Youtube byrds eight miles high portable#

The LP marked a shift in the band's direction and sound it wouldn't be the last time. 'Eight Miles High' ended up as the Side Two opener on the Byrds' third album, Fifth Dimension, which was released in July. Tambourine Man, 'Finally, I just had had it.'

Clark later attributed his departure to a 'nervous breakdown' as he's quoted in the biography Mr. The cowriter of 'Eight Miles High' had a fear of flying and walked off a plane that was headed to New York to start yet another tour. Less than two weeks before the single was released, Clark left the band. Still, 'Eight Miles High' managed to make it to No. It was simply ahead of its time, even for the psychedelic genre it helped spawn wthin a year or so, it wouldn't sound so foreign. Still, it wasn't so much the song's subtext as its unconventional structure that abetted 'Eight Miles High''s struggle on the charts: Not only was its three-and-a-half-minute running time considerably longer than most radio singles in 1966, there weren't a whole lot of pop songs grabbing inspiration from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar back then either. 'We were stoned when we wrote it,' Crosby said in the 1998 book The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited. While band members denied the allegation at the time, they eventually admitted that the track was indeed a drug song. An industry newsletter sent to radio stations claimed 'Eight Miles High' was about drugs, which resulted in the song being banned in some markets. Gene Clark - another of the Byrds' singers, songwriters and guitarists - wrote a poem that was later expanded into song form with assist from Crosby and McGuinn. They collaborated on the music, with suggestions tossed around among them, before settling on the finished piece, which was highlighted by McGuinn's skyscraping 12-string solo.īut they hit a snag as the song was making its way up the charts. Lyrically, the song nodded to the band's road adventures, too - specifically an August trip to London and the subsequent English tour.

McGuinn explained in There Is a Season that his solo 'wasn't mapped out' instead, he had a 'basic skeleton' borrowed from a four-note Africa/Brass riff he then improvised on. Even the Beatles, the most forward-thinking band of the era, had just unveiled their first real exploration of Indian music with 'Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)' from Rubber Soul, which came out in December. That classic song's key sitar line was inspired by Shankar, whose music the Byrds were immersed in during their recent tour.īut they took it even further in 'Eight Miles High,' capping it with a head-spinning guitar solo based on a jazz progression inspired by Coltrane. So, the band returned to an approved studio a few weeks later on Jan. 25, 1966, and completed the version that was released as a single on March 14.įrom the start, the Byrds knew they were getting into something new and significant with 'Eight Miles High.' In early 1966, there still wasn't much that sounded like it. A first take of 'Eight Miles High' - preferred by the group's members - was rejected by the Byrds' record company because it wasn't recorded in one of its studios. When they entered RCA Studios in Los Angeles for a session in late December, they had an idea for a new song inspired by their recent obsession. The band listened to the tape nonstop for the rest of the tour.

Youtube byrds eight miles high portable#

He recorded the album with a portable cassette deck he recently picked up, filling the other side of the tape with Indian ragas by Ravi Shankar. The music 'seared through the center of my chest like a white-hot poker,' noted Roger McGuinn - who, like Crosby, was one of the Byrds' three singers, songwriters and guitarists - in 2006's There Is a Season box set. One day, a friend of David Crosby's played jazz great John Coltrane's 1961 album Africa/Brass, which incorporated Afro-Indian improvisations into a more traditional big-band setting. They traveled city to city by bus and kept themselves occupied by listening to music. That fall, the band participated in a tour spearheaded by American Bandstand host Dick Clark.