![]() Soon, the electorate would turn away from the Great Society imagined by Lyndon B. The revolutionary aspirations of the political left, and the bohemian idealism of the hippies, had not transformed the American people. The Summer of Love was over, and winter approached. And now that the mobs of adoring women were beginning to shrink, Michael Clarke-who had never become that great of a drummer-seemed to have a foot out of the door. Gene Clark had quit in 1966, defeated by his fear of flying. They’d worn out their repertoire of Dylan covers, which were especially redundant now that Dylan himself had gone electric and begun to reject his entire folkie mythology. (An essay on the back cover of a Greatest Hits LP, released that summer, noted that their impact had come “three or four generations ago.”) Their Los Angeles fanbase had gravitated toward the Doors, who openly embraced the carnal extravagance of sex and drugs that was at inherent odds with the Byrds’ utopian invocation of sex and drugs-so much that singer Jim Morrison was unafraid to literally take his penis out at concerts. That counted for something even then.” Michael Clarke had been recruited for his resemblance to Brian Jones, which overruled the fact that he didn’t own a drum kit.īut musical trends moved lightning fast during this period, and by the time Crosby was fired in 1967, the Byrds already seemed like yesterday’s news. “They had those great clothes and hairdos. “Not to be too shallow, but they also were just the best-dressed band around,” Tom Petty once wrote for Rolling Stone. They also connected on another important, primordial level: being very cool. The appellation “folk rock” was instantly coined by Billboard to describe their sound, built around a catalog that drew from the works of Dylan and Pete Seeger, and the way McGuinn seemed to evoke the bloom of spring with every strum of his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. 1 on the charts and placed them at the center of the Hollywood scene, where they held court for celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Jane Fonda at the buzzy Los Angeles night club Ciro’s. Their debut single, an electrified version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Just two years earlier, the Byrds-composed initially of McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman, singer/songwriter Gene Clark, and drummer Michael Clarke-had achieved instant fame by becoming the first American act to marry the fizzy energy of the Beatles and the British Invasion with the reverential harmonies of the folkies. About the day he was officially fired, Crosby would remember nearly a decade later that “Roger and Chris drove up in a pair of Porsches and said that I was crazy, impossible to work with, an ego-manic-all of which is partly true-that I sang shitty, wrote terrible songs, made horrible sounds, and that they would do much better without me.” The first order of business, clearly, was getting rid of the guy who was writing way too many songs about threesomes. After becoming one of the biggest bands in America, the Byrds were beginning to sputter commercially creatively, they couldn’t get on the same page. ![]() When everyone reconvened the next month to start work on their next album, it wasn’t long before Crosby instigated another petty fight-the latest in a long, long string of petty fights-forcing McGuinn and bassist Chris Hillman to conclude that change was necessary. The next day, Crosby filled in for an absent Neil Young during Buffalo Springfield’s set, deepening his band’s suspicion that he was growing sick of the Byrds. Privately, Byrds leader and guitarist Roger McGuinn agreed there was something to the conspiracy, but he believed the best way for a musician to promote their political ideas was through their music, not by harshing the vibe on stage. At that moment, though, his bandmates were mortified. ![]() The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed, and this is your country, ladies and gentlemen.”Įventually, Crosby’s theory would be supported by a slow trickle of government documents, the work of Oliver Stone and Don DeLillo, and several podcasts recommended by your dad. “He was shot from a number of different directions, by different guns. “When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man,” he declared, to a somewhat confused audience. Stepping toward the microphone before the Byrds could launch into “He Was a Friend of Mine”-a traditional folk song that they’d reinterpreted to lament the late JFK-Crosby snuck in a conspiratorial spiel about the real killers on that Dallas afternoon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |