Podcasts about younger than yesterday

Musicians like Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Guy Clark and others changed the scope of country music forever. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with author Geoffrey Himes about the artists of the movement he calls “in-law country.” They also hear from some listeners.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:Emmylou Harris, "Born to Run," Cimarron, Warner Bros. Nashville, 1981The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Rosanne Cash, "Seven Year Ache," Seven Year Ache, Columbia, 1981Rosanne Cash, "My Baby Thinks He's A Train," Seven Year Ache, Columbia, 1981The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Six Days on the Road," Last of the Red Hot Burritos, A&M, 1972Emmylou Harris, "Luxury Liner," Luxury Liner, Warner Bros. Nashville, 1976The Byrds, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Columbia, 1968The Byrds, "Time Between," Younger Than Yesterday, Columbia, 1967Emmylou Harris, "If I Could Only Win Your Love," Pieces of the Sky, Reprise, 1975Rodney Crowell, "I Couldn't Leave You If I Tried," Diamonds & Dirt, Columbia, 1988Emmylou Harris, "Two More Bottles of Wine," Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, Warner Bros. Nashville, 1978Emmylou Harris, "Pancho and Lefty," Luxury Liner, Warner Bros. Nashville, 1976Emmylou Harris, "Till I Gain Control Again," Elite Hotel, Reprise, 1975Ricky Skaggs, "Heartbroke," Highways & Heartaches, Epic, 1982Guy Clark, "L.A. Freeway," Old No. 1, RCA, 1975Liquid Mike, "Drinking and Driving," Paul Bunyan's Slingshot, Temporal, 2024TAE & The Neighborly, "We Can Be," Self Help, smooth bean, 2024David Grisman and Jerry Garcia, "Whiskey In the Jar," Shady Grove, Acoustic Disc, 1996Graham Nash, "Chicago / We Can Change the World," Songs for Beginners, Atlantic, 1971Bnny, "Good Stuff," One Million Love Songs, Fire Talk, 2024See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

(S4-Ep 5) The Byrds- Younger Than Yesterday (Columbia)  Released February 6, 1967, Recorded between November 28-December 8, 1966  Younger Than Yesterday marks pivotal in The Byrds' evolution, blending folk-rock, psychedelia, and early country influences. While not as commercially successful as their earlier albums, it received critical acclaim for its musical innovation and experimental approach. The album features standout tracks like "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star," which critiques the commercialization of rock music, and "My Back Pages," a reworking of Bob Dylan's classic. The band's experimentation with studio techniques, intricate guitar work, and contributions from Chris Hillman and David Crosby pushed boundaries within the folk-rock genre. The Byrds also explored jazz and country influences. Despite internal tensions and lineup changes, Younger Than Yesterday remains a key work, influencing the development of psychedelic rock and paving the way for future musical experimentation in the 1960s. Signature Tracks "So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star," "Have You Seen Her Face," "My Back Pages" Playlists   YouTube Playlist  Spotify Playlist Full Albums Full Album on YouTube , Full Album on Spotify

