from the first album's goofy We'll Meet Again or the previous one's embarrassingly self-consciously cute Oh Susanna. It rounds off the album without a cringe. Things were looking up.

Fifth Dimension is how it sounds, a band that had lost their chief original songwriter (Gene Clarke, who is on the album as a writer and singer) but who knew they needed to keep moving. Like so much of the rock LPs released in 1966 this was in response to Rubber Soul, the Beatles game changing set that, from cover art to the run out groove declared that real albums now had to have some cohesion and weren't allowed to be just lists of songs. While this is less a cohesive whole than a group of songs with filler dressed up as primary material it kind of gets away with it. It's not a bad parlour trick but the quality gap between Eight Miles High and Captain Soul cannot fully convince. The best they've done is to make the contemporary formula of covers supporting hit singles digestible across time. It's not the Byrds LP to begin with (I'd go with either Notorious Byrd Brothers or Mr Tambourine Man) but it feels like its time without sounding dated


Listening Notes:
Version used for this article was the 1996 remastered CD with bonus tracks. If you wanted to hear it on vinyl you'd need to try and find an original pressing from the 60s as the reissues from the 80s are from horribly worn masters. But even if you did access a copy from 1966 it still wouldn't have the bass response that the mid-90s CDs have so, really, listen to the CDs for best results until someone budgets enough time and money to have them remastered in hi resolution digital when they will finally sound like they did at the mixing board. The original mono mix of Mr Tambourine Man appeared on SACD and it is stellar. There's one of Notorious Byrd Brothers but I can never find a copy. Other Byrds albums remain at CD level resolution but, happily, this round of remasters was a fine one.

PS - I know he still called himself Jim McGuinn on this album and Roger came later but that's how he's been known ever since so ....