Flashback, May 1965: The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ Starts Climbing the Charts

With lyrics taken from a sprawling, trippy Bob Dylan song and a jangling guitar sound like the Beatles, a recently assembled Southern California quintet, The Byrds, launched the folk-rock movement with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which began its march up the pop charts in May 1965.

A month later the tune hit #1—the only Dylan-penned tune ever to do so—and, as the lead song and title track of their first album, turbocharging sales of that collection.

The term “folk rock” was coined specifically by journalist Eliot Siegel to account for what “Mr. Tambourine Man” sought to bring together: the depth and lyrical sophistication of folk music with the energy and backbeat of rock ‘n’ roll.

By the end of the summer of 1965, record companies couldn’t rush musicians fast enough into studios to capitalize on the new trend. (Tom Wilson was especially influential, producing an electrified version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” that revived the duo’s partnership after their underperforming debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.)

The band—which formed only the year before when Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke joined Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark of The Jet Set—came across the song via their producer and manager Jim Dickson, who had secured a rough demo by Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott from Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman.

With Crosby particularly opposed to recording the song, it took strenuous convincing on the part of Dickson to bring the band around. In his 2020 memoir Time Between, Hillman remembered the producer’s clinching argument:

“You guys need to go for substance and depth. Make records you can be proud of—records that can hold up for all time. Are we making an artistic statement or just going for a quick buck?”

Dickson and the band had to figure out first, however, how to adapt this acoustic tune to the rock ‘n’ roll market:

*They switched from Dylan’s 2/4 time—more suitable for country/bluegrass—to a 4/4 groove;

*They added electric guitars, including McGuinn on a twelve-string Rickenbacker also used by the Searchers and the Beatles’ George Harrison;

*Though the Byrds played on the rest of the album recorded to follow up on the single, the only member to play an instrument on the single was McGuinn, as the famous session ensemble The Wrecking Crew were brought in for the breakthrough single;

*In place of Dylan’s idiosyncratic vocal, McGuinn aimed for a sweet spot between Dylan’s and John Lennon’s, with Clark and Crosby layering in background harmonies, with the result capturing “that angelic sound I’d heard when they were first becoming familiar with each other’s voices,” noted Hillman.

*With FM radio still a few years away, the group condensed Dylan’s four word- and image-heavy verses down to one, to accommodate AM stations’ time limits of 2½-3 minutes for singles.

Dylan, for one, was excited by the results of their three-hour January 20, 1965, studio session with the song, exclaiming “Wow, man, you can even dance to that!” So, too, was the preteen daughter of influential nightclub owner and talent agent Benny Shapiro, whose enthusiasm persuaded her father to talk it up with prominent figures in the music industry.

Eventually, the Byrds’ demo brought to the band’s door Columbia Records, which offered a deal for a couple of records that, if successful, would lead to an album. The company then assigned producer Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day) to work on the follow-ups.

With the success of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Los Angeles became “the main spawning ground for folk rock,” according to a 1986 Rolling Stone article. Several groups followed in the vein that The Byrds opened, including The Turtles, We Five, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Mamas and the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, and Spanky and Our Gang, to name just a few.

Ironically, The Byrds’ biggest impact may have registered on the songwriter whose work helped jumpstart their careers: Dylan. It wasn’t only that, according to critic David Fricke, the songwriter, “until then largely known as King Folk, suddenly had the ear of an enormous teenage pop constituency.”

Furthermore, hearing their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” spurred him to record an electric side for his next LP, Bringing It All Back Home. Later in 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, he would outrage folk purists by pursuing this experimentation more intensively.

Perhaps responding to criticism that they were too reliant on covers of Dylan and other songwriters—and by the outspoken Crosby’s urging that they (and especially he) should compose their own songs that would earn royalties—the Byrds, over the next few years, increased the original content of their LPs.

Not content with launching folk-rock, the group went on, through restless innovation and personnel changes, to pioneer, through their own compositions, other musical genres through the late Sixties: psychedelic rock (through “Eight Miles High,” an account of a disastrous trip to Britain that many interpreted as laden with drug references) and country rock (Sweetheart of the Radio, featuring Hillman’s friend Gram Parsons).

For years, I wished that The Byrds had recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” beyond their abbreviated, AM-oriented version. Then, in 1990, I was delighted to find that the briefly reunited McGuinn, Crosby, and Hillman had included such a longer version at a Roy Orbison tribute concert featured on the group’s 1990 career-spanning 4-CD box, The Byrds. 