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on "With a Little Help From My Friends" by Joe Cocker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in the first chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. The International Submarine Band's only album can be bought from Bandcamp. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a brief warning – this episode contains brief mentions of suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and heroin addiction, and a brief excerpt of chanting of a Nazi slogan. If you find those subjects upsetting, you may want to read the transcript rather than listen. As we heard in the last part, in October 1967 Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman fired David Crosby from the Byrds. It was only many years later, in a conversation with the group's ex-manager Jim Dickson, that Crosby realised that they didn't actually have a legal right to fire him -- the Byrds had no partnership agreement, and according to Dickson given that the original group had been Crosby, McGuinn, and Gene Clark, it would have been possible for Crosby and McGuinn to fire Hillman, but not for McGuinn and Hillman to fire Crosby. But Crosby was unaware of this at the time, and accepted a pay-off, with which he bought a boat and sailed to Florida, where saw a Canadian singer-songwriter performing live: [Excerpt: Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides Now (live Ann Arbor, MI, 27/10/67)"] We'll find out what happened when David Crosby brought Joni Mitchell back to California in a future story... With Crosby gone, the group had a major problem. They were known for two things -- their jangly twelve-string guitar and their soaring harmonies. They still had the twelve-string, even in their new slimmed-down trio format, but they only had two of their four vocalists -- and while McGuinn had sung lead on most of their hits, the sound of the Byrds' harmony had been defined by Crosby on the high harmonies and Gene Clark's baritone. There was an obvious solution available, of course, and they took it. Gene Clark had quit the Byrds in large part because of his conflicts with David Crosby, and had remained friendly with the others. Clark's solo album had featured Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, and had been produced by Gary Usher who was now producing the Byrds' records, and it had been a flop and he was at a loose end. After recording the Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers album, Clark had started work with Curt Boettcher, a singer-songwriter-producer who had produced hits for Tommy Roe and the Association, and who was currently working with Gary Usher. Boettcher produced two tracks for Clark, but they went unreleased: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Only Colombe"] That had been intended as the start of sessions for an album, but Clark had been dropped by Columbia rather than getting to record a second album. He had put together a touring band with guitarist Clarence White, bass player John York, and session drummer "Fast" Eddie Hoh, but hadn't played many gigs, and while he'd been demoing songs for a possible second solo album he didn't have a record deal to use them on. Chisa Records, a label co-owned by Larry Spector, Peter Fonda, and Hugh Masekela, had put out some promo copies of one track, "Yesterday, Am I Right", but hadn't released it properly: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Yesterday, Am I Right"] Clark, like the Byrds, had left Dickson and Tickner's management organisation and signed with Larry Spector, and Spector was wanting to make the most of his artists -- and things were very different for the Byrds now. Clark had had three main problems with being in the Byrds -- ego clashes with David Crosby, the stresses of being a pop star with a screaming teenage fanbase, and his fear of flying. Clark had really wanted to have the same kind of role in the Byrds that Brian Wilson had with the Beach Boys -- appear on the records, write songs, do TV appearances, maybe play local club gigs, but not go on tour playing to screaming fans. But now David Crosby was out of the group and there were no screaming fans any more -- the Byrds weren't having the kind of pop hits they'd had a few years earlier and were now playing to the hippie audience. Clark promised that with everything else being different, he could cope with the idea of flying -- if necessary he'd just take tranquilisers or get so drunk he passed out. So Gene Clark rejoined the Byrds. According to some sources he sang on their next single, "Goin' Back," though I don't hear his voice in the mix: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] According to McGuinn, Clark was also an uncredited co-writer on one song on the album they were recording, "Get to You". But before sessions had gone very far, the group went on tour. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers TV show, miming their new single and "Mr. Spaceman", and Clark seemed in good spirits, but on the tour of the Midwest that followed, according to their road manager of the time, Clark was terrified, singing flat and playing badly, and his guitar and vocal mic were left out of the mix. And then it came time to get on a plane, and Clark's old fears came back, and he refused to fly from Minneapolis to New York with the rest of the group, instead getting a train back to LA. And that was the end of Clark's second stint in the Byrds. For the moment, the Byrds decided they were going to continue as a trio on stage and a duo in the studio -- though Michael Clarke did make an occasional return to the sessions as they progressed. But of course, McGuinn and Hillman couldn't record an album entirely by themselves. They did have several tracks in a semi-completed state still featuring Crosby, but they needed people to fill his vocal and instrumental roles on the remaining tracks. For the vocals, Usher brought in his friend and collaborator Curt Boettcher, with whom he was also working at the time in a band called Sagittarius: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Another Time"] Boettcher was a skilled harmony vocalist -- according to Usher, he was one of the few vocal arrangers that Brian Wilson looked up to, and Jerry Yester had said of the Modern Folk Quartet that “the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group” -- and he was more than capable of filling Crosby's vocal gap, but there was never any real camaraderie between him and the Byrds. He particularly disliked McGuinn, who he said "was just such a poker face. He never let you know where you stood. There was never any lightness," and he said of the sessions as a whole "I was really thrilled to be working with The Byrds, and, at the same time, I was glad when it was all over. There was just no fun, and they were such weird guys to work with. They really freaked me out!" Someone else who Usher brought in, who seems to have made a better impression, was Red Rhodes: [Excerpt: Red Rhodes, "Red's Ride"] Rhodes was a pedal steel player, and one of the few people to make a career on the instrument outside pure country music, which is the genre with which the instrument is usually identified. Rhodes was a country player, but he was the country pedal steel player of choice for musicians from the pop and folk-rock worlds. He worked with Usher and Boettcher on albums by Sagittarius and the Millennium, and played on records by Cass Elliot, Carole King, the Beach Boys, and the Carpenters, among many others -- though he would be best known for his longstanding association with Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, playing on most of Nesmith's recordings from 1968 through 1992. Someone else who was associated with the Monkees was Moog player Paul Beaver, who we talked about in the episode on "Hey Jude", and who had recently played on the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd album: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Star Collector"] And the fourth person brought in to help the group out was someone who was already familiar to them. Clarence White was, like Red Rhodes, from the country world -- he'd started out in a bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels: [Excerpt: The Kentucky Colonels, "Clinch Mountain Backstep"] But White had gone electric and formed one of the first country-rock bands, a group named Nashville West, as well as becoming a popular session player. He had already played on a couple of tracks on Younger Than Yesterday, as well as playing with Hillman and Michael Clarke on Gene Clark's album with the Gosdin Brothers and being part of Clark's touring band with John York and "Fast" Eddie Hoh. The album that the group put together with these session players was a triumph of sequencing and production. Usher had recently been keen on the idea of crossfading tracks into each other, as the Beatles had on Sgt Pepper, and had done the same on the two Chad and Jeremy albums he produced. By clever crossfading and mixing, Usher managed to create something that had the feel of being a continuous piece, despite being the product of several very different creative minds, with Usher's pop sensibility and arrangement ideas being the glue that held everything together. McGuinn was interested in sonic experimentation. He, more than any of the others, seems to have been the one who was most pushing for them to use the Moog, and he continued his interest in science fiction, with a song, "Space Odyssey", inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Sentinel", which was also the inspiration for the then-forthcoming film 2001: A Space Odyssey: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Space Odyssey"] Then there was Chris Hillman, who was coming up with country material like "Old John Robertson": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Old John Robertson"] And finally there was David Crosby. Even though he'd been fired from the group, both McGuinn and Hillman didn't see any problem with using the songs he had already contributed. Three of the album's eleven songs are compositions that are primarily by Crosby, though they're all co-credited to either Hillman or both Hillman and McGuinn. Two of those songs are largely unchanged from Crosby's original vision, just finished off by the rest of the group after his departure, but one song is rather different: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] "Draft Morning" was a song that was important to Crosby, and was about his -- and the group's -- feelings about the draft and the ongoing Vietnam War. It was a song that had meant a lot to him, and he'd been part of the recording for the backing track. But when it came to doing the final vocals, McGuinn and Hillman had a problem -- they couldn't remember all the words to the song, and obviously there was no way they were going to get Crosby to give them the original lyrics. So they rewrote it, coming up with new lyrics where they couldn't remember the originals: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] But there was one other contribution to the track that was very distinctively the work of Usher. Gary Usher had a predilection at this point for putting musique concrete sections in otherwise straightforward pop songs. He'd done it with "Fakin' It" by Simon and Garfunkel, on which he did uncredited production work, and did it so often that it became something of a signature of records on Columbia in 1967 and 68, even being copied by his friend Jim Guercio on "Susan" by the Buckinghams. Usher had done this, in particular, on the first two singles by Sagittarius, his project with Curt Boettcher. In particular, the second Sagittarius single, "Hotel Indiscreet", had had a very jarring section (and a warning here, this contains some brief chanting of a Nazi slogan): [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Hotel Indiscreet"] That was the work of a comedy group that Usher had discovered and signed to Columbia. The Firesign Theatre were so named because, like Usher, they were all interested in astrology, and they were all "fire signs".  Usher was working on their first album, Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him, at the same time as he was working on the Byrds album: [Excerpt: The Firesign Theatre, "W.C. Fields Forever"] And he decided to bring in the Firesigns to contribute to "Draft Morning": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] Crosby was, understandably, apoplectic when he heard the released version of "Draft Morning". As far as Hillman and McGuinn were concerned, it was always a Byrds song, and just because Crosby had left the band didn't mean they couldn't use material he'd written for the Byrds. Crosby took a different view, saying later "It was one of the sleaziest things they ever did. I had an entire song finished. They just casually rewrote it and decided to take half the credit. How's that? Without even asking me. I had a finished song, entirely mine. I left. They did the song anyway. They rewrote it and put it in their names. And mine was better. They just took it because they didn't have enough songs." What didn't help was that the publicity around the album, titled The Notorious Byrd Brothers minimised Crosby's contributions. Crosby is on five of the eleven tracks -- as he said later, "I'm all over that album, they just didn't give me credit. I played, I sang, I wrote, I even played bass on one track, and they tried to make out that I wasn't even on it, that they could be that good without me." But the album, like earlier Byrds albums, didn't have credits saying who played what, and the cover only featured McGuinn, Hillman, and Michael Clarke in the photo -- along with a horse, which Crosby took as another insult, as representing him. Though as McGuinn said, "If we had intended to do that, we would have turned the horse around". Even though Michael Clarke was featured on the cover, and even owned the horse that took Crosby's place, by the time the album came out he too had been fired. Unlike Crosby, he went quietly and didn't even ask for any money. According to McGuinn, he was increasingly uninterested in being in the band -- suffering from depression, and missing the teenage girls who had been the group's fans a year or two earlier. He gladly stopped being a Byrd, and went off to work in a hotel instead. In his place came Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelley, fresh out of a band called the Rising Sons: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] We've mentioned the Rising Sons briefly in some previous episodes, but they were one of the earliest LA folk-rock bands, and had been tipped to go on to greater things -- and indeed, many of them did, though not as part of the Rising Sons. Jesse Lee Kincaid, the least well-known of the band, only went on to release a couple of singles and never had much success, but his songs were picked up by other acts -- his "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind" was a minor hit for the Peppermint Trolley Company: [Excerpt: The Peppermint Trolley Company, "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind"] And Harry Nilsson recorded Kincaid's "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune": [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune"] But Kincaid was the least successful of the band members, and most of the other members are going to come up in future episodes of the podcast -- bass player Gary Marker played for a while with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, lead singer Taj Mahal is one of the most respected blues singers of the last sixty years, original drummer Ed Cassidy went on to form the progressive rock band Spirit, and lead guitarist Ry Cooder went on to become one of the most important guitarists in rock music. Kelley had been the last to join the Rising Sons, replacing Cassidy but he was in the band by the time they released their one single, a version of Rev. Gary Davis' "Candy Man" produced by Terry Melcher, with Kincaid on lead vocals: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Candy Man"] That hadn't been a success, and the group's attempt at a follow-up, the Goffin and King song "Take a Giant Step", which we heard earlier, was blocked from release by Columbia as being too druggy -- though there were no complaints when the Monkees released their version as the B-side to "Last Train to Clarksville". The Rising Sons, despite being hugely popular as a live act, fell apart without ever releasing a second single. According to Marker, Mahal realised that he would be better off as a solo artist, but also Columbia didn't know how to market a white group with a Black lead vocalist (leading to Kincaid singing lead on their one released single, and producer Terry Melcher trying to get Mahal to sing more like a white singer on "Take a Giant Step"), and some in the band thought that Terry Melcher was deliberately trying to sink their career because they refused to sign to his publishing company. After the band split up, Marker and Kelley had formed a band called Fusion, which Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan describes as being a jazz-fusion band, presumably because of their name. Listening to the one album the group recorded, it is in fact more blues-rock, very like the music Marker made with the Rising Sons and Captain Beefheart. But Kelley's not on that album, because before it was recorded he was approached by his cousin Chris Hillman and asked to join the Byrds. At the time, Fusion were doing so badly that Kelley had to work a day job in a clothes shop, so he was eager to join a band with a string of hits who were just about to conclude a lucrative renegotiation of their record contract -- a renegotiation which may have played a part in McGuinn and Hillman firing Crosby and Clarke, as they were now the only members on the new contracts. The choice of Kelley made a lot of sense. He was mostly just chosen because he was someone they knew and they needed a drummer in a hurry -- they needed someone new to promote The Notorious Byrd Brothers and didn't have time to go through a laborious process of audtioning, and so just choosing Hillman's cousin made sense, but Kelley also had a very strong, high voice, and so he could fill in the harmony parts that Crosby had sung, stopping the new power-trio version of the band from being *too* thin-sounding in comparison to the five-man band they'd been not that much earlier. The Notorious Byrd Brothers was not a commercial success -- it didn't even make the top forty in the US, though it did in the UK -- to the presumed chagrin of Columbia, who'd just paid a substantial amount of money for this band who were getting less successful by the day. But it was, though, a gigantic critical success, and is generally regarded as the group's creative pinnacle. Robert Christgau, for example, talked about how LA rather than San Francisco was where the truly interesting music was coming from, and gave guarded praise to Captain Beefheart, Van Dyke Parks, and the Fifth Dimension (the vocal group, not the Byrds album) but talked about three albums as being truly great -- the Beach Boys' Wild Honey, Love's Forever Changes, and The Notorious Byrd Brothers. (He also, incidentally, talked about how the two songs that Crosby's new discovery Joni Mitchell had contributed to a Judy Collins album were much better than most folk music, and how he could hardly wait for her first album to come out). And that, more or less, was the critical consensus about The Notorious Byrd Brothers -- that it was, in Christgau's words "simply the best album the Byrds have ever recorded" and that "Gone are the weak--usually folky--tracks that have always flawed their work." McGuinn, though, thought that the album wasn't yet what he wanted. He had become particularly excited by the potentials of the Moog synthesiser -- an instrument that Gary Usher also loved -- during the recording of the album, and had spent a lot of time experimenting with it, coming up with tracks like the then-unreleased "Moog Raga": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Moog Raga"] And McGuinn had a concept for the next Byrds album -- a concept he was very excited about. It was going to be nothing less than a grand sweeping history of American popular music. It was going to be a double album -- the new contract said that they should deliver two albums a year to Columbia, so a double album made sense -- and it would start with Appalachian folk music, go through country, jazz, and R&B, through the folk-rock music the Byrds had previously been known for, and into Moog experimentation. But to do this, the Byrds needed a keyboard player. Not only would a keyboard player help them fill out their thin onstage sound, if they got a jazz keyboardist, then they could cover the jazz material in McGuinn's concept album idea as well. So they went out and looked for a jazz piano player, and happily Larry Spector was managing one. Or at least, Larry Spector was managing someone who *said* he was a jazz pianist. But Gram Parsons said he was a lot of things... [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Brass Buttons (1965 version)"] Gram Parsons was someone who had come from a background of unimaginable privilege. His maternal grandfather was the owner of a Florida citrus fruit and real-estate empire so big that his mansion was right in the centre of what was then Florida's biggest theme park -- built on land he owned. As a teenager, Parsons had had a whole wing of his parents' house to himself, and had had servants to look after his every need, and as an adult he had a trust fund that paid him a hundred thousand dollars a year -- which in 1968 dollars would be equivalent to a little under nine hundred thousand in today's money. Two events in his childhood had profoundly shaped the life of young Gram. The first was in February 1956, when he went to see a new singer who he'd heard on the radio, and who according to the local newspaper had just recorded a new song called "Heartburn Motel".  