A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 172, “Hickory Wind” by the Byrds: Part One, Ushering in a New Dimension

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

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/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs By Andrew Hickie. Song 172 Hickory Wind By the Birds Part 1 Ushering in a New Dimension When we left the birds

At the end of the episode on 8 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, Jean 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 McGuin 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. 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 birds' albums are now considered classics. Jim Dixon, the group's co-manager, said,

Jean would write 15 to 20 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, Jean 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 11 songs, Clark wrote seven on his own and co-wrote two with McGuin. But as the other band members were starting to realize that they had the possibility of extra-revement,

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. But there he'd shared co-writing credit with David Crosby and Roger McGuin, in part because that was the only way he could be sure that they would agree to release it as a single. But there were also internal rivalries within the band when related to songwriting. As we've touched on, Crosby had already essentially bullied Clark off the guitar and into just playing tambourine, and McGuin would be dismissive even of Clark's tambourine abilities.

Frosby'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 Dixon, David understood when Gene left that 95% of why Gene left could be brought back to him. The other 5% though came from Clark's fear of flying. Clark had apparently witnessed a plane crash in his youth and been traumatized by it, and he had a general terror of flying and planes, something McGuin would mock him for a little, as McGuin 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 Kay and ended up getting off the plane. McGuin and Michael Clark almost did the same, but in the end they decided to stay on, and the other four birds 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 bird anymore. 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 Clark to take over Crosby's mic. The group now had three singer instrumentalists in front, two of whom, Crosby and McGuin, 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 8 miles high. 5D was written by McGuin, inspired by a book of cartoons called One, Two, Three, Four, 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. McGuin 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. McGuin has said in the past that the single should really have come with a copy of Landis's booklet so people could understand it. Sadly, without the benefit of the booklet,

we only have the lyrics plus McGuin's interviews to go on to try to figure out what he means. As far as I am able to understand, McGuin believed, completely erroneously, the Einstein had proved that along with the four dimensions of space-time, there is also a fifth dimension, which McGuin refers to as a mesh, and that the reason for the speed of light being what it is is because of that mesh. McGwin 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, McGuin 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 Bark. And Parks obliged, having been thinking along the same lines himself. Unfortunately for the group, McGuin'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 tracks basically on commercial nature meant that it reached no higher than number 44 in the charts. Jim Dixon, 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. After the album's 11 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 birds, though Gene Clark is very audible on it playing harmonica, and one more was a jam whose only lyrics were gonna ride a Learjet 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. It was a light coming down from the sky. I don't know who or why must be those strangers that come every night. Those saucer-shaped lights put people uptight. McGu-green footprints that blow in the dark. 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. McGuin 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 realize that the inverse square law means that the signals would be too faint to make out after a relatively short distance. Please take me along.

Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me alone for a ride? Mr. Spaceman did better on the charts than its predecessor, scraping the lower reaches of the top 40. But it hardly set the world alight, and neither did the album. A typical review was the one by John Landau, which said in part, This album then cannot be considered up to the standards set by the birds 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 Alan Stanton would produce for the birds

and his replacement had actually just produced an album that was a bird's record by any other name. Well, you're smoldering, there's a moment, and you say there's nothing, 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 centered on the Beach Boys in 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. 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. 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 honies, 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 Sir Frizzell. as well as a whole host of studio-only groups like The Four Speeds, the Superstocks, and Mr. Gasser and the

weirdos, 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 hondels, 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 the 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 sound-like version. Little Honda made the top ten, and Usher produced two albums for the Hondelles, who had one other minor hit with a cover version of The Loving Spoonful's Younger Girl. Oddly, Usher's friend Terry Melcher,

who would shortly produce the bird's 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. But when Usher had got his version out first, Boone's was relegated to a B-side. When the birds had hit, and folk rock had started to take over from surf rock, Usher had gone with the flow and produced records like the Safari's album, It Ain't Me, Babe, with Usher and his usual gang of backing vocalists so augmenting the safaris as they covered hits by Dylan, the Turtles, the Beach Boys and the Birds.

Usher was also responsible for the safaris being the first group to release a version of Hey Joe on a major label, as we heard in the episode on that song. After moving between Capital, Mercury and Decker records, Usher had left Decker 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 ripcords and had just finished his time as the birds producer. Usher's first work at Columbia was actually to prepare new stereo mixes of some birds' tracks

that had up to that point only been issued in mono, but his first interaction with the birds themselves came via Gene Clark. On leaving the birds, Clark had briefly tried to make a success for himself as a songwriter for hire, in much the same mold as Usher, attempting to write and produce a single for two birds 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 Reinhardt from the leaves, Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, and Joel Larson of the grassroots.

