“Mr Spaceman” is my pick from the LP | The Byrds – ‘Greatest Hits’ (Columbia CS-9516) August 1967

Article published in Crawdaddy!, October 1967

Rediscovering The Byrds: More Than Just Greatest Hits | Sadness is perhaps a word for it, walking down the street with familiar sounds of “Light My Fire” barely audible from an apartment somewhere high above. Timelessness abounds. The song began somewhere centuries back and goes on, in the back of my mind, almost forever. I heard only a few notes, peripheral hearing, an uncertainty that blends the music into all the other background, like the vague smell of a bakery somewhere.

The Doors are good Muzak. Like the Byrds, they are perfect on a highly complex, imperceptible level. Nothing is obvious, nothing protrudes. Everywhere is here, now, current, with no sense of actual immediacy (which would imply consciousness of time) and no knowledge of the definite.

Any greatest hits album is insignificant. By definition it contains nothing unfamiliar; and yet this very fact offers great potential beauty, for a well-made greatest hits LP might then unleash the emotion of familiarity in an artistic context. The Byrds have achieved that goal: always masters of the form, they have now taken the concept of a great hits anthology and created from it an essay into rediscovery.

The opening is masterful. The listener, knowing this is a big hits album, knows he can only expect crass repetition of earlier-recorded material; and yet, staring at the cover whose beauty has only just begun to work its magic on him, cannot help but feel that somehow something miraculous is going to take place.

Rediscovering The Byrds: More Than Just Greatest Hits

Never has there been a Byrds album without a stunning cover, and never has the record itself proved to be anything less than infinitely greater than its jacket. So you can’t quite believe this will be an exception, and then you hear those beautiful notes that begin the ‘Tambourine Man’ album and the Byrds’ careers, and you know that this album too is wonderful, for there is that same joy, that same perfection, but opening a different LP . . . and no matter how many times you’ve played the ‘Tambourine Man’ LP over again, this is the first time since the first time that you have heard that opening as new, as a surprise.

Only by somehow recording a new album that again started with “Tambourine Man” could the Byrds restore the listener’s virginity, make it possible for you to hear the same thing without ever having heard it before. This is the rediscovery of the world that so many are experiencing through drugs, and never before has music captured it so well.

Implications are infinite

Aretha’s “Respect” has got to be played so loud you worry about the neighbours. And twice, like “Tambourine Man.” The second time through you begin to notice anticipation, motion as an aspect of vocal stylizing the temporal nature of music. The song continually catches up and jumps ahead, crescendos, subsides, and then waits to be played again.

The second time through you’ve already been torn apart, and damned if it doesn’t put you back together! “Tambourine Man” rises, and eventually subsides, but with no sense of peak, forcing you to play it over and over again with the curious feeling you’ve missed something. The song never resolves, never even asks a question, although you think it might, and hence its implications are infinite.

The only song I know that is structurally similar to “Tambourine Man,” with its peak before it begins and after its end, and nothing in the middle, is “Light My Fire” (which simulates a peak, but a false one, as the singles version of the song proves. Everything really happens off the record.)

Rediscovering The Byrds: More Than Just Greatest Hits

The relationships within any series of well-expressed concepts may be so complex in their implications as to multiply endlessly the concepts involved; which is to say that as you read and reread this sentence in order to make it make sense, you will constantly discover new and different ideas it might contain.

Which doesn’t mean it does contain them, but rather that it generates them; without the sentence you would never have created those ideas. Any confusion as to which sentence I’m referring to is one of the ambiguities that makes this statement valid.

The impact of “Tambourine Man” opening the LP is increased and further complicated by the fact that the next song is “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” which was also the second song on the ‘Tambourine Man’ album! The effect is somewhat like hearing one very pleasing note for four minutes and fifty seconds.

Bells Of Rhymney

Anticipation of change, of proof that this is not the first album but something very different , becomes almost unbearable, until finally the Byrds break into “The Bells of Rhymney,” which is likewise on the first side of the first album, but isn’t the third song. Such subtlety! Comparable is Aretha Franklin’s “You Are My Sunshine” which opens with a brilliant almost acapella vocal that goes on and on unbearably while you clench your teeth and sweat it out waiting for the drums and the melody to interrupt.

Long after you’ve decided the damn thing is one long introduction, the real song does begin, and the sense of relief is almost intolerable.

This album is not The Byrds Greatest Hits (“It Won’t Be Wrong,” not included, was a Top 40 hit, whereas “The Chimes of Freedom” was never even released as a single). Nor is it The Best of the Byrds, (such a collection would certainly not include “Mr. Spaceman”). It is the Byrds Revisited , and they actually make the listener experience what Dylan only hinted at in the titles of his fifth and sixth LPs (Why would you name a three-year-old documentary after (“She’s an artist she) don’t look back”?).

An aspect of rock creativity often overlooked is programming: the art of transition. Dicken Acraman, legendary discotheque programmer who waited four months for Salvation to open and disappeared a week afterwards, once followed the Four Tops’ “Walk Away Renee” with “Turn, Turn, Turn,” in open recognition of the fact that the Byrds are capable of almost any transition at almost any time.