Parsons had tried to persuade his friends that this new singer was about to become a big star -- one of his friends had said "I'll wait til he becomes famous!" As it turned out, the day Parsons and the couple of friends he did manage to persuade to go with him saw Elvis Presley was also the day that "Heartbreak Hotel" entered the Billboard charts at number sixty-eight. But even at this point, Elvis was an obvious star and the headliner of the show. Young Gram was enthralled -- but in retrospect he was more impressed by the other acts he saw on the bill. That was an all-star line-up of country musicians, including Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and especially the Louvin Brothers, arguably the greatest country music vocal duo of all time: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "The Christian Life"] Young Gram remained mostly a fan of rockabilly music rather than country, and would remain so for another decade or so, but a seed had been planted. The other event, much more tragic, was the death of his father. Both Parsons' parents were functioning alcoholics, and both by all accounts were unfaithful to each other, and their marriage was starting to break down. Gram's father was also, by many accounts, dealing with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder from his time serving in the second world war. On December the twenty-third 1958, Gram's father died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Everyone involved seems sure it was suicide, but it was officially recorded as natural causes because of the family's wealth and prominence in the local community. Gram's Christmas present from his parents that year was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and according to some stories I've read his father had left a last message on a tape in the recorder, but by the time the authorities got to hear it, it had been erased apart from the phrase "I love you, Gram." After that Gram's mother's drinking got even worse, but in most ways his life still seemed charmed, and the descriptions of him as a teenager are about what you'd expect from someone who was troubled, with a predisposition to addiction, but who was also unbelievably wealthy, good-looking, charming, and talented. And the talent was definitely there. One thing everyone is agreed on is that from a very young age Gram Parsons took his music seriously and was determined to make a career as a musician. Keith Richards later said of him "Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn't know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that's just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You're going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who's selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game." That's not the impression many other people have of Parsons, who is almost uniformly described as an incessant self-promoter, and who from his teens onwards would regularly plant fake stories about himself in the local press, usually some variant of him having been signed to RCA records. Most people seem to think that image was more important to him than anything. In his teens, he started playing in a series of garage bands around Florida and Georgia, the two states in which he was brought up. One of his early bands was largely created by poaching the rhythm section who were then playing with Kent Lavoie, who later became famous as Lobo and had hits like "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo". Lavoie apparently held a grudge -- decades later he would still say that Parsons couldn't sing or play or write. Another musician on the scene with whom Parsons associated was Bobby Braddock, who would later go on to co-write songs like "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" for Tammy Wynette, and the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today", often considered the greatest country song ever written, for George Jones: [Excerpt: George Jones, "He Stopped Loving Her Today"] Jones would soon become one of Parsons' musical idols, but at this time he was still more interested in being Elvis or Little Richard. We're lucky enough to have a 1962 live recording of one of his garage bands, the Legends -- the band that featured the bass player and drummer he'd poached from Lobo. They made an appearance on a local TV show and a friend with a tape recorder recorded it off the TV and decades later posted it online. Of the four songs in that performance, two are R&B covers -- Little Richard's "Rip It Up" and Ray Charles' "What'd I Say?", and a third is the old Western Swing classic "Guitar Boogie Shuffle". But the interesting thing about the version of "Rip it Up" is that it's sung in an Everly Brothers style harmony, and the fourth song is a recording of the Everlys' "Let It Be Me". The Everlys were, of course, hugely influenced by the Louvin Brothers, who had so impressed young Gram six years earlier, and in this performance you can hear for the first time the hints of the style that Parsons would make his own a few years later: [Excerpt: Gram Parsons and the Legends, "Let it Be Me"] Incidentally, the other guitarist in the Legends, Jim Stafford, also went on to a successful musical career, having a top five hit in the seventies with "Spiders & Snakes": [Excerpt: Jim Stafford, "Spiders & Snakes"] Soon after that TV performance though, like many musicians of his generation, Parsons decided to give up on rock and roll, and instead to join a folk group. The group he joined, The Shilos, were a trio who were particularly influenced by the Journeymen, John Phillips' folk group before he formed the Mamas and the Papas, which we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". At various times the group expanded with the addition of some female singers, trying to capture something of the sound of the New Chrisy Minstrels. In 1964, with the band members still in school, the Shilos decided to make a trip to Greenwich Village and see if they could make the big time as folk-music stars. They met up with John Phillips, and Parsons stayed with John and Michelle Phillips in their home in New York -- this was around the time the two of them were writing "California Dreamin'". Phillips got the Shilos an audition with Albert Grossman, who seemed eager to sign them until he realised they were still schoolchildren just on a break. The group were, though, impressive enough that he was interested, and we have some recordings of them from a year later which show that they were surprisingly good for a bunch of teenagers: [Excerpt: The Shilos, "The Bells of Rhymney"] Other than Phillips, the other major connection that Parsons made in New York was the folk singer Fred Neil, who we've talked about occasionally before. Neil was one of the great songwriters of the Greenwich Village scene, and many of his songs became successful for others -- his "Dolphins" was recorded by Tim Buckley, most famously his "Everybody's Talkin'" was a hit for Harry Nilsson, and he wrote "Another Side of This Life" which became something of a standard -- it was recorded by the Animals and the Lovin' Spoonful, and Jefferson Airplane, as well as recording the song, included it in their regular setlists, including at Monterey: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Other Side of This Life (live at Monterey)"] According to at least one biographer, though, Neil had another, more pernicious, influence on Parsons -- he may well have been the one who introduced Parsons to heroin, though several of Parsons' friends from the time said he wasn't yet using hard drugs. By spring 1965, Parsons was starting to rethink his commitment to folk music, particularly after "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a hit. He talked with the other members about their need to embrace the changes in music that Dylan and the Byrds were bringing about, but at the same time he was still interested enough in acoustic music that when he was given the job of arranging the music for his high school graduation, the group he booked were the Dillards. That graduation day was another day that would change Parsons' life -- as it was the day his mother died, of alcohol-induced liver failure. Parsons was meant to go on to Harvard, but first he went back to Greenwich Village for the summer, where he hung out with Fred Neil and Dave Van Ronk (and started using heroin regularly). He went to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium, and he was neighbours with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay -- the three of them talked about forming a band together before Stills moved West. And on a brief trip back home to Florida between Greenwich Village and Harvard, Parsons spoke with his old friend Jim Stafford, who made a suggestion to him -- instead of trying to do folk music, which was clearly falling out of fashion, why not try to do *country* music but with long hair like the Beatles? He could be a country Beatle. It would be an interesting gimmick. Parsons was only at Harvard for one semester before flunking out, but it was there that he was fully reintroduced to country music, and in particular to three artists who would influence him more than any others. He'd already been vaguely aware of Buck Owens, whose "Act Naturally" had recently been covered by the Beatles: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "Act Naturally"] But it was at Harvard that he gained a deeper appreciation of Owens. Owens was the biggest star of what had become known as the Bakersfield Sound, a style of country music that emphasised a stripped-down electric band lineup with Telecaster guitars, a heavy drumbeat, and a clean sound. It came from the same honky-tonk and Western Swing roots as the rockabilly music that Parsons had grown up on, and it appealed to him instinctively.  In particular, Parsons was fascinated by the fact that Owens' latest album had a cover version of a Drifters song on it -- and then he got even more interested when Ray Charles put out his third album of country songs and included a version of Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Together Again"] This suggested to Parsons that country music and the R&B he'd been playing previously might not quite be so far apart as he'd thought. At Harvard, Parsons was also introduced to the work of another Bakersfield musician, who like Owens was produced by Ken Nelson, who also produced the Louvin Brothers' records, and who we heard about in previous episodes as he produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. Merle Haggard had only had one big hit at the time, "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers": [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "(My Friends are Gonna Be) Strangers"] But he was about to start a huge run of country hits that would see every single he released for the next twelve years make the country top ten, most of them making number one. Haggard would be one of the biggest stars in country music, but he was also to be arguably the country musician with the biggest influence on rock music since Johnny Cash, and his songs would soon start to be covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Everly Brothers to the Beach Boys. And the third artist that Parsons was introduced to was someone who, in most popular narratives of country music, is set up in opposition to Haggard and Owens, because they were representatives of the Bakersfield Sound while he was the epitome of the Nashville Sound to which the Bakersfield Sound is placed in opposition, George Jones. But of course anyone with ears will notice huge similarities in the vocal styles of Jones, Haggard, and Owens: [Excerpt: George Jones, "The Race is On"] Owens, Haggard, and Jones are all somewhat outside the scope of this series, but are seriously important musicians in country music. I would urge anyone who's interested in them to check out Tyler Mahan Coe's podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, season one of which has episodes on Haggard and Owens, as well as on the Louvin Brothers who I also mentioned earlier, and season two of which is entirely devoted to Jones. When he dropped out of Harvard after one semester, Parsons was still mostly under the thrall of the Greenwich Village folkies -- there's a recording of him made over Christmas 1965 that includes his version of "Another Side of This Life": [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Another Side of This Life"] But he was encouraged to go further in the country direction by John Nuese (and I hope that's the correct pronunciation – I haven't been able to find any recordings mentioning his name), who had introduced him to this music and who also played guitar. Parsons, Neuse, bass player Ian Dunlop and drummer Mickey Gauvin formed a band that was originally called Gram Parsons and the Like. They soon changed their name though, inspired by an Our Gang short in which the gang became a band: [Excerpt: Our Gang, "Mike Fright"] Shortening the name slightly, they became the International Submarine Band. Parsons rented them a house in New York, and they got a contract with Goldstar Records, and released a couple of singles. The first of them, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" was a cover of the theme to a comedy film that came out around that time, and is not especially interesting: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming"] The second single is more interesting. "Sum Up Broke" is a song by Parsons and Neuse, and shows a lot of influence from the Byrds: [Excerpt: The international Submarine Band, "Sum Up Broke"] While in New York with the International Submarine Band, Parsons made another friend in the music business. Barry Tashian was the lead singer of a band called the Remains, who had put out a couple of singles: [Excerpt: The Remains, "Why Do I Cry?"] The Remains are now best known for having been on the bill on the Beatles' last ever tour, including playing as support on their last ever show at Candlestick Park, but they split up before their first album came out. After spending most of 1966 in New York, Parsons decided that he needed to move the International Submarine Band out to LA. There were two reasons for this. The first was his friend Brandon DeWilde, an actor who had been a child star in the fifties -- it's him at the end of Shane -- who was thinking of pursuing a musical career. DeWilde was still making TV appearances, but he was also a singer -- John Nuese said that DeWilde sang harmony with Parsons better than anyone except Emmylou Harris -- and he had recorded some demos with the International Submarine Band backing him, like this version of Buck Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Brandon DeWilde, "Together Again"] DeWilde had told Parsons he could get the group some work in films. DeWilde made good on that promise to an extent -- he got the group a cameo in The Trip, a film we've talked about in several other episodes, which was being directed by Roger Corman, the director who worked a lot with David Crosby's father, and was coming out from American International Pictures, the company that put out the beach party films -- but while the group were filmed performing one of their own songs, in the final film their music was overdubbed by the Electric Flag. The Trip starred Peter Fonda, another member of the circle of people around David Crosby, and another son of privilege, who at this point was better known for being Henry Fonda's son than for his own film appearances. Like DeWilde, Fonda wanted to become a pop star, and he had been impressed by Parsons, and asked if he could record Parsons' song "November Nights". Parsons agreed, and the result was released on Chisa Records, the label we talked about earlier that had put out promos of Gene Clark, in a performance produced by Hugh Masekela: [Excerpt: Peter Fonda, "November Nights"] The other reason the group moved West though was that Parsons had fallen in love with David Crosby's girlfriend, Nancy Ross, who soon became pregnant with his daughter -- much to Parsons' disappointment, she refused to have an abortion. Parsons bought the International Submarine Band a house in LA to rehearse in, and moved in separately with Nancy. The group started playing all the hottest clubs around LA, supporting bands like Love and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, but they weren't sounding great, partly because Parsons was more interested in hanging round with celebrities than rehearsing -- the rest of the band had to work for a living, and so took their live performances more seriously than he did, while he was spending time catching up with his old folk friends like John Phillips and Fred Neil, as well as getting deeper into drugs and, like seemingly every musician in 1967, Scientology, though he only dabbled in the latter. The group were also, though, starting to split along musical lines. Dunlop and Gauvin wanted to play R&B and garage rock, while Parsons and Nuese wanted to play country music. And there was a third issue -- which record label should they go with? There were two labels interested in them, neither of them particularly appealing. The offer that Dunlop in particular wanted to go with was from, of all people, Jay Ward Records: [Excerpt: A Salute to Moosylvania] Jay Ward was the producer and writer of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peabody & Sherman, Dudley Do-Right and other cartoons, and had set up a record company, which as far as I've been able to tell had only released one record, and that five years earlier (we just heard a snippet of it). But in the mid-sixties several cartoon companies were getting into the record business -- we'll hear more about that when we get to song 186 -- and Ward's company apparently wanted to sign the International Submarine Band, and were basically offering to throw money at them. Parsons, on the other hand, wanted to go with Lee Hazlewood International. This was a new label set up by someone we've only talked about in passing, but who was very influential on the LA music scene, Lee Hazlewood. Hazlewood had got his start producing country hits like Sanford Clark's "The Fool": [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "The Fool"] He'd then moved on to collaborating with Lester Sill, producing a series of hits for Duane Eddy, whose unique guitar sound Hazlewood helped come up with: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] After splitting off from Sill, who had gone off to work with Phil Spector, who had been learning some production techniques from Hazlewood, Hazlewood had gone to work for Reprise records, where he had a career in a rather odd niche, producing hit records for the children of Rat Pack stars. He'd produced Dino, Desi, and Billy, who consisted of future Beach Boys sideman Billy Hinsche plus Desi Arnaz Jr and Dean Martin Jr: [Excerpt: Dino, Desi, and Billy, "I'm a Fool"] He'd also produced Dean Martin's daughter Deana: [Excerpt: Deana Martin, "Baby I See You"] and rather more successfully he'd written and produced a series of hits for Nancy Sinatra, starting with "These Boots are Made for Walkin'": [Excerpt: Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'"] Hazlewood had also moved into singing himself. He'd released a few tracks on his own, but his career as a performer hadn't really kicked into gear until he'd started writing duets for Nancy Sinatra. She apparently fell in love with his demos and insisted on having him sing them with her in the studio, and so the two made a series of collaborations like the magnificently bizarre "Some Velvet Morning": [Excerpt: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, "Some Velvet Morning"] Hazlewood is now considered something of a cult artist, thanks largely to a string of magnificent orchestral country-pop solo albums he recorded, but at this point he was one of the hottest people in the music industry. He wasn't offering to produce the International Submarine Band himself -- that was going to be his partner, Suzi Jane Hokom -- but Parsons thought it was better to sign for less money to a label that was run by someone with a decade-long string of massive hit records than for more money to a label that had put out one record about a cartoon moose. So the group split up. Dunlop and Gauvin went off to form another band, with Barry Tashian -- and legend has it that one of the first times Gram Parsons visited the Byrds in the studio, he mentioned the name of that band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and that was the inspiration for the Byrds titling their album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Parsons and Nuese, on the other hand, formed a new lineup of The International Submarine Band, with bass player Chris Ethridge, drummer John Corneal, who Parsons had first played with in The Legends, and guitarist Bob Buchanan, a former member of the New Christy Minstrels who Parsons had been performing with as a duo after they'd met through Fred Neil. The International Submarine Band recorded an album, Safe At Home, which is now often called the first country-rock album -- though as we've said so often, there's no first anything. That album was a mixture of cover versions of songs by people like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "I Must Be Somebody Else You've Known"] And Parsons originals, like "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?", which he cowrote with Barry Goldberg of the Electric Flag: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?"] But the recording didn't go smoothly. In particular, Corneal realised he'd been hoodwinked. Parsons had told him, when persuading him to move West, that he'd be able to sing on the record and that some of his songs would be used. But while the record was credited to The International Submarine Band, everyone involved agrees that it was actually a Gram Parsons solo album by any other name -- he was in charge, he wouldn't let other members' songs on the record, and he didn't let Corneal sing as he'd promised. And then, before the album could be released, he was off. The Byrds wanted a jazz keyboard player, and Parsons could fake being one long enough to get the gig. The Byrds had got rid of one rich kid with a giant ego who wanted to take control of everything and thought his undeniable talent excused his attempts at dominating the group, and replaced him with another one -- who also happened to be signed to another record label. We'll see how well that worked out for them in two weeks' time.  

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode on "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in this chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, For future parts of this multi-episode story I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Byrds at the end of the episode on "Eight Miles High", they had just released that single, which combined folk-rock with their new influences from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, and which was a group composition but mostly written by the group's lead singer, Gene Clark. And also, as we mentioned right at the end of the episode, Clark had left the group. There had been many, many factors leading to Clark's departure. Clark was writing *far* more material than the other band members, of whom only Roger McGuinn had been a writer when the group started, and as a result was making far more money than them, especially with songs like "She Don't Care About Time", which had been the B-side to their number one single "Turn! Turn! Turn!" [Excerpt: The Byrds, "She Don't Care About Time"] Clark's extra income was making the rest of the group jealous, and they also didn't think his songs were particularly good, though many of his songs on the early Byrds albums are now considered classics. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, said "Gene would write fifteen to twenty songs a week and you had to find a good one whenever it came along because there were lots of them that you couldn't make head or tail of.  They didn't mean anything. We all knew that. Gene would write a good one at a rate of just about one per girlfriend." Chris Hillman meanwhile later said more simply "Gene didn't really add that much." That is, frankly, hard to square with the facts. There are ten original songs on the group's first two albums, plus one original non-album B-side. Of those eleven songs, Clark wrote seven on his own and co-wrote two with McGuinn. But as the other band members were starting to realise that they had the possibility of extra royalties -- and at least to some extent were starting to get artistic ambitions as far as writing goes -- they were starting to disparage Clark's work as a result, calling it immature. Clark had, of course, been the principal writer for "Eight Miles High", the group's most experimental record to date: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] But there he'd shared co-writing credit with David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, in part because that was the only way he could be sure they would agree to release it as a single. There were also internal rivalries within the band unrelated to songwriting -- as we've touched on, Crosby had already essentially bullied Clark off the guitar and into just playing tambourine (and McGuinn would be dismissive even of Clark's tambourine abilities). Crosby's inability to get on with any other member of any band he was in would later become legendary, but at this point Clark was the major victim of his bullying. According to Dickson "David understood when Gene left that ninety-five percent of why Gene left could be brought back to him." The other five percent, though, came from Clark's fear of flying. Clark had apparently witnessed a plane crash in his youth and been traumatised by it, and he had a general terror of flying and planes -- something McGuinn would mock him for a little, as McGuinn was an aviation buff. Eventually, Clark had a near-breakdown boarding a plane from California to New York for a promotional appearance with Murray the K, and ended up getting off the plane. McGuinn and Michael Clarke almost did the same, but in the end they decided to stay on, and the other four Byrds did the press conference without Gene. When asked where Gene was, they said he'd "broken a wing". He was also increasingly having mental health and substance abuse problems, which were exacerbated by his fear, and in the end he decided he just couldn't be a Byrd any more. Oddly, of all the band members, it was David Crosby who was most concerned about Clark's departure, and who did the most to try to persuade him to stay, but he still didn't do much, and the group decided to carry on as a four-piece and not even make a proper announcement of Clark's departure -- they just started putting out photos with four people instead of five. The main change as far as the group were concerned was that Hillman was now covering Clark's old vocal parts, and so Crosby moved to Clark's old centre mic while Hillman moved from his position at the back of the stage with Michael Clarke to take over Crosby's mic. The group now had three singer-instrumentalists in front, two of whom, Crosby and McGuinn, now thought of themselves as songwriters. So despite the loss of their singer/songwriter/frontman, they moved on to their new single, the guaranteed hit follow-up to "Eight Miles High": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] "5D" was written by McGuinn, inspired by a book of cartoons called 1-2-3-4 More More More More by Don Landis, which I haven't been able to track down a copy of, but which seems to have been an attempt to explain the mathematical concept of higher dimensions in cartoon form. McGuinn was inspired by this and by Einstein's theory of relativity -- or at least by his understanding of relativity, which does not seem to have been the most informed take on the topic. McGuinn has said in the past that the single should really have come with a copy of Landis' booklet, so people could understand it. Sadly, without the benefit of the booklet we only have the lyrics plus McGuinn's interviews to go on to try to figure out what he means. As far as I'm able to understand, McGuinn believed -- completely erroneously -- that Einstein had proved that along with the four dimensions of spacetime there is also a fifth dimension which McGuinn refers to as a "mesh", and that "the reason for the speed of light being what it is is because of that mesh." McGuinn then went on to identify this mesh with his own conception of God, influenced by his belief in Subud, and with a Bergsonian idea of a life force. He would talk about how most people are stuck in a materialist scientific paradigm which only admits to  the existence of three dimensions, and how there are people out there advocating for a five-dimensional view of the world. To go along with this mystic view of the universe, McGuinn wanted some music inspired by the greatest composer of sacred music, and he asked Van Dyke Parks, who was brought in to add keyboards on the session, to play something influenced by Bach -- and Parks obliged, having been thinking along the same lines himself: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] Unfortunately for the group, McGuinn's lyrical intention wasn't clear enough and the song was assumed to be about drugs, and was banned by many radio stations. That plus the track's basically uncommercial nature meant that it reached no higher than number forty-four in the charts. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, pointed to a simpler factor in the record's failure, saying that if the organ outro to the track had instead been the intro, to set a mood for the track rather than starting with a cold vocal open, it would have had more success. The single was followed by an album, called Fifth Dimension, which was not particularly successful. Of the album's eleven songs, two were traditional folk songs, one was an instrumental -- a jam called "Captain Soul" which was a version of Lee Dorsey's "Get Out My Life Woman" credited to the four remaining Byrds, though Gene Clark is very audible on it playing harmonica -- and one more was a jam whose only lyrics were "gonna ride a Lear jet, baby", repeated over and over. There was also "Eight Miles High" and the group's inept and slightly-too-late take on "Hey Joe". It also included a third single, a country track titled "Mr. Spaceman": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] McGuinn and, particularly, Hillman, had some country music background, and both were starting to think about incorporating country sounds into the group's style, as after Clark's departure from the group they were moving away from the style that had characterised their first two albums. But the interest in "Mr. Spaceman" was less about the musical style than about the lyrics. McGuinn had written the song in the hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life -- sending them a message in his lyrics so that any aliens listening to Earth radio would come and visit, though he was later disappointed to realise that the inverse-square law means that the signals would be too faint to make out after a relatively short distance: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] "Mr. Spaceman" did better on the charts than its predecessor, scraping the lower reaches of the top forty, but it hardly set the world alight, and neither did the album -- a typical review was the one by Jon Landau, which said in part "This album then cannot be considered up to the standards set by the Byrds' first two and basically demonstrates that they should be thinking in terms of replacing Gene Clark, instead of just carrying on without him." Fifth Dimension would be the only album that Allen Stanton would produce for the Byrds, and his replacement had actually just produced an album that was a Byrds record by any other name: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] We've looked at Gary Usher before, but not for some time, and not in much detail. Usher was one of several people who were involved in the scene loosely centred on the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, though he never had much time for Jan Berry and he had got his own start in the music business slightly before the Beach Boys. As a songwriter, his first big successes had come with his collaborations with Brian Wilson -- he had co-written "409" for the Beach Boys, and had also collaborated with Wilson on some of his earliest more introspective songs, like "The Lonely Sea" and "In My Room", for which Usher had written the lyrics: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"] Usher had built a career as a producer and writer for hire, often in collaboration with Roger Christian, who also wrote with Brian Wilson and Jan Berry. Usher, usually with Christian, and very occasionally Wilson wrote the songs for several of American International Pictures' Beach Party films: [Excerpt: Donna Loren, "Muscle Bustle"] And Usher and Christian had also had bit parts in some of the films, like Bikini Beach, and Usher had produced records for Annette Funicello, the star of the films, often with the Honeys (a group consisting of Brian Wilson's future wife Marilyn plus her sister and cousin) on backing vocals. He had also produced records for the Surfaris, as well as a whole host of studio-only groups like the Four Speeds, the Super Stocks, and Mr. Gasser and the Weirdoes, most of whom were Usher and the same small group of vocalist friends along with various selections of Wrecking Crew musicians making quick themed albums. One of these studio groups, the Hondells, went on to be a real group of sorts, after Usher and the Beach Boys worked together on a film, The Girls on the Beach. Usher liked a song that Wilson and Mike Love had written for the Beach Boys to perform in the film, "Little Honda", and after discovering that the Beach Boys weren't going to release their version as a single, he put together a group to record a soundalike version: [Excerpt: The Hondells, "Little Honda"] "Little Honda" made the top ten, and Usher produced two albums for the Hondells, who had one other minor hit with a cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Younger Girl". Oddly, Usher's friend Terry Melcher, who would shortly produce the Byrds' first few hits, had also latched on to "Little Honda", and produced his own version of the track, sung by Pat Boone of all people, with future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Little Honda"] But when Usher had got his version out first, Boone's was relegated to a B-side. When the Byrds had hit, and folk-rock had started to take over from surf rock, Usher had gone with the flow and produced records like the Surfaris' album It Ain't Me Babe, with Usher and his usual gang of backing vocalists augmenting the Surfaris as they covered hits by Dylan, the Turtles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "All I Really Want to Do"] Usher was also responsible for the Surfaris being the first group to release a version of "Hey Joe" on a major label, as we heard in the episode on that song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] After moving between Capitol, Mercury, and Decca Records, Usher had left Decca after a round of corporate restructuring and been recommended for a job at Columbia by his friend Melcher, who at that point was producing Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rip Chords and had just finished his time as the Byrds' producer. Usher's first work at Columbia was actually to prepare new stereo mixes of some Byrds tracks that had up to that point only been issued in mono, but his first interaction with the Byrds themselves came via Gene Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] On leaving the Byrds, Clark had briefly tried to make a success of himself as a songwriter-for-hire in much the same mould as Usher, attempting to write and produce a single for two Byrds fans using the group name The Cookie Fairies, while spending much of his time romancing Michelle Phillips, as we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". When the Cookie Fairies single didn't get picked up by a label, Clark had put together a group with Bill Rinehart from the Leaves, Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, and Joel Larson of the Grass Roots. Just called Gene Clark & The Group, they'd played around the clubs in LA and cut about half an album's worth of demos produced by Jim Dickson and Ed Tickner, the Byrds' management team, before Clark had fired first Douglas and then the rest of the group. Clark's association with Douglas did go on to benefit him though -- Douglas went on, as we've seen in other episodes, to produce hits for the Turtles and the Monkees, and he later remembered an old song by Clark and McGuinn that the Byrds had demoed but never released, "You Showed Me", and produced a top ten hit version of it for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] Clark had instead started working with two country singers, Vern and Rex Gosdin, who had previously been with Chris Hillman in the country band The Hillmen. When that band had split up, the Gosdin Brothers had started to perform together as a duo, and in 1967 they would have a major country hit with "Hangin' On": [Excerpt: The Gosdin Brothers, "Hangin' On"] At this point though, they were just Gene Clark's backing vocalists, on an album that had been started with producer Larry Marks, who left Columbia half way through the sessions, at which point Usher took over. The album, titled Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, featured a mix of musicians from different backgrounds. There were Larson and Rinehart from Gene Clark and the Group, there were country musicians -- a guitarist named Clarence White and the banjo player Doug Dillard. Hillman and Michael Clarke, the Byrds' rhythm section, played on much of the album as a way of keeping a united front, Glen Campbell, Jerry Cole, Leon Russell and Jim Gordon of the Wrecking Crew contributed, and Van Dyke Parks played most of the keyboards. The lead-off single for Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, "Echoes", is one of the tracks produced by Marks, but in truth the real producer of that track is Leon Russell, who wrote the orchestral arrangement that turned Clark's rough demo into a baroque pop masterpiece: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Echoes"] Despite Clark having quit the band, relations between him and the rest were still good enough that in September 1966 he temporarily rejoined the band after Crosby lost his voice, though he was gone again as soon as Crosby was well. But that didn't stop the next Byrds album, which Usher went on to produce straight after finishing work on Clark's record, coming out almost simultaneously with Clark's and, according to Clark, killing its commercial potential. Upon starting to work with the group, Usher quickly came to the conclusion that Chris Hillman was in many ways the most important member of the band. According to Usher "There was also quite a divisive element within the band at that stage which often prevented them working well together. Sometimes everything would go smoothly, but other times it was a hard road. McGuinn and Hillman were often more together on musical ideas. This left Crosby to fend for himself, which I might add he did very well." Usher also said "I quickly came to understand that Hillman was a good stabilising force within the Byrds (when he wanted to be). It was around the time that I began working with them that Chris also became more involved in the songwriting. I think part of that was the fact that he realised how much more money was involved if you actually wrote the songs yourself. And he was a good songwriter." The first single to be released from the new sessions was one that was largely Hillman's work. Hillman and Crosby had been invited by the great South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela to play on some demos for another South African jazzer, singer Letta Mbulu. Details are sparse, but one presumes this was for what became her 1967 album Letta Mbulu Sings, produced by David Axelrod: [Excerpt: Letta Mbulu, "Zola (MRA)"] According to Hillman, that session was an epiphany for him, and he went home and started writing his own songs for the first time. He took one of the riffs he came up with to McGuinn, who came up with a bridge inspired by a song by yet another South African musician, Miriam Makeba, who at the time was married to Masekela, and the two wrote a lyric inspired by what they saw as the cynical manipulation of the music industry in creating manufactured bands like the Monkees -- though they have both been very eager to say that they were criticising the industry, not the Monkees themselves, with whom they were friendly. As Hillman says in his autobiography, "Some people interpreted it as a jab at The Monkees. In reality, we had immense respect for all of them as singers and musicians. We weren't skewering the members of the Monkees, but we were taking a shot at the cynical nature of the entertainment business that will try to manufacture a group like The Monkees as a marketing strategy. For us, it was all about the music, and we were commenting on the pitfalls of the industry rather than on any of our fellow musicians." [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track continued the experimentation with sound effects that they had started with the Lear jet song on the previous album. That had featured recordings of a Lear jet, and "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" featured recordings of audience screams. Those screams were, according to most sources, recorded by Derek Taylor at a Byrds gig in Bournemouth in 1965, but given reports of the tepid response the group got on that tour, that doesn't seem to make sense. Other sources say they're recordings of a *Beatles* audience in Bournemouth in *1963*, the shows that had been shown in the first US broadcast of Beatles footage, and the author of a book on links between the Beatles and Bournemouth says on his blog "In the course of researching Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth I spoke to two people who saw The Byrds at the Gaumont that August and neither recalled any screaming at all, let alone the wall of noise that can be heard on So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star." So it seems likely that screaming isn't for the Byrds, but of course Taylor had also worked for the Beatles. According to Usher "The crowd sound effects were from a live concert that Derek Taylor had taped with a little tape recorder in London. It was some outrageous crowd, something like 20,000 to 30,000 people. He brought the tape in, ran it off onto a big tape, re- EQ'd it, echoed it, cleaned it up and looped it." So my guess is that the audience screams in the Byrds song about the Monkees are for the Beatles, but we'll probably never know for sure: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track also featured an appearance by Hugh Masekela, the jazz trumpeter whose invitation to take part in a session had inspired the song: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] While Hillman was starting to lean more towards folk and country music -- he had always been the member of the band least interested in rock music -- and McGuinn was most interested in exploring electronic sounds, Crosby was still pushing the band more in the direction of the jazz experimentation they'd tried on "Eight Miles High", and one of the tracks they started working on soon after "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" was inspired by another jazz trumpet great. Miles Davis had been partly responsible for getting the Byrds signed to Columbia, as we talked about in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", and so the group wanted to pay him tribute, and they started working on a version of his classic instrumental "Milestones": [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] Sadly, while the group worked on their version for several days -- spurred on primarily by Crosby -- they eventually chose to drop the track, and it has never seen release or even been bootlegged, though there is a tiny clip of it that was used in a contemporaneous documentary, with a commentator talking over it: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Milestones (TV)"] It was apparently Crosby who decided to stop work on the track, just as working on it was also apparently his idea. Indeed, while the biggest change on the album that would become Younger Than Yesterday was that for the first time Chris Hillman was writing songs and taking lead vocals, Crosby was also writing more than before. Hillman wrote four of the songs on the album, plus his co-write with McGuinn on "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?", but Crosby also supplied two new solo compositions, plus a cowrite with McGuinn, and Crosby and McGuinn's "Why?", the B-side to "Eight Miles High", was also dug up and rerecorded for the album. Indeed, Gary Usher would later say "The album was probably 60% Crosby. McGuinn was not that involved, nor was Chris; at least as far as performing was concerned." McGuinn's only composition on the album other than the co-writes with Crosby and Hillman was another song about contacting aliens, "CTA-102", a song about a quasar which at the time some people were speculating might have been evidence of alien life. That song sounds to my ears like it's had some influence from Joe Meek's similar records, though I've never seen McGuinn mention Meek as an influence: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "CTA-102"] Crosby's growing dominance in the studio was starting to rankle with the other members. In particular two tracks were the cause of conflict. One was Crosby's song "Mind Gardens", an example of his increasing experimentation, a freeform song that ignores conventional song structure, and which he insisted on including on the album despite the rest of the group's objections: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mind Gardens"] The other was the track that directly followed "Mind Gardens" on the album. "My Back Pages" was a song from Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song many have seen as Dylan announcing his break with the folk-song and protest movements he'd been associated with up to that point, and his intention to move on in a new direction: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"] Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager, was no longer on speaking terms with the band and wasn't involved in their day-to-day recording as he had been, but he'd encountered McGuinn on the street and rolled down his car window and suggested that the group do the song. Crosby was aghast. They'd already recorded several songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Fifth Dimension had been their first album not to include any Dylan covers. Doing a jangly cover of a Dylan song with a McGuinn lead vocal was something they'd moved on from, and he didn't want to go back to 1964 at the end of 1966. He was overruled, and the group recorded their version, a track that signified something very different for the Byrds than the original had for Dylan: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "My Back Pages"] It was released as the second single from the album, and made number thirty. It was the last Byrds single to make the top forty. While he was working with the Byrds, Usher continued his work in the pop field, though as chart pop moved on so did Usher, who was now making records in a psychedelic sunshine pop style with acts like the Peanut Butter Conspiracy: [Excerpt: The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, "It's a Happening Thing"] and he produced Chad and Jeremy's massive concept album Of Cabbages and Kings, which included a five-song "Progress Suite" illustrating history from the start of creation until the end of the world: [Excerpt: Chad and Jeremy, "Editorial"] But one of the oddest projects he was involved in was indirectly inspired by Roger McGuinn. According to Usher "McGuinn and I had a lot in common. Roger would always say that he was "out of his head," which he thought was good, because he felt you had to go out of your head before you could really find your head! That sums up McGuinn perfectly! He was also one of the first people to introduce me to metaphysics, and from that point on I started reading everything I could get my hands on. His viewpoints on metaphysics were interesting, and, at the time, useful. He was also into Marshall McLuhan; very much into the effects of electronics and the electronic transformation. He was into certain metaphysical concepts before I was, but I was able to turn him onto some abstract concepts as well" These metaphysical discussions led to Usher producing an album titled The Astrology Album, with discussions of the meaning of different star signs over musical backing: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] And with interviews with various of the artists he was working with talking about astrology. He apparently interviewed Art Garfunkel -- Usher was doing some uncredited production work on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album at the time -- but Garfunkel declined permission for the interview to be used. But he did get both Chad and Jeremy to talk, along with John Merrill of the Peanut Butter Conspiracy -- and David Crosby: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] One of the tracks from that album, "Libra", became the B-side of a single by a group of studio musicians Usher put together, with Glen Campbell on lead vocals and featuring Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys prominently on backing vocals. "My World Fell Down" was credited to Sagittarius, again a sign of Usher's current interest in astrology, and featured some experimental sound effects that are very similar to the things that McGuinn had been doing on recent Byrds albums: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "My World Fell Down"] While Usher was continuing with his studio experimentation, the Byrds were back playing live -- and they were not going down well at all. They did a UK tour where they refused to play most of their old hits and went down as poorly as on their previous tour, and they were no longer the kings of LA. In large part this was down to David Crosby, whose ego was by this point known to *everybody*, and who was becoming hugely unpopular on the LA scene even as he was starting to dominate the band. Crosby was now the de facto lead vocalist on stage, with McGuinn being relegated to one or two songs per set, and he was the one who would insist that they not play their older hit singles live. He was dominating the stage, leading to sarcastic comments from the normally placid Hillman like "Ladies and gentlemen, the David Crosby show!", and he was known to do things like start playing a song then stop part way through a verse to spend five minutes tuning up before restarting. After a residency at the Whisky A-Go-Go where the group were blown off the stage by their support act, the Doors, their publicist Derek Taylor quit, and he was soon followed by the group's co-managers Jim Dickson and Eddie Tickner, who were replaced by Crosby's friend Larry Spector, who had no experience in rock management but did represent Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, two young film stars Crosby was hanging round with. The group were particularly annoyed by Crosby when they played the Monterey Pop Festival. Crosby took most lead vocals in that set, and the group didn't go down well, though instrumentally the worst performer was Michael Clarke, who unlike the rest of the band had never become particularly proficient on his instrument: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (live at Monterey)"] But Crosby also insisted on making announcements from the stage advocating LSD use and describing conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination: [Excerpt: David Crosby on the Warren Commission, from the end of "Hey Joe" Monterey] But even though Crosby was trying to be the Byrds' leader on stage, he was also starting to think that they maybe didn't deserve to have him as their leader. He'd recently been spending a lot of time hanging out with Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, and McGuinn talks about one occasion where Crosby and Stills were jamming together, Stills played a blues lick and said to McGuinn "Can you play that?" and when McGuinn, who was not a blues musician, said he couldn't, Stills looked at him with contempt. McGuinn was sure that Stills was trying to poach Crosby, and Crosby apparently wanted to be poached. The group had rehearsed intensely for Monterey, aware that they'd been performing poorly and not wanting to show themselves up in front of the new San Francisco bands, but Crosby had told them during rehearsals that they weren't good enough to play with him. McGuinn's suspicions about Stills wanting to poach Crosby seemed to be confirmed during Monterey when Crosby joined Buffalo Springfield on stage, filling in for Neil Young during the period when Young had temporarily quit the group, and performing a song he'd helped Stills write about Grace Slick: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Rock 'n' Roll Woman (live at Monterey)"] Crosby was getting tired not only of the Byrds but of the LA scene in general. He saw the new San Francisco bands as being infinitely cooler than the Hollywood plastic scene that was LA -- even though Crosby was possibly the single most Hollywood person on that scene, being the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer and someone who hung out with film stars. At Monterey, the group had debuted their next single, the first one with an A-side written by Crosby, "Lady Friend": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Lady Friend"] Crosby had thought of that as a masterpiece, but when it was released as a single, it flopped badly, and the rest of the group weren't even keen on the track being included on the next album. To add insult to injury as far as Crosby was concerned, at the same time as the single was released, a new album came out -- the Byrds' Greatest Hits, full of all those singles he was refusing to play live, and it made the top ten, becoming far and away the group's most successful album. But despite all this, the biggest conflict between band members when they came to start sessions for their next album wasn't over Crosby, but over Michael Clarke. Clarke had never been a particularly good drummer, and while that had been OK at the start of the Byrds' career, when none of them had been very proficient on their instruments, he was barely any better at a time when both McGuinn and Hillman were being regarded as unique stylists, while Crosby was writing metrically and harmonically interesting material. Many Byrds fans appreciate Clarke's drumming nonetheless, saying he was an inventive and distinctive player in much the same way as the similarly unskilled Micky Dolenz, but on any measure of technical ability he was far behind his bandmates. Clarke didn't like the new material and wasn't capable of playing it the way his bandmates wanted. He was popular with the rest of the band as a person, but simply wasn't playing well, and it led to a massive row in the first session: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Universal Mind Decoder (alternate backing track)"] At one point they joke that they'll bring in Hal Blaine instead -- a reference to the recording of "Mr. Tambourine Man", when Clarke and Hillman had been replaced by Blaine and Larry Knechtel -- and Clarke says "Do it. I don't mind, I really don't." And so that ended up happening. Clarke was still a member of the band -- and he would end up playing on half the album's tracks -- but for the next few sessions the group brought in session drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon to play the parts they actually wanted. But that wasn't going to stop the bigger problem in the group, and that problem was David Crosby's relationship with the rest of the band. Crosby was still at this point thinking of himself as having a future in the group, even as he was increasingly convinced that the group themselves were bad, and embarrassed by their live sound. He even, in a show of unity, decided to ask McGuinn and Hillman to collaborate on a couple of songs with him so they would share the royalties equally. But there were two flash-points in the studio. The first was Crosby's song "Triad", a song about what we would now call polyamory, partly inspired by Robert Heinlein's counterculture science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The song was meant to portray a progressive, utopian, view of free love, but has dated very badly -- the idea that the *only* reason a woman might be unhappy with her partner sleeping with another woman is because of her mother's disapproval possibly reveals more about the mindset of hippie idealists than was intended. The group recorded Crosby's song, but refused to allow it to be released, and Crosby instead gave it to his friends Jefferson Airplane, whose version, by having Grace Slick sing it, at least reverses the dynamics of the relationship: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other was a song that Gary Usher had brought to the group and suggested they record, a Goffin and King song released the previous year by Dusty Springfield: [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "Goin' Back"] Crosby was incandescent. The group wanted to do this Brill Building pap?! Hell, Gary Usher had originally thought that *Chad and Jeremy* should do it, before deciding to get the Byrds to do it instead. Did they really want to be doing Chad and Jeremy cast-offs when they could be doing his brilliant science-fiction inspired songs about alternative relationship structures? *Really*? They did, and after a first session, where Crosby reluctantly joined in, when they came to recut the track Crosby flat-out refused to take part, leading to a furious row with McGuinn. Since they were already replacing Michael Clarke with session drummers, that meant the only Byrds on "Goin' Back", the group's next single, were McGuinn and Hillman: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] That came out in late October 1967, and shortly before it came out, McGuinn and Hillman had driven to Crosby's home. They told him they'd had enough. He was out of the band. They were buying him out of his contract. Despite everything, Crosby was astonished. They were a *group*. They fought, but only the way brothers fight. But McGuinn and Hillman were adamant. Crosby ended up begging them, saying "We could make great music together." Their response was just "And we can make great music without you." We'll find out whether they could or not in two weeks' time.