Just called Gene Clark and the group, they played around the club, clubs in L.A. and cut about half an album's worth of demos produced by Jim Dixon and Ed Tickner, the Bird's 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 monkeys, and he later remembered an old song by Clark and McGuin that the birds had demoed but never released, you showed me, and produced a top ten hit version of it for the turtles. Clark had instead started working with two country singers, Vernon Rex Gosden,

who had previously been with Chris Hillman in the country band The Hillmen. When that band had split up, the Gosden brothers had started to perform together as a duo, and in 1967 they would have a major country hit with Hanging On. At this point, though, there were just enough to keep me a hanging on. Jean Clark's backing vocalists on an album that had been started with producer Larry Marks, who left Columbia halfway through the sessions, at which point Osher took over. The album, titled Gene Clark with the Gosden brothers, featured a mix of musicians from different backgrounds.

There were Larson and Reinhardt from Gene Clark and the group. There were country musicians, a guitarist named Clarence White, and the banjo player Doug Dillard. Hillman and Michael Clark, the Bird's Rhythm Section, played on much of the album as a way of keeping United Front. Glenn Campbell, Jerry Cole, Leon Russell and Jim Gordon of the Wrecking crew contributed, and Van Dyck Parks played most of the keyboards. The lead-off single for Gene Clark with the Gosden 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.

for the moments that you thought where am I going? Though the walls are like the dead, they reflect the things you said, and the echoes in your head continue showing. Here the castles you can build out of dreams you have fulfilled. 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. McGuin 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 birds, 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 realized 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 Massacela, to play on some demos for another South African jazzer, singer Letta and Bulu. Details are spar, but one presumes this was for what became her 1967 album Letta Umbulu Sings, produced by David Axelod. 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 McGuin, who came up with a bridge inspired by a song by yet another South African musician, Miriam McCabe,

who at the time was married to Masacela, 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 monkeys, though they have both been very eager to say that they were criticising the industry, not the monkeys themselves, with whom they were friendly. As Hillman says in his autobiography, some people interpreted it as a jab at the monkeys. In reality, we had immense respect for all of them as singers and musicians. We weren't skewering the members of the monkeys, but we were taking a shot at the cynical nature of the entertainment business that we'll try to manufacture a group like the monkeys 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. The track continued the experimentation with sound effects that they had started with the Learjet song on the previous album. That had featured recordings of a Learjet, and So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll star, featured recordings of audience screams. Those screams were, according to most sources,

recorded by Derek Taylor at a bird's 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 their recordings of a Beatles audience in Bournemouth in 1963, the shows that have 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 and Bournemouth, I spoke to two people who saw the birds at the Gaumont that August,

and neither recalled any screaming at all, let alone the wall of noise it can be heard on so you want to be a rock and roll star. So it seems likely that screaming isn't for the birds, 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 while, a big tape, re-EQed it, echoed it, cleaned it up and looped it. So my guess is that the audience screams in the birds' song about the monkeys are for the Beatles, but we'll probably never know for sure. The track also featured an appearance by Hugh Massacela, the jazz trumpeter whose invitation to take part in a session had inspired the song. 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 McGuin was most interested in exploring electronic sounds.

Crosby was still pushing the band more in the direction of the jazz experimentation they tried on 8 miles high, and one of the tracks they started working on soon after So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star, was inspired by another jazz trumpet great. Miles Davis had been partly responsible for getting the birds 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. 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. These are the birds. They are songmakers. Much of their music is improvised. Worked out in informal jazz.

session such as this, like most of their generation, they write as they feel. Songs that reflect the viewpoints and aspirations of a generation finding its own voice. 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, Crossby was also writing more than before. Hillman wrote four of the songs on the album, plus his co-write with McGuin on So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll star,

but Crosby also supplied two new solo compositions, plus a co-write with McGuin, and Crosby and McGuins' Y, the B-side to 8 miles high, was also dug up and be recorded for the album. Indeed, Gary Usher would later say, the album was probably 60% Crosby. McGwin was not that involved, nor was Chris, at least as far as performing,

concerned. McGuin'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 McGuin mentioned Meek as an influence. Crossby'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 free-form song that ignores conventional song structure, and which he insisted on including on the album despite the rest of the group's objections.

There the sun came and the rain bits of color on the ground. It took shade. 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. Jim mighty, pouts with fire and flaming roads, using ideas as my maps.

Jim Dixon, the Byrd's 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 McGuin 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 McGuin 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 birds than the original had for Dylan. It was released as the second single from the album and made number 30. It was the last bird single to make the top 40. While he was working with the birds,

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, 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. The crowd happens now, better pray to your gods and hope that somehow,

far from the shack you call home, they aren't burning the grain that is ripened and grown, because the prices have fallen again You eat up your rice, Billy dear They're starving in India least That's what I hear Come on my child, cram it down But one of the oddest projects he was involved in

Washing was indirectly inspired by Roger McGuin According to Usher McGuin 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 McGuin 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. If you were born July 23 to August 22nd, you are a Leo, the fifth sign in the zodiac. Your ruling planet is the sun. Your key word is grace. Your symbol is the lion. As a Leo, you're aligned to the ruler of the solar system.

