but have no fear, it could (and would) get lower. Third year of college, and, personally, a very low point. It was a weird autumn, our first living outside campus housing (though we were literally catercorner from our last dorm). when I got this, roommate Danny and I were living in a tiny studio apartment in a building we had dubbed “The Embassy” because of its attraction for foreign students. The record only covers through “Younger Than Yesterday,” which also came out in 1967 - interesting that they would include two songs from a then quite-current album. The single “All I Really Want to Do” doesn’t appear, but its B side, “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” does - and it’s one of my favorite Byrds songs. Interesting that a greatest hits album diverts from the formula a bit, though I’m glad it did. And, of course, there’s the incredible “5D (Fifth Dimension),” Jim McGuinn’s attempt to out-Dylan Dylan. When the Walkman became a thing, just a year or so after I got this, and listening to music on headphones in public became a thing, “Eight Miles High” was just a revelation: an entire atmosphere in a song, a space you could occupy just by listening. “Eight Miles High.” What a song, what a soundscape. Tambourine Man” and the seemingly under-appreciated “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” the great harmonies of “All I Really Want To Do,” the cosmic weirdness of “Mr. This album is composed of the early Byrds hits, with that great early jingle-jangle sound that elevated “Mr. Fascinated by the songs on that collection, I picked up “GP” and “Grievous Angel” on CD as well, and, knowing his role in the post-Crosby and Clarke Byrds, became interested in the Byrds discography again, picking up several of their albums digitally.īut that would all be many years after this album was seared into my brain. I had a brief but intense Gram Parsons period right around 1999, when the fantastic tribute album “Return of the Grievous Angel” came out. So, just like Buffalo Springfield, I came to a fuller appreciation of The Byrds much much later than I should have. Key songs found their way onto cassettes, and so I actually thought I had more Byrds than I did. But for some groups, and I think The Byrds fell into that category, I had some, he had some, and that was just fine. Because I believe that we had some other Byrds records (I know we had Fifth Dimension, but I do not, so it must have been Danny’s)- but at a time of life when money was very limited, there were quite a few records that I never bought because Danny had them, and why would we need two? There were a lot of things that didn’t apply to - both being Beatles fanatics, we knew that when graduation day finally came, we’d both be graduating with full Beatles collections. This is one of those cases where having a lot in common with a roommate that you live with for several years can come back to bite you. Byrds Greatest Hits front cover – shot through the bag, because whoever owned this before I did taped the bag to the jacket, and I’ve never bothered to change it. And yet, I never had another Byrds record. Did I feature most of its songs on various mix tapes in the early ‘80s? I did. Did I love this record, and play it endlessly? I did. This 1967 collection, which I bought well-used in 1980, is the only Byrds album I ever owned, until quite recently.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |