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.
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