You burn brightly like the sun. You're a natural host or hostess and can usually make friends instantly. But if you become proud of your natural abilities, you'll find yourself becoming arrogant and losing everything that's... And with interviews with various of the artists he was working with, talking about astrology. He apparently interviewed Art Garfunkel, Oshar 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.

When we asked David Crosby of the birds, his feelings on astrology, he came up with this. Well, it seems to me that the stars must have some effect, you know. I mean, they're there and they radiate, you know, probably on a lot of different levels. But I must say that I'm Leo and I've never ever met another Leo that was even vaguely anything like me. 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 Glenn Campbell on lead vocals and featuring Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys prominently on backing vocals. My World Fall 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 McGuin have been doing on recent Birds albums. While Usher was continuing with his studio experimentation, The birds 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 hit and went down as poorly as on their previous tour, and they were no longer the kings of L.A. 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 L.A. scene, even as he was starting to dominate the band. Crosby was now the de facto lead vocalist on stage, with McGuin being relegated to one or two songs per set, and he was the one who would insist that they not play their role to 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 partway through a verse to spend five minutes tuning up before restarting. After a residency at the Whiskey A-Gogo where the group were blown off stage by their support act, The Doors. Their publicist Derek Taylor quit, and he was soon followed by the group's co-managers Jim Dixon and Eddie Tickner, who were replaced by Crosby's friend Larry Specter,

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 Clark, who unlike the rest of the band, had never become particularly proficient on his instrument. But Crosby also insisted on making announcements from the stage advocating LSD use and describing conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. You know, they're shooting this for television. I'm sure that they'll let it this out.

The way they'll let it out, country's going the fish is good things. Some things, but I want to say it anyway, even though they will edit it out. When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man. He was shot from a number of different directions by different guns. The story has been suppressed. Witnesses have been killed, and this is your country. But even though Crosby was trying to be the bird's 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 McGuin talks about one occasion where Crosby and Stills were jamming together. Stills played a blues lick and said to McGuin, can you play that? And when McGuin, who was not a blues musician, said he couldn't, Stills looked at him with contempt. McGuin was sure that Stills was trying to poach Crosby, and Crosby apparently wanted to be poached. The group had rehearsed intensely from Monterey, aware that they'd been performed

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. McGuin's suspicions about Stills wanting to poach Crosby seemed to be confirmed during Monterey when Crosby joined Buffalo Springfield on stage, pulling him 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. Crosby was getting tired not only of the birds, but of the L.A. scene in general. He saw the new San Francisco bands as being infinitely cooler than the Hollywood plastic scene that was L.A.,

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. 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 Bird's greatest hit. 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 Clark. Clark had never been a particularly good drummer, and while that had been okay at the start of the bird's career, when none of them had been very proficient on their instruments, he was barely any better at a time when both McGuin and Hillman were being regarded as unique stylists, while Crosby was writing metrically and harmonically interesting material. Many Bird's fans appreciate Clark's drumming nonetheless, saying he was an inventive and distinctive player in much the same way as the similarly unskilled Mickey Dolans, but on any measure of technical ability, he was far behind his bandmates. Clark 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. Will someone nod the mic in that spot because he's not doing it? Okay.

Hey, play the drums. You don't like me? You don't play? Send me away and get it. We love you. We want you to play drums right. Send me away. Aw, they're always good.

Everybody's good. Go on. Get him a pacifier. They don't even know that you're better than all of us either. Boy, gosh. One day, they'll know. So could nobody understands you, after you're dead, you'll be immortal. They'll know.

Yeah. I don't even like what I'm put him. At one point they joke that they'll bring in Hal Blaine instead. A reference to the recording of Mr. Tambourine Man, when Clark and Hillman had been replaced by Blaine and Larry Neckle, and Clark says, do it. I don't mind, I really don't. And so that ended up happening. Clark was still a member of the band, and he would end up playing on half the album's tracks, but for the 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 McGuin and Hillman to collaborate on a couple of songs with him, so they would share the royalties equally. But there were two flashpoints in the studio. The first was Crosby's song Triad, a song about what we would now call polyamory, partly inspired by Robert Highline'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 friend's Jefferson Airplane whose version, by having Grace Slick sing it, at least reverses the dynamics of the relationship.

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. 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 birds 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 were lookedantly joined in, when they came to recut the track, Crosby flat out refused to take part, leading to a furious row with McGuin. Since they were already replacing Michael Clark with session drummers,

that meant the only birds on going back, the group's next single, were McGwin and Hillman. That came out in late October, in 1967, and shortly before it came out, McGuin and Helman 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 McGuin 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. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on My World Fell Down by Sagittarius. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and tilt. ariser. Visit 500songs.com. That's 5000-0-the-numbers songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. but more importantly tell just one person that you liked this podcast.

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