The Greg and Dan Show speaks with Craig Moore of Younger Than Yesterday about the Peoria Riverfront Museum's Golden Voice LIVE concert on Sunday, October 8th from 2 – 6 PM. Golden Voice Studio, operated by Jerry and Mary Anne Milam in South Pekin, produced local and national artists such as Dan Fogelberg, The Shags, REO Speedwagon, and more. The Peoria Riverfront Museum remembers the legendary local recording studio through a Golden Voice wall of records. In addition to the wall, a Golden Voice LIVE fund has been established. Golden Voice LIVE will feature three sets of live music, coordinated by Moore, and including hits spun by local radio personalities. Visit peoriariverfrontmuseum.org for more details. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

El cuarto álbum de los Byrds, ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ , fue publicado en febrero de 1967, en un momento en que el principal compositor de la banda, Gene Clark, abandonó el grupo, y los Byrds se enfrentaban a una feroz competencia: Los Beatles habían publicado ‘Revolver’ , los Beach Boys, ‘Pet Sounds’ y Bob Dylan, al que habían versionado desde 1965, se había desmarcado con ‘Blonde On Blonde’ . Ante la necesidad, los guitarristas Roger McGuinn y David Crosby, así como el bajista Chris Hillman, aportaron más temas para rellenar el vacío que había dejado Clark. Con todo, los Byrds permanecieron fieles a lo que se había convertido en su fórmula: temas country rock y las versiones de temas de Bob Dylan. ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ se mantenía perfectamente en línea de lo que estaba ocurriendo en la escena musical de 1966 y 1967, en un momento en que un álbum era una expresión artística por sí mismo y tenía más peso que los singles de éxito. Con el tiempo, se ha convertido en uno de los mejores álbumes de la década de los sesenta.

