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.
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