Rediscovering The Byrds: More Than Just Greatest Hits

On the album “Turn, Turn, Turn” is preceded by “The Bells of Rhymney,” as if daring you to think of Pete Seeger. Hearing “Turn, Turn” on an LP with a Byrds song before it and after it is quite an experience; resolving it into “just a song” instead of “their big number one hit” is difficult and extremely satisfying.

An obvious question is, how are you reading this article? Assuming it is written with certain rhythms and concepts of structure, how are you contributing to it? Are you absorbing it all at once? Are you reading it in snatches, and if so, what sort of activity are you mixing into it? (I’ve watched girls with copies of Crawdaddy! bent back in one hand, reading as they crossed against the lights. Other people fall asleep in the middle of a word.) Are you reading this part for the second time?

“The Chimes of Freedom” always wanted to be the last song on a side, so that’s all right too.

Mirrors

Greatest Hits albums are always regarded as suspect. It’s part of the American guilt syndome: packaging is not considered work (c.f. Oedipa Maas and Maxwell’s Demon) and art without work is invisible. This is crap, of course; the Puritan Ethic; but it is still so strong in this country that it was necessary to invent (and invalidate as art) the concept “put-on” in order to make Andy Warhol famous and yet be able to ignore his genius at the same time.

Confronted with this album (and probably this review) the average American scoffs. “It’s all done with mirrors!” Yes, it is, and look at that cover again.

Rock criticism is also extremely suspect, as was pointed out to me by none other than David Crosby (he stood up on his hind legs in the Tin Angel and proclaimed, me listening, that “the one thing you absolutely cannot do in this field is intellectualize!”).

Rediscovering The Byrds: More Than Just Greatest Hits

I think it is understandable and even reasonable for a rock star to want to play God; it was a pretty good Don’t Look Back parody, and I don’t begrudge it. Sandy Pearlman later brought up an interesting point: we write articles about music and art and what’s in our minds and stuff, and these performers somehow get the idea we’re writing about them!

This article obviously isn’t about the Byrds, and I don’t think anybody really thinks it should be.

“Eight Miles High,” viewed historically (and a greatest hits album certainly invokes concern with history), was the object of an early confrontation in the War of Generations; the Adults banned the record (“You’re not allowed to have Strange Experiences, and if you write songs about your Strange Experiences, we’re not going to let you hear them!”).

It opens the second side, and these last five songs all reflect the modern version of sadder-but-wiser, which is happier-but-not-so-smart (“I’m younger than that now”).

Escape space

Once again, because of a pun in programming, you are back in an earlier album, and it really is a surprise to hear “Mr. Spaceman” instead of “Hey, Joe.” Poignant, too, because of the disappointment; and the silly as poignant is a nice achievement.

Go into the bathroom and listen to the Doors. Or listen to the Byrds beside Grand Can-yons, stuff like that. The point is to escape space and time: make environment obvious and therefore insignificant. I wrote this paragraph on toilet paper.

But you gotta come back. Listen and look separately, to get the idea, and then integrate them again; beauty is generated by interaction. Closing your eyes and listening to music is primitive, like only being able to hear one instrument at a time.

Not that primitive is bad, just that complexity is the life we lead and the more we let go to it the more we appreciate it. Surrender, absorption, boring from within, is the only real way to possess things. That’s what the Manchurians learned from the Mongols. That’s what Haight-Ashbury is proving to the world (but beware Madison Avenue bearing gifts . . . ).

Rediscovering The Byrds: More Than Just Greatest Hits

“Eight Miles High”: awe. “Mr. Spaceman”: acceptance. “5D”: insight. But any other choices might have been just as enlightening, for every Byrds song relates to every possible sequence of Byrds songs, owing to the amount and extent of implication in each one, and the formal approach that puts them all in the same approximate plane.

I would welcome – although I don’t anticipate – indefinite further permutations of already existent Byrds material. Perhaps if Columbia would release every track as a stereo single, this could be achieved.

One of the tortures devised for the “rock critic” is that he is penalized for not obviously stating the obvious, a torture in itself. The Byrds are one of the three or four best rock groups, and everything on this album is – in a rock context – great.

The transition from “5D” to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” is very clean and warm, a recognition of the long period of silence after the release of the former song and the successful resolution of all the problems that arose before the Byrds were able to record the latter.

And the Byrds’ acceptance and appreciation of themselves as rock ‘n’ roll stars is historically fascinating in that it preceded – just a month or two the Beatles’ discovery that they really are the Beatles and that’s all right. The Byrds have never doubted they were the Byrds, but who the Byrds are may still be a mystery.

Signals?

Which makes “My Back Pages” inevitable. Even Bob Dylan knew that. Especially Bob Dylan.

Significantly, because what’s important on this LP is the transitions, this may be the first album where the little silences between the songs are more important than the songs themselves. Consider all the silence between the times you hear “Light My Fire” or “We Love You” in a week. What kind of music is that silence? Signals? Noise? But definitely created by the songs themselves, beings that define all the nothingness. “And if he left off dream-ing about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

For a last sentence, anything with “context” in it is okay. (Paul Williams)