You can watch that performance—featuring a surprise appearance by Dylan himself—in this YouTube clip.

Quote of the Day (David Crosby, on His ‘Terrible Mistake’ in Using Heroin)

“Heroin is a beautiful high the first time. And then it's just a horror of trying to recapture that beauty, which you can never do. At a certain point, it defeats you completely.  Your life becomes useless because you're driving a car where the steering wheel is not attached. You have no control. Me becoming a junkie was the worst thing I did to my partners. That's how I let them down, where the rift between us started. I so wish I had avoided that, but there's no point in being dishonest about having made a terrible mistake.” —Rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby quoted in Alan Paul, “Weekend Confidential: David Crosby—A Legend Faces the End by Making Music,” The Wall Street Journal, July 6-7, 2019

Singer-songwriter David Crosby was born 80 years ago today in Los Angeles. A founding member of the influential bands The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, he might also be their most infuriating.

Crosby is only half right about drug addiction driving a wedge between him and his bandmates. That substance abuse was so protracted, so embarrassing, and so life-threatening that one is tempted to accept it at face value.

What tends to be forgotten is that ego and lack of impulse control over his tongue did the rest.

 Before the pandemic, Roger McGuinn—surely recalling tensions that led to Crosby's firing from the Byrds in 1967—issued a statement dismissing Crosby’s trial balloon of a Byrds reunion: “DC is not hated but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to work with him.”

As for Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, at last report none is speaking to him anymore, making any notion of a get-together with them even more unlikely.

All of this comes at an increasingly difficult time for Crosby, in terms of his health and finances. His struggles with diabetes and heart disease have been known for some time. But now, the musician notes in a June 30 interview with Rolling Stone, tendonitis in his hands has affected his guitar playing to the point where “I’m down 20 percent from where I was at my best, and it’s deteriorating pretty steadily.”

Ordinary people might wonder how an artist who recorded some of the bestselling music of the rock era could hit financial trouble, but Crosby also admits that the inability to tour has impacted his bottom line enough that only the sale of his song catalog prevented him from losing his home. (As a corollary, he might also have observed that his arrests and detox efforts in the Eighties—not to mention his recent health issues and the lack of a payday from CSNY tour or even concert in the last several years—combined to put him into this predicament.)

If I sound impatient with Crosby, it is because I judge few people more severely than those who have wasted their talents—and, having seen Crosby four decades apart, I have little doubt that he has them in abundance, even when he has been prodigal in their use.

Even before Cameron Crowe’s 2019 documentary, David Crosby: Remember My Name, I had seen just the year before (as I observed in this post from the time), in a concert in my hometown of Englewood, NJ, that the musician remained not only in good voice but committed to writing intriguing new material.

This summer brings fresh confirmation of the latter trend with the release of Crosby’s new CD, For Free. (Yes, the title cut is his cover version of the song by his old lover, Joni Mitchell.) Consider that this CD is his fifth solo collection since 2014, while in the 30 prior years he released only three.

I am glad that Crosby is releasing so much good work at last. Too bad it took the prospects of insolvency and mortality to do so. And too bad if that fine content came as the music industry, like Hamlet, discovered that “the time is out of joint”—with the old Geffen-like “starmaking machinery” unable to reach a younger generation that, like the one which made Crosby and his contemporaries stars, is all too forgetful of the singers and songwriters who came before them.

This Day in Rock History (‘Grand Theft Parsons’ Ends Journey of Country-Rock Legend)

September 19, 1973—It wasn’t enough that Gram Parsons influenced generations of musicians with his hybrid mix of rock ‘n’ roll and country, nor that he followed the pattern of contemporaries with an early death brought on by intense substance abuse. No, the 26-year-old former member of The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers overdosed on a combination of morphine and tequila at the Joshua Tree Inn in California –then his road manager engaged in a serio-comic body snatching that one cop, challenged to cite what law was broken, responded, “Grand Theft Parsons.”

Grievous Angel, Parsons titled his last, posthumously released solo album, and that neatly sums up the promise and pain of this singer-songwriter with such a deep affinity for country done-somebody-wrong songs--and such a lack of commercial success in his lifetime. Groupies fell in love with his ethereal face even before hearing his equally mesmerizing voice. (His embroidered Nudie tailored suits, in emulation of hero Hank Williams, didn’t hurt in the eyes of female fans, either.) Hearing him play and listening to his lyrics altered the career trajectories of musicians as disparate as Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Keith Richards and Emmylou Harris (who has probably done as much as anyone to keep his memory alive).

