McGuinn ruled that he would handle all the lead vocals for the sake of continuity which was smart: if your slowly deflating fan base is seeking anything it's at least a little of why they were there in the first place and the voice is the centre of all rock records (well, most (at that time, anyway (you know what I mean)). It really is no accident that this is the most coherent Byrds album since Fifth Dimension. Mcguinn is curating covers and taking care with his songwriting and the arrangements are like a grown up version of that one without going out on a limb even to the extent that Sweetheart did. It's not noiserock but nor is is a retread. It's the Byrds as imagined by Roger McGuinn. Even the lineup is like that, if you think of the recording of the Mr Tambourine Man single; Roger plus others rather than the people who became The Byrds but this time it's more like Roger and friends.
Anyone at the time who dreaded another country rock outing is reassured from the get go with the rock guitars of This Wheel's on Fire. Fuzzed in the left channel and skeletal and tremolo-ed in the right. Mcguinn's half-snarl evokes Dylan's original but keeps enough of himself there so you know. The chorus is drawn out a little too long but it's a cleanly defined take. Dylan's own wouldn't appear officially until the mid-70s and there had been an earnest go by his co-horts The Band but the one to beat was Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger's soaring treatment. There's a point to opening like this (and to choosing it over the more straightforward one released as an extra on the '90s remaster). It's a Dylan song like the one that started their success but it's gnarly and mean, unlike that one, and deliberately doesn't come with a big chiming riff on the 12 string. That stuff was then. It's astute, not just good.
Old Blue sounds like old Byrds but also the band that had just released a country-flavoured album. It's easy on the ear with translucent harmonies and plenty of gleaming Rickenbacker. The band is new but can still sound like the old one. This track also has the honour of being the first by the band to use the Parsons/White B-Bender on White's Telecaster which lends a clean steel-like bend to the sound. There's a lot on this album.
Your Gentle Way of Loving Me begins with McGuinn's vocal over 12 string. The band comes in soon with a 2/4 country roll. When the chorus comes up the familiar two part harmony with a descant reappears. But that still doesn't drag the song back to sounding like an out take from Turn Turn Turn. The playing by this fresh lineup feels more confident than on any of the bands records up to the session-player heavy Sweetheart album.
Child of the Universe bashes into a 3/4 12 string and timpani introduction and the modal harmonies begin before the B-section changes into 4/4 and a more laid back verse. Cosmic lyrics celebrate a goddess who might be a woman or the universe itself. This song written for the film Candy has one foot in Fifth Dimension and the other in its present. Jangle and bright vocal harmonies. Perfect Byrds.
Nashville West is an instrumental brought to the band by the new players and romps through a chord progression without a central melody with a spring in its step. It's a little ruined by the self-conscious attempt at parodying a square dance caller that comes in after an overdone "yeehaw". It's meant to sound like "swing your partner and do si do" but just sounds more like "rant rant roart roart".
Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man sounds like something from Sweetheart but, freed of that difficult context, its contemptuous parody of a Nashville industry type spits through its clean harmonies and steel bends. The character is morbidly obese, a Klan Grand Wizard and a country DJ. McGuinn fires a parting shot in the fade. "This is for you, Ralph," he says over the playout. Ralph was Ralph Emery, Nashville DJ who happily drove the band into awkwardness on air following their disastrous attempt to play the Grand Ole Opry the previous year. With no change in the lyric McGuinn yet persisted with the track on the album. Even John Lennon saw reason enough to replace Maharishi with Sexy Sadie. The song retains its bitterness and feels personal.
King Apathy III plays like a red-pilled hippy trying to play a cover of Renaissance Fair. A strident modal rock arrangement chops under dark mooded harmonies about superficial spirituality. The veil has lifted and the summer of love has become a winter of tokenism and sanitised mysticism. The chorus is all major key and country with either a steel or a Tele with the Parsons White B-bender and it's all about getting out to the country for real before the mountain of fairy floss smothers him. The switch from 3/4 to 2/4 feels smooth but not fake. In fact, this feels a lot less contrived and self-conscious than anything on Sweetheart (certainly earlier jokes like Mr. Spaceman or O Susanna).