The Greg and Dan Show welcomes Craig Moore of Younger Than Yesterday and iconic Peoria musician Dave Chastain to speak about the reunion event, Another Second Chance: A Live Music Celebration on Saturday, October 22nd at 6 PM at the 3300 Event Center.  Formerly known as the Second Chance, the 3300 Event Center is the reason for the huge reprise of longtime musical acts. Another Second Chance celebrates and recreates the days of the livelihood and electrifying energy that once was the Second Chance.  Along with the return of the Dave Chastain Band, many acts includings Captain Strobe, Eargazm, the Jade 50s, and more will find themselves back on the stage that they spent so many nights performing on.  Tickets are available at 3300eventcenter.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello Friends! This week on the show we're taking our second look at The Byrds, with their 3rd LP Fifth Dimension. Released in both mono and stereo in 1966, 5 of the tracks were treated to new stereo mixes in 1990, and then an unknown quantity in 1996. Today, we'll be comparing the original mono and stereo mixes, all the new 1990 mixes, and also all mixes used on the 1996 CD, regardless of the evidence suggesting remix or not, as honestly it's hard to tell (as you would know if you've checked out my episode on Younger Than Yesterday, and we were never given confirmation either way). With this absolute bevy of mixes in hand, let's dive into the material at hand, and take a trip to the Fifth Dimension with Captain Soul!   Happy Listening, Frederick   Support the show and get hours of extra content (including Mixology on 45) at: https://www.patreon.com/backtomono   Email the show at: backtomonoradio@gmail.com   Listen to companion podcast Back to Mono: https://www.mixcloud.com/backtomonoradio/playlists/back-to-mono-complete/   Find me on Instagram @hypnoticfred

Hello Friends! In another episode chosen by our Graduate Tier Patrons, today on the show we are taking our first flight with the fabulous Byrds, and their fantastic fourth LP, 'Younger Than Yesterday'. Released in 1967, this album was subject to mono and stereo mixes, and for almost 30 years these were the only mixes of these 11 tracks. However, in 1996, due to the poor state of the stereo master, all 11 songs also received remixes from the 3-track masters to create the current in print and streaming version of the album we hear today. So, with three mixes of the album in hand, and a bonus single edit to boot, how should you be listening to this album? Everybody's Been Burned by one of these mixes, so Why hold back any longer and see what Thoughts and Words I have on the subject. Happy Listening,  Frederick Support the show and get hours of extra content at: https://www.patreon.com/backtomono   Email the show at: backtomonoradio@gmail.com   Listen to companion podcast Back to Mono: https://www.mixcloud.com/backtomonoradio/playlists/back-to-mono-complete/    Find me on Instagram @hypnoticfred Join the Facebook Community here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/backtomono

In this episode, Part 3 of Seasonal Migrations, Jimmi shares his memories of Kevin Kelley's drumming and discusses the first few months of the new Byrds lineup, including Gram Parsons. The new foursome plays for Robert Kennedy's Los Angeles rally shortly before he is assassinated.  With the addition of Doug Dillard, who had played on the Sweetheart of the Rodeo sessions, the new Country Byrds head off to England and play a basement show with The Who, Queen, and The Rolling Stones in attendance.  The Stones invite The Byrds on a night trip to visit Stonehenge, where Keith Richards and Gram become fast friends over lines and drinks in the limousine.Some highlights from the show:00:02:06         Kevin Kelley and his metronome 00:09:57         Gram Parsons doctor's visit00:13:04          Kevin and Gram in rehearsal00:19:18           Euro tour preparations with Doug Dillard00:24:55         The Country Byrds & Sweetheart of the Rodeo00:28:19          Playing for Bobby Kennedy00:33:04         The London Gig00:36:48         The Ferry and Doug Dillard's drinking 00:41:32          Stonehenge with the Rolling Stones00:52:40         Show at the Grand Ole Opry & Ralph EmeryThanks for listening!Visit our WEBSITE for additional information on this episode, extra content and information on future episodes.Or follow Echoes from the Canyons on FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM or TWITTER

Time to begin the McGuinn as we leaf through the back pages of The Byrds.

In this episode, Part 2 of Seasonal Migrations, Jimmi shares his memories of Michael Clarke, his talent and personality, and discusses the last several months leading up to his departure from the Byrds. Michael has been having issues with his bandmates and the music they have been writing for some time but when his drum parts are replaced on several songs for the Notorious Byrd Brothers album, he is furious. Michael and Crosby's relationship becomes more strained, but David is fired soon after and Michael's close friend and former Byrd, Gene Clark, returns for rehearsals and television appearances. All seems well until Gene's sudden departure, when Michael decides to quit the trio and moves to Hawaii to pursue painting. Some highlights from the show:00:01:46   Michael Clarke, drumming on phonebooks 00:05:26   Mr. Tambourine Man & Terry Melcher00:07:54   Crosby vs. Clarke00:13:03   Michael doesn't like 12-string solos00:15:54   The dolphin smiles at Jim Gordon00:20:03   McGuinn's “outer space” songs00:24:39   The leadup to Crosby's firing00:28:24   Michael quits the band. 00:29:46   Post-Byrds MichaelThanks for listening!Visit our WEBSITE for additional information on this episode, extra content and information on future episodes.Or follow Echoes from the Canyons on FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM or TWITTER

On Part 1 of Seasonal Migrations, our continuing saga of the ever-changing Byrds roster, Gene Clark makes his return after an eighteen month hiatus from the band.  The Notorious Byrd Brothers is nearing completion in an antiquated CBS Studio B and Larry Spector's presence is starting to show as he recommends bringing in his client Gram Parsons for rehearsal.  McGuinn isn't sold on Gram joining the Byrds, so Spector instead brings in Gene Clark, another client and original Byrd member.  Gene is not confident in rehearsals, and Jimmi asks the band to help him find his confidence before they head to Minneapolis for their first show of a short east coast tour.  Despite reservations about whether Gene is ready for tour, Spector books a train for him to get to the first show, but Gene gets stuck in an elevator before heading to the station and his claustrophobia and travel anxiety are triggered.  Several days later, Gene's train arrives in Minneapolis and he meets up with the band for lack-luster performances that is essentially a photoshoot for Acoustic Amps.That evening, Gene decides he can't fly to New York for the Fillmore East shows and returns to LA via train the next day, quitting the band for the second time.  The band finishes the tour, but Michael Clarke isn't happy and won't be around for very much longer.   Some highlights from the show:00:02:18    Who are The Notorious Byrds Brothers?00:08:04    Larry Spector has an agenda00:15:20    Gene shows up for rehearsal00:22:32    Bill Graham, Kip Cohen and Fillmore East00:25:05    Acoustic Amplification and Roger McGuinn00:31:13    Gene's trip to nowhere00:33:28    Gene gets stuck in an elevator00:40:04    CBS and their antiquated studios00:45:29    Minneapolis performances00:51:49    Gene can't fly with the Byrds after all Thanks for listening!Visit our WEBSITE for additional information on this episode, extra content and information on future episodes.Or follow Echoes from the Canyons on FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM or TWITTEREchoes from the Canyons is a TERMINAL BIRDS PRODUCTION