His real name was Ingram Cecil Connor III, but that and the rest of his life changed when his father, a country music musician, killed himself when the boy was 13. (Compounding the misery: On the day of the boy’s high-school graduation, his mother died of alcohol poisoning.) In the following year, his stepfather had the boy’s surname legally changed to his own, and the youth ran away from home to ply his trade as a folk musician.

That attempt to break away failed; he was too young. He was likewise unsuccessful at conformity: only a year at Harvard. But from now on, when Parsons failed at his work, he did so in ways more innovative and interesting than anyone else was doing.

Still only 20 years old, he founded what is often considered the first country-rock group, the International Subway Band. A year later, he was jamming with the whimsically titled Flying Burrito Brothers when he made the acquaintance of Chris Hillman, bassist of The Byrds.

Over the years, the list of musicians influenced by Parsons was lengthy: The Eagles, Elvis Costello, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Rodney Crowell, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, The Jayhawks, Marty Stuart, Black Crowes, The Lemonheads, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, and Tom Petty. (Oh, yes—and, reminded now of the circumstances of his death, you’re sure to remember another group—U2—and perhaps its most successful CD: The Joshua Tree.) But three musicians especially benefited from direct contact with him:

*Chris Hillman. Parsons’ meeting with Hillman was catalytic. Oddly enough, he’d been hired to play jazz piano, as part of Roger McGuinn’s project to release an album that served as a virtual history of music. Parsons soon persuaded him and the rest of the group to junk that for a country-influenced LP, Sweetheart of the Radio. The wonder was not that it didn’t sell well, but that it was made at all, at a time when true believers in both rock ‘n’ roll and country found it impossible to think of any point of intersection between the two.  Parsons’ decision to quit the band, just as it was about to fly for concerts in South Africa, came at an awkward time for the group, but it also presaged the rising concern of rock ‘n’ rollers with apartheid. Shortly thereafter, Hillman followed his friend to the Flying Burrito Brothers. (In the 70s, Hillman, in turn, would continue his own explorations in country rock as part of the Souther Hillman Furay Band.)

*Keith Richards. Parsons’ growing drug abuse led to his dismissal from the Flying Burrito Brothers. Getting wasted with Mick Jagger's songwriting partner didn’t do much for his health (not that Parsons was innocent in this regard: Richards remembered, “Gram could get better coke than the Mafia"),but it did much for Richards’ art and, in turn, the Rolling Stones’ work. Nearly four decades after his friend’s untimely death, in his autobiography Life, Richards recalled: “Gram taught me country music -- how it worked, the difference between the Bakersfield style and the Nashville style. He played it all on piano ... I learned the piano from Gram and started writing songs on it. Some of the seeds he planted in the country music area are still with me.” The flowering of those “seeds” are apparent in the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” “Dear Doctor,” “Country Honk,” “Dead Flowers” and “Faraway Eyes.”

*Emmylou Harris. She had only about a year to work with him, but that was enough to change her life forever. "I didn't get his music; I didn't quite get his singing either,” Harris recalled, in an interview with Fiona Sturges of the U.K.’s Independent. “I had always sung folk music and I saw country music as kind of hokey. So at first I just saw what we were doing as an opportunity to make some money singing on a record. But as we began singing these harmonies it seemed like we sounded good together and I began to appreciate what he was doing." He validated her talent, giving the single mother the courage to continue her work when the music industry seemed aligned against her.You can hear the piercing results of that collaboration in songs such as "Love Hurts."

The end for Parsons came predictably, as it did in that era for others that the Eagles called, in “James Dean,” “too fast to live, too young to die”: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. The mix of morphine and tequila was insane, as if he yearned to be with his father and mother immediately.

Parsons’ stepfather planned to transport the body to New Orleans, the better to bolster his claim to Grams’ estate as the nearest male relative. Road show manager Phil Kaufman also recalled the pact he had made with Parsons that, in the event of death, he should take the body, transport it to Joshua Tree National Park, and burn it.That is what Kaufman now tried to do—intercepting the body at the airport, taking it out to the preserve, and setting the coffin alight.

Kaufman and an associate eventually turned themselves in and were fined $700. As for Parsons, his death was a real-life answer to the climactic cry of Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, that it was better to burn than disappear. His posthumous legend has only grown with each passing year.