Candy was submitted for but not included in the film of the same name. It's a laid back paen to a girl and her adventures in love with a pun in the chorus. The country of the verses gives way to a spacey rock guitar workout which moves back after another verse before the final invocation of the name. It takes a lot of work to sound that relaxed and while everyone's on form I'll single out John York's solid but melodic bass runs that provide such an easy foundation. It does sound like a late '60s movie theme.
Bad Night at the Whiskey begins with a full rock attitude with crunchy chords as a spooky distant lead soars above. The groove is very Woodstock/Grateful Dead. McGuinn's vocal is earnest as he recriminates a personal foe who by that stage in his career might have been one of many or maybe all at once. He's really just saying he made it through and is doing just fine, thanks. It's a potent statement after the disintegration of the original band, a nasty tour of South Africa which had dire consequences for the band worldwide and the difficult times surrounding the Sweetheart album. McGuinn had made it through and gets a song out of it. The minor mode and his worn but defiant vocal let us know his triumph.
That should have been the last track with the lovely ghostly mood lingering. But someone thought otherwise and what we get instead of meditative silence is a goofy retread of My Back Pages a forgettable 12 bar and then another one after some studio patter and then it's over. The Byrds had a weird tradition of ending their albums with naff, grooved up cover versions or novelty songs. The worst was O Susanna at the end of Turn Turn Turn which just sounds embarrassingly self-conscious. This is better than that but not much. When McGuinn sings instead of "I'm older than that now" "I'm older than that cow" I cringe. It's puerile, like a schoolkid drawing a moustache on a text book illustration. And it's odd, My Back Pages was given a serious if, by then, backward-looking take on Younger Than Yesterday (which took its title from the spirit of the song) and here it's like drawing a moustache on both Bob Dylan and The Byrds' own legacy. Interesting as an outtake but as they began with a Dylan song it comes across as contemptuous.
I think that's a bad end to a decent Byrds album. While many might object to the backward reaching of some of the arrangements that remind them of the glistening days of 1965 there really is a lot of the new apparent here in harder guitar sounds, broader subject matter in the lyrics. The idea of the band with two sides is there from the title and the cover art where the cowboy version seems to hatch from the heads of the rock version. The back cover looks like a series of stills from a sci-fi movie mixing astronauts with cowpokes and the IBM style font puts another look in there. But while there are county-flavoured songs that end in electronic drones and spacey sounds here and there this one is less forward looking than Notorious Byrd Brothers from the previous year. Then again, the country side of things sounds truer than anything on Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Personally, I don't find the juxtaposition of Nashville and Cape Canaveral jarring as the transitions are so smooth and there is a palpable enjoyment of their interlocking in the overall scheme.
The strange thing for me is that this album sounds as much like a band effort as the early ones up to Fifth Dimension. The two in between sound like an augmented studio lineup because they were. I think it's remarkable that the near complete replacement of all players resulted in such cohesion. And the playing is good. McGuinn is on fine form here with such support from the others (Clarence White would improve any outfit he sat in on) and, to be frank, the absence of Chris Hillman's lesser songcraft prevents the blandness that overtook Younger Than Yesterday and added lard to the rest of the albums he was part of. An unpopular opinion among Byrdmaniax, I know, but it's mine. Dr Byrd and Mr Hyde is undeservedly neglected. Neither as unevenly brilliant as Notorious nor as forced as Sweetheart, it feels more like the progression that should have come from Fifth Dimension but then that might have meant reducing the original lineup to one plus hirelings earlier and that definitely would have been bad. It's still around and you can hear it and if you find yourself travelling around their back pages and come across the odd cover art, give it a click and leave it on.
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