In Part 2 of David Crosby: Flying High Until The End, Jimmi discusses the last few weeks of  Crosby's time with the Byrds and some of the events that lead to David being fired from the band.  Crosby has been on the outs with the other bandmembers for some time, but his behavior towards the end becomes more erratic and it seems to Jimmi that he is trying to get himself fired from the band and released from his contract with CBS.  Crosby has already begun to rehearse with Steven Stills and others in secret, and it is becoming clearer that Crosby is considering his future may not be with the Byrds.  The day before heading to a weekend gig in San Francisco, Jimmi is called to Crosby's house by a woman who believes Crosby is overdosing. Two days later, Crosby takes out his frustration backstage at the Fillmore West by punching Jimmi in the back of the head and gets fired by the band several days later upon his return to LA.Some highlights from the show:00:01:25    Photoshoot where Crosby is a Notorious horse's ass00:04:52    Jimmi delivers a guitar to a clandestine jam session at Crosby's00:06:50     Crosby takes Triad to Jefferson Airplane and RCA00:19:19         Bill Graham and Fillmore West00:21:31         Jimmi goes to Crosby's to deal with an overdose00:39:34       Things get a little physical at Fillmore West01:00:32        Larry Spector's management role01:01:46         Crosby gets firedThanks for listening!Visit our WEBSITE for additional information on this episode, extra content and information on future episodes.Or follow Echoes from the Canyons on FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM or TWITTEREchoes from the Canyons is a TERMINAL BIRDS PRODUCTION

In Part 1 of David Crosby: Flying High Until The End, Jimmi discusses the Byrds in the early days, a few of Crosby's idiosyncrasies, and how his behavior eventually became problematic for the band.  From smoking marijuana on an airplane and at a CBS photos session, to playing with Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival as his bandmates watch from the audience, Crosby is starting to pull away.  He seems aloof and detached, and begins distancing himself from the other bandmembers; a prelude of the things to come.Some highlights from the show:00:02:45    Crosby's Rules of the Road00:09:30    Tangent: David Cassidy loves koala bears 00:11:03       Crosby's cape and the Byrds imitating the Beatles00:15:00      Crosby gets choked out at a tractor convention00:21:03       Jimmi and Crosby get high and battle waves in Hawaii00:29:38      CBS photo session goes awry 00:36:45      Getting high on an airplane00:45:07       Bad shows at the Village Gate00:50:15       Crosby plays with Buffalo Springfield at Monterey Pop FestivalThanks for listening!Visit our WEBSITE for additional information on this episode, extra content and information on future episodes.Or follow Echoes from the Canyons on FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM or TWITTEREchoes from the Canyons is a TERMINAL BIRDS PRODUCTION

Ayer se cumplieron 3 años de la muerte de Tom Petty. El 2 de Octubre de 2017 recibimos aquella triste noticia. Tom Petty había sido encontrado inconsciente a consecuencia de un paro cardíaco y fue trasladado al Centro Médico de UCLA en Santa Mónica, California, donde falleció. Fue una sobredosis "accidental" de medicamentos para paliar el dolor de su cadera rota, el insomnio, la ansiedad y la depresión. Estaba celebrando sus 40 años de carrera con una gran gira y faltaban 18 días para que hubiera cumplido 67 años. Los más fieles seguidores de Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, aquellos que se inscribieron en el Highway Companions Fan Club de la banda, recibieron una copia de Hypnotic Eye, el último trabajo del grupo por entonces, y un álbum exclusivo grabado en directo y titulado Live 2013 con tomas de las actuaciones de Tom Petty el año anterior en el Beacon Theatre de Nueva York y el Fonda Theatre de Los Angeles, además de algunos de los momentos más destacados de su aparición en el Bonnaroo Festival. De su paso por la Gran Manzana queda esta versión impecable de “So You Want To Be A Rock N' Roll Star”, una canción compuesta por Jim McGuinn y Chris Hillman para que los Byrds la incluyeran en su LP de 1967, Younger Than Yesterday. Estoy convencido de que Tom Petty siempre soñó que era el miembro oculto de los Byrds. Una implacable versión de “I Feel a Whole Lot Better” abría en 1989 la segunda cara del primer LP en solitario de Tom Petty, Full Moon Fever, y es un ejemplo más de la adoración que el artista de Florida tenía por los Byrds. La colaboración con Jeff Lynne fue fundamental en aquel sonido. Sin embargo, en un principio, la compañía discográfica no estaba satisfecha con el disco y se plantearon no publicarlo ya que, decían, que no había ni un single para editar. "Free Fallin'" les hizo cambiar de opinión. Fue la mejor despedida de la década de los 90. Aunque nos pueda parecer mentira, esta obra de arte llamada "Leave Virginia Alone" es una de las 10 canciones que quedaron fuera de la primitiva edición de Wildflowers. El artista de Gainsville la compuso en el 93, un año antes de la edición del disco. Eso sí, algún seguidor impenitente de Rod Stewart, como nuestro amigo Ignacio, la recordará formando parte de su álbum del 95 A Spanner in the Works. Por suerte, Mark Seliger y Adria Petty, hija de Tom, han conformado un vídeo delicioso protagonizado por la actriz Casimere Jollette, de la serie de Netflix sobre el mundo del ballet Tiny Pretty Things. Hay personajes inolvidables, en el mejor de los sentidos, y ese es el caso de Tom Petty, el artista de Florida que nos abandonó hace tres años. Su carrera en solitario nos dejó tres álbumes impagables y el segundo de ellos, el mítico Wildflowers de 1994 se convirtió en una de las joyas de su discografía. En realidad, todos los Heartbreakers estuvieron al lado de su líder, excepto el batería Stan Lynch que fue sustituido por Steve Ferrone. “Somewhere Under Heaven” forma parte del segundo de los álbumes de la reedición de Wildflowers, en concreto el llamado All The Rest. Era una de las 10 canciones que quedaron fuera de la edición original de 1994. "Crawling Back to You" reflejó, como todo aquel Wildflowers, los 20 años de fracaso de Tom Petty en su matrimonio con Jane Benyo, de quien se divorciaría dos años más tarde. Había estrofas como "Estoy tan cansado de estar cansado/Seguro que la noche seguirá al día/La mayoría de las cosas que me preocupan/Nunca suceden de todos modos". Las sesiones de grabación de Wildflowers comenzaron en 1992, cuando el músico de Florida tenía la intención de dar continuidad a su debut en solitario Full Moon Fever del 89. Pero Petty había llegado a un acuerdo con Warner, con quien había grabado como miembro de los Traveling Wilburys, a pesar de que junto a los Heartbreakers pertenecía a MCA. Aunque mantuvo a Rick Rubin como co-productor junto a su compañero Mike Campbell, decidió tomar el mando de aquel proyecto. Gracias a la familia de Petty y a sus archivos, se ha recuperado esta maqueta de uno de los temas punteros de aquel registro como es el caso de “You Don’t Know How It Feels”. En este caso, está grabada en su estudio casero un año antes de la edición del disco y los seguidores impenitentes del músico encontrarán diferencias en la letra, como una muestra más del proceso de creación. Esta versión de “You Don’t Know How It Feels” da una sensación mucho más íntima y personal de la original. Además, encontramos un verso que más tarde aparecería en la penúltima canción de aquel mismo álbum. Wildflowers fue el segundo álbum de Tom Petty como artista en solitario allá por 1994, que abrió con la canción que lo dio nombre genérico. Rick Rubin aportaba de nuevo su trabajo en la producción junto a Petty y Mike Campbell para llevar a cabo aquella aventura. El próximo 1 de noviembre se cumplirá un cuarto de siglo de su publicación. El próximo 16 de octubre aparecerá, por fin, Wildflowers & All The Rest, el proyecto más personal en el que Tom Petty estuvo centrado tras la publicación en 2014 de su último álbum con los Heartbreakers, Hypnotic Eye. Su intención primitiva era publicar las 10 canciones que no se incluyeron en el disco original, y que él llamaba All the Rest. Pero se ha añadido mucho más. En la cuádruple edición de lujo y dentro de las llamadas Home Recordings, con 15 cortes, de los que 12 son versiones nunca editadas y 3 son canciones inéditas, vamos a encontrar esta maqueta del tema central, “Wildflowers”, grabada en su estudio casero. A mitad de agosto de 1994 y dentro de las sesiones de grabación de Wildflowers se registró “Wake Up Time” que cerró aquel proyecto como décimo quinto tema. En esta reedición podemos escuchar la versión original, una “home recordings” y, además, esta toma alternativa que tan solo aparece en el quinto CD de la Super Deluxe Edition que han titulado Alternate Takes (Finding Wildflowers). El músico de Gainsville nunca olvidó que aquel segundo de sus álbumes en solitario de 1994 debía haber sido un disco doble, y fue dejando algunas muestras en distintas publicaciones posteriores. Tras su muerte, todos los planes de reedición se pospusieron hasta que se resolvió una demanda entre las hijas de Petty, Adria y Annakim, y su viuda Dana, el pasado año. Tom Leadon, hermano de Bernie Leadon, encontró a Tom Petty en los Epics y juntos formaron Mudcrutch en 1970 con Randall Marsh , añadiendo muy pronto a Mike Campbell y pasando a ser un quinteto tras la incorporación de Benmont Tench. La influencia de Leon Russell en la personalidad musical de Petty era relevante en aquellos tiempos y, de hecho, firmaron un contrato en 1974 con Shelter Records y se marcharon a Los Angeles, California. Publicaron un single en 1975, compuesto por él, sin ninguna repercusión y se disolvieron a finales de aquel año. Sin embargo, Petty, Campbell, y Tench, junto a Stan Lynch y Ron Blair formaron los Heartbreakers unos meses más tarde. En aquella reunión de 2007 para grabar con los miembros originales de Mudcrutch, quedaron para la historia canciones como “Orphan Of The Storm”. Tom Petty era el bajista de la banda, como su buen amigo Chris Hillman en los Byrds. The Live Anthology es una obra de arte convertida en colección de actuaciones de Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers a lo largo de su carrera que apareció hace 10 años. Existe una edición de lujo con los cuatro CDs de la edición estándar más un quinto CD de material también grabado en directo, dos DVDs nunca editados, un vinilo remasterizado de su álbum de 1976 Official Live 'Leg, y un disco Blu-ray disc con las 62 canciones de la caja, a la que se añade un poster de un concierto, reproducciones de pases de backstage, un libreto de lujo y una litografía. En ese quinto CD se encuentra esta versión del clásico “Ballad Of Easy Rider”, grabada en directo en el concierto de Nochevieja de 1978 en Santa Monica, California. Easy Rider se ha convertido en una de las películas de culto para los amantes de las road movies. Peter Fonda y Dennis Hopper la protagonizaron y dirigieron, contando con un joven Jack Nicholson entre los actores. "I Won't Back Down" será recordada por muchos como el primer single extraído del álbum Full Moon Fever, el debut de Tom Petty en solitario allá por 1989. Compuesta junto a su buen amigo Jeff Lynne, estrecho colaborador en la autoría de canciones para este registro, resultó ser un desafío contra las dificultades y la opresión. El tema fue muy radiado a raíz de los acontecimientos del 11 de Septiembre de 2011, y Tom Petty la interpretó de esta forma junto a los Heartbreakers a un ritmo más lento que el original en el espacio America: A Tribute To Heroes. Escuchar audio