 (The image accompanying this post is a publicity portrait of Parsons for Reprise Records, 1972)

Song Lyric of the Day (David Crosby, Influencing Newt?)

“So you see what we can do
Is to try something new —that is if you're crazy too
But I don't really see, why can't we go on as three.”—“Triad,” written by David Crosby, from the CD 4 Way Street, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1971)

What a difference sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll makes! In October 1967, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman sacked Byrds bandmate David Crosby for pushing the group too hard to play his songs. The last straw was probably “Triad,” which the future CSNY legend later stated was about “lust and perversion.” Even for the bohemian atmosphere of Sixties rock ‘n’ roll, Crosby’s mating call for multiples was the equivalent of stepping on the third rail.

But the song did end up getting performed--not just by CSNY, but also by Jefferson Airplane, on their 1968 “Crown of Creation” LP. And so, it began to penetrate, slowly, into the general public consciousness.

Could it be that one of those affected was Newt Gingrich? You’d never think that the man who advised members of the Occupy Wall Street movement to go home and take a bath would ever consort with protesters who took a walk on the wild side. But in the late 1960s, while a grad student at Tulane University, that’s exactly what he did. It was beyond simply going one toke over the line. No, it turns out, according to an essay by Tim Wise, that during this time, Gingrich also backed the idea that the student newspaper should be allowed to print photos of nude statues with enlarged genitalia, along with shots of the sculptor himself also in the altogether.

Maybe at one of these protest sessions, Newt first heard Crosby’s musings about a different kind of love. That might be speculation, but where else could such an innocent, impressionable mind such as Gingrich’s find out about this stuff?

In the old days, they used to call “this stuff” “free love,” but today’s Tea Party-friendly Newt would probably call it something else. “Free,” after all, sounds vaguely Communistic. He’d probably want to label it “an opportunity relationship,” though the “opportunity” sounds as if it would have benefited one person only: himself.

Which brings us, inevitably, to his role in the increasingly nutty GOP Presidential race. The same day that Gingrich heard that Rick Perry was not only withdrawing, but throwing his support behind him, the news broke of the ABC News interview with the former House Speaker’s second wife, in which Marianne Gingrich claimed that he pressed her for an “open marriage” as their relationship came to an end.

Former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan wasn’t alone among Republican old pros when she speculated, in her weekly Wall Street Journal column, that the latter news “is going to have an impact. ” The funny thing was, that view turned out to be dead wrong--at least for now.

It’s hard not to interpret Gingrich’s double-digit victory margin in the South Carolina primary as “Annoy the Media Day.” How else to view this tally as anything but that, in a state with evangelicals who, under normal circumstances, would shake their heads and flood talk-radio stations with complaints about the shame of this all?

In the wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio, all the old, familiar rules about politicians and sexual waywardness have been scrambled. Clinton and Rudolph Guiliani went out of office with sky-high ratings, but the public didn’t look so kindly on others. Arnold Schwarzegger earned a “Sperminator” tag for knocking up the family help, and John Edwards finds himself with all doors to future high office closed to him for the foreseeable future, even if he survives his current simultaneous legal and health crises.

In this world-turned-upside-down, Anthony Weiner lost favor in his heavily Democratic district in New York--yes, the same place that most South Carolinians probably view as akin to Sodom and Gomorrah--after his experiments with social media turned him into a national joke. How unlike the big, fat wet electoral kiss South Carolina voters just bestowed on Gingrich!

Predictably, Gingrich has lambasted the media for dredging up a matter more than a decade old and not concentrating on real issues. Many people are going to find that a bit odd coming from the same politician who brought up a matter nearly a half century old--i.e., his speculation that the “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” that President Obama inherited from his father is “the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

Gingrich has called Marianne Gingrich’s claim about the open marriage “false,” but he is saying this on the stump. Were he to be hauled into court on the matter, he might be forced into an admission to the contrary (as Bill Clinton was, five years after denying any involvement with Gennifer Flowers), or run the risk of having a jury weigh his ex-’s truthfulness versus his own. Based on his past admitted adulteries and his reprimand for violating House ethics rules, such a test is hardly a slam dunk for Gingrich.

Like Clinton--so like him in his academic leanings outside of politics, his baby-boomer background, his outsized ambition and ego, and his difficulties with marriage vows--Gingrich has become a marker in the culture wars. Some, in fact, might find him a bizarre cross between Clinton and Edwards, then somehow squared--a serial philanderer who cheated not just on one wife, but two--wives, be it noted, who were about to experience severe health crises.