Gestur þáttarins að þessu sinni er Magnús Stefánsson sem er meðal annars fyrrum trommuleikari Utangarðsmanna, EGÓS og Sálarinnar hans Jóns míns. Hann mætir með uppáhalds ROKKplötuna sína klukkan 21.00. Vinur þáttarins sendir lag og óskalagasíminn opnar kl. 20.00 - 5687123. Plata þáttarins sem við heyrum amk. þrjú lög af er Younger than Yesterday með Byrds sem kom út 6. febrúar árið 1967. Younger Than Yesterday er fjórða plata Amerísku rokksveitarinnar Byrds, sem á plötunni tekur inn áhrif frá sækadelíu og jazzi. Bassaleikarinn Chris Hillman er þarna í stærrsa hlutverki en á plötunum á undan og sýnir að hann er lunkinn lagasmiður sem hann hafði ekki sýnt svo mikið til þessarar plötu. Hann er einn skrifaður fyrir fjórum laga plötunnar og er meðhöfundur í laginu "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star". ?I tveimur af þessum fjórum lögum Hillmans á plötunni byrjar sveitin að feta sig inn á kántrí-rokk slóðina sem átti síðar eftir að einkenna The Byrds á næstu plötum, Platan náði 24. Sæti Bandaríska listans þegar hún kom út og því 37unda í Bretlandi. Lagið So you want to be a rock?n roll star kom út á lítilli plötu áður en stór platan kom út, og eftir að hún kom út voru tvö lög önnnur gefin út á smáskífum, Have you seen her face eftir Chris Hillman og My back Pages eftir Bob Dylan. Ekkert laga plötunnar gerði miklar rósir á vinsældalistanum í Bretlandi. Í dag þykir Younger than Yesterday ein alla besta plata Byrds og ein besta plata ársins 1967, þrátt fyrir að það hafi lítið farið fyrir henni á sínum tíma. Egó - Mescalin Volcanova - Welcome Volcanova - Where?s the time R.E.M. - The one i live (Live Paleo festival 2008) The Verve - History My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the black parade Rory Gallagher - Bad penny VINUR ÞÁTTARINS Foghat - Sarah Lee Hellacopters - Murder on my mind SÍMATÍMI Bob Jovi - You give love a bad name (óskalag) AC/DC - Let me put my love into you (óskalag) Nothing but Thieves - Amsterdam (óskalag) Brain Police - Jacuzzi Suzy (óskalag) Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (óskalag) Bruce Springsteen - Lettter to you Lemmy & Probot - Shake your blood (óskalag) The Byrds - So you want to be a rock?n roll star Wilco - True love will find you in the end MAGNÚS STEFÁNSSON GESTUR FUZZ Utangarðsmenn - 13-16 MAGNÚS II Deep Purple - Might just take your life MAGNÚS III Deep Purple - Lay down, stay down The Byrds - My back pages Deep Purple - Burn

Gestur þáttarins að þessu sinni er Magnús Stefánsson sem er meðal annars fyrrum trommuleikari Utangarðsmanna, EGÓS og Sálarinnar hans Jóns míns. Hann mætir með uppáhalds ROKKplötuna sína klukkan 21.00. Vinur þáttarins sendir lag og óskalagasíminn opnar kl. 20.00 - 5687123. Plata þáttarins sem við heyrum amk. þrjú lög af er Younger than Yesterday með Byrds sem kom út 6. febrúar árið 1967. Younger Than Yesterday er fjórða plata Amerísku rokksveitarinnar Byrds, sem á plötunni tekur inn áhrif frá sækadelíu og jazzi. Bassaleikarinn Chris Hillman er þarna í stærrsa hlutverki en á plötunum á undan og sýnir að hann er lunkinn lagasmiður sem hann hafði ekki sýnt svo mikið til þessarar plötu. Hann er einn skrifaður fyrir fjórum laga plötunnar og er meðhöfundur í laginu "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star". ?I tveimur af þessum fjórum lögum Hillmans á plötunni byrjar sveitin að feta sig inn á kántrí-rokk slóðina sem átti síðar eftir að einkenna The Byrds á næstu plötum, Platan náði 24. Sæti Bandaríska listans þegar hún kom út og því 37unda í Bretlandi. Lagið So you want to be a rock?n roll star kom út á lítilli plötu áður en stór platan kom út, og eftir að hún kom út voru tvö lög önnnur gefin út á smáskífum, Have you seen her face eftir Chris Hillman og My back Pages eftir Bob Dylan. Ekkert laga plötunnar gerði miklar rósir á vinsældalistanum í Bretlandi. Í dag þykir Younger than Yesterday ein alla besta plata Byrds og ein besta plata ársins 1967, þrátt fyrir að það hafi lítið farið fyrir henni á sínum tíma. Egó - Mescalin Volcanova - Welcome Volcanova - Where?s the time R.E.M. - The one i live (Live Paleo festival 2008) The Verve - History My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the black parade Rory Gallagher - Bad penny VINUR ÞÁTTARINS Foghat - Sarah Lee Hellacopters - Murder on my mind SÍMATÍMI Bob Jovi - You give love a bad name (óskalag) AC/DC - Let me put my love into you (óskalag) Nothing but Thieves - Amsterdam (óskalag) Brain Police - Jacuzzi Suzy (óskalag) Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (óskalag) Bruce Springsteen - Lettter to you Lemmy & Probot - Shake your blood (óskalag) The Byrds - So you want to be a rock?n roll star Wilco - True love will find you in the end MAGNÚS STEFÁNSSON GESTUR FUZZ Utangarðsmenn - 13-16 MAGNÚS II Deep Purple - Might just take your life MAGNÚS III Deep Purple - Lay down, stay down The Byrds - My back pages Deep Purple - Burn

Gestur þáttarins að þessu sinni er Magnús Stefánsson sem er meðal annars fyrrum trommuleikari Utangarðsmanna, EGÓS og Sálarinnar hans Jóns míns. Hann mætir með uppáhalds ROKKplötuna sína klukkan 21.00. Vinur þáttarins sendir lag og óskalagasíminn opnar kl. 20.00 - 5687123. Plata þáttarins sem við heyrum amk. þrjú lög af er Younger than Yesterday með Byrds sem kom út 6. febrúar árið 1967. Younger Than Yesterday er fjórða plata Amerísku rokksveitarinnar Byrds, sem á plötunni tekur inn áhrif frá sækadelíu og jazzi. Bassaleikarinn Chris Hillman er þarna í stærrsa hlutverki en á plötunum á undan og sýnir að hann er lunkinn lagasmiður sem hann hafði ekki sýnt svo mikið til þessarar plötu. Hann er einn skrifaður fyrir fjórum laga plötunnar og er meðhöfundur í laginu "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star". ?I tveimur af þessum fjórum lögum Hillmans á plötunni byrjar sveitin að feta sig inn á kántrí-rokk slóðina sem átti síðar eftir að einkenna The Byrds á næstu plötum, Platan náði 24. Sæti Bandaríska listans þegar hún kom út og því 37unda í Bretlandi. Lagið So you want to be a rock?n roll star kom út á lítilli plötu áður en stór platan kom út, og eftir að hún kom út voru tvö lög önnnur gefin út á smáskífum, Have you seen her face eftir Chris Hillman og My back Pages eftir Bob Dylan. Ekkert laga plötunnar gerði miklar rósir á vinsældalistanum í Bretlandi. Í dag þykir Younger than Yesterday ein alla besta plata Byrds og ein besta plata ársins 1967, þrátt fyrir að það hafi lítið farið fyrir henni á sínum tíma. Egó - Mescalin Volcanova - Welcome Volcanova - Where?s the time R.E.M. - The one i live (Live Paleo festival 2008) The Verve - History My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the black parade Rory Gallagher - Bad penny VINUR ÞÁTTARINS Foghat - Sarah Lee Hellacopters - Murder on my mind SÍMATÍMI Bob Jovi - You give love a bad name (óskalag) AC/DC - Let me put my love into you (óskalag) Nothing but Thieves - Amsterdam (óskalag) Brain Police - Jacuzzi Suzy (óskalag) Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (óskalag) Bruce Springsteen - Lettter to you Lemmy & Probot - Shake your blood (óskalag) The Byrds - So you want to be a rock?n roll star Wilco - True love will find you in the end MAGNÚS STEFÁNSSON GESTUR FUZZ Utangarðsmenn - 13-16 MAGNÚS II Deep Purple - Might just take your life MAGNÚS III Deep Purple - Lay down, stay down The Byrds - My back pages Deep Purple - Burn

Punk singer Matthew Brennan (currently in Deep Pockets) and fellow music nerd Scott Floman (author of The Story Of Rock and Soul Music: Album Reviews and Lists and Greatest Underrated Guitar Solos) have joined forces to talk about music. The first several episodes will feature NCAA Tournament type brackets (one each for the '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s) that will attempt to determine the greatest rock band/solo artist of all-time. We spent a fair amount of time on choosing which of the 64 bands/solo artists should be entered, the seedings/match ups, and of course the winners, but the actual conversations about the match ups was 100% spontaneous, and we did minimal editing afterwards (Matt did all the technical work there so thanks Matt!). In other words, what you hear is what you get, but we'll try to correct some obvious mistakes we made via the Notes section below. Matchups for this episode: (1) The Beatles vs. (16) Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Sometimes Young) (2) Elvis Presley vs. (15) Cream (3) Bob Dylan vs. (14) The Byrds (4) The Rolling Stones vs. (13) The Doors (5) Jimi Hendrix vs. (12) The Band (6) The Beach Boys vs. (11) The Velvet Underground (7) The Who vs. (10) Simon & Garfunkel (8) The Kinks vs. (9) Creedence Clearwater Revival Notes for this episode: To be clear, we slotted bands in particular decades based on when they peaked artistically (though we made some exceptions for the '80s which you'll see later). However, the winner of each match up is based on their entire career, not just that decade. Scott completely botches the word “coronavirus”! Scott incorrectly contradicts Matt about how the winners of each match up are chosen. Ignore that part! The winners were somewhat objectively picked, though obviously our personal preferences will inevitably come into play as well. Scott incorrectly called Elvis' “Can't Help Falling In Love” by the title “Can't Stop Falling In Love” – same sentiment but wrong word. Scott completely botches trying to say “sadomasochism” – should've just stuck with S&M! Scott incorrectly said that David Crosby left The Byrds during the recording of the fourth album. He was thinking of the right album, but The Notorious Byrd Brothers was actually the fifth Byrds album, not fourth (that was Younger Than Yesterday – both of these are Scott's favorite Byrds albums, BTW). Most of Cream's studio songs were 3-4+ minutes, not 2 minutes. And by pioneering live improvisation, we meant specifically for rock bands; that practice was already common for jazz bands. Cream was also one of the first power trios which we failed to mention. When talking about The Band-Dylan connection, we should've mentioned The Basement Tapes as well (though maybe we do so in a later episode). Also, although The Band peaked early on the first two albums, they did have other high-quality albums thereafter as well. Nico was only on the first Velvet Underground album (not “albums”) called The Velvet Underground & Nico. The original “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” was actually by Gladys Knight & The Pips, the more classic version everyone is familiar with by Marvin Gaye came after that. When discussing The Who's live prowess we should've also mentioned Live At Leeds, considered by many to be the greatest live album ever.

Craig Moore of the iconic Peoria record store Younger Than Yesterday joins the Journal Star's Steve Tarter to discuss "The Basement Tapes," a set of early recordings featuring Peoria-area bands and musicians, some of whom, like Dan Fogelberg and REO Speedwagon's Gary Richrath, went on to fame and fortune.

Younger Than Yesterday was somewhat overlooked at the time of its release during an intensely competitive era that found the Byrds on a commercial downslide. This is the moment we start questioning why this book has so many Byrds albums. Why book why?

Craig Moore, owner of the iconic Peoria record store Younger Than Yesterday, talks all things vinyl and plays a little "Name That Tune" with some vintage Western-themed television music with the Journal Star's Steve Tarter.

February 2017 Anniversaries Part 1: 1967 and 1972 - Jefferson Airplane, Byrds, Neil Young, Allman Brothers, Nick Drake, Todd Grundgren, Guess Who